Vicissitude and Season

Well, hurray! I can now announce that fic for the Waters of Time series exists. headrush100 has written Times Change (link is to her fic journal where there is also a link to AO3), PG-13 gen, summary: An inexperienced jumper gets more than she bargained for when she lands on a ship of the line during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. I haven't read it, but I'm sure it's good as Headrush is an excellent writer with a nice ear for voices and Research Skillz.

And also yay, I don't feel weird about this. I mean, you all know I'm fic-positive (it would be really hypocritical of me not to be) but there's still that moment of knowing someone's taken your characters and universe and done things with them, and it passed without a qualm and with a good deal of joy.

In other news, I am skipping Jazzercise today, which is a rare occasion these days since I've been participating in their 30-classes-in-35-days challenge - which has stretched to several days more because of snow closures, so I have to take 7 more classes in 10 days, which is quite doable at this rate. Today I'm just a bit sore, excessively earwormed with Taylor Swift et al., still tired from Friday's drive to Allentown and back (directly followed by an evening at the concert hall, the Folger Consort and friends doing music related to The Merchant of Venice with several actors including Derek Jacobi and Samantha Bond doing readings from the play; it was lovely but I was a little too zonked to appreciate it fully), and it's snowing so class might have been canceled anyway, I haven't checked yet. I have been for a walk, and now I'm going to stretch and read more of Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America and have hurray-P-is-briefly-home brunch.

I have been sniffly, fatigued, and a bit depressed lately, so it's good to have a day with nice things in it. Hopefully I can get back into posting (here and elsewhere) as March slams into spring gear.

Aaand posted. Snap.

The Tale of Henry Gale: Benjamin Linus staying smug and conflicted while being imprisoned, beaten, analyzed, sewn up, confessed to, offered a strange combination of foodstuffs, and forced to read Dostoevsky. Set during Lost S2, but not really comprehensible unless you've watched through S4 at least. Cheers for nonlinear storytelling.

In other news, someone asked me today where I get my ideas. People actually say that! (For the record: "From a corner of my twisted brain.")

Big news for the day: we went to a local shelter and adopted two cats. We've been thinking about doing this since getting over the initial grieving for our old cat, and the shelter opened again today after the holiday down-time, so we went, thinking "well, we'll just look," and "maybe kittens!" and of course ended up with two adult cats, who are settling in now - meaning that Kurtz (we named neither of them, but I think the names are sticking), the 5-year-old orange tabby, came out of his carrier and told us yes, this was home, didn't we know he'd always lived there, and he would like access to the entire house now, thank you. Whereas Lancelot, the almost-solid-black 2-year-old, is hiding under Younger Son's bed. But he was sociable enough at the shelter, so I think he'll come around. Photos when I haz them.

In other news, I finished and posted the Irrelevant Gift Exchange story yesterday; it's a Root and Shaw sorta-gen coda to 3.10 "The Devil's Share," with baked goods, called Advent Cookies. I'm glad my recipient liked it, and it turned out okay, but it was a painful slog to get through even 1460 words of it. There are just times that the writing muse deserts me entirely, and this is clearly one of them, so don't be expecting anything new in the fannish realm from me in the near future, and I hope I can get that Time and Fevers epilogue written without writhing and gnashing of teeth. But perhaps I'll be more in the mood for marketing plans and PowerPoints, so all is good.

I'm pretty sure I won't be watching the new Sherlock episodes before they start airing on PBS later this month; just can't be arsed to acquire them otherwise. I've managed to block Sherlock-tagged posts on tumblr, and people are being pretty good about tagging, so I shouldn't get too spoiled. Meanwhile (still fighting the cold, still tired in the evenings - hey, in the afternoons) I watched most of Doctor Who season 4 again - oh Donna, you are still wonderful, and I'm still angry at the end of the season, though I think it may be only in part because what happened didn't need to happen and in part because it just wasn't given enough time. This is a common problem, this "let's do a really big and horrible thing in the last five minutes because we had to spend way too much time earlier in the show blowing stuff up" issue. Or the equivalent for other distractions (like Norwegian scenery), or for simply Too Much Plot. I think I might have been okay with the Donna thing if it had been discussed more. Or reacted to more, or in other ways than the David Tennant Patented Determined and Sad Stare. Or if the show managed to meta-analyze the theme of forgetting better (since it turned up rather neatly in "The Day of the Doctor" as well as lots of other places). This is obviously too much to ask; I do realize that. And I do applaud them for ticking off as many boxes as they did in that whiz-bang double-parter (I am never not going to laugh at the opening credits whipping out triple the names they usually have time and space for).

I need to go play with a cat now.

Oh hey, I wrote a thing with Shaw and Grace and Harold and John, and it is here: Fierce. It's kind of silly and serious all at once, and I would likely go on at length about why but it's 11:30. Suffice to say there are moments when I think Harold is an idiot, and in one of them I had a flash of Shaw and Grace passing the Bechdel test, and this is what came of that.

I was going to write vegetable gardening fic today about John Reese a prickly lettuce spy disguised as Romaine, but I didn't get to that. And no, I didn't have a cocktail until this evening.

Also I just watched "The Cabin in the Woods" and I'm pretty sure I liked it; at any rate I feel drenched in blood. Fran Kranz is still awesome. Dude.

I have posted the ridiculous Cabin Pressure/Lost crossover in which Martin Crieff meets Frank Lapidus in a bar, Because. If you are one of the five people who will read it (a generous estimate), you can find it on AO3:

No, We Only Have Plane

Apparently my Lost fics take place on Christmas. In this case, Martin's second Christmas of the year...

Two more ficlets, and I will try to get to the others soon!

For philomytha, Simon and Finch going to tea at the Residence, which turned out to be the start of a new Sparrow-verse fic, which I will write in full... sometime.

And for killalla, Nathan and Grace in a bar. Because.

I slept late today (kept awake late by a mysterious foot cramp, and then rising briefly early to make sure the kid was up to get on a train and a bus, then dead to the rainy world for hours, oh well so much for being back on Eastern time) so I'd better get on with other stuff before nattering about present tense. But I wanted to note that I put up the Lost fic. (I have no idea if I have any Losties on the flist, or anyone who's watched the whole show but is not inclined to self-attach cutesy fan names, but probably someone will read it? People have subscribed to me. Still an odd concept.)

To Make Amends In, 5400 words, post-series on-island, ends and beginnings. The cast list would be a spoiler, as is everything in the story. The title is from "A Christmas Carol," because of Dickens and because of redemption arcs and because it made a weird kind of sense to me partway through.

Enjoy! I did.

Story's up; came in at just over 1100 words, which is super-short for me.

A Heap of Broken Images, which is another of those working titles that made it through to the final version. Root and Harold and the Fisher King, blasted lands and castle towers and the usual amounts of landscape and botanical imagery.

I had the, um, root of the idea a long time ago, but it came together when I realized that Ms. Groves thinks she's Galahad and the Machine is the Holy Grail. Or that made sense to me; dunno if it will to anyone else. *shrugs*

Aaaand it's up. All I Know Is Flight, Finch/Reese in the motel room of self-restraint.

Which, heh, reminds me I have to make a reservation for Friday night in Allentown...

(I don't know; it's what Danielle would say?) There's a prompt on the PoI kink meme for a Lost crossover (because of so many actors being common to the two shows. Fusco even had a cameo!) with specific instructions not to make Harold and Ben the same person.

So, naturally, that's what I woke up with today, and I wrote a brief snippet of what could be a story but totally won't, and posted it as "not a fill" and I'll post it here too in case anyone's interested. Because I think becoming Harold Finch would be an interesting kind of redemption.

( an essay concerning human understanding )