The Tradëscan Codex

x. RAH -- World-as-Myth multiverse, Lapus Lazuli Long/Lorelai Lee Long**
x. RS+RAW -- The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy, Miss Portinari
x. The Neverending Story Trilogy (movies), Bastian Bux/Nicole/Childlike Empress
x. The Neverending Story (book), Childlike Empress/Xayide
x. FHB -- A Little Princess, Sara Crewe/Becky
x. Ultimate X-Men, Kitty Pryde/Jean Grey/Charles Xavier
x. Ultimate Spiderman, Kitty Pryde/Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson/Jessica Drew
x. Spider-Man <3's Mary Jane, Mary Jane Watson/Gwen Stacey/Liz Allen/Felicia Hardy
x. Spider-Man <3's Mary Jane, Mary Jane Watson/Gwen Stacey/Liz Allen/Lindsay Leighton
x. GBS -- Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle/Clara Eynsford-Hill
x. GBS -- Man and Superman, Violet Whitfield/Anna Whitfield
x. RPF, Joss Whedon/Summer Glau
x. GO -- Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia
x. Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, Carmen Sandiego/the Player
x. OSC -- Ender's Game, Peter Wiggin/Valentine Wiggin
x. The Parent Trap (1999), Hallie Parker/Annie James*
x. My Summer of Love, Mona/Tamsin/Phil/Sadie
x. The Truman Show, Truman Burbank/Sylvia
x. The Secret Garden (musical), Mary Lennox/Neville Craven*
x. MT -- Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer/Mary/Becky Thatcher
x. WS -- As You Like It, Celia/Rosalind/Touchstone
x. WS -- The Taming of the Shrew, Kate/Bianca
x. Into the Woods, Cinderella/Baker
x. D.E.B.S., Janet
x. Gray Matters, Gray Baldwin/Sam Baldwin/Charlie Kelsey
x. Winter Passing, Reese Holden/Shelly
x. KDW -- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Emma Jane Perkins/Rebecca Rowena Randall
x. KDW -- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Jane Sawyer/Miranda Sawyer
x. Beautiful Girls, Marty/Willy Conway
x. GCW -- The Boxcar Children, Henry/Violet/Jessie
x. Legally Blonde, Elle Woods/Vivian Kensington
x. Brides of Christ, Sister Catherine/Sister Paul
x. Brides of Christ, Rosemary Fitzgerald/Frances Heffernan/Brigid Maloney
x. Brides of Christ, Rosemary Fitzgerald/Lucy Mulcady
x. Sunshine Cleaners, Rose Lorkowski/Nora Lorkowski

*Written for me in Yuletide.
**Written for me in Yuletide as a Yuletide treat.

The 2009 prettylightsfic archive is up. I got ophelia, you are so well-read, an Ellen Page/Anna Paquin story which inhabits Ellen in a way which is fun and hip, and includes X-Men 3 set antics and a romance which is fraught with the uncertainty of an early relationship. Awesome.

The first five people to correctly guess which story I wrote will get a ficlet. Only the first five because, well.

Comments are screened; comments which aren't guesses will be unscreened unless you tell me not to.

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The Secret Slasha 2009 stories are live. I received Besotted, Amy/Buffy with a noncon situation I can imagine happening to fairly easily.

If you can guess which story in the archive I wrote, I'll give you a ficlet. Comments are screened; comments which aren't guesses will be unscreened unless you tell me not to.

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I've written five fics in the main Yuletide archive this year as well as three (I think?) in the Yuletide Madness collection. Only two of the stories, my original assignment and one other story, are in fandoms I haven't written in before.

I think some are pretty easy to identify if you know me and happen to come across them; others, not so much. Correctly guess one or more fics I wrote and get a ficlet per fic correctly identified in the Yuletide fandom (with which I am familiar) of your choice.

Screening of comments is turned on; if you make a comment which isn't a guess, for whatever reason, I'll unscreen unless you explicitly tell me not to.

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OMG, my author essentially wrote me a fourth movie. My yuletide fic this year could well have been titled The NeverEnding Story IV: A New Beginning or some such.

In the world transform'd shall view, a fourth nihilistic force, the "Disquiet," threatens Fantasia, but it is more subtle in its working than the three which preceded it. Nicole and Bastian travel to Fantasia to try and save the world of imagination. The fic focuses on the Bastian & Nicole stebsibling relationship just like I asked it to, giving me exactly what I wanted in that regard, and culminates in a moment so perfect and beautiful (and geared right at my narrative kinks) that I shan't spoil it.

It also takes one of the important female secondary characters, Nicole, and promotes her to viewpoint character and protagonist, creating a chance for her story to be told (with that metaphor becoming reified in an appropriately metafictional way). Fic which passes the Bechdel test FTW!

The author captures perfectly the voices of the various Fantasians, while providing the reader (me!!!) with a Bastian and Nicole who are ever so slightly more mature (three years have passed in the fic since The NeverEnding Story III), but with their own new set of problems as a result of their transition into adulthood.

ETA: If you've never seen the third movie (part of me wants to say "lucky you" but the part of me which genuinely loves it despite its many flaws won't let me), all you need to know to understand the fic is that Bastian's father has remarried and so Bastian has a stepsister, Nicole. (It does make oblique reference to the fact that in the third movie Nicole steals the Auryn from Bastian and uses it to go shopping, which is the second most awesome scene in the whole movie; see image below/under the cut) All the other essential canon is contained in the first movie.

( image )

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As much for my use as anyone else's.

• Secret Slasha, due December 19th [COMPLETED AND SUBMITTED]
• Pretty Lights, due December 20th [UPLOADED TO ARCHIVE, STILL POLISHING]
• Yuletide, due December 21st [COMPLETED AND UPLOADED]
• I Saw Three Ships, due December 27th [BACK FROM BETA, REQUIRES FINAL EDIT]
• Broken Toys, due January 2nd [STARTED]

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I guess I should start doing the research on my Pretty Lights Fic, due today (and also find out if the deadline is something other than midnight E.S.T.).

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Here's the poll, inspired by the "She's-not-straight-they-just-love-each-other" Giles/Kennedy fic I may or may not be working on (when I should be working on one of my five fest fics, but that's another story):

And here's a meme, gacked from my flist:

If I had a warning label, what would it say?

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I feel like that, after last week's Dollhouse episodes, there's finally enough for me to write a fic that's not just a cameo (like my last remix was). 60% of that might be Summer Glau, even though I'm not really interested in any pairings. ( spoilers )

In conclusion: Summer.

(Oh, and thank you to all the people who sent me vgifts!)

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Does anyone have any McKeller recs? The only Rodney/Jennifer story in the Archive isn't actually McKeller at all, if you know what I mean.

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So this post by havocthecat implies that Sanctuary fandom is big on incest? Now, I'm a fan of both 'cest fic and Sanctuary but for some reason the idea of the two together surprised me, and I began to figure out just how many 'cest combinations were possible in that fandom (although of couse, only one has to catch on--the most plausible striking me as Druitt/Ashley). There's actually more than I realized at first (at first, I could only think of Helen/Ashley): two father/daughter pairings, one mother/daughter, one brother/sister, and one grandfather/granddaughter. Unless there's more I'm just not thinking of?

Still doesn't really speak to me, though.

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Writing is like acting: sometimes you need to create truth, and sometimes you need to create illusion, and if you do your job correctly, you'll be the only one who will be able to tell which is which.

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Title: The Whipping Girl
Fandom: Ender's Game
Pairing: Peter/Valentine
Rating: Very much NWS.
Summary: He loves her for her martyrdom.
Author's Note: This is a rewrite of a fic which was posted to a porn battle which has since been deleted. I can't find my backup, so I rewrote the whole thing, fleshing it out and adding some extra pr0n. Be warned; this is pretty dark.

( The Whipping Girl )

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I'm getting a little frustrated working on fics nobody's going to see until late December, so leave a character and a short prompt in a comment and the first five or so will get ficlets. One character per request please; I'm also in the middle of working on a Peter/Val pornapalooza and I'm not sure I'm up to doing pairing fic on demand.

Fandoms: Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, new Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Firefly, the 4400, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah Jane Adventures, Stargate SG-1, Torchwood, Veronica Mars, and others

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Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 700 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic (fic series, fic universe), lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

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So I was all, "How the heck did I end up with 27 items in my Hulu queue?" (It was basically empty last week.)

Then I realized--Stargate SG-1 Season 9 is up!

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So, some other concerns raised about the AoOO's tagging system concerns the genre system. Namely, the two following interrelated concerns have been raised:

1. The distinction between "Multi" and "Other" is unclear and/or ambiguous.
2. There's not a sufficient distinction between, on the one hand, a story with multiple pairings and one with an instance of polyamory, and on the other, a story with an instance of polyamory and a one with pairings between non-traditionally gendered individuals.

The most popular temporary solution put forth is to further refine one's classification of the story with freeform tags. However, as I've set about to do so, I've realized I don't really have a sufficient working understanding of polyamory to do so. Largely this is a result of a monogamocentric (I'm assuming that's what the word would be, and Google attests hits) worldview, in which any relationship can be reduced to a set of pairings. (This, undoubtedly, is the source of the "Multi" tag.) Even a threesome can be reduced in this way: A/B/C becomes A/B, B/C, A/C--but admittedly, this reduction is a distortion, because the threesome is a fundamentally different thing than just the sum of its parts. That's the main complaint as I understand it: the "Multi" tag simply doesn't capture that extra richness.

So take a fic like What the Caged Bird Feels, which has two pairings: Dawn/Ethan and Dawn/Giles. Is this an example of polyamory, multiple pairings, or both? (In that story, Dawn is married to Giles. Does it make a difference that's she had sex with Ethan before, and may see it as likely that she'll do it again, or would the dynamic be the same if the relationship with Ethan was a one-time thing. Does Giles' perspective on the whole thing matter?)

Or how about Substitution Rule, which manages to be A/B, B/C, and A/C without being A/B/C (and to make it more complicated, C thinks A and B are the same person)?

Restricting a poly tag to just threesomes or moresomes doesn't seem to be in accordance with the way real polyamorous people on my flist use the term.

But I'm afraid that identifying all (or even most?) cases of a single character being involved in more than one pairing would be too broad a use, which could end up being appropriative.

So I'm throwing this out to those on my flist who know more about these issues than I do, in hope we can work out (and/or you can help me work out) a helpful, accurate, and non-appropriating tagging practice for me to utilize, because I've come to realize that my thoughts are much less clear and much more monogamocentric than I had previously realized. (ObDisclaimer: No one is required to help me do this.)

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( embedded video )

OMG, so good. Venom is my favorite Axis of Anarchy member (and I just looked her up, and the part is actually played by a disable actor!), and was awesome, but what was best about the episode was the way all the characters were utilized with great moments and great dialogue--the only person who was really missing was Tara Caso's character, Dina.

ETA: The more I read, the more awesome Teal Sherer seems to be (although I must admit my interest is fairly shallow). And I know that she and Felicia would have first worked together on Warm Springs (which I'll probably now move a little bit farther up my Netflix queue). Which makes me want The Guild RPF all that much more.

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1. I understand "Choose Not to Warn for Some Content" as meaning that, if no other warnings are selected, then there is a nonzero number of primary standardized warnings which don't apply to the story (most likely noncon)--because if all of them applied, and the author didn't warn for all of them, then the phrase "Choose Not to Warn [full stop]" comment would apply and, in accordance with Grice's Maxim of Quantity, the author would have used that tag.

Apparently, not everyone shares this understanding.

2. I'm very uncomfortable with the implication, given by the existence of the primary warning tag "noncon/rape," that dubcon isn't rape. "Rape," as the term is used more or less uniquely in contemporary usage, is a legal-ethical concept: it identifies a certain type of illicit sexual activity. "Noncon" and "dubcon" pull out certain aspects of these acts which are relevant to the needs of fanfic readers and writers, but not to a legal or ethical understanding, and involves knowledge unavailable to people who are not omniscient narrators (e.g., the precise mental state of the victim, and what what that state would have been in other circumstances). But any circumstance in which consent is in any way dubious--whether through the use of alien influence, or power imbalances, or social pressure, or drugs or alcohol, or through not being of legal age--is rape. Period.

"Noncon" and "dubcon" identify out types of rape, in much the same way the term "statutory rape" does. (ETA: Actually, they don't even do that, I think; they measure something which is on completely different axis than what "rape" measures. It just happens that there is an incredibly huge degree of correlation.)

Now, one doesn't have to read the "noncon/rape" tag as implying that "noncon" and "rape" or synonymous or equivalent. But if not, the meaning is ambiguous: does it cover for cases which are "noncon AND rape" (but not dubcon) or cases which are "noncon OR rape" (which would include dubcon). ("Noncon XOR rape" can be safely ruled out.) Praxis seems to support the first usage as being dominant, but I think this somehow covertly encourages the (problematic equivalence between the two terms discussed above. (And both usages are fundamentally redundant, because "noncon AND rape" = "noncon" and "noncon OR rape" = "rape.")

And, continuing to read the post linked above, I'm not the only who has thought of this (not that I had assumed I was).

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So I posted my dw_femslash fic to the AoOO, with fake cuts pointing to it from my DW/LJ/IJ/JF and from dw_femslash itself. Largely this was because somehow it ended up with a lot of crap HTML (I think I'm going to go back to composing in Semagic until Dreamwidth introduces draft functionality, even though I'm not posting from Semagic anymore since DW has its nifty crossposter) and I had to fight to get it formatted correctly for AoOO and I didn't want to have to do all that again for Dreamwidth/LJ/IJ/JF.

Partly also because my shiny new AoOO account is shiny and new and I wanted to test it out. I don't expect to start posting solely to AoOO as a general rule anytime soon, though.

I spent most of today getting my fic up onto AoOO. I have to say that it's the most pleasant uploading experience I've had with an archive: the Rich Text Editor actually seems to understand what I want the text to do and does it. (I do wish it would auto-format line breaks the way DW and LJ do, though.) Most of my fic's there now, with three exceptions: 1) fic written for yuletide, 2) Buffy/Angel fic, and 3) Firefly fic. 2 and 3--or really just 2 by itself, even--are pretty significant exceptions, though.

I have an invitation to the AoOO to give out if someone wants it (and they should!).

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This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/313136.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID (prefered), or here.

(N.B.: Portions of this letter have been lifted from last year's letter.)

Thank you for signing up to write a story for me! You're one of three people (one of whom was me) who offered to write for The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy, one of seven people (one of whom was me) who offered to write for The NeverEnding Story film trilogy, one of eight people (one of whom was me) who offered to write for Heinlen's books, and/or one of nine people (one of whom was me) who offered to write for Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, and I love you for that alone.

If you check out my userinfo, you'll find a 'thon policy which implores that you be true first and foremost to the prompt and your muse, and to consider whether I'd like a story as, at most, a secondary concern. I stand by that, but I also recognize there is a sense that a yuletide story is explicitly a gift in a way which most 'thon fics aren't, so feel free to surf through this journal to get a feel for me, and here's a little bit more, if you are interested, to help you understand how I relate to the specific texts and characters in the fandoms I've requested and what I might like. OTOH, don't be intimitated; this letter might demonstrate that I've thought long and hard about why I want what I want, because I'm full of myself and like to navel-gaze so you can get a feel for my tastes, but the specifics of what I'd like are intentionally vague even in my own mind.

I'm drawn to what I call will-to-poweriness, the adolescent fantasy, the desire to exceed oneself that also draws me to things like superhero comics (one of my fandoms is, indeed, X-Men) and fantasy shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is my main fandom). My especial kink is (female) children and teenagers who prove themselves to be the equals (or betters) to adults because they are just that awesome. All of this comes through in my requests, I think. There is a clear will-to-poweriness in Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, most of all in Carmen herself, of course, beyond good and evil, doing whatever she wants whenever she wants because she can, stealing things for no good reason except as an expression of her superiority, the former ACME agent engaged in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. But also, on one level, in Zach and Ivy, the young (!!) ACME agents who pursue her, and on another level, in Player, just as much a teenager, radically empowered within the world of the game she plays and manipulates, Carmen's eternal antagonist. Likewise, Miss Portinari is a girl who is both a teen and the spiritual leader of the Lief Erikson, commanding a position of authority and respect while be sexually and spiritually and practically liberated. Bastian and Nicole are teens who have command the awesome power of the NeverEnding Story and of the Auryn. And the Childlike Empress--well, I could go on for ages about the Childlike Empress. Likewise, Laz and Lor always get the better of their elders.

This, actually, is where my interest in incest comes from: with these radically autonomized figures no real problematization of consent is possible, an argument I make more fully in this post from 2006. But don't feel like you have to write incest if you've matched up with me on The NeverEnding Story or Heinlein (although, really, Laz/Lor is canon, no?); I'd much prefer experiencing the characters as you see them behaving in-character as you see them than twisted out of shape to force them into bed with each other. The most important thing is to preserve the canon dynamics--I have my trusty 'cest goggles for everything else. Although if you throw me a bone in making it subtexty, that's wonderful too. But there is a way in (my corners of, I don't know whence you hail) fandom that we use sex as a metaphor for emotional intimacy, so that incest becomes the deepest, strongest type of interpersonal communion imaginable (with the platonic ideal being, ultimately, twincest)--and this is the dynamic I'm looking for with Bastian/Nicole or Laz/Lor if you go down that route, a demonstration that their strongest bond (or, at least, an exceptionally strong bond) is to each other, and if you feel most comfortable providing that bond in a non-sexual way that's still absolutely wonderful.

Beyond that, I like to think I'm easy to write for. I have few squicks--I'm fine with character death, BDSM, mpreg, dubcon, noncon, chan, incest (obviously, given the above, and in both the fluffy and dirtybadwrong versions, although I prefer fluffy for sibcest), you name it, I'm probably okay with it. Just please no bashing of my favorite characters, and only break up pairings if you're going to put the characters back together again in a combination that fits my requests. Happy, uplifting fics are good, but so are soul-crushingly depressing ones so long as the pairings and characters get to be awesome. Ambivalent fics where we're not sure whether we should cheer or cry are probably best of all. If I didn't like existentialism and pseudo-nihilism in my fic, I wouldn't be a Joss Whedon fan.

( more on where on earth is carmen sandiego? )

( more on the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy )

( very little about r.a.h. )

( more on the neverending story )

Thank you again for writing a story for me. Be true to your own muse, and I'm sure I'll love the result!

Yours in La Mancha,



Episkopos Reverend Alixtii O'Krul V, TRL
Church of St. Jesu the Heretic, Discordian

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The other day I made a comment on Twitter (after much counting of characters to make everything fit):

Bit disturbed by implications of man needing to sweep in & make things better, but guess @feliciaday's awesome makes up for it. #theguild

And just today she blogged:

An interesting comment was made on Twitter, about everything being made “ok” because a man came back and took over. I certainly didn’t mean that at ALL. The fact is, Codex is not a good leader. She will never be a good leader, especially in the time frame of 6 days in this season. That is how people ACTUALLY are. She’s BETTER than she was at the beginning, but to think that she realistically could take on the mantle of Guild Leader (and REPLACE Vork which I didn’t want her to do) against the Anarchists was such a stretch for me, and a direction I didn’t want to go in with the script. So, Vork comes back, after his big journey, and puts the Guild back together. Codex will get her moment, don’t worry.

Now my main reaction to this is to mentally jump up and down in excitement that Felicia Day spent a whole paragraph in her blog responding to a criticism I made. (I went backwards through the hashtag and I'm assuming it's me she's responding to there.) As an obligatory response to what she wrote, I suppose I should say that of course I didn't think for a moment (nor do I think anyone else could) that Felicia Day intentionally meant to say anything anti-feminist. I think her cred in that area is pretty much unassailable, but at the same time her intent doesn't negate the possible moral of the episode I read in it. This is basic Anti-Oppression 101 to anyone on my flist, but somehow I feel need to reiterate anyway. I don't think Felicia Day is any more sexist than anyone else; I do think this particular episode she wrote and produced (and starred in) does replicate sexist messages already present in our culture in a disturbing way. But again, I think the more important point is that she wrote and produced it, period. When I say Felicia's awesome makes up for it, I don't mean I'm willing to look past the flaws because I like her a lot. I mean that the fact that the episode exists at all, a product of the entrepeneurship of her and her co-producer Kim Evey, is an inherently feminist act. As I've said before, the problem with our culture isn't that stories like S3 Ep10 exist. ( embedded video for context ) The problem is all the other stories which don't exist, or at least don't get to be heard. The problem is a lack of pluralism: stories which focus on (white, heterosexual, cisgendered, etc.) men's problems and men's victories keep on pushing out other media. I think the only solution to this problem is a two-pronged approach: one, producers of media need to think more deeply about the stories they're telling. But this can only go so far; if all the producers are men, chances are the stories they're going to be interested in telling just aren't going to capture the whole of human experience no matter how much feminism they try to inject in. Sometimes even a Joss Whedon is going to want to tell a story like Dr. Horrible where ( cut for spoilers? ). I think we need to respect that. That's where prong two comes in: making sure people other than cisgendered heterosexual abled white males get a chance to tell their stories. And this is why Felicia Day's story (her life story, not Season 3 Episode 10) is so important. She managed to carve out a space for herself outside the already existing system where she could tell the stories she wanted to tell, where she could exist as a powerful woman to create, write, produce, and star in the webseries we know and love, to find a way to support her project (in season one, on donations; for seasons two and three, by being sponsored by Microsoft and Sprint) without giving up the rights to her project or creative control. She is a pioneer and an inspiration to others. (And which is not to elide the fact that Felicia is privileged in so many other ways, of course: she's white, straight [so far as anyone knows], abled [for now at least], brilliant, [so incredibly] beautiful, university-educated, and comes from a background where she was encouraged to use her talents from an early age). The Guild is not a perfect feminist work. In addition to the issue with S3 Ep10 I already mentioned, it has some real successes alongside some real failures in its treatment(s) of race, class, and able-ness. Felicia Day, as deeply awesome as she may be, is still only human. But I don't think any work is a perfect feminist work: the future I envision is one in which all types of works, each one of them deeply flawed in its own way, get brought to the table, not just a certain kind, so they can all end up critiquing, complementing, and supplementing each other. And I think The Guild, taken as a whole, brings us closer to that future. This entry was originally posted at http://alixtii.dreamwidth.org/311592.html. There are currently comments there. You can comment there, using Open ID (prefered), or here.

I'm in need of a beta for a Doctor Who-related fic. (Post-2005 canon only.) Anyone able to help?

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Gakked from likeadeuce and inlovewithnight.

Ask me either a broad [writing-related] question (i.e 'who is your cruelest character?', 'what is your most optimistic story?') or a specific question/request ('what world does ___ come from?', 'tell me about ___') and I will answer you. Or you can ask meta- questions like 'what was the inspiration for creating ____?'

Pretty much ask me anything about my fic and I'll ramble at you a bit.

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New York Times: We should point out that you were deposed from ministry of the Episcopal Church by the presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, after you threatened to have your diocesein Pittsburgh secede.
Robert Duncan: That was a year ago, but what’s interesting is that virtually no one in the Anglican world accepted that sentence. Within two weeks of being deposed, I was received at Lambeth Palace in London by the archbishop of Canterbury, who continues to consider me a bishop. (Source)

Of course he's still a bishop. It's disingenuous to imply that ++Schori or anyone else would think anything else. ++Schori stripped him of his position within the Episcopal Church. I don't know of anyone who thinks that she would have the authority to strip him of his position in the historical episcopate, and to imply otherwise strikes me as downright dishonest.

But I don't actually know how ++Schori or anyone else sees things, or how the canons of the church are actually written. (And I don't care enough about canon law to look into it.) So I could be wrong.

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Gakked from wisdomeagle, here ("I'm sure all of fandom has heard of this by now. Post the first lines from some of/20 of/50 of/all of your fic. Your flist writes drabbles for you.") and here ("So. Here they are. Sixty-odd first lines of fanfic. [. . .] Do as you like with these: put them in drabbles, put them in ficlets, put them in novels. Change the names, leave the names, edit them, what have you. Post the drabbles here, there, everywhere. Guess where they came from. Marvel at their inanity. Ignore them. Up to you.").

So under the cut we have almost 150 first lines, in alphabetical order.

( 148 first lines )

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I started my Yuletide signup at 1:30 this afternoon. It's now 10:30. I took breaks--made dinner, ate dinner, had a discussion group--but still, the majority of that time was expressly devoted to signing up for Yuletide.

*collapses*

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I've been working on my Yuletide sign-up for the last hour and a half and I'm still only up to "F."

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So I threw something together for dinner last night which came out somewhat differently than I expected.

Pasta from 1 (small) box Mac&Cheese
1/2 box different pasta

Cheese sauce from Mac&Cheese (either mix the powder with butter/milk as directed or use the goopy kind, which is what I did because we were all out of the powdery stuff)

3-6 strips pig bacon
2 chicken breasts, cubed
Frozen veggies (I used corn & brocolli)

Caesar dressing
Tobasco Sauce
Seasoned Salt
Grated Parmesan
Tomato Spaghetti Sauce


Boil the pasta.

Put the cheese sauce in a 13x9x2 glass casserole dish.

Cut the bacon strips into 1 inch squares, then sautee in Caesar dressing over high heat, turning constantly and using the spatula to scrape up the carmelized sauce from the bottom of the pan. When the bacon is done cooking, more or less, add the chicken and some more dressing, continue turning and scraping. When the chicken is done cooking, more or less, add the veggies, and keep on turning and scraping. (You can turn down the heat at this point if necessary.) When the veggies are done, put the mixture over the cheese sauce. Add some tobasco sauce, some seasoned salt, a bit of spaghetti sauce, and some more dressing. Mix thoroughly so the cheese sauce mixes with the meat and veggies.

Strain the pasta in a collander, then add to the cheese/meat/veggies mix. Mix so the sauce covers the pasta completely. Serve with grated permasan cheese.

The bacon/chicken grease in the sauce made the whole thing end up tasting a lot more stroganoffy than I had expected (which is odd, since there's no beef in the dish), but that's not bad, exactly. It was quite tasty, which is nice as I was cooking for one and have plenty of leftovers.

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Title: Fever
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Buffy/Faith
Rating: Worksafe
Summary: Faith turns to Buffy for help as she struggles with a demonic fever.

( Fever )

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Title: The Watcher's Diary of Lydia Chalmers
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel
Characters: Lydia, Spike, Quentin Travers, the First Evil, Lorne, Angel
Summary: Lydia learns the world isn't quite as simple as Quentin taught her it was.
A/N: None of this text is new. It appeared first as part of my WIP Windows of My Soul, and then as individual ficlets. I think it makes the most sense in this form, however. (For reference--mostly my own--the ficlets can be found.

( The Watcher's Diary of Lydia Chalmers )