Off the prompt "cuddles."

So um.

You may or may not be aware (god, do you people read me at all *G*) that there is an awesome fic about Darcy and Loki writing on the for-them-RPF Avengers kinkmeme for which I asked if I could write more fic for, because fanfic for fanfic about meta fic where they write fic about themselves is THE BEST THING EVAR AMIRITE? And the author told me yes so I've been indulging this bunny about Loki and Darcy going to a convention together.

Well naturally it's not enough just to write it, grey_bard and I needed to make LJs for Darcy and Loki.

So! Who has an LJ they still use and wants to be Darcy's friend? She is onthenose and as long as you're not Phil Coulson, she'll friend you back.

(You can also friend Loki at 3791111 but he might just laugh at you.)

If I'm going to get anything done I think I need to close all the fic and glitch and dreamwidth and twitter and pinboard and.

Yeah, let's try dropping off of the face of the internet again in favor of writing and homework and packing. Plan? Plan.

ETA: huh, only took me an hour and a half to clear all my tabs into Pinboard. SHALL I NOW GO FORTH AND BE PRODUCTIVE?

ETA2: The good news is, I'm writing. The bad news is, have I mentioned I keep a large image of Steve open for inspiration? Well, HE'S JUDGING ME. ( large image, fic snippet below cut )

So I put all the bits of V60 I've written in one doc and outlined the scenes in between that still need wrote and came up with a current total of ~8300 words. I think that means I still have a long way to go, but it feels less terrifying now that I can identify all the scenes. On the other hand it feels more terrifying that I identified places where I was like "if Matt knows X AND Y, why has he not pennydropped on the whole grand scheme yet?" and also: I can't figure out the order their fates get decided in (Matt, Danny, Harriet, Harriet's baby, Harriet's husband...probably reverse order, except Matt still comes before Danny).

At some point I guessed the whole thing would be about 30,000 words, and I think I'm still right, based on the ratio of what I've written to what I still need to write.

I realized that only one scene I've written is from Danny's POV, and I'm trying to figure out if I want to correct that by swapping over some other scenes or by dropping that scene and having Danny tell Matt about it later. The second sounds easier except for how there's one more scene later that's Danny off doing stuff that Matt doesn't know about, that I don't know how I'll deal with. Maybe he knows Danny went to see Count Vorkosigan but not what came of the meeting, because he's too involved with the Appalling Secrets eating his brain?

I feel like the ending needs some kind of bow tied on top. I don't know what that could be yet.

All of the stuff with Count and Countess Vorkosigan is yet to write. In case you were wondering, Cordelia continues to inflict total awesomitude on Barrayar despite its pleas for mercy. She has a plan to sneakily slip past the Council a bill that would essentially provide a way for any woman on Barrayar to get access to a uterine replicator on the Imperium's dime. Matt is quite impressed when he figures that one out. Also it's probably going to result in marriage law reform. *cough*

Then there's foodness and cluebat to write, and I never did find a place to fit in the detail about Byerly, but it may not be relevant. Also I have to find a way for some detail of Danny's family backstory to tie into the thing Matt is solving as an inspiration, like a "right, Barrayarans are fucking backwards! got it" moment or something, so I can have an excuse to insert that backstory. Maybe what constitutes a mutant at different classes--Danny's family kept his sister, whereas Harriet's mother-in-law killed her daughter.

My festivid is a hit. I am refraining heroically from answering comments, which are awesome. (I also keep seeing my gift, the awesome Marion from Indiana Jones vid, on recs lists, which brings me glee.) niqaeli is collecting an entry of quotes from the vid mines that I wouldn't let her post at the time because they're spoilery, but the schedule on festivids is so stretched out that we're reaching the point of losing context. "Why was [char] a vampire?" I found myself asking regarding one of the quotes that was hilarious at the time. I remembered eventually. It's spoilery.

Today I discovered a new portmanteau for niqaeli's favorite SPN pairing: Casquatch. We died and died of laughter.

Last week we went to see Red at the dollar theater--that being the flick where aging ex-spies (Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren) are on somebody's hit list and being pursued by up-and-coming spy (Karl Urban). We found it hilarious and adorable. It almost but not quite passed Bechdel. I'm not sure I would find it as charming on second viewing because ( violence against women )

Watched the last two episodes of White Collar. My memory for the one last week is full of holes. Oh wait, it's coming back to me. Burke's Seven. Right. Did you know niqaeli and I have a pet theory that El totally was a con and Peter figured her out in a way he couldn't arrest her for (among other things I like this theory for decreepifying the surveillance photo courtship: it was legitimate case surveillance!) and either she knew Neal and lets Neal think Peter doesn't know this for hilarity or Neal has only recently discovered her shadowy past and recognizes her reputation and is all OMG HOW WHAT YOU WERE SO AWESOME I DON'T EVEN. Anyway, with that theory, most El scenes get an extra twenty points of sweeeeeet.

So the most recent episode had the potential to joss the vid I'm working on, and I've been expecting to be jossed since--okay, no, I was expecting to be jossed last November but I've since given up on it (my attitude at this point is SHOW, PROVE ME WRONG! JOSS ME!)--but far from jossing me, this episode provided more fodder for the vid. ( my thoughts on this week's episode )

In other news, Ivan quietly went under and waited out Yuletide and Festivids and this week resurfaced. Bits of three of my four active Vorkosigan novellas of last year are once again taking over my brain (and the fourth is waiting for Bel to come out of hibernation). And I haven't even reread the books again or read any fic lately (except for dira's this evening, which made me cry at the sweet, and I would link but I'm on bit and I can't be bothered to deal with the annoying screenness to hunt down the URL ETA http://dira.dreamwidth.org/561801.html /ETA). So I decided to try for 300 words a day all year on one of those four plot bunnies, which at this point in the year would give me 100K by December 31, and hopefully enough pieces to string together a whole postable story or two and a lot of hilarious outtakes. Those of you on my WIP filter will get to watch me muddle through out of order!

Work: my hours are getting cut stupid low sigh.
School: I have another nominee for the "film class from hell" tag.
Cope: Hahaha what is that. At least I am still to some extent getting shit done?

So all month and maybe longer I'll be posting scenes of this Vorkosigan fusion fic I should really find a title for; per the results of this poll I'm making a WIP access filter. If you can see this snippet you're already on the filter. If you're not and you'd like to be, ask here. (If you are and you don't want to be, yell at me here.)

I want a new default/writing icon. Thoughts/requirements: female character in a current or enduring fandom of mine, preferably in the act of writing or drawing, although I am also considering the thought of text tattoo (text need not be English/Latin alphabet, though I would like to know what it says). Studio 60 is in my brain a bit, so I thought about Matty at his computer (an icon saying "I am eating it" would crack me up) but fairly rapidly determined that no, I really did want a woman, and none of the women from Studio 60 speak to me emphatically enough for default icon material. Then I considered Supernatural and I went poking for Ruby and spell diagrams or devil's traps or something but I think most of that is elided out. I have a reasonable shot of Anna and a blood sigil, but a) Anna makes my brain hurt and b) she looks really freaked out, which is non-ideal. I'm halfway contemplating an icon of Pam looking over her shoulder laughing at Dean about her "Jesse forever" tramp stamp, but a) I dunno what I think about using, for this purpose, ink that outlived its purpose, and b) I'm not that big a Pam girl. I remembered Lady Gaga has a ton of ink, but curiously the cinematography in her videos doesn't fetishize it. (For instance, I am not sure I will ever figure out what she has on her left shoulder.) I am most interested on the long German text she has on her inner arm, partly because I'm mostly likely to get it in frame with her face, and partly because of what that text is--a Rainer Maria Rilke quote, "In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?"

Okay, so far, images I'm considering (that I would probably want to add text to)--
http://jmtorres.dreamhosters.com/images/jesseforever.jpg
http://jmtorres.dreamhosters.com/images/germantat.jpg
http://jmtorres.dreamhosters.com/images/recliningtat.jpg

Any thoughts on other characters that might suit my criteria, or other places to find images of the strong contenders that might suit my criteria?

All of which is in aid of (because one must have the appropriate icon for the post):

I feel like my brain is roiling with epic WIPs lately and I want to note them all (and give anyone who wants opportunity to um, encourage anything they like).

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Vorkosigan 60, which really ought to get a proper working title for the story as opposed to the 'verse. I went back looking for records of ever talking about this, and I don't think I managed to properly explain it to my journal any time in the three years I've had the bunny. See, back in... early 2007, I think, is when I broke and let niqaeli show me Sorkin's meta RPF crack, there were odd bits about how Danny ran the show like, um, the whole machiavellian control freak manipulation of the focus group data to make Matt start fighting back about politics in his writing, and the exchange regarding intermittent power outages caused by a palm tree:

Danny: How much do I wanna know about this?
Cal: As little as possible.
Danny: 'kay.

So I had this thought that had me literally on the floor laughing, and if I remember right niqaeli ended right there with me while the boys of the household sort of... eyebrowed at us. That thought was that Matt and Danny would be good ImpSec officers.

That is basic concept of the fusion. Details have sorted out thusly: Danny's Barrayaran, a captain, in Galactic Affairs. He trains up agents to work as responsibly as if there is no safety net by attempting to convince them he is not actually paying attention to anything they do--so they'll get shit done because if they don't, it's not getting done. Illyan threw him mediocre agents to sharpen up in this manner. There's a fair number of agents who recall Captain Tripp with... fond terror. Matt is Komarran, Danny went to college on Komarr, met him, and sort of dragged him home. Matt is Danny's pet analyst and his specialty is spotting domestic assassination attempts using galactic resources. He sort of chews on invisible problems from both ends and then says "There, that shipment of phlebotinum, so and so's using that for this plot." It's a... heavily intuitive pattern recognition thing. He couldn't tell you how he picks out what's important, but once he's at the conclusion, he can point to all the data points that got him there, and he's right. It relies hugely on having reams of accurate, seemingly trivial data. The first time he gets really fouled up is circa Civil Campaign, because one of the reports he mines regularly for currents in high Vor society is Byerly's, and Byerly started falsifying/leaving many things out of his reports. Not that Dono was a mystery that would have concerned Matt much, just that Byerly's reports got sparse while he was covering for Dono.

There's two main plot threads to the story I'm writing--one is that Matt and Danny get split up, which neither of them copes with well. Illyan had some patience for their special partnership but management has recently changed at ImpSec, and not all the personnel details came to Allegre intact. And also: without yet knowing why he's off (Dono not yet revealed, the hole in the data not yet obvious) Matt has been off, so the apparent efficacy of his and Danny's partnership is tarnished. So Matt's getting transferred and Danny's trying to pull strings to get him back, which is... you don't go around department heads in ImpSec, really, you don't. You most certainly do not go to the retired former head of ImpSec and ask for a social introduction to a potential patron who could somehow intervene on your behalf with the Emperor, because that's who you have to go to if you're going over the current head of ImpSec. You don't do any of that. Unless you're Danny Tripp and completely co-dependent to the point that it uh, interferes with your judgement.

The other main plot thread is the mystery that Matt's trying to unravel with no good sense of what pieces he's missing. It centers on Harriet Vorhayes, née Vorrutyer (which is part of the reason Byerly's inaccurate reports are so crucial here; he's stopped reporting family gossip). Matty has been inappropriately hung up on the married Vor lady for a long time; not involved, just, Danny really wishes he would... not attempt to socialize with her. So while Danny indulges Matt's requests for more data about her, because Matt's hunches pan out nine times out of ten, Danny is also quietly headdesking about stalking goddamn Harriet of all people. (Harriet's family history is... of import, so out of not spoiling the nature of the plot Matt uncovers, I will not go into it here.)

The eventual intersection of the Harriet mystery and Danny trying to climb the Vor for a patron lands squarely on Gregor being Gregor at them. Gregor being quietly, intensely Imperial is quite possibly my favorite thing in the entire Vorkosigan universe, so naturally that's where the whole story I'm writing is aimed at. So that's what Vorkosigan 60's about. Heh.

---

The Haunting: A Comedy of Spirit is, approximately, an AU of season 6 of SG-1. (This is the season when Daniel was dead.) In this story, ascended Daniel just never leaves Jack alone. Jack is bitchy about this, Sam and Teal'c are concerned for Jack's sanity, Skaara would like to not have to be the one to break it to Jack that Jack and Daniel are kind of dating, and somehow Jonas ends up obsessed with vampires. I've written a chapter and a half and about two thirds of the outline, and that much story is twelve thousand words, seriously, what, how. I posted the first chapter two years ago, and I really would like to finish it. I started rewatching season six with my brother toward this end.

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Kryptonian Neal, who needs a better working title. This is a White Collar/DCU fusion inspired by this image of Matt Bomer in Clark Kent glasses and some of Neal's more alien behavior--seriously, every time I watch the scene at Maria's house in "Book of Hours," where she leans in and he doesn't kiss her for like, two minutes, and in fact does not kiss her at all in that scene, despite her continually leaning right into his space--yeah, this is clearly Kryptonian touch taboo at work. *nods vigorously* There are two relevant entries where I discuss this story: a snippet about Neal's Kryptonian criminal record and a solicitation of which parts of DCU I should draw on.

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Rubyverse, my AU of season 4 of Supernatural, which is actually two fucking epic stories, paired:

The first is primarily about Sam and Ruby's summer vacation. Its working title is something along the incredibly clichéd lines of "To Hell and Back" because the primary AU feature of this part of the story is that Ruby actually assists Sam in attempts to get Dean back from hell, up to and including storming hell via the devil's gate in Wyoming. They also do other dumb shit like call up the crossroads demon and fail to deal (almost exactly as shown in canon) and call up the Trickster and ask him to turn back the clock again. But the main feature is the trip to hell--the preparation for it, because they have to get the colt from Crowley to open the gate, and because it's a long journey requiring provisioning (I think they spend nine months under hill, which works out to like, two and a half days topside) as Sam can't eat or drink anything he didn't bring in with him, or he'll end up trapped there. Ruby leaves her body topside and in hell becomes apparent as the image of how she was when she died, which leads to interesting bits of backstory coming out (which conflict with other parts of backstory she tells to other people at other times, unless you know what I know, and you won't, because the one POV that will not be present in this story is Ruby's). Ruby feeds Sam a metric fuckton of her own blood in hell, to the point that he can black-eye voluntarily, in an effort to allow him to pass as demon to casual inspection, so they can travel in hell without getting caught. (Sam remains altered by this after they get out, and Dean gets out, much to Dean's dismay; however, the manner of blood-drinking matters a lot, and this Sam only drank Ruby's freely offered blood: he didn't slaughter unwilling demons or kill a nurse or even take of Ruby's unconscious host, because Ruby left her body topside and fed Sam direct from herself in hell. He was also not trying to gain the strength to control or kill demons, and intent matters. So Sam ends up with an uncomfortable amount of power that is not tainted the same way it is in canon.) They eventually do not break Dean out because Sam snaps and busts a few hundred damned, tortured souls out and draws the attention of who Ruby terms "the scary motherfuckers": fallen angels, of whom there are not that many, but they run hell, and really the only thing to do is flee. I know this story is told out of order and I'm playing with something as simple as the framing device of telling Dean what happened while he was down, interspersed with a short run of events immediately after they get him back (Ruby fucking with Dean, the process of figuring out who Castiel is, and Castiel meeting Ruby and being extremely baffled by her, because interrogation suggests that not only is she trying to prevent the apocalypse, she has feasible plans for doing so). The ending is where Sam and Dean meet Ruby-who-is-not-Ruby: the coma girl woke up, and Ruby vacated her body.

The second part is going by the working tile of "Janie, and Other Lost Lambs," and is about, among other things, just-awoken amnesiac coma girl, who goes by Janie, as dubbed by Ruby, short for Jane Doe. Janie makes a go of life away from the Winchesters and the apocalypse while Ruby rides a proper corpse (male, just to mess with Sam and Dean's heads). But Janie... she can't remember anything about her own life at this point, but she remember parts of what Ruby did in her body (so most of part 1, except for the actual in-hell bits, during which comatose Janie was left in Bobby's care, I'm pretty sure). And she ends up calling Ruby, because Ruby is all she knows. Eventually demons hunt Janie down and try to take her apart to figure out what the fuck Ruby is doing (not unlike what happened to Jimmy Novak), and when the boys and Ruby ride to her rescue, Ruby ends up riding Janie again on a more permanent basis, with permission and certain protections. Janie gets more involved in Ruby's plan to stop the apocalypse, which at this point involves fucking with the seal count to buy time. I have a handful of seals I know they mess with that I swear are not all designed to get certain rarepairs I want (Ruby/Cas, Janie/Jo, Cas/Janie, what have you...) and there is ongoing back and forth between Ruby and Cas about how possession functions (and the fact that Jimmy is so totally Cas's sub) and how seals are constructed and deconstructed. Janie's pre-coma identity is eventually determined, and it's relevant, but mostly as a thing Janie gives up when Ruby offers her the out again and Janie chooses to stick around to be part of the fight instead. Ruby makes the guys train Janie to fight in case Ruby herself is ever out of commission, which becomes useful sooner than Ruby was expecting when they need a Trickster and Gabriel's reaction to the curiosity that is the Ruby/Janie partnership is to poke hard and damage Ruby in the process. Crowley pops up again. Among my primary clusterfuck (Ruby, Janie, Sam, Dean, Cas and Jimmy) blood and sex get exchanged in various lines. Tattoos are acquired. There is a too clever plan about Lilith, and a less clever back-up plan that Ruby is not admitting to herself she is setting in motion, although Cas and Janie back her on it. There is noncon snuggling. Many people well-meaningly ask, with varying degrees of tact, Janie if she's okay being Ruby's host. The answer sort of fluctuates, but Janie chooses Ruby over other options again, and again, and again. Ruby pushes her, but Ruby offers her the out, too, because it's important that Janie choose--particularly because Ruby is a demon, and there are things she can't choose, and needs Janie to agree to choose for her. I am sort of dancing around not blowing the ending on this one, so I will sum up thematically instead: it's about the limits of free will and the power of choice.

---

*sits back and stares at screen* I've been working on that for four hours, and by the way, those are only the epic stories in my head. I have a ton of smaller bunnies, up to and including the wtf how did I end up with this one Misha/Dean twitterfic. I also have plans this weekend to bang through my prompts post, though I have decided for the sake of getting things flowing that for those prompts I will write what I'm inspired to write and not worry about whether it fits the prompt exactly or might not be what the prompter intended. I feel kind of guilty about it, but it wasn't a secret santa prompt collection and the point was to get me writing, so get me writing we'll do.

And now it might be time to sleep.

I've been slowly loading all my finished fic onto AO3 and somehow this morphed into poking at WIPs I have thousands and thousands of words and wondering if I could ever find the wherewithal to finish them.

I have 9800 words of a From Eroica With Love story--it's Klaus/G and while it has cute moments, I clearly didn't finish it because it's doomed to tragedy. It was supposed to be for a zine and I missed that deadline by a lot. I feel certain I talked at people (probably grey_bard and keelieinblack) about this story, but I can't find chat logs for it. I mean, it is like, three years old now.

I have so much Andromeda Rhade stuff scattered over so many files--I started writing that like fifteen times, and never really got around to finishing my version of Rhade's AU because the show eventually provided. But the biggest file is 8850 words which seems like I might be interested in working out how that ends and committing it to the ether.

Or, here's a good one, I have 9570 words of Firefly-Serenity Mal/River fic and wow, the inside of River's head is an interesting place to write from.

I have a few Fullmetal Alchemist WIPs that reached ridiculous proportions. There's the Hughes Home For Children of Wayward Alchemists, wherein Hughes laughs at Roy and takes the Elrics home personally and essentially adopts them. That hit 5200 words. There's the Roy/Maes/Gracie story that all the segments I've written add up to 16,000 words. Hughesmunculus is around a paltry 2000 words.


I should note that I'm deliberately only mentioning WIPs in fandoms that I can look out with running into the night. So if it's on this list, there is... moderate cause for hope. I saw this as preface to bringing up Iron Man WIPs, because echan will be ALL OVER ME, but I did tell her to expect more writing when the new movie came out. So: there's the Electric Sheep story, of which there's about 2400 words. Mistress Pepper, I, uh, apparently have not written any actual prose on, but the collected, edited chat logs clock in at 5300.

I have a Kyo Kara Maoh story called Carnivale that was mostly a style experiment that's around 3400 words. The part I didn't get around to writing was the ugly question of who was wearing the Maoh mask on night three of the carnivale.

In Numb3rs, I had a story where Amita is a secret agent, up to 1500 words. And over a thousand words of the random mpreg story (I don't even know). Also, there's a story where Amita joins Stargate Atlantis that's up to 4750.

The Stargate SG-1 season 6 AU has what, 11,870 words of draft and outline.

There's a Taltos story that's kind of back and forth about Kiera and Kragar, and I've got 8800 words of that.

I appear to have 5100 words of a Glass Houses story, too. Wow. I'm so behind on GH it's not even funny.

There's also 4970 words of a Torchwood story where Jack gives into temptation and clones Ten from the hand.

So yeah. um.

My plans to to cut and run before I hit 5000 words seem to have gone awry. I am not sure what happened. Well, no, I'm sure what happened, but it's kind of disturbing, so I laugh at it and then go back to trying not to think about it. My protests that this is GEN GEN OMG GEN are getting more and more ludicrous, structurally speaking. I mean, in a literal sense it IS gen, damn it. I'm just absconding with all the OT3 conventions. There's a lot of them, and every time the story hits one (and by the way it hit about five on its own before I realized I was writing it) I crack up in a slightly hysterical way, so yeah. Story keeps getting longer.

What.

*stares at googledocs morosely*