Now officially relocating to nomadicwriter on Dreamwidth. Not going to delete this LJ, but I won't be crossposting here either. (I will undoubtedly continue to only post about three times a year so you won't notice much difference anyway.) Also, I haven't really touched that account since I first set it up in 2011, so if I don't already follow you on DW, let me know who you are over there.

I've imported doomfans to doomfans and will be updating it there from now on.

I haven't updated nomads_gen_recs in an age and am unlikely to (these days I use my AO3 bookmarks for recs, gen and otherwise, plus I'm trying to get back in the habit of favouriting things on ff.net when I read over there), so I'm just going to leave it up on LJ as an archive rather than copy it over.

Now, time to figure out which 15 of my 205 userpics I'm gonna keep...

My fic writer this year, Ione, went above and beyond and wrote me a fantastic 20k Rat Patrol fic! I was very impressed. (And ill-advisedly stayed up to 4:30 to finish reading it after the collection opened later than advertised, oops.)

I also managed to achieve my goal of doing better writing-wise than I managed last year, when I only had time to write three fics. This year with the extra time I managed to write five! These are they:

You've Got Male (Arrested Development)
Gob and Tony make a connection, miss their connection, connect, and then fail to make the connection. (3700 words)

I just got into Arrested Development this year and was really hoping to write it for Yuletide, so it was great to get this as my main assignment. It turned out to be a bit of a challenging fandom to write, trying to blend the voice of the in-universe narrator with more standard third-person narration, but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. (And also with that summary!) I ended up mixing and matching several of my recipient's prompts, "You've Got Mail"-style double identity hijinks plus Tony's POV of how he ended up at the place he's in by s4 plus playing with the amnesia effect of the Forget-Me-Nows. Also, I was so sure a zillion people before me would have used this terrible pun title that I actually did an AO3 search just to see how overused it was, and was bemused to find I was only the fourth. (And yet about fifty people have imaginatively titled their "You've Got Mail" slash AUs just "You've Got Mail". Up your pun game, AO3 users.)

Trust in God (And Keep Your Powder Dry) (Secret Wars)
Stephen knows he's in no position to question Doom's decisions... but sometimes he really questions Doom's decisions. (2650 words)

I was pleasantly surprised when the main Secret Wars miniseries was considered eligible this year after being disqualified last year. I was especially happy get a chance to write a treat for dhampyresa/sevenofspade, who's written for me several times before, and who wanted something on the relationship between Doom and Valeria. I struggled a bit coming up with a plot until I came up with the angle of telling the story from the POV of Stephen Strange as he's in the process of his transition from the hero-villain relationship he has with Doom in the regular 616 universe to the friendship they have eight years into the Secret Wars AU. The title was a last-minute choice courtesy of scrabbling through the proverbs section at the back of my dictionary for a good phrase involving 'God', but I feel like it's actually a pretty fitting quotation for where Stephen's at in this AU.

Demento (Black Books)
When Fran, Bernard and Manny wake up with no memory of the day before, they must reconstruct events from subtle clues around the bookshop - and solve a murder. (Or at least cover it up.) (3900 words)

It wouldn't be a Yuletide without a Black Books story! It's become a bit of a tradition for me to write one every year. The recipient suggested three-way amnesia as a possible prompt, which made me think of Memento (hence the "murder mystery" angle, though it doesn't bear much resemblance to the film otherwise, especially since I haven't actually seen it) and from there I leapt to the idea of the three of them "reconstructing" the events of the day before from clues around the bookshop using their own special brand of non-logic.

Days Gone Down (From Eroica With Love)
An aging Klaus has a conversation with his father. (1600 words)

I was sad to see after the main deadline had passed that there were no Eroica fics this year; there wasn't much time left to write anything, but I remembered an idea I'd had for a futurefic involving Klaus and his father that I thought wouldn't need to be too long. I like futurefics in this fandom, but all the ones I've seen have been set after Klaus's father's death, which feels like a missed opportunity considering I'm fascinated by the hints we get of their relationship; I wanted to do a take on it that involved his elderly father having moved back in with him and both of them having somewhat mellowed in their attitudes with time. I did worry that this story might be a little melancholy for people at Yuletide (despite the lighter-hearted ending), but it seems to have gone down well enough so far as I can tell. The title is from a Gerry Rafferty song.

Out on the Wild and Windy Moors (Behind You)
An encounter on a walking holiday. (2150 words)

I fell in love with this collection of single-panel horror comics when I saw it linked during nominations, and I really wanted to write something for it. (Especially since nearly all of my original writing is horror or horror-adjacent, but it's not really something I ever write in fanfic form.) I ended up going right down to the wire on this one because I only had two days to write it and it got a little longer than I expected; I eventually finished and posted it at 6:10 on Christmas Eve, twenty minutes before I had to go out to spend the rest of the evening at my brother's. Hence the rather uninspired summary and song-lyric title; I wanted to use something from Iron Maiden's "Fear of the Dark" but nothing quite fit, so you got a misquote of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" instead. (Googling tells me the actual lyric is "wiley, windy moors" but I preferred the more standard version.) The particular comic this story is based on is this one.

All in all, a really great Yuletide experience this year!

Now, I just have to try to post some stories the rest of the year round instead of waiting until Yuletide 2017.

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi! And thanks in advance for writing for me. I've tried to give a mix of both general and more specific prompt ideas this year, but please don't feel like you have to pick one of the specific ones if you've got a different story idea that you'd rather write. I'm really pretty flexible about what I read.

( GeneralCollapse )

Fandom specific details:

( Arrested DevelopmentCollapse )
( Eroica Yori Ai o Komete | From Eroica with LoveCollapse )
( Fantastic Four (Comicverse)Collapse )
( The Rat PatrolCollapse )

Anyway, please don't stress about sticking too close to the letter of any of these requests - they're basically just lists of Stuff I Would like in case you need the inspiration, but I'll happily read almost anything if it's about my favourite characters. Hope you enjoy writing for me!

Anyone here joined Imzy? I'm not usually an early adopter of new social networks, but this one looks vaguely promising, since it has a community-based setup and the owners are actively courting fandom users and very responsive to suggestions. It has a neat system for managing multiple different usernames/profiles and anonymous posting all under the same account, too.

I don't have a personal blog there (you don't have one by default - you can create up to two blogs/communities when you join and one further per month up to a max of ten) but I've set up an Imzy version of my Doctor Doom fan community at /doomfans. The site's still in closed beta so you can't yet browse without signing up, unfortunately, but I've posted some screenshots here on the LJ version of doomfans.

I don't love everything about it (handling of long comment threads needs work, there's a lack of built-in ways to customise the appearance so far, and at the moment there's no paged view, only the dreaded infinite scroll) but a ton of suggested improvements have already been implemented in the couple of weeks since I joined, and it definitely looks much more suited to discussion-based fandom than Tumblr or Twitter.

( Some community linksCollapse )

(Also, erk, have I really not posted since last year's Yuletide reveals? This is exactly why I didn't bother setting up a personal blog on Imzy. Will still be posting my ceaseless torrent of sometimes as many as a whole four entries a year here.)

In other fannish news, I recently watched and loved Arrested Development and plan to request/fic it at Yuletide, and also after many years have finally secured DVDs of Sports Night without paying a ridiculous price for them (they never got a region 2 release and I only started looking for them years late). So I hope to, y'know, maybe actually watch those sometime.

Reveals are here! I received two delightful gifts this year: Iron Klaus and the Sunshine Band by tenser, a fun Eroica mission-fic with Klaus out of his element, and Zero Sum Game, another Doomtastic Fantastic Four treat from sevenofspade/dhampyresa.

I didn't get to write as much as I hoped this year, since a massive editing job basically ate all my free time and inspiration from mid-November to mid-December, so I only finished my assignment quite close to the deadline. But it felt a bit sad to stop at just one fic considering I haven't actually posted anything since, urk, last Yuletide, so I made a bit of a last-minute push and managed to write two shorter treats as well.

Private Correspondence (Blackadder Goes Forth)
Blackadder's latest plan to escape back to England causes him to take an interest in the contents of Darling's drawers. (6500 words)

This was my main assignment, and I was really delighted to get it, since between having been watching Hugh Laurie in House recently (although that attempted rewatch/catch-up project's also been stalled since November thanks to The Editing Job That Ate Christmas) and the Dave channel showing a Blackadder documentary around signups time, I was in a very Blackadder-y mood. I've poked at the idea of writing it for Yuletide before, but I've always been hesitant to sign up because I'd only really feel confident writing Blackadder II or Goes Forth, plus "write a version of Blackadder from a different period of history" is also a pretty popular request. But I took a gamble and it worked out very well, with a recipient who was flexible about the setting and actually cited Blackadder/Darling from the Goes Forth years as a particular fave. So that's what I wrote, and it was enormously fun to do. I actually own a copy of the script book, and Dave was airing repeats through the whole writing period, so I was able to get a pretty good feel for structuring the story like an actual episode.

Going Clear (Famous Blue Raincoat - song)
Jane comes by with a lock of his hair. (1350 words)

Fic based on songs is not usually my thing, but Famous Blue Raincoat is my absolute favourite Leonard Cohen song, and pokes me in the part of my brain that loves frenemies dynamics with that "what can I tell you my brother, my killer / What can I possibly say? / I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you / I'm glad you stood in my way" section. The request was for OT3 fic with a focus on Jane, and as she's the only one of the three with a name, working around that ended up shaping the direction of the story: I framed it as her conversation with the narrator so I could distinguish the two men as "you" and "he" in her first-person POV. I think my rewatch of House also bled into the character dynamics I went with here, since I didn't want to write it as just a simple love triangle of two men after the same girl; as it's a song about jealousy, I ended up envisioning the narrator and his rival in a bit of a House and Wilson type dynamic with the rival starting out as the possessive best friend trying to drive the girlfriend away and only taking a personal interest when she refuses to back down.

On the Cards (Black Books)
Manny has a foolproof plan to bring the shop more money. (2300 words)

Writing Black Books fic has become a bit of a Yuletide tradition for me, so that was the fandom I thought of with time left for one very last-minute treat. The trouble is it's a fandom where people mostly just request non-specific canon-style capers, which makes it tough to come up with a plot at short notice. But when I went looking for my file of canon quotes to put my brain in the right mode, I discovered I'd actually done some brainstorming last Yuletide and left myself a file of vague one-liner ideas; the first one on the list was "collectible card games", so I ran with that. (I would have liked to have come up with a better title and summary for this one, but I'm bad at those at the best of times, so there's no guarantee that having more time would actually have helped.)

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All in all, a less productive Yuletide writing-wise than I would have liked, but I was lucky enough to receive two fics and was pleased with all three that I wrote, so definitely no complaints from me!

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi! And thanks in advance. Please don't worry too much about writing for me, I'm very flexible about the kind of fics I read and really would be happy with almost anything about my chosen characters. If you're struggling with my prompts and you've got a different idea you like better, or you like my prompts from previous years better than this year's, feel free to run with that instead.

( GeneralCollapse )

Fandom-Specific Details:

( Eroica Yori Ai o Komete | From Eroica with LoveCollapse )

( Fantastic Four (Comicverse)Collapse )

( Judge Dredd (Comics)Collapse )

( The Rat PatrolCollapse )

( Ultimate FFCollapse )

Anyway, feel free to ignore as much of this rambling as you want, and I hope you enjoy writing for me! Please don't stress out, I'm really very easy to please.

Just went to see Age of Ultron. Enjoyed it! Made an effort to go in wholly unspoiled, but still managed to pick up a couple of character/relationship things by accident.

( Misc. spoilery thoughtsCollapse )

I knew this one had to be coming someday, but it still feels far too soon. My brother's Discworld books were the first adult books I ever read, and the series still stands up as my favourite of all time, and the source of my two favourite characters of all time. RIP, pTerry. You're leaving a hell of a hole in the world behind you.

A true icon, and one of those people you really did believe would somehow be around forever.

Yuletide reveals are here! I received a lovely 9000 word Eroica story with a great Klaus-voice, Klaus's Christmas Carol by dkwilliams. (Who I actually wrote an Eroica treat for last year, haha!)

I wrote four stories this Yuletide, which is not as much writing as I'd hoped, but one more fic than I was expecting to get done, so I call that a net win. They were:

Spirits (Black Books)
The bookshop is troubled by unwholesome spirits. (2400 words)

My assignment turned out to be for Black Books again, the same fandom as last year. But since it's one I only write at Yuletide - it's one of those fandoms where I feel like I need some sort of prompt to spark off of because the plots can be literally anything - it's always great fun to revisit.

Marooned (Hark! A Vagrant)
Diary of a pirate captain with vengeance on his mind. (1100 words)

The surprise entry on this year's list. I'm not usually drawn to five-minute fandoms, but Kate Beaton's nemesis comics basically distil everything I love about frenemies into half a dozen three-panel strips, so I had to try to write something for this one.

The Greater Prize (From Eroica With Love)
The Major needs Dorian's help in a mansion full of fine art and hidden booby traps. (5100 words)

I wanted to try to write at least one Eroica fic this year (and actually ended up writing two). The prompt mentioned liking "canon levels of gen/preslash/antagonistic friendship", which I love just as much as the shippier Klaus/Dorian fics, so I thought I'd try my hand at a bit of an action/adventure story. This story ended up being from Dorian's POV, as did the other, which is unusual for me since I usually lean in a Klaus direction.

Excuses, Excuses (From Eroica With Love)
Klaus is a difficult man to back into a corner. (1600 words)

Unexpected last-minute fic was unexpected! There were only a few days to go when I saw the prompt, which had a list of "forced intimacy" type tropes that I really love, but I kept thinking that it would need to be a longer fic than I had time for because of Klaus's stubborn refusal to play along with the script in those kind of situations. And then Klaus's stubborn refusal to play along became the basis of a "four times" fic. (It was going to be the more traditional five, but I felt like the fifth, "locked in a cell together" wasn't really adding anything, so I cut it.)
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So I got one more fic written than I expected to this Yuletide, though it hasn't been the most productive writing year for me in general. Hopefully, I'll find more writing time in 2015. ...From somewhere.

Happy New Year, all!

Hello, prospective Yuletide writer! This letter is pretty rambly, but it's mostly just a long-winded way of saying that I'm fairly flexible and will enjoy almost any story featuring my chosen characters, so please don't panic too much.

( About me and my taste in ficCollapse )

Fandom specific details:

( Fantastic Four (Comicverse)Collapse )
( From Eroica With LoveCollapse )
( Judge Dredd (2000AD comics)Collapse )

Anyway, I hope you enjoy writing for me, please don't stress too much, and don't feel like you have to stick to the letter of my requests if you've got a better idea. I'd much rather you write something you like than write something that you're not happy with trying to stay close to one of my prompts. I'm really very easy to please!

Just heard about Robin Williams. So sad. I remember so many of his movies fondly from my childhood.

Saw GotG today, and thought it was great fun. A quick jumble of random, rather disjointedly tired thoughts:

( Not hugely spoilery, but anywayCollapse )

I'm fascinated to see where they might go with a GotG 2. Incidentally, comic-wise I thoroughly rec the 2008 Abnett/Lanning run of Guardians of the Galaxy, and the whole Annihilation event that it spun out of. Those comics were my first introduction to most of the Marvel cosmic characters and still managed to be a brilliant read - Annihilation is probably just about the best crossover event that Marvel's ever done. (Not that the standard of most of the competition is that high, but still. It's great.)

New Eroica fic! Considering one of the main things that drew me to the fandom was the fact that Klaus can be quite convincingly read as asexual, it seems to have taken me a while to write a fic that actually runs with that interpretation. But here is that story at last. Hopefully to be part one of a series, though as usual, no promises. (Except that if I do write further stories, yes, they too will be named after Pink Floyd songs, and no, I don't know why.)

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

In the wake of a rough undercover mission, Klaus re-evaluates his priorities. (5000 words)

Here at AO3 or here at FF.net

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In other fandom news, I have finally got round to making use of the bookmark facility at AO3 (largely just stuff I've already recced at nomads_gen_recs at the moment, though I'll be adding other non-gen faves as I remember/come across them) which has led to me rereading some old Alias favourites and completely reawakened my love for that fandom. So I've been contemplating a rewatch and even tentatively poking at my outline for an epic post-finale story again - which I still rather love, but is huge and intimidating and involves about fifteen minor characters who I'd barely even remembered existed, so I'm not sure with my very slow current rate of DVD-watching and fic writing it's going to be possible for me to resurrect it any time soon. But perhaps there is hope of me writing more Alias fic yet! You never know.

Reveals are here! I was awesomely lucky enough to receive two fics this year: Of the Boston Chambers by bloodredcherries, a Frasier/Cheers crossover with fantastic character voices, and Retrograde, another fab Fantastic Four fic from sevenofspade/dhampyresa who wrote for me last year. Woot!

I didn't have quite as much time for fic-writing as I'd hoped this year, since work and 'flu ate my November, but I managed to write four fics altogether:

Noble and Most Ancient (Black Books/Harry Potter)
Bernard's past catches up with him - by owl post. (8000 words)

I wrote Black Books treats the past two years and had a lot of fun doing it, so this year I decided to offer it officially, and I ended up getting matched with Grevling, the same person I wrote a treat for two years ago! So that started my Yuletide off on a great note. The request asked for crossovers putting the Black Books characters into a different setting, and I'd always had a vague itch to write a "Bernard Black of the House of Black" story (it's been done before, but it's one of those crossovers that fits so perfectly I think there should be a million different takes on it) so... here it is.

Certainties (Discworld)
Only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. The anthropomorphic personification of one meets the man behind the other. (3100 words)

This was a request by Rimedio for a fic where the Patrician was able to see Death; it caught my eye and I was already in the process of writing a treat to fill it when it came up as a pinch hit. It was fun to get a chance to write from Vetinari's POV, since he's the only one of my favourite Discworld characters I've never written before. The requester mentioned shipping him with Drumknott, and going through some of the books to research their interaction for a brief cameo both reinvigorated my interest in the fandom and made me ship it myself a bit. (Which is very surprising, since my gen goggles are even tighter than usual when it comes to the Discworld books.) The story almost had a final section about the death of Wuffles, but I wrote a couple of lines of it, realised it was going to be incredibly sad, and decided that the gift of devastating pet death was probably not the best thing to give somebody for Yuletide unsolicited. Maybe that section will see the light of day as a separate story someday.

Claudia (From Eroica With Love)
Klaus and his team need some help infiltrating a club with an exclusive members list. (7400 words)

Given the way Eroica has taken over my brain this year, I definitely wanted to write at least one fic for it this Yuletide. One of dkwilliams' requests was for a mission where Klaus had to dress in drag, and considering how resistant he would be to that idea, and my ongoing fascination with Klaus's boundaries and identity issues, I ended up spinning out a whole longer casefic to support it. I labelled it gen to avoid false advertising, but it's probably about as slashy as the manga itself on the Klaus/Dorian front.

Ghost Town (Zelda II: The Adventure of Link)
All Link needs is a place to rest and heal. (1850 words)

Taking the prize for least likely fandom for me to write in: Zelda II! Literally the first computer game I ever played, since it was one of the small handful of games that came with the second-hand NES my parents got for us when we were kids. JackOfNone wrote an awesome prompt about the fact that the setting of the game is actually pretty much post-apocalyptic horror, which both inspired this treat and kicked me off on replaying the entire sequence of Zelda games in chronological order. (I'm currently midway through Majora's Mask.) Despite being very inspired I had a real struggle with writing this one, since apparently when it comes to writing for computer games my instinct is to reproduce the events of the game exactly, and it took a lot of rounds of editing to hack out all the extraneous detail and turn it into something that felt more like a story.

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So, all in all, fewer fics than I'd originally hoped to write, but I'm pretty pleased with how all of them turned out, and I got not one but two great gifts. An excellent Yuletide all round!

Short, non-spoiler version: I enjoyed it! Funny, entertaining, and I thought it handled Loki well, a more emotionally complex role than in Avengers but without brushing any of his actions under the rug. All in all, a very fun film and a good follow-up to the first Thor movie.

( Spoilery thoughtsCollapse )

This has been sitting half-finished on my hard-drive for months, so I wanted to finish it off and get it posted before Yuletide assignments go out.

Operation Fruitcake

A sequel to Not the Only Fruit, in which Klaus attempts to get to grips with the revelations of that story in his own way. (3350 words)

Here at AO3 or here at FF.net

Also, apologies for the scarcity of updates at nomads_gen_recs of late - I've been short on reading time and mostly using it to catch up on tiny fandoms, so I haven't been coming across much gen fic suitable to rec. But rest assured it's not abandoned, and I'll try to update more regularly when I have more time to read.

The full story on those recovered Classic Who episodes has been released: apparently they've recovered nine of the lost Patrick Troughton episodes, all missing parts of The Enemy Of The World and all but one of the missing episodes from The Web Of Fear. (The missing one has been reconstructed with audio and stills.) They're up on iTunes already and will have DVD releases in November and early 2014.

(I am only a casual fan of Doctor Who at best, but apparently recovery of long-lost episodes of things excites me. It's so cool! And yet bad for my completionist tendencies that insist that one day I must sit down and attempt to watch the entire series in order.)

Huh. That'll teach me to not believe in wild rumours: the BBC is now confirming that it's true, though they're still playing coy about the exact number of episodes they've recovered.

It's that time again...

Welcome, Yuletide writer! And thank you for writing for me. Below the cut lies far more information than you probably want or need, so feel free to ignore or pay attention to as much of my rambling as it suits you.

( About me and my taste in ficCollapse )

Fandom specific details:

( FrasierCollapse )
( From Eroica With LoveCollapse )
( Judge Dredd (comics)Collapse )
( The Rat PatrolCollapse )

Finally, please have fun, don't stress out, and don't feel like you have to stick to the letter of the requests if you've got a better idea. I'll be pleased to get any kind of story that you want to write.

Thank you!