Just the start of it all

It's that Resistance is Futile questions meme again, this time with questions courtesy of peeeeeeet. You can ask for questions here or on the previous post of it I did.

( This meme is going to make me spammy, isn't it? )

Speaking of things I might regret, it turns I am going to have four weeks in the second half of February/first half of March much more available for fannishness than I usually do, and I can't help but notice that if tardis_bigbang runs again I could sign up and write my first draft in that time in a mega-efficient and organised way, rather than leaving it to the last minute like I did this time, subjecting my long-suffering betas to much long suffering. 'Cos I've just proved to myself that I can just about write 20k words in a month with 666words so hrm. My main problem is not having a clear idea what I'd want to write about -- I do have a few ideas for longer fic percolating in the back of my brain, but they're all ones that I've discarded for one reason or another. (They're mostly variations on "New School Character X goes to Stockbridge; X/Izzy ensues", for some reason. I suppose I could attempt epic Izzy/Destrii; my main problem with being able to write that is that there's a lot to unpick in terms of making it work sensibly and I normally give up when it gets too complicated to fit in a short fic.) Has anyone got any suggestions for what I should write?

Meme from drho:

Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile" I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity. Update your journal with the answers to the questions. Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

( drho's questions were ... )

(I'm not promising to be particularly timely with questions for you if you do go all Borg-like on me, mind. On the other hand, I am mainly doing this out of procrastination, so.)

For various reasons, not least procrastination:

Ask me anything fandom-related and I'll answer honestly in a separate post. Comments are screened so no one needs to know it was you who asked.

From everyone ever:

Ask me my fannish Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really!

Last one for this go round! Requested by elliptic_eye.

( Porny fic discussed below the cut )

Requested by radiantbaby.

Warnings that were too long to put in the cut text: it's an NC-17 fic so NSFW and all that, there's some minor discussion of spoilers for the upcoming specials/S5, and there's also very vague spoilers for Time Traveller's Wife, if that's something you're worried about being spoiled for.

( Wow, it turns out I had quite a bit to say on this one )

Requested by livii

( Weirdy parallel universe wibbling under the cut )

Requested by biichan.

( Romana/Duggan the long-winded way )

Fic: Days Like Crazy Paving, PG-rated metatastic post-Time-War Mel/Ace fic for glinda_penguin in the femslash09 ficathon.

Meme: Now that I have Free Time once more, I'm going to do another go round of the DVD commentary meme, because I am a bit in love with rambling on at length in a pretentious and self-involved way.

Request any fic of mine and I will provide you with a commentary/annotations, like a DVD extra.

(In previous iterations, I have covered Going Forward, In All Her Beliefs, The Turn of the Universe, Hardly Moving Yet and Do You Remember the First Time?)

Gakked from lizbee and astrogirl2. (Incidentally, I very much approve of this meme, as I have felt for a while that Who fandom is needlessly, even counterproductively, cagey about Teaspoon stats.)

Open up your "Manage Stories" page on Teaspoon and unfold all the chapters. For the purposes of this meme, disregard first chapters of multichapter fics. [Teaspoon counts any hits on the TOC as a hit on the first chapter.]

( results under the cut )

I need to get a this-is-me-being-nerdy-and-obsessing-over-stats icon, I think.

Anyway, my internets are almost inevitably about to switch themselves off; I'm already on borrowed time, the phone line has died on schedule but weirdly the broadband still works. I will see you all from another house. (*hugs* to all who feel the need for them.)

Irrelevant ETA: Is it something like a sign of the downturn that there seems to be a lot more spam nowadays trying to sell me email address lists so I can be a spammer myself? Hopefully they will all eat each other to death.

I think this might possibly be my favourite meme ever:

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

(You can comment and not get things, if you want. It's not compulsory or anything.)

silly_cleo gave me:

( Being into Old Who fandom before the new show )
( Nyssa/Tegan and femslash generally )
( the Doctor Who books )
( Buffy )
( being sane about fandom )

requested by biichan, to whom much thanks because this is one I really wanted to talk about; this was written for last year's lgbtfest, and they've just got up and running again for this year (plug, plug, plug; there might just still be time for you to submit prompts)

( Hardly Moving Yet: the more than you really wanted to know version )

requested by magicallaw, who said she was going to do the meme herself but hasn't yet, which means I can't request Girl from Mars from her (that was gloriously unsubtle, wasn't it?)

( Do You Remember The First Time? the long-winded edition )

coming soon: Hardly Moving Yet, requested by biichan, and I'm still taking requests, if you haven't been completely put off by all that smug self-congratulation

I'm sure someone somewhere on LJ is doing this right now and if I bothered to search appropriately I could claim I was gakking it from them, but really I am disinterring it because I fancy talking about myself in long-winded and vaguely self-important ways:

Request any fic of mine and I will provide you with a commentary/annotations, like a DVD extra.

(Last time, I did Going Forward In All Her Beliefs and The Turn of the Universe, so there's not much point asking for those.)

These are the top hundred "books we can't live without", according to a poll conducted for World Book Day 2007 (presumably in the UK). According to the meme, "the BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100"; I can't find any source for the statistic, and the spurious-seeming invocation of the BBC suggests this list is being conflated with the Beeb's "Big Read" from 2003, which produced a similar but not identical list (The Big Read has LotR top and P&P second, for starters, and the HP books were listed separately with the most recent at the time -- Goblet -- doing best out of the four).

Anyway, the rules are: bold the books you've read in their entirety, italicise the ones you started but didn't finish.

( here goes ... )

Twenty five, which is both more than I expected and more than it felt like in the process of going through the list.

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

kseda gave me:

( Anji Kapoor )

( sizeofthatthing )

( my favourite comic book artist )

( how awesome my username is )

( pie )

(If you want to comment without being tagged for the meme, just say. If you do want to be tagged, be aware I may be offline for a while because I am probably about to switch off my router until I have finished this thrice-damned fic that doing this meme was blatant procrastination from.)

Here are my answers to the questions I got asked in that meme:

Do you sometimes feel that there's an awful lot of shippy fic (in general) that could be "Any Two, Three or However Many Characters of Either Gender" - that the cliche takes over from the characterization?

( Apparently it takes me 200 words to say 'hell yes!'. )

Do you have any guilty pleasures when it comes to fanfic?

( Excellent question! )

What was wrong with Forgotten? Is it the one that has Handy as a villain? And there was a panel showing all the Doctors that the writer thought was the best Who illustration ever? (from peeeeeeet, following on from my whining about Tony Lee in the questions post)

( Short answer: what's right with it? )

And this last one has an answer short enough that I don't feel the need to cut it, though it will make precious little sense to anyone except me and the questioner:

Do you still want that copy of Years of Rice & Salt?

Oh good god, I'd completely forgotten about that! Nah, don't worry. Looking at what have become my to-read bookcases, I don't think I'd ever get round to reading it properly. I skimmed enough of it to get the gist and the more I play Civ IV (where they have a "religion" system that is as open to vehement argument about how well it models the way history really works as everything else in the game) the more I realise I can do my own alt-hists along the same lines rather more enjoyably than trudging through KSR's infodumps.

OK, so this is the version where you can ask me the really wanky stuff (and I get to take forever on the answers):

Ask me anything: all types of fannish opinions, good, bad, and ugly. I'm screening all comments so ask me anything fannish-related and I'll answer (in a separate post) with complete honesty. Any TV show/book/movie that you're pretty sure I've mentioned in the past is fair game, as are thoughts on general themes and trends in fandom/fiction, lists of loved/hated characters, thoughts on ships, whatever. Comments are screened so you can ask whatever you want without being "revealed". If you don't care about being revealed you can let me know.

Fandoms: Who, comics, Whedon stuff, West Wing, Trek (in as much as I spent my teenage years on it so have lots of opinions), proper written SF!, most C4 Friday night comedies, Demons, Terminator: SCC, other stuff you know I like but I've forgotten to mention here

Have a free one: I am not in the slightest bit interested in IDW's new ongoing Who comic, entirely because it's written by _tonylee_, who was responsible for the sub-fanfic Forgotten.

This is (or will be, assuming it gets validated) a Teaspooned version of a fic about Ten and Martha having wibbly wobbly time sex what I wrote for sizeofthatthing the other day. (Ten/Martha is by far my most actively shipped ship, but there are several that I feel more strongly about. It's a bit of a paradox.)

And this is my thread at that anon feedback meme thing (I am not going to do the giant text, sorry). I do feel like there's a general Cult of Nice vibe in fandom that prevents proper concrit outside of the beta-reading dynamic, and to be honest there are a lot of bad or at least very lazy things about my writing, so go on, be mean constructively critical mean.

who_anon implied I was Cult of Nice the other day. This has been preying on my mind.

(via cedara)

When you see this, quote Douglas Adams in your journal.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."