Selenay's Ramblings

When I finished Marvel Bang last year, I said it would be my last one. I'd done it five years in a row and last year's was the first one that really felt overwhelmingly stressful, so it was time to stop.

And you know, I'm feeling really good about that decision. I was worried that, as sign-ups happened and things got going, I'd get tempted into going back to do just one more. I've really enjoyed every one I've been in (even though last year's got very stressful due to too many commitments) and it feels a bit odd not to be doing it.

Now that sign-ups are closed I've realised that, actually, nope, I don't miss it. I mean, I've got no Bang-length plot bunnies, so that definitely helps.

But I'm also facing another summer of being incredibly busy and having loads to do, and knowing I'm not trying to write a big fic at the same time is so freeing. No deadlines! If I don't want to write tonight, I don't need to! It's so nice :-)

I'm sending Hunter out to a couple of beta readers this week and I plan to let it rest for a while, so there's no editing to poke at. I'm casually doing world-building and plotting for my next book, but I don't plan to start writing until after the summer busy has finished, so I can do that at my own pace. For the first time in a long time, I've got no deadlines hanging over me during the summer and it feels like I'm free.

Which definitely demonstrates that my time in Marvel Bang is done and I've made the right choice.

Fic challenges should be fun. As soon as they stop being fun, it's time to step back and do a different thing.

*blows dust off blog*

Ahem. Yes. I am terrible about updating. BUT. I figured it might be handy if I listed somewhere which panels I'm on at Nine Worlds THIS WEEKEND OMG HOW IS IT SO SOON. Don't believe the schedule - there's a small back-end issue with one of my panels, where I had to turn one down due to a clash but the listing still has me down on the turned down one. Woops!

So, if you want to see me be geeky, here's where you can find me:

Friday, 3.15pm: Writing Superheroes

Join Emma (signe_chan), Ollie, and I as we discuss writing superheroes in our fic. The ins and outs, the interesting aspects to explore, the way fic explores superpowers. However you define superheroes and superpowers, whether it's DC/Marvel or Buffy, this is the panel to be at.

Friday, 5pm: WILD SPECULATION: Star Trek

Round-table speculation about the movies and the forthcoming TV series. The wilder the idea, the better!

Saturday, 11.45am: History of Femslash

Llyn, Cleo, Roz Kaveny and I will be talking about femslash and its history, discussing where it began, where we all began in it, and how it has changed over the years. Whether you're new to femslash or an old hand, this is a panel for you! Wanna know what the first written femslash pairing probably was? Or what in heck a Xena Uber was? (And why so much lesbian fiction from the early 2000s looks suspiciously Xena-like?) Audience participation is encouraged and we'll be trying to put together an actual timeline on a large piece of paper during the panel.

Sunday, 9am: Why we love femslash

Despite the early hour, this is a celebration panel! Why do we love femslash? What are the tropes and stories we adore? Come and spend 45 minutes squeeing with Llyn, Cleo, and I about the joys of f/f romance in our favourite shows, books, and movies. There's only one rule: the phrase "femslash is better than dudeslash because..." is outlawed :-D

Ganked from sineala last year, and repeated due to cool questions :-).

( Writing meme below the cut )

Today for the December talking meme, captainhillshipper asked me for my favourite fic and why I love it. Which is basically impossible to narrow down to just one fic, in the same way I can't pick just one book or movie (anyone who wants the rundown on those - I'm still taking topic suggestions!), so it has to come down to a list.

Most of these fics are ones I've read in the last five years or so, because my memory for fics I read further back than that is...hazy. Any older fics on this list stood out like woah. Sadly, that means fandoms I was active in for a long time (SG1, Buffy) are not represented well. Er, at all. Everything blurred into a mush.

Also, bookmarking and Kindling today makes remembering newer favourites so much easier than it used to be. There are fics that I remember loving at the time, enough to reread multiple times, but all I can remember is fandom, pairing, and maybe a vague premise. Maybe. The archives they were on are long gone, which makes them pretty much impossible to trace. Hence the bias towards newer fics.

The fics below are the ones that I've read a dozen or more times, the ones I open when I need a pick-me-up or a cosy afternoon with a cup of tea. I love them to little bitty pieces and keep going back to them. Bashing my favourite fics ain't gonna win you points here, is what I'm saying :-)

Launch Your Assault: I've lost count of how many times I've read this. It's a Clint/Coulson college AU by one of my favourite fic writers, and there's something about the mix of angst, porn, self-discovery, and porn, that really registers with me every time I read it. (No, it's just just the porn.)

Ordinary Workplace Hazards, Or SHIELD and OSHA Aren't On Speaking Terms: I might have read this one as many times as LYA, it's hard to tell. It's a Clint/Coulson fic that has one of the hottest non-sex scenes I've read, and it's the fic that launched this ship for me. I love it enough to have it on my Kindle and in two different podfic readings on my iPod.

Motion Practice: An Avengers lawyer AU sounds like it should be the most boring thing ever, but it really isn't. Loads of well-written, novel-length fics. My favourite pairings. Emotionally difficult but hugely satisfying stories. I've read the original fic multiple times and most of the others at least twice. They're gorgeous.

Men of Our Word: I read this so many times when I was Sparrington shipping hard. And then last year I got a craving, spent an evening tracking it down to reread, and I still love it to a ridiculous degree.

#435, The Atlantis Local Stitch'n'Bitch: I'm linking to the text of this, because I have no idea where I got the podfic version of it from. That's the version I've listened to fifty billion times, though. It's maybe my favourite McShep fic and I can't even articulate why.

Drastically Redefining Protocol: By the same author as the last fic, this is the Merlin Royalty AU of my heart. It's my favourite Merlin fic. It's ridiculous and awesome and I'm never, ever getting over it.

So there we go, this is my list, and in about five minutes I'm going to realise there were a dozen other fics that I wanted to list here as well, but never mind. This list is the fics that came immediately to mind when I was asked this question, which speaks to how much I love them.

Anyone else want to share some favourites?

Every now and again, I look at the responsibilities I have and the number of people who come to me looking for guidance or consultation on projects...and I have a momentary freak out. Why do people keep thinking I know stuff? Why do they want my approval before they do things? Why do they think I can fix this?

And then I do it, fixing the things and providing answers and showing people what to do, and I realise...yeah. This has happened because I'm actually pretty good at my job.

In my head, I'm still that scared seventeen year old kid who'll never figure out what she wants, and is about to spend around eight years going down various paths before settling into something. In my head, I don't have eight years of experience in IT and a bunch of successful projects behind me. My headcanon for myself doesn't match reality.

It's a little odd, sometimes. Hopefully I'm not the only person who feels that way :-D

In other news…

I have finally broken ground on my femslashex fic. This is possibly the latest I've ever got before starting an exchange fic, so I'm slightly freaking out, but it'll be fine. It's not going to be a novel, but that's probably a good thing. I'm trying to edit several long fics (two over 40k) and taking on another big fic just before NaNo might break me. It's not the pairing or the POV character I thought that I'd pick when I got my assignment.

I'm actually pretty happy to have picked it, though. Even if it means I'm going for a rarepair within a fandom with a really low femslash percentage.

At some stage, I really need to write a sequel for last year's femslashex fic.

At some stage, I need to write that Jane/Sif role reversal fic I keep getting bunnied for with gifs on Tumblr.

At some stage, I need to work out what will be my Christmas fic.

There are two many 'at some stage' notes in this post :-D

*blows dust off the furniture*

Hello! Yes, I aten't dead. Again.

But I have been finding it increasingly difficult to put together anything approaching an actual blog post. One with words and thoughts and so on. It's much easier to chatter on Twitter and reblog stuff on Tumblr and my brain has been on a "do the easier things" setting for most of the winter. There's a lot of reasons for my absence and lack of braining, including (but not limited to):

WINTER - This has been the worst winter since my first one in Canada. So, so cold. So much snow. Constant, unrelenting snow and ice and shovelling and falling over. I've been feeling quite low a lot of the time, with occasional forays into irrational dread when another snow storm is forecast. If we can please not have another winter like this for a few years, that would be great.

If spring could start to show up, that would also be great. It was -15C this morning, before windchill was added. There's another big snow storm predicted for later this week. IT'S FRICKING MARCH.

So yes, winter. My brain got eaten by winter. And also...

Writing - ( Cut for lengthy stuff about writing )

My current plan is to mostly take April off from fanfic and concentrate on an original story. It's something that's been rattling around my brain for a while and I'm reaching the "must write this" stage now. This week I've been writing a short story connected to it, just to get it out of my head, and I'm itching to get to the main piece. I don't know whether it will go anywhere beyond the hard drive of my computer, but I want to try and I'm planning to use Camp NaNoWriMo as the motivation for it. AFter all, the regular NaNo got me mostly through writing a fanfic novel. Hopefully it's baby cousin can keep me on track for something original. At least for the first month, anyway.

(I'm not calling it a novel, in case it gets intimidated and runs away from me before I finish it. Set the bar low and all that.)

If people see me chattering about Zombie Circus, that's what I'm doing. There are no actual zombies in the circus. My working titles only make sense to me :-D

NaNoWriMo is going surprisingly well. I started this with no actual expectation of hitting 50k - I was aiming for maybe 30k and managing to write at least some words most days. I'd hit a slump after the massive push to finish the steampunk AU and even though I'd been writing and prodding at bits and pieces, I hadn't really been able to throw myself into anything for a couple of months.

Elizabeth Bear often talks about post-novel ennui, that state where you've put so much into the big push to finish a novel and you've thrown so much of yourself into said novel that all you want to do is slump on the sofa with a stack of DVDs, books, and food until you've recharged.

That's where I'd been for a couple of months and I was struggling to get past it so I decided to do NaNo and see if that jolts me out of it. I'm doing it rebel style, working on multiple projects including finishing a WIP that's been in hibernation since June due to the steampunk AU.

The WIP has a working title of Match Made in Heaven but I usually just call it the crackfic wingfic AU. I wrote 10k back in June and then had to put it aside to get the steampunk AU written. I had this idea that it wouldn't be a long fic, definitely under 20k, and it would be sweet and fluffy and silly. I poked at it a bit in October, added an extra 5k, and put it aside again.

Since the beginning of November I've added 27k. It's definitely not *short*. With the other short little things I've done, I'm at over 30k for the month already so I've more than hit my original NaNo goal and I may actually be thinking that 50k looks achievable now. I'm even far enough ahead of goal that if I lose a couple of writing days this weekend, I still might make the 50k.

Most excitingly, I've remembered why I like writing big fics and why it's so much easier to just power through one huge project rather than prodding at half a dozen things at the same time. It's the main thing running through my mind whenever I have time to think - thinking about how the next scenes should run, rehearsing dialogue, picturing things, nudging at plot barriers and finding ways over them. This is the part of writing I really love and I guess my big learning from NaNo will be that while I *can* flutter around projects, I enjoy writing most when I'm focusing on one project at a time.

I said that after the steampunk AU, didn't I? One day this message will actually stick.

The other learning will be that when the fic calls for it, I can actually write smut. I'll need my beta to tell me whether it's good quality smut, but this fic? Yeah, it's getting a high rating. Oops?

Today I am having the fun of arguing about the existence or otherwise of a table with the DBAs.

Hint: it exists.

Hint 2: half my code would be broken if it didn't exist.

Conclusion: clearly someone here has gone blind and it ain't me.

The argument is because I need them to change some columns and apparently if they declare it non-existent, they won't do the change. Except, uh, it's there. I'm looking right at the data I just selected from it.

*headdesk*

And people say my job doesn't require deep and meaningful thoughts on the wider issues at hand. I'm debating the nature of existence, guys! Totes deep and meaningful :-D

( Cut for witterings about fanfic and writing in general )

Oh look, it's 2007 all over again. Well done, Amazon.

( Cut for length )

Hopefully Kindle Worlds will go the way of Fanlib and die a quiet, ignomnious death. At the moment that seems the most likely future for it, given the level of uproar and the fact that 99% of readers/writers are already planning to simply pretend it doesn't exist. Fingers are all firmly crossed.

The emails came out today with dates and details for this year's marvel_bang! Author signups open on May 1st, close on May 8th. If anyone else is interested :-D

( Cut for slightly lengthy fic discussion )

Does anyone know if/when any Avengers-specific Big Bangs are running? I liked Marvel Big Bang last year, but it would be good to know what all the options are before I commit. Or, you know, have some idea on whether I want to do more than one BB this year :-D

It might be fun to try out a reverse big bang, if that's running again.

Fahre, stop looking at me like that. I vowed not to sign up for any challenges until after March. It's after March. No, don't shake your finger at me. I'm not going to overload myself again this year, I promise. Um.

In other news...

I'm so freaking happy that it's Friday and I can sleep for a long time tomorrow. So damn tired. There are things I need to do (specifically, do the paper edits on the mechanic AU) but my major aim tomorrow is to catch up on some sleep and read the latest Fables tpb. With Doctor Who as the highlight of the day, obvs :-D

Last night I did some housekeeping on my PVR and officially broke up with Gray's Anatomy. It's gone. All episodes deleted and setting removed. This way I won't decide to watch the last few episodes, just for completion, and end up getting sucked back in again. Nope.

I'm also seriously considering breaking up with Bones at the end of the season. That will leave me with NCIS, CSI:NY, Arrow, and Once Upon a Time as my regular cable tv shows.

Er, yes, I have noticed that frees up some time and space for the SHIELD tv show :-D

OK, maybe I should also admit that I intend to add Teen Wolf to the schedule when (if *sigh*) it starts airing up here in June. MTV is, apparently, completely different up here from what's shown in the States so I'll just have to wait and see what airs where. Oh, Canada, you continue to baffle me five years after moving here.

At least SHIELD will be on ABC and that means we'll definitely get it up here :-D

And I'll be recording it off ABC if at all possible, particularly if CTV gets it as well, because I don't trust CTV with things after the clusterfuck that's been their Arrow broadcasts.

*looks at previous journal entries* Wow, this week I've apparently been obsessed with TV despite not watching much. Must be the total mind-melting exhaustion. Next week I'll be talking about something much more sensible.

Like comics :-D