Selenay's Ramblings

Yuletide reveals are now live so I'm posting this while I remember:

Action Hero Figures and Ham Sandwiches (2509 words) by Selenay
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Peter Parker & Flash Thompson
Characters: Peter Parker, Flash Thompson

Summary: When Peter and Flash met, they almost bonded. Until the moment Flash said something stupid.
That has been the pattern of their relationship until now but maybe things are about to change.

Dear author,

Firstly, you're writing a fic just for me so don't worry because I'm going to love it. Seriously, that is a given and I'm already flailing about it :-D

I'm pretty easy-going with fic reading. Provided it doesn't contain my absolute, hard, no no no squicks, there's not much that I won't love. My biggest joy is from fics that have a bit of plot and a bit of character stuff. Whether it's fluff, adventure, romance, drama or complete crack, I love it.

The things that I really don't read are death fics, horribly tragic fics, BDSM and other extreme kinks, and mpreg. So, you know, the standard things :-D

So, having said all that you might be looking for some specific guidance. My sign-up optional details are a fairly complete precis of what would make me flail madly, but here you go:

( Mission Impossible (movies) )

( Call the Midwife )

( Parasol Protectorate )

I hope you have fun writing your yuletide fic and I can't wait to see what the results are!

Your grateful recipient,
Selenay.

You know those weekends where you have loads of plans and a time table that, if followed perfectly, will ensure that you get everything done?

And you know how plans always fall apart due to miscalculations like running out of mince meat and cats knocking over the Christmas tree?

Yeah.

The good news is that it was only the little tree downstairs and it was easy to fix. The tree is now being hidden under the stairs unless I'm at home and awake to supervise.

And I've got more mince meat marinating so the mince pies for the work thing on Wednesday can still happen.

OK, yes, no cards got written and I'd planned to have the pies made and ready to bake so that Tuesday evening would be less fraught...

I love Christms but I always get over confident about my plans. At least my Yuletide fic is pretty much done and will be uploaded tomorrow. How is everyone else doing on the Christmas insanity?

Please don't let that be a cat with a bauble that I can hear...

I have my Yuletide sign-up all worked out. I'll be entering it tomorrow. It's taken all week to put together 3 prompts.

It took me thirty minutes with the nominations results to find 15 fandoms that I felt confident about writing in. For the first time ever, I'll be putting in a bucket sign-up. I am undecided about whether this is progress or madness.

In other news, I have a ton of credit on my iTunes account and a big list of apps that I want to put on my iPad on Wednesday. I'm all about list making this week, it seems.

We should probably not discuss how many pretty games I appear to have listed. Let's instead focus on the fact that I've picked out a word processing app that apparently synchs well with Google Docs (QuickOffice Pro HD, for the interested) so I'll be able to write my Yuletide assignment(s)* wherever I may be.

* I may be seriously considering signing up as a pinch hitter. I know, I'm insane this year.

So, yesterday I had a really bad day because I had very little sleep the night before thanks to my stupid back. I was mostly competent at work but rather fell to pieces when I got home and went straight for a nice lie down with a book that turned into a nice nap.

Then Mum had to wake me up from that nap. Remember the episodes of West Wing where someone has to wake the President and they don't want to because he'll be very grumpy?

That's me when woken from naps. Grumpy. Uncooperative. Horrible. Poor Mum.

Today I'm feeling better thanks to the application of drugs last night. I've moved the bottle of co-codamol to beside my bed rather than in the kitchen to make it easier to dose myself the moment I get woken by my back rather than trying to keep sleeping and then waking up every few minutes the way I did the other night. Argh.

In less grumpy news...

I bought a new coat. I've got a lovely warm coat that goes down to my knees and is terrific when I'm out in the freezing weather or shovelling or trying to walk in a snow storm. It's got a big hood, deep pockets and it's big enough to fit a thick sweater under.

It's also deeply ugly and makes me look scruffier than a very scruffy thing.

New coat is not quite so warm, so won't be suitable for storms or shovelling, but it's got a furry collar and it looks very nice so I won't be embarrassed to turn up at work functions, dinners out or off-site meetings in it. Yay! It's long, beige and sort of trench-coat like with a belt. But stylish. I'm very pleased. There's enough room to layer up under it (damn, I'm getting thin - the medium had tons of room!) so I shouldn't be frozen and I feel much more confident in it :-)

Also, my iPad was despatched yesterday. Wooooo!

Finally, yuletide nominations open this week. Keep an eye out! Nominate! Join in! Get a lovely ficcy Christmas present! It may be my favourite ficathon of the year and I'm impatient to get started :-D

It took me an hour (due to editing twice, once for a forgotten shout out to my beta in notes and once due to not formatting some italics) but I have posted my yuletide fic.

This is mainly because the archive will be insane tomorrow (worse than today, if that's believable) and I don't want to panic about not being able to post before the deadline. It's editable so if my beta comes back with big red scrawls over the second draft that I sent, I can still correct and amend, but at least it's there and I feel fairly happy with it.

Also, if the physio kills me tomorrow it's also there.

I have got physio for 8am. As physio at 8am on Friday was a disaster due to me being incredibly stiff and immovable, I'm thinking that tomorrow may also be a Bit Of An Issue.

Note to self: book physio for afternoons in future when the morning stiffness has decreased and you're 'just' suffering from too much sitting down.

Today my back woke me up at 4am (after not going to sleep until after midnight) to inform me that we were done with lying down now. I was stubborn and stayed in bed, propped into semi-less-uncomfortable positions with pillows. It wasn't a good morning and I am so incredibly tired right now.

Dear Yuletide Writer,

I am not hard to please. If you write something in either of my three requested fandoms, I shall probably be over the moon. The only things that I really don't enjoy are tragic endings, deaths of favourite characters and the squicky things like rape.

My big love is stories with plot and drama that also have some nice character development. I understand that not everyone likes writing meaty stories like that, though, so a nice fluffy vignette would make me equally happy. A writer who is writing what they enjoy tends to produce better stuff that a writer forcing themselves to write way outside their normal parameters.

If you want some better, more specific guidelines, here you go:

( Holby City, Nina's Heavenly Delights, Bend It Like Beckham )

Wow, I really got rambly on Holby there. Can you tell that I'm lamenting the severe lack of Holby City fic?

So, yesterday Mum and I made our Arctic trek down to the shops half a mile away for milk. It took us a long time because the sidewalks were so dreadful.

We got home and were discussing the fact that we'd need to do some shopping before Christmas. Dad asked whether we *really* had to and we started listing all the things we'd run out of. As a lot of them were things that Dad likes to eat, he concluded that we needed to go shopping RIGHT NOW OMG. Before the roads freeze, or something.

Mum and I had planned to go today, but as he was actually volunteering to drive somewhere we decided to take advantage.

Um. Scariest. Drive. Ever.

There was a car ahead of us where the occupants were obviously taking pictures. They would stop every now and again to take photos. They stopped just around corners so that we could not see they were stopped until we were almost on them (not the kind of roads you want to do emergency stops on). They stopped at the top of a small rise so that we had to stop on the rise. Our wheels spun for a moment as we attempted to pull away. Yikes.

It was pretty, but not the weather for that kind of stuff. The store was packed and we saw a couple of people collecting deliveries that the store had obviously managed to pack but couldn't get anywhere. Mum decided that she was glad that she hadn't tried for a delivery! We got everything in record time, packed up the car and then proceeded home. Slightly less scary (due to lack of photographers) but still not an experience to be repeated regularly.

We spent the rest of the evening at home, recovering while watching trashy TV and drinking tea. Today has largely been about relaxation as well. A cafe has opened in what used to be one of the banks in my village so Mum and I decided to walk up there this morning to buy a paper at the newsagent (I've missed The Independent and Private Eye) and get some coffee at the cafe. Then we started working on Christmas lunch: the stuffing is ready and the spiced ham just finished baking. Yummy.

Now I think that I'll curl up with knitting and Spooks for the evening. It's Christmas Eve tomorrow!

And I crazy to be looking at Yuletide Madness to see whether anything inspires me?

Dear Santa,

For this year's Yuletide I found that I knew which fandoms I wanted some fic in, even which characters, but got a bit stuck on the actual prompts. This is why most of my prompts are fairly bare. All I really want for Christmas is some good, plotty fic that explores my beloved characters a bit. And plotty does not mean that I want a 32,000 word adventure: it means that I want something to happen in the fic and there to be some kind of reaction and learning from the characters. Really, I'm just trying to say that I'm not the kind of person who loves a "xx and yy go buying shoes!" kind of thing.

That said, I can probably provide some more info on my fandoms and why I love them and want more from them, although I'd really just like you to write something you enjoy and feel proud of at the end. So you can ignore my prompts entirely if you need to. But please, no death fic and no extreme violence/tragedy or non/dub-con, kthx. Those are the things I deliberately avoid in fic.

( Cut for length and irrelevance to 90% of my f-list )

Yuletide sign ups are open: http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/signup_page1.cgi

Eep! It's going to be a really tough choice this year. Made even worse by the fact that B5 is eligible this year. At first I was "WTF?" about that, until I remembered how frustrated I've been about the fact that I found the Internet too late to join in the B5 ficcing. Most of the websites that hosted B5 fic have gone, there is only a smattering on the big archives, and very little new stuff is coming out. So, er, B5 actually does qualify as a rare fandom now.

*sigh*

I've only got four request slots available and, including B5, seven that I'd love to request. So I need to sit down and think carefully, not just about which fandoms I want fic from but also what fandoms I can think of good prompts for. Last year I got really luck with two lovely Bend It Like Beckham Jess/Jules stories (after three years of not getting BILB at all even in femslash challenges) but I'm greedy and want more. Then again, there's Press Gang. And my beloved Holby City. And Chalet School. And Casualty 1909 is already up as requested/offered, so there's a possibility. And Young Wizards seems to get some lovely stuff written.

The thing that's not going to be as difficult this year, I think, is working out what I can offer. I made notes of which fandoms I was considering at nomination stage and even in the ones that I didn't nom, there are several that I feel I can offer. I'm trying to make sure that this year I only offer for things that I have easy access to source material for :-) So that I don't get asked to write fic for one of the Chalet Schools that I don't have...

I think that I need to have a good, long think about this and do my sign up at the weekend.

Now, is there any kind of Doctor Who Santa type thing out there? After all, two deadlines is better than one. Um.