I totally lied, this is the placeholder for my yuletide post.

Placeholder for my yuletide Dear Writer post, once I decide what I actually want (Troy/Abed's a given, but I have about a dozen other fandoms to narrow down to three. Not to mention that we can only offer ten fandoms to write this year, which is proving even tougher than picking requests. All this is assuming the site stops crashing my browser, mind...) The Big Bang Theory's not an option this year, woe. The last episode has me dying for Amy/Bernadette slumber party shenanigans.

ETA: site's still not loading, though I've narrowed my requests down to Community (Troy/Abed, natch), Better Off Ted (Veronica-centric, with het, femslash or OT3 options), Back to the Future (1955!Doc gen) and one of this lot:
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air: Will and Carlton are tremendously slashy; good lord, there's an episode where Carlton not only tells Will he loves him, he sings a medley of love songs, badly and loudly, until Will grudingly says it back. I love them. Even leaving aside incestuous-cousin-slash, I adore the Banks' family dynamic and Christmas fic might be fun.
30 Rock: There was awesome Jonathan fic written last year. There can never ever be enough awesome Jonathan fic in the world.
The Philadelphia Story: Tracy/Mike/Dex are one of my OT3s of all time. This is almost always on my yuletide shortlist. But I don't have any specific prompt in mind, which isn't much fun for my writer.
Being Erica: I ship the living hell out of Erica/Dr Tom. Father/daughter relationship, you say? PFFT, I say. This season hasn't been great, though, and I can't stand Adam, so my enthusiasm for this fandom's not high right now.
St Trinians: It's schoolgirls who pull off heists. Hijinks are built into canon. Of course there are millions of fics I want in this universe.
The Sarah Jane Adventures: I want Clyde fic, and this season's got me all on for Clyde/Rani in particular, and I badly want gen about Haresh being comedically over-protective and possibly teaming up with Carla Langer. But at the same time, it's a fandom I can request fic in other times, and I feel like I should use yuletide for stuff I genuinely can't find/cajole out of people elsewhere. Plus I kind of want to write that Haresh fic myself.

On another note, I'm doing a complete watch-through of Frasier and hit a scene where Niles mentions that on the day he met Maris his own car was in the shop so he was driving Martin's - Frasier comments doubtfully "I can't quite imagine Maris in Dad's Impala." And then I spent several days thinking about a bizarre Frasier/Supernatural fusion where Frasier and Niles are the most inept (but classy) monster-hunting brothers of all time. If I didn't fear the wrath of my poor Yuletide writer, I'd totally request that.

...I appear to have finished my PhD. Well, bar the pesky bit where you actually have to pass; but I've written and submitted my thesis.

Am a wee bit shell-shocked, though better after sleeping for thirteen hours last night (making up for the last six weeks of thesis writing, where getting to bed at midnight was a short day). I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of having free time again - including actual time for fandom rather than dropping-random-comments-and-running, which is all I've been fit for for months. It's very strange. But I've got nothing to do but tool around with my academic CV for the foreseeable future, so I should probably muster up some comments on this season of Doctor Who (expect that would descend into how I'm OT3ing Eleven/Amy/Rory so much that Ican'teven.)

This probably means I have to get a job and be a proper person now, y/y?

My entry for the who_like_giants minor characters ficathon.

Title: Other Women
Author: Doyle
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Annalise, Leo Jones, Francine Jones
Rating: All ages
Word count: 1900
Disclaimer: Doctor Who characters belong to the BBC.
Note: I had three or four ideas half-started for this fest, and then I caught the beginning of Smith and Jones and wondered ‘whatever happened to Annalise…?’ One line rather obviously nicked from Gone With the Wind.
Summary: Normally you couldn’t have paid her to knock on Francine’s front door. Not for a million pounds. Not if they were the last people on Earth.

( Read more... )

Dashing in for a flying visit because this amused me too much not to share. I've been looking at the Mills and Boon (Harlequin) medical line because my mum loves those books and I was wondering which ones to buy her for Mother's Day; I started reading one called Wife For the Baby Doctor (terrible title, yes, though sadly not on the same level of brilliance as 'Billionaire MD'). Here's the synopsis from Barnes and Noble's website:

Junior doctor Dani Dixon is nervous about working with specialist Joshua Weatherby in his prestigious neonatal ward. Not only does he have a reputation as an exacting taskmaster, he's also the man who stole her heart!

But Josh keeps Dani at a distance, believing he still has a duty to protect the abandoned girl he once knew. All grown up, and working side by side with Josh, Dani now has a chance to show him that she doesn't need him to look after her anymore--she needs him to love her...as only a husband can.

Well, that's fairly accurate. It just leaves out what I would consider to be the most notable feature of the book; Josh and Dani are brother and sister. (Not blood related - I very much doubt Mills and Boon would go for full-on sibling incest - but Josh's mother adopted Dani when he was nine and she was a newborn, there are repeated flashbacks to him doting on his 'baby sister' when she's a baby, and even as an adult she calls him BB for 'big brother'...)

Is it wrong that this makes me much more inclined to seek out trashy series romance novels?

Anyone know if there's some way to block lj-toys? Would Ad-Block work? I think it might be to blame for the fact that I've only been able to sporadically get at my friends-list since yesterday afternoon, and that my computer's crashed twice today after freezing while loading LJ. *pokes things*

I made a Mickey picspam and a little bit of blathering about why he's great, for choc_fic's 100 Days of Characters of Colour fest.

Looking at all those pictures of Mickey makes me want to write more Mickey fic.

Don't be alarmed if you suddenly get a reply from me on a weeks-old comment; I've been appalling at keeping up with LJ the last couple of years months and I'm trying to go some way to rectify this. By amazing coincidence, I've decided to do this when I've got a huge amount of work on this weekend. I hope skience isolates the procrastination bit of the brain soon.

( A very brief summary of 2009, in lieu of the proper meme thing that's going around )

...why, after more than eight years on LJ, did I have to look up the FAQ on how to LJ-cut? Stupid non-working brain. Just because I threatened to cut out the procrastinating bit of you.

The servers are being a bit robust, but I managed to read my yuletide story and it filled me with giddy glee - (Sweeter Than the Sweetest) Cherry Pie, a Bernard and the Genie fix-it fic. I normally don't bother much about icons on my posts but in this case I carefully looked through my list for the most adorable, squeeful-looking icon in order to properly reflect how pleased I am with my story. I really like the new archive, too; things like crossovers or specific characters/pairings are much easier to find. On which note, I am off to read every HIMYM story in the archive, before family-people drag me away to be sociable...

Dear yuletide writer (I just feel a bit odd about calling people goats, although goats are perfectly nice creatures. Maybe that bit in Harry Potter about Dumbledore's brother and the inappropriate charms ruined them for me?),

Hurray! You've signed up for one of my rare fandoms - and this year they're really pretty rare, I think the most popular has four offers that aren't me - which means I like you already. And I'm dead easy to please, honestly. I like gen, slash, het, femslash, poly, I'm a huge multishipper, there are very few characters I don't like, I'm a big fan of humour and dialogue and adventures and fun character interactions; I'm not very fond (at least for these four fandoms) of unremitting angst without at least some spark of hope at the end of the tunnel, and I really hate character or ship bashing (though obviously some characters do canonically dislike each other, and reflecting that's fine).

I know this is weird in fandom, but I generally skim NC-17 scenes, so PWP isn't really my thing; don't feel you have to fade to black if it's going to wreck the story you're writing, of course.

( Enid Blyton - St Clare's series )

( Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? )

( The Brady Bunch Movie )

( Bernard and the Genie )