stunt_muppet

You all make such unreasonable demands of me, you know.

But first, some chitchat:

1. My uncle and I are carrying a sign to the Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear tomorrow; somewhat predictably, ours reads "this is a sign", but let me tell you it was extremely tempting to make my own sign reading "+5 to SAN Check".

Because, you see, it's the Rally to Restore Sanity. And in the pen-and-paper RPG Call of Cthulu, whenever you glimpse the Horrible Elder Things or their constructs, you lose Sanity, abbreviated as SAN. And to determine how much Sanity you've lost at any given encounter, you make a SAN Check.

So, obviously, a +5 bonus to your SAN roll would help you...drumroll...restore sanity!

I think you can see why I could not do this. With my luck out of the 60,000+ people at the Rally there'd be maybe one who knew enough about Call of Cthulu to get it, and they'd be standing on the other side of the Mall from me, and my joke would be totally wasted. Also I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with being that much of a geek in public and possibly on national TV.

2. I have for the first time eaten a delicious new fruit! My uncle came in yesterday and very kindly took me to dinner, and we went to this Chinese restaurant we like, where they had a dish of shrimp complemented by a fruit called the longan, a relative of the lychee. Like the lychee it's small with tender pale flesh, but it's almost sugary-sweet and bursts into juice when you bite into it. The next time I drive by my local Asian market, I'm going to keep an eye out for it, and if you see any raw in your local markets (it looks like a tan lychee fruit) I highly recommend giving it a try.

3. Ellen DeGeneres dresses up as Snooki's Pouf for Halloween. STOP BEING AMAZING ELLEN I CAN'T HANDLE IT.

4. Paul the Octopus, who successfully predicted the outcome of every World Cup game, has died. Spokespersons for the aquarium where he lived have proposed burying him on the aquarium grounds with a modest permanent shrine. May the aquarium bubbles rise to meet you, Paul. *removes hat*

5. A meme that pretty much everyone and their mum has done by this point:

1. Comment in this post with a pairing, a character, or theory.
2. I shall write you back a paragraph explaining what I think about it (good, bad, indifferent) and why.
3. Repost in your own journal if you want.

Fandoms: TF Animated, Beast Wars, and G1; Doctor Who Doctors 1-5 and 9-11; Umineko no Naku Koro Ni (anime only; haven't read enough of the VNs to be comfortable answering questions yet); Star Trek Reboot; Shadow Raiders; ReBoot; NCIS; Bones; Toy Story. You know, stuff.

6. spacehussy  tagged me for this other writing meme, and let me tell you it takes so very long to compare reading stats over four different sites. My life; so hard.


Soooo rather a lot of these ended up requiring answers about my old Miami fic, which I may or may not link to depending on how I feel about it at the time. You all promise not to judge to harshly, right? SAY YOU PROMISE. >:(

1. Which is your favorite fic?

Um...a lot of them. I think it's still probably a toss-up between The Waiting-Room World (also here), because it was actually one of my earlier Who fics and it let me really play with an episode and setting I like, expanding it and thinking about it and turning it over in my mind, and plus it was one of the more daring things I've ever done as far as "nobody is going to read this but I want to write it anyway"; and Block Transfer Computations (also here) because I'm just so ridiculously proud of it. I made people like Adric with this fic, at least while they were reading it. Fuck yeah. :D

2. Which is your best-received fic?

Depends how you calculate it. Block Transfer Computations is up there, with 3 reviews on FF.net, 7 on Teaspoon, 1 on AO3, and 3 on LJ (14 total) and three independent recs (which is more than any of my others). Someone Else's Stories also managed six comments on LJ and six on FF.net (plus seven favorites the first week it was posted! :D), while so far as TF fandom goes, Connections and The Sound of Travel and the Engine have eleven and ten between both sites, plus one Delicious bookmark apiece.

But, while I'm not sure they still would be if I updated them now, and going solely by review count, my best-received stuff has been my Miami fic, in particular The Sixth-Date Rule (tooth-rotting fluff, just warning you) (17 reviews) and She Sees Through Shadows (around 15 not counting repeat reviewers). And while Sixth-Date looks kind of overly fluffy to me now because I've been in fandom too long I am still quite proud of Shadows and am glad people seemed to like it, considering what an experiment it was, although I'm annoyed that Miami fandom did not respond with a sudden outpouring of Alexx Woods fic because I love her. <3 

3. Which is your worst-received fic?

I can't think of any that have been poorly-received except for being just bad. I am ashamed to admit that there were a couple of fics when, after a review/critique pointed out their many flaws, I actually deleted them (or locked them down) because I was so embarrassed about having written them; I guess you could call those badly-received. For obvious reasons I cannot link to them here. ;)

Going by review count, the only fic on FF.net with no reviews is I, You, He, a brief Wilson/Cuddy House fic that kind of doesn't go anywhere and doesn't do anything a bunch of other House fic didn't do; the only one on Teaspoon with no reviews is Old Friends and Observers; I'll get to that later.

4. Which is your angsty-est fic?

A ha ha ha ha ha oh God, looking back some of my old Law and Order fic was the most melodramatic thing ever and I might as well have just titled it My Girlfriend's Dead, Waah (or, alternately, The Guy I'm Sleeping With Is a Jackass, Waah). Hilarious. I don't know if I've ever written straight-up angst after that. Probably the closes I've gotten is this little LJ-only omake/extra from The Memory Always Lies, which doesn't make huge amounts of sense and is basically me with symbolism coming out my arse, and possibly also Concerning Multiverse Theory, concerned (hurr) as it is with what the Doctor thinks is his imminent demise. 

5. Which is your funniest fic?

Looking at this question, I realize that I have not written anything that's actually meant to be funny. And that's sad.

I mean, there's maybe Looking Good Is Serious Business, which consists of Polly trying to straighten the Second Doctor's hair, but I don't know how funny that actually was.

6. Smuttiest?

Only two I've ever written that were in any way graphic and didn't involve robots: Holding the Reins (Three/Jo) and Entirely Your Fault (Three/Brig). The latter of which I just realized I completely forgot to post anywhere outside the kinkmeme, whoopsie. 

7. Fluffiest?

The Sixth-Date Rule. Because it's about two characters going on a date and one of them trying to get a kiss from the other. Not even get laid, just get kissed. Younger Me is sometimes rather charming in her innocence.

Yeah, I know. Quit your laughing.

8. Have you ever made someone cry with a fic?

Comments have told me I have, but those were for the most part on those My Girlfriend's Dead, Waah fics and thus I can't really claim credit for them. Because in an instance like that, how do you know that it's your writing that moved the reader to tears or if it's just the fact that someone's dead (usually a character that the reader liked) that made them cry? Odds are it wasn't me making them cry at all.

9. Which fic frustrates you the most?

Old Friends and Observers. Because I've never figured out what to do with it; it just kind of ends because I don't know where to go from the place where it ends. And I think it could have been really good and it has a good idea at its core (the Brigadier visiting and connecting with Lucy Saxon), but because it's effectively a fragment it's just...sort of there.

And also The Memory Always Lies. Yes, I'm still working on it. THERE'S A PLOT IN HERE SOMEWHERE. A COHERENT PlOT WITH NO LOOSE THREADS AND A PROPER ENDING AND CLIMAX AND SHIT. WHY CAN'T I FIND IT.

10. Which fic was the most fun to write?

All the stuff I write for fun never gets posted. :( 

Seriously, a lot of the fic I've actually posted was written under deadline pressure after staying up absurdly late, and as such any fun I had writing them is kind of subsumed in the stress and exhaustion and awfulness of the school year I wrote them in. As such, the one that I most remember having fun with was probably All Manner of Surprises, which I wrote in about an hour in the Student Union completely on a whim. It's still one of the odder things I've ever written (PG-rated Doctor/Master shaving kink? I mean, really?) but I do love it quite a bit.

Actually, now that I think of it, Epistemological Mysteries is another one written largely on impulse; I started out writing with nothing more than the idea that I wanted to write a story where Sari gives Prowl a ficus, and it just kind of went off and did its own thing from there. Despite my anxiety about posting my first fic for the fandom it came very easy. 

But the one that was the most fun, ever, would probably be The Waiting-Room World. I really pushed myself with that fic, did things I hadn't even thought about doing before - wrote characters with little to no backstory and even less screentime, wrote postapocalyptic fic, tried to flesh out a future world and make it that much more real - and it was a really fulfilling and enjoyable process even when it was difficult. And for all my whining and complaining I really did enjoy working on The Strength to Hold On once I finally got on a roll, so.

11. Who is your favorite OC you've ever created?

I haven't used OCs in any of my fic, unless you count Little Miss Metaphor in Sentencing, but by a loose definition of OCs my favorites (and only ones) are the crew from the Ark in The Waiting-Room World (including Dune, who really is an OC). Vira and Noah might be the main characters, but they're only there for one serial and Noah's characterization is a little basic before he starts getting taken over by the space bugs, so I had to do a lot of it on my own and flesh out characters from what was often a few lines of dialogue, which was a lot of fun. And I really like Vira. I like how she's just a little tiny bit conflicted, a little bit curious, but at the same time so trained and sealed off from life on Earth that she regards the death of her home planet as just a stage in the preparation for her life's mission. I wish I could think of reasons to write more fic about her.

12. Are you better at oneshot or multipart?

Oneshot, definitely. My multiparters have this tragic tendency of not getting finished an/or losing the plot after two chapters.

13. What character do you think you're the best at portraying?

I...really don't know? I'm told that my Adric is very believable, sympathetic without losing his character flaws, and I'd like to think that's true, because I love getting inside his head, exploring his strange relationship with the Doctor after he regenerates and his self-enforced isolation from Nyssa and Tegan while at the same time trying to connect with them. I also find Jo Grant fairly easy to write, possibly because I also enjoy talking a lot, but also because I like to think that I give her savvy and directness underneath her bubbly exterior, which I think a lot of people don't write or see as much of.

More recently, I really like writing Sari, though I don't know how objectively good I am at it, possibly because I'm good at being a slightly bratty eight-year-old/barely-pubescent teen.

14. What character is the most difficult to portray?

I always have problems writing Liz Shaw. She's only got the four serials (three-and-a-half, really), and because she's an actual our-world scientist, I have to sound like I know what I'm talking about, whereas with the Doctor I can just make shit up. Not to mention because her main attribute is so often rationality in her serials so it's hard to know how she reacts or thinks in a more emotional situation - writing any kind of romance involving her is a bear, for example, because it's hard to know how she'll actually feel. And unlike, say, Jo or Sarah Jane, she often doesn't say what she's thinking, which means I don't get to know what she's thinking and have to rely on nonverbal cues that can be interpreted a whole lot of ways and...just...I'm worried, every time I try to write her, that I've got it wrong.

So far as TF fandom goes, I don't know if I'll ever be able to write TFA Blitzwing without coming off as annoying. Which is a shame, because I'd like to try.

15. Tag five other authors!

You. Yeah, you. Don't pretend you don't know who I'm talking about.

Past my bedtime; rally to get to tomorrow. Good night, flist.