EXCHANGE INTERFACE

How interesting.

While googling how to make a cup of tea with my fancy (old, but never used) tea set, I landed on a "cup of tea scene" from Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

I watched about half of it, and then went looking for the tail end of my Meeting Halfway Maria/Steve series, which ended up dealing with the problem of canon-universe Wanda as best they could. (It mostly involved locking her out of their universe and leaving her for the canon-universe to deal with.)

I think that, in spite of being a universe-next-door and never having seen DS:MoM, I managed to tie it in very neatly!

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Lunar New Year was great: family, food, catch-up with cousins.

Feeling a little bit exhausted and run down. Not sure if I have actually caught something or if it's just tiredness. Also, I've been going back to the gym and all sorts of things are twinging everywhere.

And it might just be *gestures at everything*. Great moogly googly.

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I'm back to making quilts again! Partly because of the new year catchup with cousins (who I've been planning to make quilts for since forever), partly because I'm mostly made my way through all the quilts I finished off in the last couple of years. And now I'm ready to start the next set of quilts!

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Writing the candyheartsex fic and trying to keep it from getting smutty because that's not what the recipient asked for. Actually, I should also check how long it is.

Have begun the rewrites of And If I Rise in the first person. It's slow going.

Still trying to finish The Civilian Peace: each time I think I have it pinned down, it slips away, or there's a new aspect of the situation I want to have them look at. ARGH.

I was hoping to add to several WIPs but none of them have provided quite enough words. I know where I want them to go; getting them there is proving problematic.

I kind of want to tagset for lul_soulmatesex but I only want a handful of pairings and none of them are popular.

Gotta remember to sign up for YT before the sign-ups expire. I have my letter started, I'm just working my way through writing it.

Gotta get my trickortreatex written; it's not difficult, I'm just uninspired.

Need to sketch out a plot for the sedoretuex. A get-together story complete with all the relational negotiation? Or an existing-relationship-with-speedbump story, defining an issue and resolving it?

I really don't know why I participate in these things. Misplaced hope, I guess.

fandomgiftbasket: my basket

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I'm going to post a few old, unfinished stories from Stargate Atlantis and maybe even SG1 days. There might be a Merlin fic in there, possibly a Harry Potter story or two.

I wrote so many words in fanfic, thousands of which have never seen the light of day. Ideas that came but which I couldn't finish, stories that I got halfway through and lost interest. IDK. That seems to be the story of my writing history: can't seem to finish the novel.

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Still trying to finish the last of the 30 Days. Maria and not!Natasha are having a conversation at Vormir. I'm still not entirely clear what's going to happen, although I know what I want to have happen, but I've known what I wanted to have happen for a fortnight now, and it still hasn't, so I have the feeling that the key pieces are still to land in place.

I finished my everywoman fic, but I think it needs polishing. Or I could write another one, same characters, different vein.

Also, a month and change after intoabar was due, I finally have a germ of an idea for my characters. Phew.

Mostly, I think, I'm hoping that the current fanfic writing will buoy me up to writing the last 4/5ths of the novel. And then there's the editing and rewriting. Not looking forward to that.

Technically it's 7 Days, 7 Stories: write a story each day.

I'm not going to be able to do it this week, just too much on. Barely enough time to breathe, let alone write. I have the ideas, but just not going anywhere.

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Woke up early to watch Eurovision. Okay, not that early. Missed the first hour. I always go into Eurovision mostly cold turkey because I just don't have the time to listen to the songs beforehand. Heard Austria (on the tickyapp) and went and listened to Australia so I had an idea of what we'd be doing.

Two notables for me:
- Austria because it was boppy.
- Croatia because it made me laugh.

The others kind of passed in a blur, as they do every year.

But I do have Australia's entry in my head. It's my type of song in tone and tune.

That said, I only saw a link to New Zealand's unofficial entry this morning - Open Up! (YouTube) - and I love it. Excellent humour.

--

Permaculture group meeting tonight. So many things to do:
- bring sewing (grab sister's mending bag?)
- bring supper (persimmons and teacake)
- bring stuff for the swap-and-drop table
- return books (if I can find them)

( feelings )

Hockey tonight (it's now Tuesday). Bible Study tomorrow night.

I kind of want to do dinner with local friends on Thursday night. Just tell them I'm going to be at this restaurant at this time, please come and join me if they've got time/space.

Friday and Saturday have no plans, probably moving things back into the house and back into the sorting/tossing cycle of stuff.

Sunday is an online chat with the SJHW (online friends for a fannish aeon) and two games of hockey - one on the field, one in goals.

Well, we're back to painfully cold mornings. 4C at 7:30am this morning, when I went to get a pathology blood test at a clinic that allegedly opened at 7:30am.

There was no clinic that opened at 7:30am. There was one that opened at 8am, so I wandered around intending to wait until the clinic opened. Except that by the time it did, my request for pathology had vanished. I think I dropped it while wandering around. I retraced some of my steps, but couldn't see it. Not sure if someone will return it or try to contact me about it.

The blood tests were all standard health blood tests, nothing particularly useful against me. Usually, I'd have gotten the blood taken at my doc's but he wasn't able to find my veins the day I went in, so he gave me a sheet for a pathology blood draw instead.

--

Still not feeling 100% on the chest. I'd almost like to take a test to see if I had COVID without realising. I'd also like a test for something like mild aspergillus? I work with soil and dust, and our house is dusty and my room is very dusty. Something to look at next week.

More COVID-related, our death toll is crazily high given how long we managed to keep COVID at bay, and our case levels are climbing. At this point, COVID booster shot #2 (shot #4) is available in NSW, and everyone above 30 is being encouraged to get fully vaxxed.

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Also, our conservative state government is actually behaving itself and working with the centrist federal government regarding the state flooding instead of belligerently posturing. Mind you, the issue with the floods in March was that it was the (then-conservative) federal government who were belligerently posturing while electorates that didn't vote for them drowned.

It was a really bad government, and they've left the country in a really bad state. That said, the current centrist government are unfortunately doing Bad Government Lite. I am not surprised, exactly, it's very much like watching the Democrats being only able to hold the ratchet in the US instead of winding it back. Still, given how 'commie leftist' the PM was as a young bloke, I would have hoped for better. (Back in the day, mind, Labor was a lot more 'commie leftist'[*] than it is today.

[*] Not Actually Communist for anyone who's freaking out. *eyeroll* 'Commie Leftist' is probably pretty damn close to my own perspective on the world: the strong help the weak, the rich help the poor, those with help those without - and they do this through the vehicle of the government. Which, yeah, not a great vehicle, but has a considerably better chance at the scale of operations required and without having to subscribe to an organisation or company's "mission statement" (whether that's "MAKE ALL THE MONEY, SAVE ALL THE COSTS" or "MAKE THEM SUBSCRIBE TO OUR BELIEFS BEFORE WE HELP THEM"). And once the money or assistance is given, that's when I think that the government should step away. Adding conditions is what adds bureacracy and wasted. Give and don't look back.

FTR. I give a large regular sum to at least one organisation who regularly and publically dismisses and belittles the Christian faith and Christians. It's not comfortable, but the things they are fighting for are good things, and the people working towards those things have been burned by society and the church and religious people - as have many - and I don't begrudge them their bitterness. Do I wish they weren't quite so "everyone who is so stupid as to be a Christian"? Yes, I do. I've thought about saying something, but that feels like holding my donation over their head. I give because they do good work; I wish that they were doing good work while not belittling me and my faith, but I figure I and my faith can take it. If God is in control, then I don't need to react to them about their stings of dismissal, however much they twinge. Their prejudice is on their own head; however justified they feel it.

--

I am picking up, um, about 2L of ice-cream from Gelato Messina today. Their 'Greatest Hits' sale, which ran out of some flavours within, oh, fifteen minutes.

I think I'm going to put a label on these containers, though: "$0.50 per spooful! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I PAID FOR THIS?" Because I regularly start with a full tub of ice-cream, and only get to eat about half of it, because the rest of it slooooowly disappears, spoon by spoon, until there is a thin scraping on the bottom of the tub. Which is left there, because it's rude to finish the ice cream that someone else bought (but not, apparently, to eat half of it).

--

Ugh. Back to the floods. It's the same old story. Suburbs built on floodplains in recent decades, with people presuming that if the land was being sold it then it must be safe to build on! And certainly, some places were safe...until the last couple of years. And then weather instability thx to climat change means higher highs, lower lows, stormier storms, rainier rains. All of it, everywhere, all at once.

--

Good news for the Brits. Except that whoever replaces him will likely be worse.

But full kudos to Hugh Grant, actor of one of the most delightful fictional British Prime Ministers, who, via the medium of Twitter, inspired a protester with speakers to put on the Benny Hill Theme just as the announcement were being made. Which meant that when you watch both Boris' resignation speech, and the announcement of it to the networks by one of the ministers, it's raucously and hilariously playing in the background...

--

I've jiggled my dwircle around a bit. Subscribed to a few people to broaden my horizons, although these days I mostly talk about my life rather than my fandoms. All my fandom favourites are dead, dying, or dismissed. Yes, there is an exceeeedingly slim chance that Maria will have something significant in Secret Invasion but I kind of doubt it. Nobody actually thinks she's interesting except me and a couple of people I've dragged along the way.

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I have temporarily put 'The Nullifae' on hold (a woman working for an org that deals with Fae on Earth turns out to be utterly, completely, and totally immune to magic). I think I'm going back to Queen of the Night ("Joss Whedon got it wrong: there are plenty of slayers, but only one Queen of the Night"). I have the plot simplified for Book 1 of 3, and a chunk of it already written.

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Okay, time to lead the chooks out to The Promised Land (ie. across the grass and up to the fenced-in garden).

Answers to the fanfic meme I posted last week.

27. What’s the nicest comment you’ve ever received? requested by beatrice_otter

I've gotten a lot of comments over the decades, and I can't actually remember which one was "the nicest". But I can tell you the ones that I love receiving and often later re-reading when I come back to a story and read the comments weeks, months, even years later.

It's always delightful to hear from people who loved the story, but particularly delightful to hear what they loved: the phrasing, the characterisation, the situation/crisis and how I resolved it.

As an example, my recent fic 'Twelve Steps' is a canon-divergence from Endgame, and quite a few of the comments mentioned that they not only loved the changes I made and the reasons I gave, but also they loved that I'd followed the logical conclusion of the events of the movie, as well as how clear it was that the characters had changed in their time apart from each other.

Those are the comments that warm my heart: where people appreciate and pick out the details that struck them, particularly when those details are ones that I took pains to include in the story.

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2. Why do you write fanfiction? requested by rmc28

Thinking all the way back to my earliest days of fanfic conceptualisation, it was usually because I wanted to see a variation on a story that wasn't contemplated in canon.

I wanted to see Leia save the galaxy and her brother. I wanted to read more about Generation X (of the X-Men comic books)'s interactions with each other and the world around them as teenagers rather than as superheroes. I wanted Sam Carter to end up with Jack O'Neill without losing her sass and her delight in technology and her duty in the military. I wanted to explore the dynamics between the characters of the Justice League cartoons both when the world's fate rested on their shoulders and when it didn't...

A lot of times, I write fanfic because I want to see a scenario about a character that I like, but who isn't well-liked by most fans, or whose fans can't write them as the character in which I see them. And yes, I have a type when it comes to fanfic characters, and yes, they're a bit like me in character (which makes it considerably easier to write tem).

And, you know, the feedback is nice. :)

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Coming up: 17, 22, 30, 3, 19, and 5.

I will not manage to finish the (currently) 4K story that I started for fffc, alas. Star Trek (AOS), a mystery-adventure, and I only have parts 1 and 2 written, and there's a 3 yet to come. Also: still haven't quite worked out what's actually happening. This would seem to be a flaw when writing a mystery-adventure.

Going to have to link up all the fics I wrote for fffc at some point. Although, I imagine most people who are interested in my fic-writing have subscribed to my AO3 account so they get notified when I post stuff.

aaaaaanyway. I'm trying to write a 24 fic with 24 super-short chapters (<500 words). I had the notes, it seemed doable a week ago. *eyerolls at self*

And I'd like to sub the next fic in Meeting Halfway for the fffc. If it would only finish! (I don't actually know where that one ends up either. Like, I'm not sure if they're back together or getting back together or broken up, or even on the same freaking page.

However I've been up since 5:30am, though, and I should probably have some coffee and do the shopping before it gets busy. Always best to do the shopping before it gets busy...

And I got stuck in Act II of the novel. "Things Happen Where We Learn More About The World The Heroine Has Landed In". You know, maybe I should just kick out Act II and start Act III and then come back and fill in the scenes that I need instead of writing around in circles. I mean, that's how I usually plan a fanfic: I know how its' going to end and what has to happen to get me there in the process. Which is why longfics take so long for me, because I'm so busy working through the middle of the fic which fills in all the details I need for the ending.

Hmmmm

Coffee. Coffee first.

Character Headcanon Meme

I did:

• Kara Thrace (BSG)
• Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
• Dawn Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
• Maria Hill (MCU)
• Hermione Granger (Harry Potter)
• Mako Mori(Pacific Rim)

That was kind of fun.

I'm trying to finish off the next story in the Meeting Halfway series (30 Days of OTP, for Maria/Steve, which I started 8 years ago and haven't yet finished).

I'm also trying to get the next chapter up for the MCU/Psy-Changeling universe up. The scene keeps ballooning out.

--

Have a snippet from the original fic I've been trying to write the last six months. I've been stuck at this segment about halfway through for, oh, around three of those six months.

"What's a callback?"

Green-flecked eyes stared at him like she'd forgotten he was even there. "It's a spell to 'remember' where everything was at a certain point in the past, in a location where magic was recently performed."

"Capturing the echo of the magic performed and how it affected the area." Cal knew the type of spell she was talking about - in Fae it was better known as 'magical memory'. "What's involved in casting a callback spell?"

"For the basic callback in the kit? The ability to cast a spell. Are you offering?"

"Yes." He held up a hand as she stood. "But only after you finish your dinner."

"The longer we wait, the less residue there'll be for performing the callback!"

"There'll be enough." He pointed at the bowl on her desk. "Eat. The faster you eat, the faster we'll get moving."

This time the look she gave him was grumpy, but she ate her meal and ten minutes later, they were walking through doors labelled Security with an additional sign beneath it that indicated, personal glamours may not hold past this point.

"Does that happen very often? The collapse of a personal glamour?"

"More often than you'd think," she said as she walked past the empty security desk towards the closed door behind it, but waved at the clearly-mounted camera in the corner before swiping her card to unlock the door. "People use personal glamours for a lot more than deception."

"Vanity is the usual cause," said the woman who swivelled her chair around from the desk where she'd been working, and rolled it over to the table nearest the door. "And I don't mean the two people with vitiligo who use a glamour; I mean the ones whose glamours are pretty much cosmetic; freckles or nicer shaped eyebrows or an entire makeup routine. Hi, I'm Ani." Her eyes crinkled at the corners as she grinned at Cal. "You really are as pretty as they said you were."

Jenna snorted. "Box kit now, flirt later."

"Work, work, work, this one," Ani grouched, still smiling, but pushed a box across the table top. "You know the deal for a callback spell; you've seen it done often enough. Although who you're going to find to do a spell at this hour, I don't know..." She trailed off as Cal raised a hand.

"He's actually not bad at magic," Jenna said. "For a Fae."

"Well, you're not all bad for Low Fae," she laughed, sliding her arm around his waist and snuggling up to him. And he was young enough and needy enough to take the affection - who'd ever shown him such regard before? - without pointing out how much it stung to be the exception.

He thought he did a better job of hiding his disquiet, but when they were in the elevator, Agent Jourdan turned to him. "I probably shouldn't have said that."

"Said what?"

"Not bad at magic for a Fae. I've gotten enough flak for being shit at magic this high up in Crossover, and you're considerably better than me."

"I..." He hesitated. "You scraped an old wound."

--

Okay, going out in the blowing wind to take osme photos of spring buds and blossoms for a friend who's been stuck indoors for a while and wants some reminders that spring is coming.

I was looking back through my 'feedback' emails, and found the point at which AO3 stopped sending individual kudos emails and started collecting them together. And then found the point at which they started sending them as HTML and not just plain text.

It's...kind of fascinating.

Also, a reminder that there was a time when I didn't get that many kudos. When a half-dozen kudos was a big thing.

( But a quick look at subscription stats )

Got both my quilts done. Boy was that an effort! Pictures later when I have brain.

In the meantime, linkspam.

Trump Voters and what unites them.
Christian Nationalists and how to fight back: The call is coming from inside the house. Maybe it has been for a long, long time.

My Story Of Becoming Affirming:
"Even thought I've been affirming of LGBTQ+ people for a long time, this is the first time I'm sharing my process. My hope is that this (really long) essay will bring a few more chairs to the table."

When 'organic' doesn't have to mean 'there's less of it'.
Learning How The Aborigines Farmed Is Changing The Way We Look at Drought: we're not farming in England anymore. It only took us 230 years to realise that.
Natural Sequence Farming: slowing down the water as it goes through the land, giving the soil more time to soak it in.

Lamington Souffle: add some raspberries in and I Am THERE.

--

Also, you remember this To Do list I wrote last week? I did almost all of it! Not the stuff with the bulbs, alas, but the rest of it? DONE AND DONE, BABY! (But a tendon in my right forearm is aching now. Gonna need some compression and salve on that one.

So, the last week was mostly quilting, a lot of moving of woodchips, and various meals with dad and stepmother. I have decided I will venture up to Queensland with them this week for two days, and maybe try to catch up with an fannish friend of old who lives up that way. Hope springs eternal, right?

Otherwise, the Endgame fixit is going nowhere (Steve is being obstreperous), I've re-written the opening scene for my manuscript about a dozen times and only just lit on how it need to go and why, and all my old AUs are calling me with a siren song...

Also, MCU Exchange. I really need to write that thing. I'm just...well, I'm cynical about MCU fandom and my place in it.

This week: Write a lot. Even while travelling. In calculation, 4-5K a day can translate to 120-150K a month in wordcount, yeah? I have done 5K days before (I've done a 10K day earlier this year and felt slightly crazy at the end of it), obviously when I'm not working and have the scene quite clearly set out in my head. (It was the Maria-Nick-Vormir scene in other side of infinity. I'm pretty sure I wrote that sucker in a day.)

Probably best to do most of the writing in the morning before 10am. After 10am, there's enough sun in the backyard for me to go out and do little touch-ups with the chooks, and check around the garden. But the sun is gone by around 3pm and at that stage I usually want a nap.

Oh, that's right. The Matildas are playing Italy this evening at 9pm. Viewable on SBS. Must tune in to that. Women's sport is always amazing, particularly the ones which are considered big when it's the men playing. Frankly, my perception of women's sport is that it tends to be fairer with less grandstanding, more thought and strategy with less muscling around.

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I tend not to post so much when I'm not working. I've got so many other things to do!