they did not rocket away, they rose slowly

yuletide letter

2023-10-17T05:16:52Z

I haven't done Yuletide or posted to Dreamwidth since like 2012 and I don't remember how anything works. All of this was already in my actual signup, but I'm chucking it into a letter so it's generally visible.

Christine (1983) - Arnie Cunningham, Dennis Guilder, Leigh Cabot

Hey. Hey so. I have felt strongly for years that there is a Stephen King story that could have been solved with group sex and it is NOT the one where he, you know, actually did that. I'm not actually asking for explicit fic, I'm good either way! But I think there's some really juicy ot3 potential in Dennis and Leigh falling in love over how much they both love Arnie, and I'd love to see somebody wring a somewhat happier ending out of that dynamic.

Something I've loved generally about recent horror fandoms like The Terror and IT is the way people can write fix-it fic that gets their ships a happy/hopeful ending while still leaning into the horrors. As someone who has a solid horror tolerance but can't cope with sad endings to romance arcs, I'm the exact target audience for that kind of thing and I think that style of fix-it fic would go great for Christine. Love doesn't necessarily conquer all but maybe it could pull Arnie back from the brink, you know?

Hilary Tamar mysteries - Julia Larwood, Selena Jardine

I love everyone in this bar but I love Julia the most. I support her in all her life choices, no matter how bad they are. I love that she's so dedicated to accidentally getting mistaken for a lesbian that she probably actually slept with another woman that one time. So you'll be just shocked to hear that I'm requesting Julia/Selena fic! Explicit or not, plotty or not, full of legalese or not, however you like.

Here's my one quibble: I love these books to death but the uber-dry humor and overall arch, detached tone don't always lend themselves to capital-F Feelings (except for The Sibyl In Her Grave, which kind of sneaks its way around to being a real gut punch). So if there's anything specific I'm looking for in this fandom, it's fic that can lean into people having Big Feelings while still keeping the books' general tone and sense of humor.

Agent Pendergast series - William Smithback, Margo Green, Nora Kelly

I would welcome fic about any or all of these three, shippy or platonic, casefic or not.

I love how when these books are firing on all cylinders they just chuck, like, every subgenre of sensation fiction ever into a blender and produce pure chaos. I love how grimly, violently FUNNY they can be. I love Margo, Nora and Bill in any and all combinations. He stans both of them so hard and just wants them both to think he's cool! I love that Bill brings out the worst in Nora but, like, in a good way, where Bill is a messy piece of shit who loves drama and Nora is a very serious hardworking person who secretly also loves drama, and they cheerfully talk shit about their coworkers every night over dinner. I love how Margo and Nora hated each other for exactly four days after they met and then instantly flipped to being best friends--it's a shame we don't get to see more in canon about what they're like as coworkers! And I love Margo and Bill's friendship generally, it's a delight, but I particularly love the scene where she's on the way to the hospital and he sits with her and washes her hands and face to make her feel better oh my God that was so hot.

I don't want to address Bill's canon death, please; you can fix it or set the story before it or just pretend it never happened, whatever you want. I especially hardline do not want to hear about whatever is currently going on with Nora's love life in canon right now, because I'm so mad about it that I quit reading canon entirely.

VERY OPTIONAL CROSSOVER THOUGHT: I think Margo Green and Ellie Sattler would be great friends, so if you're into Jurassic Park and feel like playing with that, please do!

(To be clear, I love all my prompts equally and would be thrilled to get any of them! This one is just longer because it's one I write so I've thought about it more.)

General likes: temporary character death, hurt/comfort, happy/hopeful romantic endings, mutual protectiveness, most flavors of horror, people who are bad at talking about feelings but manage to struggle through in a way that makes sense to them
General DNWs: permanent character death, sexual violence, animal harm/death, omegaverse

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hey look this fic ended

2012-12-30T05:18:28Z

for merlin’s sake how long has this been going on: chapters 19-20/20

She had known him long enough to recognize his exuberant style of flight, but she saw no evidence of it now; he was hovering quite still and level with the goals, pelting Quaffle after Quaffle through them. Hilary wanted nothing more, and at the same time nothing less, than to to go there and face him.

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-12-20T23:39:00

2012-12-21T04:40:28Z

internet please help me i can’t stop

in fact at this point i feel obligated to write more installments, just bc i have written 5500 words of “pirate au” with v little actual pirateing and i’m ashamed

calm seas and sail so expeditious: part the third

hilary/st. george, pg-13, etc. etc.

He looked very much the duke’s son rather than the sailor, and Hilary felt a stab of misgiving—what real place could a duke’s son find in a life such as hers?—-but just as quickly rejected it. She had successfully avoided useless thoughts like that thus far, and saw no reason to begin indulging them now.

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-12-03T21:42:00

2012-12-04T03:43:26Z

apparently when i think up an au i don't know how to leave it alone oh god help me

calm seas, and sail so expeditious: part the second and hopefully final

captain hilary thorpe/lieutenant viscount st. george, PG-13

She drew her pistol with her free hand, pointed it in Lord Peter’s face, and waited. St. George made a small, choked, noise of protest that might or might not have been genuine; Lord Peter raised an eyebrow and met her gaze along the pistol barrel.

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-11-15T02:13:00

2012-11-15T08:13:53Z

for merlin's sake how long has this been going on--chapter 18/20

Hilary Thorpe/Viscount St. George, PG this chapter and explicit overall

"What you will face today is a test of character--and that, of course, is what makes a great wizard, more than whatever number of hexes and tricks you may know.”

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-11-04T23:10:00

2012-11-05T05:12:14Z

calm seas, and sail so expeditious
Hilary Thorpe/Viscount St. George, 2000 words, PG-13.

A pirate AU. Because why not.

“It really isn’t worth it,” said Hilary dully. “This kidnap-for-ransom business. I’d never tried it before, and it’s worked out to be such an awful lot of trouble and risk that it almost isn’t worth returning you.”

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fic: a jolly kind of detective game

2012-07-08T09:54:17Z

A Jolly Kind of Detective Game
St. George/Hilary Thorpe
explicit
139,000 words

In which Miss Hilary Thorpe and Gerald, Viscount St. George, freshly released from Oxford upon an unsuspecting Britain, try to do one of Hilary's friends a simple favour with disastrous consequences; Lady Winifred Wimsey tries her hand at detective work; and Charles Peter Parker, aged five-and-a-quarter, single-handedly repels the German invasion.

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-06-28T01:20:00

2012-06-28T06:24:21Z

Hey so I've been paying less and less attention to DW and LJ lately and I am super sorry about that, it does not seem like a process that's likely to reverse :/

But hey you know that really long fic I've been writing for like three years

I will probably be finishing and posting it in like...the next week or two? (And then clearing up some other WIP stuff, including Hogwarts, but this is the big thing that has me kind of in preemptive shock.)

so if there's anyone left who hasn't unfollowed me for inactivity yet, you should probably wait a couple weeks longer I'm just saying

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-04-27T01:42:00

2012-04-27T06:43:20Z

I am alive! And I've posted another Hilary/Jerry fic over on LJ.

What's up with you folks?

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-04-09T05:16:00

2012-04-09T10:21:21Z

Hello, Internet! Is anyone still paying attention to me? Is there anyone left besides me who cares about my fic? (Am I going to post it anyway? Yes.)

It may be time to admit I am not as much of a LJ/DW person as I used to be? I am trying super hard to be more of a real person, but honestly it is slow going so far. I am still absolutely writing fic--Hogwarts AU got clogged up for a while but is progressing again, slowly. (Mostly the problem is that I need to write some Harriet/Peter in this bit and Harriet/Peter scares the crap out of me.) Casefic is still in editing mode, but there may be a very dim spark of light at the end of the tunnel? I hope.

I couldn't sleep tonight and the next two days are going to be rough as hell schoolwise, so I don't want to talk about real life much because I won't have anything good to say about it.

How are you folks?

(Also, if you want to get me somewhere that I'm keeping up with better right now, I'm spintheiryarns on Twitter and queencardigan on Tumblr.)

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fic: of punctured damn-the-things

2012-02-19T09:04:47Z

Still alive, still writing for some reason, and have posted a Hilary St. George story over at Livejournal!

of punctured damn-the-things, PG, 1700 words. Set in May 1944.

Jerry tried to move, found it unexpectedly difficult, and coughed once or twice on the vague principle that someone ought to be told he still existed.

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omg delicious nutrition

2012-01-22T00:39:22Z

( Cut for discussion of nutrition information, with numbers. )

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-01-20T09:38:00

2012-01-20T15:45:47Z

Last night I got out of class "early" at 9PM. I was cranky, because it was literally about seven degrees Fahrenheit out and I needed to go to the school library and then walk half a mile down to the 24-hr grocery store for milk and hummus. (I am a baby who frequently will only get her vegetables if it's by eating carrot sticks + hummus on the side of all her meals.)

Anyway, I went up to the school library in search of Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, which I should really just buy already because it's like six bucks used and I'm taking Ivan's class in the fall anyway, and I had never been up in that corner of the library before. And you guys, they have an aisle and a half of comic books. In my school library. You'd think after three years of art school I would have known or guessed this sooner.

Basically the way this turned out was that I wandered around going 8D for fifteen minutes, panicked, grabbed volumes 1-5 of B.P.R.D. for some unknown reason, walked down to the grocery store still going 8D, bought milk and hummus and a ton of pork chops (I have never eaten pork chops you guys what do I do with these) still going 8D even as my fingers were falling off from the cold.

8D

Also, when I went to Jimmy John's yesterday, they told me about their punch card (buy ten sandwiches get one free, the usual thing) and, because I'm in there so much, gave me a card with nine holes already in it. CUSTOMER LOYALTY PAYS OFF, FOR THE RECORD.

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HAHAHA.

2012-01-19T14:08:00Z

manasseh and I: drawing a picture for every movie we watch this year! Except I'm sort of cheating and starting off with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Lord of the Rings, which I watched in the last week of 2011.

manasseh wrote me an amazing and hilarious AU version of The Young Lord Peter Consults Sherlock Holmes, about RDJ Holmes instead of book Holmes; she refuses to post it, but she can't stop me illustrating it. TAKE THAT, MORGAN >:(

( Under the cut. )

Meanwhile, in the real world, I have only had one class so far this week and my sleep schedule is completely fucked up, which is why I've been awake drawing this since like five AM when I don't have class until 10:30.

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spintheiryarns @ 2012-01-09T02:56:00

2012-01-09T09:02:52Z

things that i would weep with joy to read on the slim chance they ever exist:

the AU version of The Young Lord Peter Consults Sherlock Holmes with Guy Ritchie's Holmes instead of Doyle's, in which Holmes is of course utterly delighted to help find a missing kitten, but is also high the entire time and accidentally involves ickle Peter in a very dangerous and complicated international conspiracy in the process.

To be fair, that last bit could be Peter's karma at work as much as Holmes's.

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not that I was bored or anything?

2012-01-04T05:31:13Z

but Zoya has a New Year's promotion: two free nail polishes for just the cost of shipping, so of course I had to get out my nail polish box to figure out what shades I was missing. And then the box broke and you know what, I've been wanting for a long time to find a part of my room where I could actually line my polishes up where I could see them, so I did that.

On the scale of life goals, it's pretty tiny, but I am pleased. :D LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY COLORS.

In other news: I have a Tumblr at queencardigan. It started out as a class project and then I wasn't sure what to do with it, but now I'm going to start putting my own art up on it, so y'all should please come be my friend :D

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happy new year!

2012-01-03T02:39:52Z

I was on a train from 8AM Jan 1-noon Jan 2, so I did nothing for the holiday :( Not that I ever do, but hey.

1. Yuletide reveal: I only wrote one fic this year, and had a lot of fun with it, but sadly it wasn't too far outside my usual product.

I think, if I were king of Greece
1443 words, PG.
Gherkins had gotten hold of her fountain pen, and was doodling scratchily all over one end of her blotter. “Aunt Mary,” he said thoughtfully, “when you were Winnie’s age, could you climb trees?”

I have a NYR in mind, but it would be in art form and y'all know how I get about drawing things where people might see them, so God knows.

2. People have so much to say about how 2011 went for them. I feel kind of shitty thinking about it, because I really don't feel like I made much of a net gain. I got marginally better at drawing, I guess. I got worse at exercising regularly. I actually talk to people IRL, though I have no faith that any of them gives a damn about me. I went on two dates, both of which were failures except as character-building exercises, but I had never been on any before so I guess that's progress. I joined group therapy and quit again. I started a webcomic, failed, deleted the website. I bought roller-skating lessons and failed out. There is a pattern here.

I have a lot of specific goals for next year involving exercise and health and art et cetera, but my real resolution as always is to really feel that I have progressed and changed in some noticeable way. Just once. That would be nice.

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fic!

2011-12-30T08:59:58Z

I'm very new to this whole double-journal thing, and I'm so used to my setup over at LJ that I don't feel entirely comfortable with crossposting fic like I would other kinds of entries?

Regardless, I know I have Wimsey fans over here who don't know me on LJ, so I thought I would at least alert you that a story has in fact occurred!

I took my pennies to the market square, St. George/Hilary Thorpe, 2200 words, PG. Set on Christmas, 1944.
It wasn't a real disappointment that it didn't snow for the Christmas of 1944, but it felt somehow as though it were just about to, which was really the most one could hope for.

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hay dreamwidth hay

2011-12-21T16:33:48Z

how you doin'

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when you least expect it

2009-09-05T05:12:20Z

Yeah, so this really really sucks. My computer is barely useable and getting gradually worse; basically I can only do one thing at a time, and right now that thing is almost always backing up my files to box.net. I can't find my Vista install CD, so I can't send the computer to a professional place to get fixed, because if they wipe my hard drive I've paid at least a hundred dollars to make my computer completely unusable. There are things I need to be doing-- signing up for Internet service, finding a job, signing my lease, not to mention writing fic-- that I simply can't do right now, and while I'm shockingly functional 80% of the time it is amazing how hard it is to make myself eat when I haven't got anything else productive to do while doing it. And I have to get this all sorted out before the 16th, when my free box.net trial will run out.

katarin, do you know anyone with a computer running Vista? I could really, really use an install CD to borrow.

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this show isn't broadcast in cinemascope

2009-08-20T05:52:36Z

I don't know what to say, but I feel like I should be posting. Nothing terribly exciting is going on in my life right now.

Crossover fic is chugging along. polybigbang is chugging along. I'm not sure why, because I still have no idea what the fuck I'm doing and am thinking up things to happen as I go along, but once I know what scene I'm writing it's surprisingly easy and fun to write.

After a lot of calling around, my CTA pass finally showed up; my drafting table hasn't, though, and I've been calling the company so often that I'm on friendly first-name terms with the shipping manager but he can't get hold of the warehouse for tracking information. So in the meantime my CTA pass is no good, because I can't leave the apartment for fear that Fed-Ex will show up with my table.

School starts in a few weeks; I'm taking Drawing I and Costume Construction I, which are both useful life skills in any case.

I seem to have fallen off the baseball-following wagon, as I do every year. I have the vague impression that the Mets are being complete crap and the entire Cubs roster is injured, so I suppose my attempt at support wasn't much help to them in any case. I have been watching Ken Burns' Baseball for the first time since I was tiny, so I'm still loving the whole baseball history thing.

I still don't have a job! Surprise surprise.

Like I said: not very exciting. Being stuck at home does that.

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and by tomorrow everything will be just fine

2009-08-11T11:28:10Z

Okay, this bit of complaining is kind of complicated. Hang in there.

--> Almost three weeks ago now, I ordered two fairly expensive things: a new desk and a 30-day CTA pass, which cost about two hundred dollars combined.
--> By last Monday my credit card still hadn't been charged for the desk, so I called up the company and they went "Whups, sorry, getting on that, you should get tracking info in another day or two." And I never heard from them again.
--> The transit pass never showed up either; when I checked my confirmation email I discovered I had accidentally had it shipped to my billing address instead, which is a place I haven't lived since last June and have never bothered to change since I get all my bank alerts, etc. by email. This, at least, was my own error.
--> I called the furniture place again today, and discovered that it had been both shipped and delivered last week, and signed for by someone whose name I didn't recognize.
--> So, being irritated and needing a walk, I went down to campus to see if I could track down the envelope with my transit pass in it, and the lady in the mailroom said "Oh right, I remember your mail! It was an enormous box, we returned it to sender." And apparently the envelope from the CTA, too, but . . . what.
--> The furniture company apologizes profusely, and claims they're going to send me another desk. The Online Orders department at the CTA . . . went to voicemail.
--> Conclusion: I really need to change my billing address and start buying my transit passes in person at Jewel or somewhere; Chicago Drafting Furniture's shipping department is made of fail.

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like ordinary people

2009-08-08T01:23:19Z

OMG OMG GUUUYS.

I need this now.

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her heels so high and my hope so low

2009-08-05T11:28:48Z

HERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT ARE AWESOME.

1. You know that ridiculous crossover fic I've been nattering about since January 16? It just went off to beta, all nearly-29000-words-and-gonna-get-longer of it, so HA. FIC WILL APPEAR RELATIVELY SOONISH.

Of course, this now means that I no longer have an excuse not to actually reread the Series of Unfortunate Events books, or watch Star Trek, or-- most importantly-- stop looking at pictures of motorcycles and buckle down to write my polybigbang. Oops.

2. So naturally I spent the rest of my evening torrenting Ken Burns' Baseball and watching the first inning. I haven't watched it since I was little and renting the videos with my dad! And I've failed at my New Years' resolution of keeping track of how the Cubs and the Mets are doing, same as I do every year, but oh my god baseball history is still so cool and I love it.

3. The Sisters Grimm series, by Michael Buckley. ( Block quotes under the cut. )

So yeah, these . . . may or may not have beat out Snow White: A Tale of Terror for my favorite fractured fairy tale, because I love that movie an awful lot, but they're coming awfully close. :DDDDDDDDDDDD

4. In celebration of the possibility of me finally actually posting fic: a WIP excerpt meme. This thing is always going around somewhere.

( Three Link/Violet, one Doctor Who/Hot Fuzz, and the beginning of my polybigbang under the cut. )

5. I cleaned my laptop screen! The world looks so much brighter now :O

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in america we don't believe in kings, we believe in baseball

2009-07-28T23:31:29Z

I could swear writing fanfic used to be easier than this. This doesn't feel like dashing off a bunch of words, like it did in high school; it feels like making a movie, and needing all kinds of research consultants and production designers and God knows who else. Except I have no budget but a ton of time, so I get to be all my own research consultants and production designers and, oh right, screenwriters.

This might have to do with my recent inability to come up with simple fic ideas; it might be some kind of attitude problem brought about by two years of writing history papers. Either way, I seem to need to flip some switch in my brain back from research research research to write write write.

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