alara_r

Parental Permission Only Goes So Far Concoction:

Ingredients:

a glass milk jug to be your beaker
salt
hand sanitizing gel
some of your gummy vitamins
a little Mrs. Dash
more pepper than you really needed
All of your mom's vitamin C capsules when she is not looking

Stir.

Mom Sends You To Bath And Bed Immediately Concoction:

Ingredients:

more than half the canister of flour
all of your mom's expensive ground cardamom spice
the rest of the black pepper
all of the rosemary
all of the Mrs. Dash
half a bag of carrots

Pour into cups on kitchen table. Allow excess to spill all over table, rug, chairs, and yourselves. Stir for ten minutes.

Results: Mom will yell at you and send you to take baths immediately and go to bed right away.

Hurt The Ones You Love: Star Trek bookverse. Suzy-Q, M (from "I, Q" by John de Lancie and Peter David), Q. Suzy-Q has decided that the best way to pay Q back for making her angry and jealous is to have an affair with an M. Sweet and fluffy f/f between energy beings we use girl pronouns for, violent and dubconny m/f between energy beings we use girl and boy pronouns for, but honestly, they're all energy beings and haven't got innies or outies.

Watching: Star Trek, "Friends With Benefits" story arc, set in the alternate timeline of Voyager "Endgame". Janeway and Picard are having sex. Q thinks that if his two favorite humans didn't want him to watch them having sex, they wouldn't be doing it with each other. Voyeurism, explicit m/f sex.

Tainted: Star Trek bookverse, based on "The Q Continuum" trilogy by Greg Cox. After his role in the destruction of the Tkon Empire, the other Q are shunning Q, calling him tainted by his experiences with 0. Suzy-Q begs to differ. This is possibly the fluffiest and most basically romantic story I've *ever* written.

Alex and Talya are playing Dr. Horrible. According to Alex, Talya is Dr. Death, and she and Dr. Horrible have a baby, who they named Dr. Criminy. They all have freeze rays, including the baby, and they have fake rays, which you shoot at things to turn them fake. So if you shoot a fake ray at a door, it turns into a painting of a door, and if you shoot yourself, you turn into a dummy.

Dr. Horrible *totally* needs to hook up with a female mad scientist Mary Sue supervillain named Dr. Death and have a baby named Dr. Criminy. And build a fake ray.

ETA: Dr. Criminy has a brother! His name is Dr. Germ.

Is voyeurism without the knowledge of the person being spied on a consent issue?

Specifically, in a story where character A is watching characters B and C have sex, for purposes of A's own sexual gratification, and B and C do not know A is doing this, does this need a noncon or dubcon warning (A *is* using B and C sexually without their consent) or just mention that it's voyeurism (A doesn't coerce, or even interact with, B or C in any way in the story)?

Does it change things to know that both B and C are A's lovers, but while they both know A has a lover besides them, they don't know for certain that the other one is that lover?

Does it change things to know that neither of them would be particularly surprised to find out that A is spying on them, though they might have some strong words for A about the appropriateness of the behavior?

Under the cut are my current RP muses.

Choose one of them and then either ask them three questions or suggest a prompt for a drabble.

If you want to play along, put this in your journal.

( I don't actually have that many right now. )

Appropriate response to Yuletide: Wow, look at all the cool stories! Oh my god, that's a *fandom*? Awesome, there's a story about that!

Inappropriate response to Yuletide: I am *so* glad I didn't participate this year. Just reading people's discussion of writing for Yuletide gives me secondhand stress.

Totally weird response to Yuletide: Won't it be beyond awesome when people are asking for fics about the characters from my novel? Think people will ship the femslash villainess!protagonist/heroine, the femslash villainess!protagonist/heroic mentor, or the het villainess!protagonist/villain!annoying ally? Or will they just work really, really hard to find a male slash pairing to ship?

Talya, age 3: The old Natalya was a baby 'cause she used to pee and poop in her diaper. Now she's gone. But don't worry, now you have a new Talya.
Me: You're a new Talya?
Talya: Yes, because I'm a big girl. I wear underpants and go in the potty. Not the old Talya. She was a baby.
Me: What happened to the old Talya?
Talya: She went to the store.
Alex, age 5: I think she got kidnapped!
Talya: Yeah, she did.
Alex: We have to rescue the old Talya!
Talya: We don't need to rescue her because she wears diapers.
Me: I think you ate the old Talya.
Talya: Yeah, I did.
Alex: That's it! I'm taking that new Natalya down!

I see this as a tag on Archive of Our Own. I'm guessing, something about centering two female characters? Or maybe a fixfic replacing a male character in the narrative with one of the existing female ones? Or an episode filler/tag that re-inserts the existing female characters so they get to talk to each other?

I googled it, but only found stories with the tag, not an explanation of the tag.

You'd think that a word like "dubcon" could cover enough territory that I could confidently header my stories...

( What warning should I use for this fic? )

Why can't I just write about straightforward consent or lack of consent? Why do my characters insist on playing head games with each other?

This was actually a remarkably productive year.

( Fic I've written this year )

Okay, perhaps "this beautiful green earth will soon be mine" may be overstating the case, but at the very least, the house next door will soon be mine. Yatta! (Or as Dora would say, "Lo hicimos!")

See, I live in half a duplex (a house that has been divided in half to be two houses, common in big cities). I have four kids, and four cats, and a husband, and a housemate, and maybe another housemate in a little while because my sister-in-law needs a place to stay, and I own stuff. And I live in a city. We bought the place when we had three kids because it had a big yard and, during the height of the real estate bubble, it was barely within our price range, and it was in a decent school area, which in a city is not easy to come by. But the overcrowding has been painful to deal with.

No longer! For twice the price, we will have twice the house. When we bought the current house, I wasn't working, and my credit sucked, so my name is not on the title. So this house is being bought with my credit, my salary, and *my* name only on the title -- it's intended to be a primary residence, but Tom, since he owns our current house, could only have bought it as an investment property, with so much money down that we couldn't have managed it. I have no intention of using this thing as an investment property -- I'm gonna *live* here. And also in the house next door, the one I live in right now. But mostly in the new house, because it has never undergone rounds of lead abatement that ripped it to shreds and didn't get properly restored afterward, and it does not have cats (and it will not have cats; they will be restricted to the other house. We'll see if my breathing improves.)

It's taken since April, because the house was being sold as a short sale. (Short sales take months and months and months. The "short" doesn't refer to the timing; it means the owner is selling for less than he owes the bank, and therefore needed bank approval, which takes forever to get.) But we got the approvals back, so we are moving forward at last! Hopefully we'll close on it and move half our stuff into it mid-January.

I didn't mention that it has a hot tub, did I? And three stories of deck? Our house has a huge yard; the house next door has no yard. But three stories of deck and a hot tub. Woot!

So back in 1992-93, before I got into the Internet, I started writing this really, really awesome cyberpunk-with-psi-powers novel, featuring an albino, neutered telekinetic assassin who's a double agent, and a shapechanger with multiple personalities, one of which is a werewolf, and a teenage girl with telepathy and cyberpathy, who narrowly avoided becoming an ego-destroyed conduit for an artificial sentience and now has a secret that could shake up the world. It had anime physics, it had made-up future slang, it had extra genders and superpowers and multiple double crosses and all in all it was essentially a paean to the Rule of Cool.

And then I got into Q, and started writing Only Human, and ran out of steam on the project. I only ever got two and a half chapters into it.

My top priorities right now are still The Cold At The Heart of the Light and Play Like God, but I think I'm going to resume work on Hands of the Bright. In typing in the handwritten third chapter, I've observed that my writing has improved slightly -- I can tighten things up and remove some "she said" type phrases -- but overall I'm surprised how well the thing holds up. I guess I shouldn't be -- I still like the opening chapter of Only Human and it was written contemporaneously with Hands of the Bright.

Also, I found the opening few pages of an original story set in the backstory to The Green World, which riffs on X-Files rather than on TNG like "The Green World" does. That, too, was pretty good and deserves for me to finish it one of these days (although, honestly, "The Green World" itself probably deserves it more.)

(BTW, all links in this post are going to original work friends-locked on alara_works; I friend everyone who friends that journal, but I do need some way to control who gets to read my original, publishable work before it's published. So if you want to read any of this, friend that journal and I'll give you access.)

New Star Trek fics (at least, new in the sense that I haven't linked them here):

Two for matrithon:
Loving the Alien: Lwaxana Troi's entire life has been about her love for aliens.

Goodbye: The story of Captain Silva LaForge, Geordi LaForge's mother.

One for startrekbigbang:
West: Your Possible Pasts: Second in "West" series (though written third). Q gives Janeway a gift containing all the memories she lost to temporal loops and other such incidents.

One just for fun:
Mad World: Chapter 1, Unreliable Omniscient Narrator: I have no idea how many chapters this is going to be. Dixon Hill's having a day; the cross-town bus has square wheels, his landlady Worf is going to cut him with a bat'leth if he hasn't got the rent, Durango the gunfighter is looking for him, and he trips over a homeless bum who claims to be God.

Not a fic project:
Created trek_bookverse, for fanfic set in or featuring the characters from the Star Trek novels.

Totally unrelated to Star Trek:
In honor of the remake of The Prisoner, featuring Ian McKellan, a 99-word ficlet for the original series:
It's A Beautiful Day

Also, got Chp. 2 of Cold Light finished and Chp. 3 started.

Rant 1:

Why why why why would a bank "upgrade" to an online banking system WITH LESS FUNCTIONALITY than they had previously?

I want my ability to transfer from my lines of credit and my real-time snapshot of my financial data back, goddamn it! Especially the lines of credit; if the bank changed the way it batches transactions so it doesn't actually *know* I deposited to checking until midnight, then they won't be able to show it on the web site, but there was no fucking excuse for removing the ability to manage lines of credit from the main screen and removing the ability to transfer from lines of credit.

Rant 2:

Why do I need to fucking WRITE A LETTER to get a copy of my old credit card statement? You have three of the old ones online; why isn't there a function for "retrieve old archived credit card statement", and assuming you can't do that, why can't I just call you and ask you to mail one to me? Forcing me to submit my request in *writing* is fucked up... the reason I don't *have* the statement is that you pushed your paperless product on me, I signed up for it, and only after four months did I figure out that you only store three months of data. Unacceptable! A paperless statement product, where you never get a physical statement, needs to either email you a PDF of your statement, or needs to make all the statements you ever had accessible in some way -- three on line and the rest archived offline where you can request them with a button click and get them within 24 hours would be ok.

I hate bad system designers right now. I hate them with the passion of a thousand fiery suns and I hope they all have to go work at Dilbert's company and then the pointy haired boss fires them all and hires on a bunch of guys from India and they have to go to work flipping burgers.

I've finally, finally finished my story for startrekbigbang; the requirement was 15K and the story insisted on being 47K! It's off to beta now, to be posted Nov 10.

I am now going on fannish hiatus to work on professional stuff. I have The Cold At The Heart of the Light to finish, and I may start Play Like God for NaNo (I might not, because I might concentrate on Cold Light instead), and I have a project planned to have 52 short original fic stories in the can by Jan 2011.

I'll probably still generate the occasional short ficlet (particularly about Q, because I'm not dropping my muse communities with him, and I do sort of have an idea for the Rule 63 Watchmen community, watchingrule63), and I may very well still kick off a Star Trek bookfic community, and I'll be doing prompts and such for matrithon as I posted there recently. But I'm not signing up for any new fanfic challenges this year, I'm not expecting to finish or make progress on any of my long works such as Working In Groups, and while I do hope to finish Churchill's Black Dog, I won't be starting a *new* Judgement Day story.

Don't know how long the hiatus will last -- almost certainly through the end of November, possibly until one of the novels is done. The novels will be posted friendslocked to alara_works as chapters are completed; if anyone wants to read them, just friend alara_works and I'll friend back from there.

I'm working on "Your Possible Pasts" for startrekbigbang, due Oct 10. I expect to be done with the story this weekend, and I could seriously use a beta. It's Voyager, Janeway, lots of flashbacks to Voyager events, and pretty much every Q in the Continuum that we know of turns up. No explicit sex; some un-explicit sex in flashbacks. Anybody up for it? This sucker's 30 K and counting.

Sadly, I'm not going to be able to do "War Stories" for startrekbigbang; the entry I had planned for the matrithon, "Your Possible Pasts" (part of the West series), ended up eating all my time and in the end I had to do something else for the Matrithon for the Janeway/Q prompt anyway. That story is *already* at 15K and not done, but I can probably finish it faster than "War Stories", where the problem would not be doing 15K but *finishing* in only 15K... I'm thinking it will be longer than that, and I don't know how much longer, and I've only got 5 days.

After the Star Trek Big Bang, I have committed to finishing "Working In Groups" for the 12 Days of Trekmas E-Book project, for early October, and then I have to go back to Cold Light. At this point I won't have Cold Light done by my birthday as I'd hoped, but I still live in hope of getting it done by the end of October. Then we have NaNo, where I plan to get 50,000 words done on "Play Like God", the original novel where a character who is, essentially, Q, is on Earth in the 21st century trying to track down a corrupt politician of his own kind who he believes to be impersonating the God of Earth's primary religions.

So I won't be getting back to either "War Stories" or "Churchill's Black Dog" until those are all out of my way, most likely; December's probably my month for finishing those.

Why did I just discover st_genderswap's existence when I am on deadline for startrekbigbang and my third matrithon story? I don't even have time to format and repost genderswap ST fics I've already *done*.

Speaking of the matrithon, it's kicked off with a boom, with strong entries by penknife and kernezelda so far, as well as me. My story is:

Options, a Voyager Janeway/Q story, rated R, bondage and sexual situations but no actual sex.

I have Lwaxana Troi done and beta'd for Wednesday and have to finish Silva LaForge's story for Thursday.

Does anyone who is actually really familiar with Lwaxana Troi want to beta this for me? I have, of course, watched several episodes with the character, but most of them were years ago, so a lot of this is going off of Memory Alpha and transcripts, and I'd really like someone with more familiarity to check it over for me.

So the prompt is "Janeway/Q, unexpected", so that's a no-brainer, right? I start one of my West fics for this, a month ago.

At 15000 words and probably only half done, I figured I'd better abandon it for something I could complete faster. So I picked this one idea I had which was rather smuttier (though no *actual* sex), figuring I could knock it off quickly.

It's at 12000 words. Jesus Christ. When will I learn to write short?

Anyway, it's a Janeway/Q set in the alternate future timeline of Endgame, and it could probably really use a beta. Especially one who has read Rocky's Q and Sympathy, because there are only so many ways to handle a Janeway/Q relationship while being respectful of the J/C subtext from the show, and I think I ended up doing a bunch of the same things she did simply because I couldn't think of any other way it could go, and I want to make sure the resemblance is within the range of "so-and-so's great story had ideas that inspired me, but the story is my own" and not "I totally ripped off someone else's story."