Otter's Rock

I'm going off to a training retreat, will be back Wednesday, may or may not have internet.  So if my xover_xchange fic is posted in that time, I don't know when I'll be able to read it.

My second Yuletide fic of the year, this is the first Enchanted Forrest fic I've ever written.  I wrote it as a treat a day or so before the deadline; I had to re-read the last Enchanted Forrest book, but that was no hardship ;)

Title: In Which Daystar Learns Magic and Asks A Question
Fandom: Enchanted Forrest Chronicles
Word Count:  1891 words
Written For: silencedancer 
Summary: A little vignette set immediately post-Talking To Dragons

( The castle was large, and impressive, and didn't feel at all like home. By the time he'd been lost five times (which only took until noon, the day after the battle), Daystar would have liked very much to go back to the cabin he was raised in. )

Crap.

Yuletide only allows you to nominate three fandoms, but you can request four.  Once the nomination form is accepted, it cannot be changed.  And it doesn't tell you if something has already been accepted before you submit.  So if you have four different fandoms you would like to request fic in, and nobody else nominates one of them, you are SOL.  Or if you, like me, want three desperately and have one or two others that would be really cool, you ask for the three you most desperately want and hope someone else nominates one of the others--unless you know that someone else has or will request one of your three top fandoms, leaving you with a slot to request one of your second tier fandoms.

On the spreadsheet run by volunteers based on what people report has been accepted, Batman Beyond hadn't been accepted yet.  So I put it as one of my three nomination fandoms (along with Donovan's Reef and Temeraire).  It's already been accepted, all but one character I nominated, so obviously someone else nominated it.  If I'd known that, I would have nominated either Bride and Prejudice or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

I mean, come on, I get that generating a constantly updating list of everything that has been requested so far would be way to server-intensive, and therefore impractical.  But how much server load would it take to have an asterisk or pop up or something when you enter in a fandom or character that has already been added to the Yuletide tag set?


If anyone has any spare noms, please nominate one or both of those fandoms!  You can nominate without needing to participate in Yuletide itself!  All you need is an AO3 account.  (And, by the way, if you are waiting for an AO3 account, you will automatically get one now if you want to participate in Yuletide.)  Nomination Form.  Tutorial.

Bride and Prejudice
1. Lalita
2. Darcy
3. Balraj
4. Jaya

Heinlein--The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
1. Mike
2. Manny
3. Wyoh
4. ________________ (if you're not familiar with the canon, Professor de la Paz would probably be a good fourth person to nominate)

Title: Stories We Tell Ourselves
Characters: Sarah Connor, Catherine Weaver, John Henry
Fandom: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Betaed By: hradzka
Word Count: 3084
Written For: such_heights for rarewomen 2012
Summary: Weaver returns post-born to run, with an offer for Sarah.

At AO3


( The doorbell rang. Sarah tensed. )

Title: Family Matters (The Things Inside Remix)
Characters: Anastasia Dualla, a Six, Bill Adama, Lee Adama
Pairing: Anastasia Dualla/Lee Adama, Six/Lee Adama
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: assault, Cylon mindgames.
Summary: Dee is on Pegasus, finding her place. A Six is on New Caprica, learning what she doesn't know. Lee Adama is a Cylon prisoner, but this is not his story. A New Caprica AU.
Original Story: Give You All by nicole_anell 
Author's Notes: Many thanks to lls_mutant  for the beta
Word Count: 32,560 words

At AO3

( Family Matters (The Things Inside Remix) )

Anybody got any chess-for-beginners primers they could recommend that would help me understand the subtleties of the game at least well enough to write a fic with it?  Because I just signed up for and got the most stylishly awesome piece of art at trekreversebang this year, and it's Pike, Spock, Kirk, and Uhura against a background of a chess board and pieces.  So I'm thinking I should know something about chess to write this.

Other ficathons: bsg_remix  is done, and Remix Redux is coming along nicely.  Anyone want to beta 30k words of BSG AU on short notice, or about 10k words of SG-1 on slightly less short notice?

Um.  So, remember that I gave up on my xover_exchange story because it was going to be too long to get it finished in time, and started a new story?  Well, I might have ended up writing less if I'd just stuck with it.  I don't know if I've ever written that much in that short a time.

It's a good story.  I like it.  It was fun to write.  I think my recipient will like it better than the original story.  It just ... kind of came out of nowhere.

... there's never even been a Yuletide fic of it.

Yuletide Nominations Are Open!!!!!!!!!




Remember, nominations are EXTREMELY important this year!

Instead of getting six nominations (two more than you can request fic for), you get only THREE.  So instead of people nominating what they'd like to receive with a couple extra just for fun and to see if anyone else would like it too, a great many people are left with fewer nominations than they will be requesting fic for.  Since there half as many nominations per person, you cannot count on someone else just happening to nominate something you want to request, as well.    And only being able to nominate 4 characters makes it even worse.

So!  Here is the post where people have been listing what they will nominate, and horsetrading the details, and here is the googledocs spreadsheet of it.  Check there to see if someone is planning to request one or more of your fandoms.  Note that there is also a column for fandoms people request others to nominate because they don't have the slots themselves.  This is because you can request fic in four fandoms, but can only nominate three, so there are people who want to request four but will otherwise not be able to.  If you have extra nomination slots, please be kind and nominate something for someone else who has already used up their slots.

And here is the post of what has already been nominated, and its googledocs spreadsheet, noting as fandoms and characters are approved or rejected by the mods.

nominations run through Monday at 9PM Eastern.

Go nominate!

I'm writing a story for oc_bigbang, and that means I get art made for me.  Yay!  And it looks like I'll get the rough draft done on time, even bigger yay!  When I signed up, they asked if I had a particular actress in mind for my OC, Tora Manar.

Well.  That's a problem for me.  I have face blindness; recognizing faces is difficult for me, and so visual cues aren't at all what I write from.  I mean, even when I'm writing characters from a TV show or movie where they already have actors that I have seen many times I don't really picture them at all when I'm writing (or reading) fic.  But, you know, I thought I'd try, which has led me to a frustrating half-hour with Google Image search.  I don't want Manar to be supermodel-gorgeous; just kind of normal-looking is fine with me.  Because she is a kind of Bajoran-girl-next-door who survived the Occupation and the camps and wants to rebuild Bajor and make a better life for herself and her family.  Fairly ordinary, glass-half-full type.  One of my inspirations, back when I thought this was a romance instead of a gen story, was Lalita from Bride and Prejudice, played by Aishwarya Rai.  Now that I know it's a gen story, Lalita's refusal to accept patronization from the privileged people is still a contributor to Manar, although Manar is much less likely to point it out unless it's really big.  She's trying for a career as a Starfleet officer, she's trying to blend in and get accepted and so she's got a lot more incentive to bite her tongue.  But, you know, Aishwarya definitely has supermodel good looks that I don't want Manar to have.  But that got me started with Bollywood actresses (and also, it annoyed me that while we occasionally saw Bajorans of color in the background, I can't think of a single ep that had one with an actual speaking role), and from there several other searches, and here's what I've found.

Vega Tamotia seems to have a good face; pretty enough, but not hubba-hubba.  But her skin is a bit lighter than I described Manar's skin as being.
Karthika Nair is a bit closer, but I'm not quite sure about for some reason--maybe it's her expression in most of those pictures, she looks a bit too cynical or something.  This is Star Trek after all, and so Manar has a bit of that optimistic/Pollyannaish quality that infuses most of the Star Trek universe.
Rula Jebreal is wonderful, but a tiny bit too close to the too-gorgeous, and also possibly slightly darker than I described Manar.

Now, I've never seen any of these women act (nor read Rula's books nor seen her TV show), so this is going strictly off of pictures.  What do you guys think?  Any suggestions?

(The other main character is a Vulcan male, in that indeterminate middle age Vulcans have where they look thirty and could be anywhere from 30 to 100 years old.  He may be distantly related to Spock and to Ambassador Soval from Enterprise, with whom he shares a name.  I don't really care about what he looks like; there are thousands of white actors in the right age range to choose from, and there are probably quite a few who could do appropriate Vulcan dignity.  Besides, it's not Soval's story, it's Manar's.  He's got his own internal life, but we only ever really see glimpses of it.)