Sophinisba Solis

Well it's a good thing I made a New Year's resolution to post a fanwork each month, or I wouldn't have edited this last night and posted it this morning:

Title: Fall of Princes
Author: kaizoku
Fandom: Merlin
Rating: NC-17
Ships: Arthur/Gwen, Gwen/Merlin, Arthur/Gwen/Merlin
Summary: Arthur wants to see Gwen with another man.
Notes: OMG you guys this story is so hot.
Links: Text, download, and streaming links at the AO3

Another one of my resolutions was to repost twenty of my old podfics to the AO3 each month until it's done. Well, work has been busy and I've been putting it off so I didn't really try until today, and so far I've done three. Lots more uploaded to the webspace paraka's giving me, but it will take a long time to fill everything in, especially with some authors having left fandom and/or taken down their fics, and with the files on my own computer being way more disorganized than I'd realized.

Anyway, here are my works tagged podfic on the AO3. It will be gradual. I'm using a posting skin that eosrose made and shared at podfic_tips a while back, with the colors tweaked by fire_juggler and I really like how it looks. I sure regret not doing this years ago.

The Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology is happening again this year with submissions due by February 8th. This is a fun thing to participate in even if you haven't made podfic before. I am happy to have a deadline to motivate me to make something in February.

I did this meme just over a year ago, and I thought it would be fun to come back and compare how it looks this year! My top ten fics by AO3 hitcounts:

( list )

( thoughts on this list and last year's list )

The other day anatsuno pointed out a great Tumblr post by helens78 about the taboo against saying we like and our proud of our own work. Helens said it would be great if more authors would use the One of My Favorites tag on the AO3 and I agree, so tonight I went in and added it to four of my fics. I had decided to limit myself to five and I can't quite decide between two others. :) And none of those six fics overlap with the ten that are here, but that is okay.

So far only 135 works at the AO3 have that tag. Why not add it to a few of your stories, if you archive there? A lot of readers would like to know about them.

If you are a fan of the AO3 and can afford to do so, consider donating to the OTW! (I just accidentally typed OT3. Seriously, that comes to my fingers more easily than OTW or OTP. My OT3 is in fic #6 in the list above.)


Also also, the OTW is hosting an AO3 Tag Wrangling Open House from 19:00 to 21:00 UTC on April 22nd. In my timezone that is Sunday afternoon or an excellent time for fannish discussion, before frantic Sunday night catchup for the school week and frantic last-minute Remix edits. As much as I love the archive, I rebel a little every time I post a fic because the canonical Merlin character tags are ALL WRONG from my perspective. I am really curious as to why they've chosen to do things that way (and whether they might change it omg!) and also lots of other things about tags. Tags!

-aralias has started up podtor_who, a new comm for Doctor Who podfic! Sign up for a day between Nov. 20 and Dec. 19 to post a newly recorded Doctor Who podfic! Wouldn't it be great if we had one for every day?

-The Kaleidoscope fanworks exchange is probably going to go live this weekend! In the meantime, they are looking for pinch hits in the following fandoms:
十二国記 | Juuni Kokki | Twelve Kingdoms
青い花 | Aoi Hana | Sweet Blue Flowers
NO.6（ナンバー・シックス） | No. 6 (anime)
Epic of Gilgamesh
Dragon of the Lost Sea - Laurence Yep
Static Shock
サイレン- | Psyren
東海道HISAME | Toukaidou Hisame
姑獲鳥の夏 | Ubume no Natsu | Summer of the Ubume - Kyōgoku Natsuhiko
The mods would appreciate it if you'd pass on this info to people who might be able to help. You can also browse all the requests and make extra treats if you want. ETA: I am so amused by the two Y tu mamá también requests, right there one after the other. That is fandom, right there. God bless. /eta Some of the requests are open for art and fanmixes and vids as well as fic. All the links you need are at dark_agenda.

-Speaking of rare fandoms, Yuletide is open for signups! I'm not especially in a writing place these days and the nominations process looked scary, so I've decided to sit out official participation again this year, but I do hope to write a treat or three! You can get the links you need for that at yuletide_admin. The years I participated in Yuletide I had a really awesome time!

-OMG OTW elections! If you're a member, you should have instructions and useful links in your email.

I have had a week. FRIDAY has not meant this much to me in a long time. Yes I am tipsy in the late afternoon okay.

Anyway here are some things:

-I have only finished one paperlegends fic, but it was awesome. Destiny That Darkly Hides Us by nympha_alba is a wonderful long Arthur/Merlin fic takes place before and during WWI but in an AU where magic exists and is illegal. The language in this is fancier than what I usually like to read but it won me over pretty quickly with the LONGING and the ACHING. It is great.

-I am in the middle of reading The Ivy Crown by briar_pipe and it is also great. It is the AU-from-the-end-of-season-one fic you've been waiting for, full of plot and characters from Arthurian legend and Morgana being the strong, intelligent, and flawed center of her own story.

-Speaking of ladies and fic, my fellow Merlin femslasher has convinced me to join pornspiration, a comm for getting better at writing porn that will be kicking off tomorrow. Membership is moderated but they welcome people from any fandom and level of experience, and the mods would especially like to invite femslash fans to join in. There will be lots of different kinds of posts but if you're like me and you don't want people to critique your writing then it's okay to sit out those rounds and just play along in other stuff. It looks like it will be a fun and upbeat place and I hope I can find time to participate and I wish it were on Dreamwidth but hey.



( AO3 Feelings and Opinions )

-Last week I finally made a good start on my podfic project for ladiesbigbang! I made some big mistakes but I still got a significant chunk done and it felt good.

-I have filled twenty out of twenty-five squares on my first kink_bingo card!!! I have until the end of September to cross off "silk, velvet, feathers, furs", "prostitution/sex work", "whipping/flogging", "obedience", and "consent play". I think it's kind of funny that I haven't come up with anything for consent play yet, considering how excited I was to get that square and the fact that half of my fills have been dubcon or noncon. I just haven't found anything that quite fits it in the way I want. (I thought about trying to do Gwen/Vivian with enthusiastic consent for the Happy Endings challenge at summerpornathon but it didn't work out.) I had pornathon fics picked out that I wanted to podfic for both that and obedience, but the authors either never de-anoned or didn't answer my podfic permission requests, so I'm still looking. There's another piece I started writing for pornathon that involves prostitution, so I should try to sit down and make that work. Silk/velvet/feathers/furs is another one that seems like it should be easy but hasn't happened yet. And whipping/flogging is not really my kink and I don't have any ideas. So yeah, I would take suggestions for any of those five, particularly if you know of good, relatively short fics that ought to be podficced.

-I watched the first two episodes of Parks and Recreation last night and another this afternoon. I like the main character a lot and it often makes me laugh but more often just makes me very uncomfortable. If you would like to try to convince me to keep watching I will listen. I would also take recs for other shows that are streaming on Netflix or other places on the Internet, especially the half-hour funny kind that I can watch right before bed. What I would really like to watch is more Community. That's coming back soon, right?

I finished the first season of Mad Men a couple days ago and was going to try to hold off on diving in to the second, but I think I will probably cave tonight.

Here is a fun meme that I saw on torachan's journal and since then on a few others'. My top-ten fics by AO3 hitcounts:

( List and thoughts )

Fic rec! Last night I read the first 18 parts of a new WIP at the kink meme, The Map of Love. It's, um, Arthur/Merlin in which Arthur is a doll, but it's quite lovely and achy rather than creepy or cracky (not that there's anything wrong with crack or creepiness). It's from Arthur's POV and it has great supporting characters (FREYA!!) and in general is just very interesting and enjoyable. It just got updated with with another 8 parts a little while ago, so I'm looking forward to reading some more of it tonight. ETA: Note that it starts out with cancer and death - if you'd rather not read about that you can skip ahead to the middle of the third comment, and the story will still make about as much sense.

Podfic rec! Earlier this week I finished listening to The Student Prince, fic and podfic by pandarus, and that was also wonderful! It's a very long fic and I liked some parts more than others, but I was completely charmed by the end, as I pretty much knew I would be. I was sort of laughing at myself and how predictable my reactions were, as in getting bored with the love triangulations and the drinking, then happy with the romance and the porn, and over the moon whenever glbt issues came up. Anyway, FayJay's reading is totally smooth and fun and happy-making, and I highly recommend it.

( Podfic progress! )

( Lack of Writing Progress :( )

Yuletide signups are up on the AO3! They will be open until…okay I guess we don’t get a deadline, maybe the 17th or maybe the 19th or 20th. If you’re not in a rush though you might want to wait a day or two so as not to pound the servers so hard. Apparently the form is huge and may take a long time to load. People seem to be having better luck with Chrome than other browsers. There’s more information at yuletide_admin. I have an extra AO3 invite code, so let me know if you need one. I have really enjoyed this challenge for the last three years and I highly recommend it. I'm excited that some of my friends are participating for the first time this year.

Don’t forget that you can also keep up with dark_agenda, who are running a subcollection within Yuletide 2010 to encourage and promote fics with chromatic characters and creators, and access_fandom has an informal challenge for Yuletide fics about characters with disabilities.

I’ve decided not to sign up myself this year for a combination of reasons, the biggest one being that I’m facing a lot of deadlines in real life right now and I don’t want to risk getting a difficult assignment and having fandom become another source of stress. (There’s a small possibility that I’ll cave though.) Normally I would power through on the strength of my Yuletide squee, but, um… ( squee harshing )

On Dreamwidth you can see the latest posts tagged yuletide. (I do wish this had inline cut tags like one’s reading list does.) I was using that to follow the wank but then it turned into more and more “Dear Yuletide Writer” posts and those are also cheering me up. Already this morning I found a request by someone I don’t know that’s uncannily similar to what I want from the source, and I might try to write that or something else, even though I’m not signing up. Last year I wrote two extra stories and the year before I wrote five and those were all a lot of fun, even though last year I also had people telling me that reading letters to get ideas for extra stories was Not In the True Spirit of Yuletide. *g* I guess there’s always something.

Sign-ups for Remix Redux 2010 are probably going to start in the next week. Yay! Watch remixers_lounge if you're interested. I wrote last July about why I love remixes. ( anticipation )

kink_bingo is also running a remix mini-challenge this month with more flexible rules. ( shiny )

I've been having a really nice week. I've been blowing off exercise (eh, the gym is closed and it's too cold to run outside) and rl work (eh, no excuse there), staying at home and throwing myself into some fun fannish projects. I started a new Merlin fic on Monday and another one yesterday and have been writing a ton on both. \o/ I haven't posted anything new but I've had new comments on a few older fics that made me feel really good. I've been archiving my old fics at the Archive of Our Own and exchanging e-mails to brainstorm for a small fic and art fest to be held at camelot_fleet next month.

I finally finished watching Noah's Arc on Netflix instant viewing a few days ago. I liked the movie a little less than most of the episodes because (skip) of all the relationship/infidelity angst and because I was disappointed that Junito wasn't in it and that Noah ended up with Wade, who I still think is an asshole. I did like the part with Wade's mom though, and Chance's student Brandon was a cutie. It was still fun and I think I might request Alex fic for Yuletide next year.

On Tuesday I went out to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie and I liked it pretty well, though not as much as I'd hoped. ( Comments on style and characters but no real spoilers )

I thought uploading my fic at the AO3 would be really tedious but it's mostly been easy and occasionally fun - I like skimming my old fics and deciding on tags for them. ( lots of AO3 talk )

Speaking of LotR, franzeska commented on the Dreamwidth side of the Fanlore post I did a couple weeks ago to ask whether I remembered the vampire hobbits fad from a few years back, and I had to say no, I think it was before my time. Does anyone else remember who the authors were, when that happened and where they got archived?