Sophinisba Solis

In the last couple weeks four different people have made podfics of things I wrote!!!!!!!

flammablehat made her very first podfic with Drink His Kiss Down Dry (Merlin/Nimueh, 5 minutes). This is a porny D/s ficlet and she reads it in a matter-of-fact way that I think fits Nimueh very well. I helped show her how to edit so I listened to the raw file and was crazy jealous of how few mistakes she made while she was reading, so I figure she is a natural at this (not that one needs to be) and she and another friend and I have decided to go in on a 4-hour project together. Ha! Anyway, please welcome a new reader to the fold.

leish aka quintenttsy recorded falcon and a dove (Gwen/Merlin, 4 minutes). This is quite light and playful and everything I love about my secret OTP, really.

croissantkatie listened to leish's podfic and liked it so much that she decided to repod it! Now this is very exciting in itself because omg transformative works! I wrote that story inspired by yue_ix's artwork rosebud with a flush and to a lesser extent by a commentfic by isabear that was also inspired by yue's work. yue's drawing was in turn inspired by a lyric by John Boyle O’Reilly (and obvs by this show we watch) and it is just this whole universe of connections spinning around and making me very happy to be part of it.

But then also Katie was enjoying that so much that she read a bunch of my other fics and decided to make a whole little anthology of 5 Merlin podfics!!
-falcon and a dove (Gwen/Merlin, 4 minutes)
-Her Balm, Her Bane (Morgana/Morgause, 7 minutes)
-If I Cannot Be Your Queen (Gwen/Arthur, 5 minutes)
-The Opposite of Work (Gwen & Morgana friendship, 5 minutes)
-My Best Kept Secret (Freya/Merlin, 12 minutes)
These are all pretty small but there's also a huge range between them, including one of my first Merlin fics from three years ago as well as three that were dark enough to make me fear I'd lose friends when I posted them (rapist!Merlin wth). Katie takes different approaches to reading them, and some were very close to what I had in my head as a writer while others were very different. Listening to them was thus trippy and emotional and excellent.

cantarina wanted to help me celebrate something that happened offline last week so she asked me for something to podfic and I picked one of my last Lord of the Rings fics Little Illusions (post-quest RosieSamFrodo, 3 minutes). It is quite lovely and might be fun for some of my old friends to listen to even if you are normally not into podfic (there's a streaming link so you don't need to bother downloading).

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Also also, for Reverse Remix (which is still going and also has LotR people in it!), netgirl_y2k wrote Sparring Partners, (Forridel/Morgana, 880 words), a wonderful update on a comment fic I wrote during season 2. If you love Morgana you gotta love Netgirl.

♥ ♥ ♥ fandom.

Back in 2006 I wrote two hobbit fics using songs by the band Hem as inspiration. Here are recordings of them!

Title: Torn from the Map
Author and reader sophinisba
Fandom: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing: Frodo/Aragorn (background Merry/Pippin and Sam/Rosie)
Rating: light NC-17
Contains: sex, mild post-Quest angst
Notes: Written for the "Inside a Song" challenge at hobbit_smut, inspired by the Hem song "Half Acre" (included in this recording), dedicated to claudia603.
File info: mp3, 32 minutes
Download link: Torn from the Map at Audiofic (.zip)

Title: He Came to Meet Me
Author and reader sophinisba
Fandom: Lord of the Rings
Characters/Pairing: Pippin/Diamond
Rating: PG-13
Contains: kissing, mention of masturbation, discussion of political violence
Notes: Inspired by the Hem song "He Came to Meet Me" (included in this recording), dedicated to danachan.
File info: mp3, 17 minutes
Download link: He Came to Meet Me at Audiofic (.zip)

First, here is another fest link:



[Multifandom friendship fic fest]

Yay, something to do on Valentine's Day besides thinking about romantic love!

Now let's have another meme! From rubynye,

Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.

I don't actually have a WIP folder, but here are a bunch of file names of unfinished fics. Some of them are very old! I put fandom folders in bold and subfolders in italics.

( LOTR FP )

( LOTR RP )

( Faculty )

( HP )

( Firefly, Lost, Supernatural )

( Merlin omg )

That took a long time but it was fun!

OMG you guys I haven't started reading yet but look at this I mean look indy1776 wrote a 22K of Merlin/LotR fusion and zephre did Gwen/Morgana art for it and it's awesome!!

Summary: When Gorlois Baggins departed the Shire, he left his daughter Morgana a ring, one he thought was nothing more than a trinket that he’d won from Gollum. When Gandalf discovers it’s the One Ring, Morgana is forced to flee the Shire and head to Rivendell, accompanied by her lover Gwen and her cousins Merlin and Arthur. Together, along with the other members of the Fellowship, they set off on a near-impossible quest to destroy the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. A Merlin/bookverse LotR fusion in which the OT4 are the hobbits and Nimueh is Saruman.

Fic link: Take the Hidden Paths by indy1776
Art link: At the End of All Things by zephre

!!!

Title: Gondor Has No Buttons, Gondor Needs No Buttons
Author: sophinisba
Reader: sophinisba
Fandom: Lord of the Rings
Pairing: Merry/Pippin (with hints of Pippin/Beregond and mentions of other pairings)
Rating: NC-17
Contains: Uniform fetish, light bondage, "anachronism"
Summary: Pippin learns about a useful feature of the uniform of the Guards of the Citadel. Merry comes up with other uses for it.
File info: mp3, 15.1 MB, 33 minutes
Podfic link: Download from Audiofic!
Author notes: So back in 2006 there was this hobbit_smut challenge where I was assigned to write a fic involving a zipper, and this is what I did! Also, rubynye remixed this as Morning at Crickhollow for a_conspiracy, the hobbit remix challenge Dana and I ran the following year.
Reader notes: This is my longest podfic so far! It fills the "teasing" square on my kink_bingo card and completes my first bingo!!

Here are some links to things you have probably seen already if you are interested in these kinds of things! Oh well, I will feel better if I also have them here!

-Fanart: Guinevere of Rohan by felix_aeternus!

-Make Something Good by sweetestdrain, the Gwen-centric OT3 (Arthur/Gwen/Merlin) vid we've been waiting for! Oh my lovely thoughtful people with their significant looks! ♥!!

-All We Have, a beautiful Treme vid by hersluck focusing on the show's main female characters. Also in comments heresluck linked to this article in The Nation, Katrina Is Not a Metaphor by Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

-Meta: Neoliberal Holmes, or, Everything I Know About Modern Life I Learned from Sherlock by magnetic_pole. I found this uncomfortable to read but very much worth reading through to the end.

-There's been some good discussion in the comments to heather's post linking to some of these same things about how the issues Maggie's talking about with Sherlock come up in Merlin and some other shows.

-I haven't felt up to watching sweetestdrain and sisabet's new multifandom torture vid On the Prowl yet, but giandujakiss has an interesting post comparing it to Women's Work and talking about some related issues of the meanings of men's pain versus women's pain in our media - more relevant comments on the LJ side than Dreamwidth, last time I checked. (Remember a couple months ago when we were talking here about female woobies?)

-Oh heck, have an MP3: This Is a Rebel Song by Sinéad O'Connor, from the LP Gospel Oak, 1997. It's not one of my favorite songs of hers but I've been listening to it and singing it a lot for the last couple days so I feel like sharing. ( cut for Feelings about Sherlock )

-The philosophy of squee by cherrybina. I feel a little bit funny about linking to these things together because Maggie and the folks at Heather's post are all, "Let's problematize these shows we want to love!" and Bina's talking about Merlin fandom being her happy place. But I love what Bina's saying about there being room in fandom for us to find what I ourselves and our people. I love seeing her squee about how hot Arthur and Merlin are on my f-list and I also love seeing someone like Maggie or zahrawithaz nail down just what that niggling feeling was when I was watching that last episode of Sherlock or Merlin or Doctor Who. (And also I'm with Bina about avoiding anon memes because eeep.)

Let's take another look at my kink_bingo card, shall we?

( kink talk! )

( guitar and songwriting talk )

So yeah, I'll probably have another podfic or two to post this week, but after that I'll be traveling for a while and probably won't be doing a lot of public or fannish posts until sometime in August, though I do hope to get some writing done on my own.

I'm working on trying things I haven't done before, both in terms of formats and in terms of kinks, and this is exciting but also scary, even if I try to act casual about it. :) Some of my fills will have noncon. I get that most of my friends don't like noncon, so thank goodness we have headings and warnings to help us get around these differences. Also, some of the kinks on my card are things I'm into reading already and some of them...well, I'll try to learn to like them and understand the appeal. So I'd appreciate it if folks would not comment on those posts to say they don't like the thing that I've warned for in the heading. I haven't gotten any comments like that in a while but I have in the past and I've seen them recently on some friends' journals, and I find them hard to deal with. They can make the author/creator and other people who enjoyed the work feel judged for liking what they like, whether it's a fantasy in a fic or something that's part of their sexuality in real life. So, don't do that please! Thank you! ♥

(This is not to do with the current disability or racism discussions or other things you may have seen on metafandom. Those are different issues where I'm trying to listen and get better.)

Yesterday was the first check-in post at ladiesbigbang and I took the opportunity to drop out of my podficcing project. :( It makes me sad because I still want more podfics of my favorite lady-centric Merlin AUs to exist, but at the time I signed up I hadn’t realized how difficult recording was (for me), plus my summer’s turned out to be busier than I thought it would be. trascendenza, your comm is still awesome! woldy and shiegra, I will still be there for you (although less so in July)!

But also yesterday sign-ups went up for kink_bingo and I so cleverly enticed and impressed baranduin and hanarobi by showing them kink_wiki that I also got baranduin to sign up! Then today we convinced claudia603 to join in too! :D :D Yay, I’m so glad to have some old friends doing this with me. (No offense, kink_bingo kids, but a lot of you intimidate me! In a good way though! ♥ ♥)

ETA hanarobi caved yay!!! /ETA

such_heights, who participated last year, explains why she likes this challenge and I'm excited for a lot of the same reasons. Most of my fics are shippy but not explicit or kinky, but I like challenging myself and stretching my ideas of what I can do. Also, though such_heights doesn’t mention this, I think the game format will work well for me, as writing_game did for getting me to write lots of drabbles in lots of fandoms last year. I like the motivation of trying to get through the squares and the flexibility of choosing your route, without the pressure of a gift exchange. (writing_game put up a new game a few days ago, by the way! Check it out if you’re looking for some drabble prompts.)

Here is my card and some thoughts about what I could do! ( only moderately safe for work )

Yesterday I (sort of) finished posting my fics at the Archive of Our Own, for a total of 100 works! This is exciting because it gives me an opportunity to make pie charts. ( Pretty colors! Het and slash and other genres that may or may not have a slice of pie or a place in the conversation! )

Title: Little Illusions
Fandom Lord of the Rings
Rating: G
Characters: Rosie, Sam, and Frodo – more or less gen.
Warnings: None.
Word count: 500
Summary: Five things Sam believes about Frodo that (Rosie knows) aren't true.
Author's Notes: Written for the "Take Five" challenge at waymeet, previously posted at Waymeet and archived at the AO3. Thanks to baranduin for looking this over for me!

( Little Illusions )