Sophinisba Solis

There was a post today at lotrips_finders looking for a specific Merry/Pippin h/c fic, with no responses yet. Maybe some of you hobbit kids can help them out.

Lotrips fans, we're looking for Dom/Elijah recs at lotr_fic_recs this month. Just one new rec so far, and a depressing number of the ones recced in previous challenges have since been taken off the Internet or put under f-lock. I'm pleased that the ones by people on my friends list are still public anyway. :)

Eep! I just signed up for camelotsolstice, the Merlin winter fic and art exchange! ( ILU Hanarobi )

In other Merlin multishipping news (or not so new but I've been meaning to link to them for a while), vicky_v posted a great bunch of screencaps of When Gwen Did Awesome Things And/Or When I Especially Loved Her and miakun wrote Test of Patience, a great Gwen fic with hints of lots of pairings but especially Gwen/Lancelot.

Oh also I saw someone say she thought the new season of Merlin was going to start on September 19th, which is my birthday! :D Even if this is not true and even though if it is true I still wouldn't be able to watch it until the next day at the earliest, this was still totally awesome to read.

Earlier today I put up a new challenge at lotr_fic_recs, looking for fics about birthdays. This one should be especially easy for the Frodo and Bilbo fans, but I hope we will get some good rps recs too. I feel like there are a couple classics about Elijah's birthday but I don't remember details.

(Eep, I signed up for an exchange! *flails*)

So even though Merlin is my favorite character on the show and most of my favorite fics are from his POV, I totally adored Pastimes & Lifestyles by netgirl_y2k, an AU in which he never comes to Camelot and so Morgana has to take over his job of protecting Arthur from various monsters and sorcerers. The fic has a lovely light tone, great characterization, plot, and a satisfying Gwen/Morgana romance.

thefuturequeen is hosting its second Gwen Battle with prompts open until August 5.

Merlin Big Bang fics will go up at boxofmagic on August 5th!!!

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We're about to close up the Lórien challenge at lotr_fic_recs, putting up a new challenge (something Lotrippy, I think) over the weekend.

Someone at lotrips_finders is asking for favorite long Frodo/Sam fics. Maybe you can help them out.

Happy Mayday! I feel bad that I didn't post more poetry during April. But then again I guess there's no rule against posting poetry at other times of the year.

I put up the sign-up posts for round 6 of remixthedrabble a couple hours ago! I meant to post links from here right away but I've been consumed by a Canadian TV fandom controversy I was previously unaware of. o_0 Hopefully that's been sorted out now. I'm actually terribly nervous about being the primary mod on this challenge for the first time, but I'm also really excited because I love the reading and writing part so much.

This is the Drabble Purist Round, where all the remixes will be exactly 100 words. Sign-ups are open until the 11th and are nonreciprocal again, so you can sign up as a remixee (giving permission for others to write drabbles of your stories) or as a remixer (you'll get four weeks to write a drabble!) or both, as you prefer. As usual, I am making sad puppy dog eyes at all you LotR writers hoping that you'll join in so I can mess with your stuff. :)

Remix Redux will also be happening again this year and will probably include rpf for the first time. If you're interested in the challenge and in particular if you're an rpf writer the mods would love it if you'd fill out this poll about the proposed changes.

Also earlier today I posted a new challenge at lotr_fic_recs, asking for fics with a memorable portrayal of Sean Astin, and mews1945 has already contributed a few recs. I'm hoping we'll get a lot on this one (which will be on for the whole month) since there are a lot of people still writing Sean/Elijah and there's overlap between that group and the hobbit fans who participate in the comm more often.

I have five Dreamwidth invite codes. Comment here with your e-mail address if you'd like me to send you one.

In non-fannish news, I've had a mysterious headache off and on since Wednesday night, just in a small area on the right side. Not too big a deal and if it had to happen I'm grateful it's this week and not last week, but it is annoying.

Well, I think I'm going to sign up for springtime_gen, a Harry Potter genfic exchange. Would any of you like to join me? (Or try to talk me out of signing up so I can write something else like I don't know maybe my dissertation?) Writing up my sign-up and thinking about what kind of fic I'd like to read or write reminded me of several HP gen fics I started last summer and didn't finish, so I've taken those out and am now close to finishing two of them. Would any of you like to beta? I could especially use a Britpicker for the longer one (maybe around 2500 words) and someone who knows French for the shorter one (less than 1000 words), though I also have someone I could probably e-mail about the French thing. Yay, writing! This is a nice feeling!

In other news, we are looking for ficlet recs (anything less than 1000 words but not exact drabbles) at lotr_fic_recs. I know a lot of people on my f-list like reading and writing drabble sets and other short fics. This could be a nice time to give some of those short fics some recognition, rather than the long ones that tend to get recced a lot. :)

When I was going through old entries for that meme yesterday I came across a "don't forget we have this challenge!" post that was meant to go on lotr_fic_recs but that I had posted to my own journal by accident. I'd answered three or four comments here and everything and never realized the post was in the wrong place lol.

Yuletide sign-ups close in less than two hours (9 PM Eastern US time), you guys! More than 1500 people have signed up already! The list of eligible fandoms is here. I can't wait for assignments to go out!! (I should really start composing my dear writer letter omg.)

Also please contribute your Ian/Elijah recs at lotr_fic_recs! It's always so nice when those posts get more of a response than I'm expecting so I'm excited about how active this one's been so far. Post your own recs or help us track down some grievous_angel fics, here.

We are asking for LotR and Lotrips femslash recs at lotr_fic_recs. I was excited that there were several recs right away on the first day and one of them was for one of my friends (that is always nice to see) but there could be a lot more. Of course, I haven't done my part yet myself. Anyway, femslash, yay.

Signups are open at remixthedrabble are open until tomorrow night. I'm really happy that two great writers from my f-list plus a few other LotR fans are participating already but again I am greedy, I want more. :D (100 little words! You can write 100 words, can't you?)

Signups just opened at at slashababy, the LotR RPS story exchange. (It's crazy how much looking at that post makes me want to sign up, even though I've never been able to write in that fandom and have barely been able to write anything in any fandom in recent months.)

And signups also just opened at lotr_sesa, the Secret Santa exchange for LotR fic and art. A few people on my f-list did this last year – are any of you planning to do it again? Comments are screened on the signups post so I can't tell.

Happiness meme: Today I'm happy because I have new shoes that are both comfortable and very cute. This is the second pair of Sketchers I've bought this year. I bought the other pair mostly because I liked how they look but they turned out to be great for walking too, so I'm happy to have these new ones, which are almost as funky and look like they'll be slightly better for walking.

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We are looking for good Pippin fics at lotr_fic_recs. It was great to get a rec from mews1945 right away on the first night and they've been coming in steadily since then. The challenge will be open for another week and a half, here.

If I weren't expecting this September and October to be horribly stressful for me in real life I would totally sign up for the Finish-a-thon at multific: "The finish-a-thon is a ficathon, with all the ficathon-like things like deadlines and fellow volunteers to encourage you, but with this ficathon, you write your own ideas. But since part of the encouragement of a ficathon is writing things for other people, what we're going to do, is vote for which story ideas people should write." In the sign-ups you list at least three stories that you've been wanting to write or to finish, and later on there'll be a poll so that others can choose which one you're going to finish this fall. You decide whether voting is open just to other challenge participants or to everyone (including your f-list and others more likely to read your fic). Sign-ups end on August 15th, fics are due by October 24th.

I think I'm going to sign up for tindogs_fic, a fic exchange for minor characters in the new Doctor Who. Anyone care to join me? Sign-ups close today! Fics must be posted by September 1st. The sign-ups post is here.

Doctor Who is one of my favorite shows but I've always thought it would be scary to write fic for it because
-there are decades of canon I haven't seen
-Ten is the Doctor I'm in love with but I don't know if I could ever write his voice
-the fandom seems to have an awful lot of crazy shippers (but then maybe it just looks like that from the outside)

Anyway, I don't think any of those things would be a big problem with this exchange, since it's limited to the last four seasons, and most of the requests have to do with characters who've only appeared in an episode or three, which can be reviewed easily enough. The requests that are there look really interesting and are mostly to do with characters, plots, and worlds rather than sex. (Smut is great but it's not what I've been especially wanting to write lately.) I just found out about this today myself and my biggest challenge at the moment is to come up with three story ideas to request. (I can freak out about actually writing the story next month omg.) Anyone have any suggestions?

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Speaking of suggestions, there have only been a few comments on the latest challenge over at lotr_fic_recs. We are looking for Frodo/Sam fics, which you wouldn't think would be hard to find! elanorgardner has heroically coded links to all the recs in previous Frodo/Sam rec challenges and we could also use a little help correcting broken story links. If you know of a good F/S fic or two, go here and tell the community about it. We also really appreciate link posts (like this one) in other journals and communities to help spread the word.

(See? I am still a fan. I can post about things other than traveling and being sick!)

We are collecting recs for hurt/comfort fics over at lotr_fic_recs. These can be LotR FP or RP, gen or any pairing, any rating or level of medical explicitness. (And in case you were wondering, Elanor and I had decided on this challenge theme before the latest round of controversy arose around Stories of Arda.) Even if you're not in a reccing mood, you might want to check out the entry to see the past and new h/c recs and find something to read. We already have three recs since late last night and I expect this to be a popular one. Hurt/Comfort recs

( digression about language )

Anway, I think it's unfortunate about SoA, but it has been nice to see an increase in posting at The Last Ship lately. I have been very lazy and haven't done much work there since we started up in November, but baranduin has been working on the site and just fixed the thing with e-mail notifications so now they'll take you directly to the reviews. You can also choose between several really pretty LotR-themed site schemes that we didn't have at the beginning. The thing I did work on early on and that I'd like to get back to now is the help site, which is a wiki, meaning that anybody who wants to can contribute to it. We did disable anonymous editing because we were getting some spam, but anyone who wants to can set up an account. If you're looking to contribute something, it would be great if you could add some links to other archives and communities on the External resources page. Just click on the "edit" link at the top of any page or section, and if you're not familiar with wiki language you can use the little icons at the top of the box to add links. It's easier to get used to than you probably think. :)