Hello, friend. If you're reading my prompts and thinking "what on earth am I going to do with this nonsense that she would actually like," let me assure you that it doesn't matter. Write whatever your muse tells you to write. Take my prompt and turn it sideways. Take one tiny detail and magnify it, and ignore the rest. Just have fun with it, and create something that makes you happy. Chances are, it will make me happy too.

(Okay, don't turn it into an outer space AU where Cas is a Martian and Sam is an android. That probably won't make me happy.)

{smooches}

I’m looking for one or more people to beta my spn_j2_bigbang fic (so it needs to be someone who isn’t signed up as an artist for that challenge). Gen, about 20k words. I’m looking less for spelling and grammar and more for logic, continuity, canon compliance, and BRUTAL HONESTY about whether the whole thing is boring or stupid. Any help would be most greatly appreciated. Comment or message me, whatever works best for you, thanks!

Yeah, I'm talking about kalliel again, because she posted this lovely essay about Easter eggs, the little bits of her life that she puts into her fic. And she's had an interesting life and such cool (and very Winchester-eque) travels. I mean, look at everything that she packed into one fic.

Me, on the other hand... I've had a fairly boring life, and very little of it makes its way into anything I write. Y'all do not want to read about Sam and Dean's frustrating trip to Walmart, or their stop at a Hampton Inn that looks exactly like every other Hampton Inn (although, Dean would love the breakfast buffet, particularly the make-your-own waffle station). But every once in a while, something real creeps in.

Of flesh and blood I'm made was inspired by a conversation between a family member and a nurse in the ER.

But I've become what I can't be uses a location I've seen while traveling (the giant double church, although it's not actually in Memphis).

My untitled Nazi car fic came about after I rented a Volkswagen and started wondering what Dean would say about it.

Coda was inspired by my very real inability to deal with a whole raw chicken.

What about you? What sights and/or experiences make their way into your writing?

(And okay, now I have to do it...)
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I'm late to this, as I'm late to everything.


If you read LJ on your phone, your year-in-review graphic doesn't have the cheerful holiday goat, even if you're viewing it in a browser and not through the app. Thanks, LJ.

106 posts doesn't seem like very many, especially when you consider that approximately half of them must be episode recap/reviews and polls. I posted a couple of metas and 11 fics in 2017, although one was unfinished and another was actually posted to Tumblr before 2017, so that's really only ten written in 2017. And four of those were short episode codas (in fact, one was a single sentence). I guess my biggest accomplishment, if you can call it that, was that I finally participated in Summergen (which turned out to be a lot of fun and I will hopefully do it again this year). The rest of my posts were mostly nonsensical whining.

The interesting thing about this is, I've seen the stats for people on my flist who have a lot more posts and a lot more interaction from readers. And yet, my ranking of overall LJ users is pretty high (75 as of today). Since that ranking can't be based on my prodigious posting schedule (heh) or my large number of likes and comments (an average of a little over 17 per post, which is mostly from people who have entire conversations in my comments that don't involve me at all, not that I'm complaining because I actually love that y'all do that), so it's got to be based on hits. As in, maybe I get a lot of visitors (I do hit the top 25 posts occasionally) who just aren't commenting. So. Say hi, guys!

Anyway. My favorite things about 2017 were works that were done for me, not by me.

First, the incredibly talented crowroad3 posted all your lovers, a gorgeous little Trials!Sam fic, on my birthday. I said it then and I'll say it again: I'm simply not worthy.

Second, if you're like me, you have a silly fantasy that one day a talented, respected, dare I say beloved artist will read one of your works and say "I want to art that." And it happened to me, when quickreaver created this masterpiece to accompany my OhSam prompt fill. Literally a dream come true, guys.

Finally, tifaching got my spn_summergen prompt and turned it into Message in a Bottle, which is nothing I ever would have come up with, and I guess that's the best part of Summergen, isn't it? Someone taking your wee little seedling and nurturing it into a beautiful flower that you didn't even know existed?

So, that was my LJ year. Real life? Eh. There were upheavals of various kinds, medical dramas both human and canine, setbacks and triumphs. As always, I found myself ending the year pretty much in the same position I was in when it began - broke, exhausted, and frustrated at my inability to find a nice comfortable pair of black over-the-knee boots. Such is life.

How about some resolutions for 2018?

1. Finish those two fics that I've been poking at for a year - you know, the ones where you ignore the huge chunks of plot still to be written, and keep rewriting and refining the non-plot bits that you've already done?
2. Post more recs. Every time I love something, I should share it with you guys.
3. Continue to fight for my right to party.
4. Follow/friend more people. I have a bad habit of thinking I follow someone just because I read a lot of comments from them on my recaps or polls. Luckily, LJ is doing this thing now where they send me "things you missed," and I usually see that email and think "how did I miss this post?" and then realize it's because I haven't friended that person. So I'm gonna fix that.
5. Like more. Comment more. I'm bad at this, because I do almost all of my LJing on my phone, but I just need to get over it.
6. Endeavor to persevere.
7. Whine a little less. (Maybe. That's a hard one.)
8. Find those damn boots.

Let's have a great year!

Anyone(s) available to beta (redacted)? And I'm serious about that plural... the more, the merrier. Though I can't use anyone who's arting for the 2016 spnhorrorbang since this is my submission for that. I feel okay about spelling and grammar; I'm mostly looking for logic, continuity, and for someone to help determine if this really is a horror story or just a series of extremely unfortunate events followed by a very dark ending. (Oh my god, so much to read, so far behind on LJ...)

In which our heroine writes 16K words and then starts to wonder if it's going to annoy people.

[Poll #2039262]

Thanks!

Hey, look, I'm doing that weekly post thingie again. What's happening this week?
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See you on the other side!

A meme! Borrowed from kalliel and elwarre and who knows who else...

1. What are some writing tics that persist in your work but that you dislike?

I'm not sure I can answer this. I mean, if I dislike something, and it persistently shows up in my writing, I should be able to recognize it and stop it, right? This feels more like something I should ask the reader - what tics do I have, that I don't realize I have, and I need to stop?

Well, okay, here's one that I do recognize and can't seem to stop. I seem to find it hard to write Sam. This makes no sense. I'm a devout Sam!Girl. But for some reason, every time I start a Sam story, Dean takes over. Is it because the show usually only gives us Sam as seen through Dean's eyes? Take Coda, for example. Coda started out as a story about Sam - the whole thing sprang from one sentence, "Sam hasn't eaten a steak since he got out of Hell." And it turned into a tale of Dean's trauma and angst, and by the time it got to Sam and his steak, I'm not sure how many readers even got that Dean wasn't reacting to the steak, but to his realization of what he'd done to Sam by trying to get him to eat it. Oddly enough, once I wrote the story from Dean's POV, I was able to go back and write it from Sam's. But Dean's story insisted on being told first.

(I mean, I wrote a Mystery Spot story from Dean's POV. I took one of the few really good pro-Sam, Sam-centric episodes and made it all about Dean. Who does this? What kind of Sam!Girl does this?)

2. What does your id want? Do you ever give in?

My id wants to do things I can't do. My id wants to write beautiful, surreal, dark, dreamy things. But my superego says "Sorry, dear, we're simply incapable of that. Don't even try."

3. You have to erase one of your fics from existence forever. Which one and why?

Probably my first one. It's not bad, per se. I just think it could have been a lot better.

4. How much do you trust the reader?

Either too much or not enough. I worry that I'm leaving things unclear. I worry that I'm explaining too much, to the point that it's boring or insulting. For example, in Til the sandman he comes, I really wanted to have Sam explicitly say that this must really be Dean, because Dean knows the words to the song that Sam doesn't know. But that felt like overkill. Until I posted it, and then I was all, damn, this is too subtle. No one's going to get it.

So, I guess the answer to that question is "I have no idea."

5. Have you ever written anything you would’ve backclicked if it’d been written by anyone else?

No. I stay in my comfort zone; I don't write my squicks.

(And yet I have this Wincest drabble bunny in my head that will not go away, dammit, and I may have to exorcise it by writing it. Possibly under an assumed name.)

(As if Caranfindel wasn't an assumed name.)

6. What’s your guilty pleasure as a writer?

Writing itself is a guilty pleasure for me.

7. Be honest: are you mean to your faves, or do you go easy on them?

That depends on what you mean by "go easy" on them. Am I a cruel, capricious god who unleashes whump and despair onto characters I love? Absolutely. Do I say mean things about them? Do I blame Sam Winchester for anything, ever? No. (But I do let him blame himself. Hence the despair.)

8. What parts of writing a fic do you think are a chore?

The mechanics. Formatting, putting it online. Writing a summary. God, I hate summaries. I tend to make mine vague because I don't want to give away too much of the story (and once or twice I have seen a rec to one of my fics that completely gives it away, and I'm torn between being absolutely thrilled that someone would care enough to rec it, and distraught that they also spoiled the ending) but then I think too-vague summaries are annoying, so, yeah. Summaries. Hate 'em.

9. Are there any unintentional trends in your writing?

Run on sentences, sentences that just go on and on, barely giving the reader a chance to take a breath, with something repeated at the end, repeated because it's important, because the character really feels it.

And fragments.

"And clunky dialog," she said.

"Clunky? What do you mean?" he replied.

"Like this," she said softly. "Lots of said."

"Well, if you know that's bad," he smiled, "why don't you do something about it?"

She sighed. "It's not that easy."

(Nothing is that easy. Ever.)

(Did I mention internal monologue? In parentheses, or italics, or both? Is it a trend? A habit? A crutch? An affectation? A useful device?)

And the language, jesus fuck, the language. It's goddamn inappropriate, is what it is. Although, to be fair, I think this what the characters would sound like if they weren't on the CW, you know? There's no way Dean would yell at someone about their "freaking" apple pie, for fuck's sake.

(Also, that one's not actually unintentional. But it's definitely a trend.)

10. Have you ever intentionally written a character as OOC to fit with a kink/prompt/story idea?

Does Evil!Sam count? Because Sam Winchester is sweetness and light and everything that is good and beautiful, so obviously Evil!Sam is OOC. No matter how hot he may be.

The Inside Man seems to be inspiring a lot of good fic ideas. Visit citrusjava's journal and leave one of your own, or see if you can bring any of these to life!

This comes from alexisjane, who says to share three lines from three WIPs. Unfortunately I only have one WIP right now so it will have to do.

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He pictures his hands stained red with Sam's blood and he wonders if he can do it and if he would forgive himself if he did, and if Sam would forgive him if he didn't, and now here's Cheryl Kramer, sitting here in this interrogation room like the ghost of fucking Christmas future, showing him what it's going to feel like.

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Post yours!