somniloquence

I am seriously behind in everything, but especially in posting here. Outside of Yuletide stuff, I've been far too radio silent, but I'm heading into that time of year when I'm even more silent. I'm missing my sister beyond belief this year, and although I have some plans for my birthday, it just feels too empty this year. I know it's the cancer talking--I've gotten used to trying to just power through having a birthday solo, but doing it this year with everything that's going on...it's unexpectedly hard.

Anyway, I suppose that's why I put my name in on the Holiday Love Meme, which I usually don't do. I've been going through it, trying to leave some comments where I can (I feel like such an Old, with so many people I don't know!), but it feels funny to put my own name there.

I need to really get cracking on my Yuletide fic. Writing in my head is not useful when the deadline is drawing near! Also, I don't think I'll be posting a fic on my birthday, which feels...really awful. I feel like such a loser. But there's just been so much going on between treatment, pain, all the changes in my house (I haven't posted about it, but OMG have I had to spend a lot of money making fixes to my house). It's just been ALot.

Anyways, here's my spot, she said embarrassedly:
✨ holiday love meme 2023 ✨
my thread here

This is a cute meme swiped from killabeez that might be a fun way to squeeze some positivity out of things.

I currently have 179 works posted on AO3. Choose a random number—no peeking!—between 1 and 179 inclusive (where 1 is the first work ever posted and 179 is the latest), and I will tell you three things I currently like about that work.

(Obviously higher numbers will give you the stuff from my descent into MCU madness...)

I'm thinking of doing a meme I last did in 2014, something that raveninthewind started years ago: 31 Flavors of recs. It's basically a rec for a fanwork every day of the month, in different fandoms. It's a good time for it, in that Yuletide has just happened and Festivids will be around (I think? unless it's not till February), and there are other challenges happening this time of year as well. I'm somewhat monomaniacal about my fandom interests, but I managed it last time, so...recs ahoy! If you're interested in doing it with me, I'd love some 31 Flavors company!

I haven't read anything in Yuletide except my gift and a friend's story. Too busy by half. But I hope I can get started in earnest today sometime, after I do a bunch of errands.

For Boxing Day, I hung out with belmanoir and she showed me the OG Mary Poppins--believe it or not, I've never seen the whole movie. I had a deprived childhood, whatever--there are huge gaps in my childhood stuff knowledge from moving around so much and having grumptastic parents who hated anything they thought would be "sappy." I had to seek out sap on my own and that wasn't always very easy.

For Christmas Day, I went to lovely, lovely brunch at killabeez and Mrs. Killabeez's home, which was good because it got me out of the house and social, which I haven't had a lot of chances for since the last of the fam died. Sometimes I've gone to my cousins', but I think they've sort of given up on me because I'm so lousy at keeping in touch.

Meme from tumblr because any excuse not to continue struggling with my Yuletide story:

 

1. favorite fic you wrote this year
2. least favorite fic you wrote this year
3. favorite line/scene you wrote this year
4. total number of words you wrote this year
5. most popular fic this year
6. least popular fic this year
7. longest completed fic you wrote this year
8. shortest completed fic you wrote this year
9. longest wip of the year
10. shortest wip of the year
11. fandom you enjoyed writing for the most this year
12. favorite character to write about this year
13. favorite writing song/artist/album of this year
14. a fic you didn’t expect to write
15. something you learned this year
16. fic(s) you completed this year
17. fics you’ll continue next year
18. current number of wips
19. any new fics to start next year
20. number of comments you haven’t read
21. most memorable comment/review
22. events you participated in this year
23. fics you wanted to write but didn’t
24. favorite fic you read this year
25. a fic you read this year you would recommend everyone read
26. number of favorites/bookmarks you made this year
27. favorite fanfic author of the year
28. longest fic you read this year
29. shortest fic you read this year
30. favorite fandom to read fic from this year

*feel free to specify fandoms or a fic depending on the question.

I did answer #14 already for musesfool this way: 
 

14. a fic you didn’t expect to write

I’ve written so little this year that I could probably say most of it, especially the two Shuri and Bucky fics because boy howdy, didn’t see that coming at all! 

But I might in this case go with lucida, obscura because I initially wasn’t sure I’d do the Cap Reverse Big Bang again, and when I did, it’s kind of a crapshoot what art you’ll end up with so you can’t really plan those things. You can sort of try for certain types of art that’ll fit with some general concepts (like, in my case, I primarily chose WWII-themed art because I really longed for a chance to do more war stories, or if you wanted mermaids or dragons, you’d pick the mermaid or dragon art), but if there aren’t enough of those, your picks will still include other topics. 

And even though the art was one of the first picks I made, I had absolutely NO idea what I could write for it. Eventually, I lit on the idea of the tesseract and Zola’s serum having affected Bucky in a way that made him phase in and out of this world, that he was disappearing and not understanding what was happening because at that time, no one on their side had any idea the tesseract even existed, let alone that it wasn’t from this world and had mysterious properties (what we now know is the space gem).

It was such a fun idea to play around with, and to get inside Bucky’s head while things were happening to him. I think it’s become one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written, I think both the war story and the take on the results of Bucky’s experimentation turned out well, and despite some less than wonderful emotional things around the fic, I’m so glad that I wrote it. Thank you for asking!

I didn't write nearly as many stories this year as I have in previous years, but that was made up for by the fact that most of them were long honking huge things of more than 30,000 words, and one was a WIP that I posted over a couple months, so. I'm definitely at a lower word count than I had been in 2015 (though apparently more than in 2014!), but counting the two things I wrote in December, it brought it up to a respectable number, considering that I've felt mostly like a worthless failure that no one wants to read. I wish I'd done more of the comment fic prompts people gave me back after Civil War, to get out of that malaise, but who knows, maybe that's something I'll go back to this year.

I'm not gonna go month by month since some months I didn't have anything, these are just the stories what I wrote:

How Do You Fondue? The little Valentine's Day fic
I Meant What I Said When I Said Until My Dying Day One of the interludes I was writing based around the Civil War trailers and my guesswork
Don't Wait Up for Me The WIP, where Bucky and Sam go to the place Bucky fell for some closure
All we've got (is what no one can break) The last of the interludes based on the trailers
Dedication A little tumblr fic I wrote for Memorial Day
Clean Skin A comment fic about Bucky in Bucharest (I feel like that should be the title of an adventure comedy, don't you?)
The Bucket Another comment fic for Civil War, about Three Caps in a Bug
Stealing Home The final story in the baseball series
Still Let Me Sleep My Stucky Big Bang entry, a dreamsharing epic
Sway With Me The coda to Still Let Me sleep
These Long and Better Days To Come A shrinkyclinks, nonlinear narrative fic I abandoned back last January 1st and finally finished in November
War Dogs A little Christmas fluff, Bucky and Steve and dogs

( Thinky thoughts part of the meme )

my final word count wasn't too terrible, all things considered:

140,477

Sorry, yesterday was a really, really bad day, and that was without the death of Carrie Fisher, so I missed the 27th posting date. Between it being my dad's birthday (I'm just realizing more and more each year that I'm completely alone now and have no family left), and there's been some really negative weirdness (I know it's not just me, even other people have said dude that's terrible) around my Yuletide fic, and then Carrie, who was…well, I've been with her since opening night of Star Wars in May 1977. So. Yeah.

Anyway, getting back to things:
For the 27th, kirbyfest asked If there was a cancelled TV show you could bring back, which would you pick? With the same cast (this is a fantasy, so pretend this is totally possible even if someone has passed away), or rebooted with a new cast?

Yes, hands down, Now and Again. It was a brilliant, witty, clever, unique show with some of the most amazing performances (Dennis Haysbert's Dr. Theo Morris at the top of them) and musical selections and spot-on New York guest stars, and thanks to a pissing contest between CBS (the network) and Paramount (the production company), CBS cancelled it after one of the cliff-hangeriest endings I've ever seen. I would resolve that cliffhanger stat, of course, and pick up right where we left off, so I'd also need a time machine because 16 years have passed. :-D It had mild sci-fi, action, romance up the wazoo, and just…tonally, cinematographically, acting-wise, there was nothing like it. Over the years I've seen it cut up (the original opening sequence was over 20 minutes long), chunks cut out that were crucial to the story, and there's apparently a DVD version with none of the amazing music they used (I don't even know if they allowed Dr. Morris to, when his human creation awakens for the first time, sing "Close to You"). It's just a travesty how badly this incredible show was treated, but if I could bring it back, I would treat it like my most precious baby.


December 28: anoel What are some of your favorite childhood books?

The weird thing about being this old--and having moved so much in my early life--is that I can't remember the names of the books anymore! When we were really little my sister and I were in the Weekly Readers Book Club, and we got monthly shipments of about ten books, five for sis_r and five for me. I remember one time getting so excited about our books being there, and Mom was on the phone, and us running around and around her while she tried to talk on the phone, getting wrapped up in the long phone cord, and my mom just losing her shit. After she hung up she told us we couldn't open the book box till later as punishment, so my sister picked up the phone (this was one of those heavy old '60s phones) and bopped me in the eye with the handset, pow, two black eyes and when we were finally allowed to look at our books, I couldn't read them. One of the books in the shipment was one of my favorites--all I remember is that it had a girl witch, and it was bright and colorful, but that's all I remember (I can't believe this: I found it! It's called The Witch of Hissing Hill and here's an Etsy seller with a copy. I don't think this has survived into the modern era, and one Etsy seller was even advocating tearing it up for scrapbooking needs, arg). I think another one that I loved dearly was in that shipment, or it could have been another time: Ping, the story about a little duck on the Yangtze River.

I wore out two copies of The Velveteen Rabbit--I read it so many times and I carried it everywhere I went, so both copies disintegrated in rainy Seattle, as you can imagine. I don't remember a lot of kid's books, because I was reading at such a high level that they let me go into the older kids' libraries and I wanted to scope out more "grown-up" books, so a great deal of what is really crucial to people I know from their experience reading it as a kid is lost on me, the little showoff, bad form Past Me you missed out on some cultural touchstones. I do remember that I'd loved Where the Wild Things Are and that I discovered what might be my actual favorite forever book in a section away from Maurice Sendak's other books because it was so "grim": Higglety Pigglety Pop: or, There Must Be More To Life. I…that book. It is just so creepy and weird and I loved it and I thought Jenny and I could have been the best of friends.

Later, in my pre-teens, I discovered this insanely creepy book about dreams kids have, where this photographer tried to re-create different children's dreams and most of them were these bizarre nightmarescapes. I checked that book out so many times from the local library that the librarian started making sarcastic notes on the checkout card. But once it was gone from that library, I was never able to find it again, and a few years ago I asked for help on MetaFilter and lo and behold, someone actually knew right away what the book was: The Dream Collector by Arthur Tress. One of these days I might still try to buy a copy of that, though some of them still make me shudder even as an adult.

Others I remember liking were the Danny Dunn series, and I think I loved reading Nancy Drew even though it frustrated the shit out of me with all the girly nonsense and the sexism back in the day. I read all the Hardy Boys, too--I often gravitated to books that were way, way too adult for me (Valley of the Dolls, anyone?) or they didn't like me reading because they were for boys, but I was interested in adventures and being free to do whatever you wanted, and there weren't a lot of titles back then for a kid like me.

Squeaking in under the wire with a question from kass : If I could come and visit you where you live, where would you take me / what would we do?

Oh man--well, we'd have to do the obligatory tourist things like the Pike Place Market, because everyone wants to see that, and drive down to Mt. Rainier, and take a ferry across the sound. As much of a tourist destination as the Market is, it's really fascinating and is a huge part of Seattle's history, features some amazing views of Puget Sound, and has all these interesting little side places to look at, besides the usual things that people think of: the fish throwing market stalls, the cafes that have had movies filmed in them, all that stuff that people think about because they've seen Sleepless in Seattle or something. Many people go to Pioneer Square, the "old town" area, and love to do the Underground tour--a lot of Seattle was destroyed in the 1800s so they built on top of it, and the tour takes you through the areas that remain underneath Pioneer Square still. I've never been on the tour, weirdly, even though I've lived here most of my life. Everyone wants to ride to the top of the Space Needle, as well. But I feel like the mountains and the water are sort of necessary in some ways, because that's also what's informed this city's character--we're surrounded by water and many large and small lakes, bordered by mountains on the peninsula and in the middle of the state.

But I'd also want to take you to my neighborhood, West Seattle, because it's kind of eccentric in some ways, and it has the only real sandy beach in the area and it's really beautiful to walk along. It would be fun to take you to Fremont, where I used to live, because that's the funkiest part of town and has the famous statue of Lenin and the Troll (a cement troll that lives under the Aurora Bridge and has a VW Beetle clutched in his hand; it used to be a real Beetle till they had to cover it with cement too because people kept stealing parts off it) and beautiful art on the bridge. Capitol Hill is a pain in some ways, but it's also fun and has the most restaurants, I think, outside of downtown and there's always a good place to eat. Hopping on a ferry from many different points could take us to tons of different places like the Olympic Peninsula, some of the islands like Vashon or Bainbridge of best of all, Whidbey, or fun little places like Poulsbo or Gig Harbor.

We are very much a film city, though in some ways it's declined a bit in recent years, but it would be fun to take you to Scarecrow Video, and the film festival if you came to visit in later spring. We are also a reading city, and there are still some independent bookstores around, so going to those would be swell as I don't have a lot of opportunity these days. A lot of people want to visit the Rem Koolhaus designed downtown library, too--it's not my favorite place, I think the design is terrible, but many people love it a lot, so it's at least worth a visit. And frankly, I just love hangingin around downtown and don't get to much anymore, and so I'd love to take you to some fun restaurants, shops, and museums or cultural places.

ETA. I would also have to take you up to Vancouver to see all the film locations of shows you like, and then down to Portland for other show's locations, like the Librarians!

Today's question from sholio : If you had been in fandom when you were a kid, what shows would you have been fanning on, and what kinds of things would you have looked up for them?

I used to actually write stories, sometimes on paper, sometimes just in my head, for my favorite shows and movies when I was little. The first thing like this I know of I wrote when I was five--a little Hound of the Baskervilles remix, I suppose you could call it, of the Mickey Mouse and Goofy version. We found it when we were going through my mom's things after she died, and I laughed my ass off because…wow, even though I didn't know about this kind of fandom till I was in my twenties, apparently I was a little fanfic writing fangirl as a child.

I also still have the record albums my sister and I wrote all over with ballpoint pen--the first two Monkees albums; we put hearts and stars and shit all around the names of the guys we liked best (she was a Davey Jones girl, I went for Mike and Mickey). I was fucking obsessed with that series, and their music, I really was. I still love it, unironically, unashamedly. If we'd had internet then, I would absolutely have been following them on social media, and buying all the weird merch, and going to shows, and whatever else was out there. As it was all we had was Tiger Beat and 16 magazines, so I had to get my fixes there.

I also would have been writing fanfic and vidding, I'm sure, for this incredibly obscure western called Laredo. No one knows about it, but for some reason my sister and I were obsessed with it, which was difficult because my mother pretty much banned westerns from our television--my sister and I wanted to watch Bonanza and the Rifleman and stuff like that, but my mom had this deepseated antipathy toward any show where anyone used the words "ma" or "pa" and so it was rare for us to be able to watch those things. There was very little written about it, and I think we found it after it had gone off the air and was being shown in reruns on a Saturday afternoon or something--that was the one time Mom wasn't dictating what we could watch, so I think that was how we found it.

It was a strange show, in that it was tonally different from anything else you'd find on TV then--not quite a dramedy, but definitely a comedic hour-long series. The two main characters were complete hotasses, and even my young self was wide-eyed at William Smith's pecs and biceps and traps, and he wore pants that rivaled Jim West's in tightness, BUCKSKIN pants that were deliciously tight, and he had that Chris Evans Dorito shoulder to waist ration. So much of the series makes me cringe now, the racism and the sexism and all of that '60s era shit, but man, little me loved it, and I'd have been all over fan sites if I could have.

There were a lot of things I was actively fannish about without even knowing that a thing like fandom existed--my walls were littered with the pullout posters from Tiger Beat (sigh, David Cassidy), I'd write in for giant posters of actors like Paul Newman, and I collected clippings in scrapbooks and stuff. I was a budding film buff as young as ten, so I was starting to research movies and collect things about them, and the movie stars, and the musicians I liked. I think that's why I know I'm never going to be able to fully disinvest from fandom--I've been this way my whole damn life, without even knowing that such a life existed.

___

ETA: Did anyone else get a kudos email today from AO3? Man, I finally have some kudos and I still don't get an email even when I have some! I'm used to going days and days without any kudos, but it would have been a nice thing today except that there's been no sign of one, it's almost midnight, and I can't find anything about it on the twitter feed so I assume everything's fine.

For ranalore: Is there a Steve/Bucky vid or fic you'd prefer to watch or read that you haven't run across yet?

You know, that's actually a really hard question to answer. I had to think about it quite a bit, because I tend to either make the vids I want to see most or write the stories with the ideas I like best. I mean, this is one of the few fandoms I've been in where there's a lot of good fic that's pretty representative of what I'd like to read, which is rare since I'm so fucking picky, but I still have to write the ideas I like most of all more often than not because no one else is doing them. And I hate that; I'd much, much rather read something than write it myself.

Someone wrote a story for the big bang that's about the Ghost Army in WWII and I look forward to reading that (though I'm always trepidatious about reading historical pre- and war-era fiction in this fandom because so many people get so much of it wrong and that just drives me batshit, especially the war OMG it's horrible). I'd been contemplating a story based around the Ghost Army, and it's nice to know now I don't have to waste my time writing something no one will read. I'd love to have someone do the WWII fic with the bonus appearance of Band of Brothers' Easy Company so that I don't have to spend so much time with my references and plotting and shit, but I know it's not gonna happen. And I've never in my life written a true AU, but I think all the time about how fucking cute a Desk Set AU (minus all the gross period politics) with Steve and Bucky could be--Steve in the head researcher Kate Hepburn role, Bucky in the computer guy efficiency expert Spencer Tracey role, lots of banter and sexual tension. If someone wrote that I'd be so happy.

I wish someone else would make the vid I was talking about the other day! There've actually been a lot of vids to songs I wanted to see or themes/stories, since Winter Soldier even came out, but I haven't liked most of them--they've been wildly popular, but for whatever reason I thought they were not done well and that was really disappointing. I know that these days using the same song as someone else isn't the bad form it used to be in olden tymes, but I just can't see doing those songs or concepts again, so I'm always going to be a bit disappointed by that--it's like the thing I want is so close and yet so far.

Today is: what is something you've always wanted to do in a vid that you haven't done yet? (I'm thinking of form, but if it's musical or fannish, that's okay too) for cesperanza

Oh man, so many things, honestly, but they are all things I need to be far more competent for, and to know how to use AfterEffects and be able to figure out how to use Premiere, which bewilders me, and get it to actually function the way that it supposedly does for apparently everyone else except me.

One of the few things that isn't oriented solely to technology and a specific program is using stills. I have this vid I've been trying to make since 2014 that I can't seem to actually make (partly it's a problem with lack of video, which I'd hoped Civil War would rectify but...not so much), partly it's a problem of finding the narrative, but on occasion I've been trying to re-examine it as a stills-focused vid, or at least stills heavy. I don't know if you remember a Sentinel vid back in the day that was nothing but stills of the series set to a Sarah McLachlan song, but soooorta like that. I mean, not exactly, and not like the original songvid slideshows of the earliest days of fan vids, but doing a sort of collage effect in a way, building a narrative through still shots rather than just using them to illustrate a word or line.

And not to be grandiose because I'm definitely not pretending to be Chris Marker, but I loved that storytelling approach in La Jetee, that lingering effect you get with still images over music or words, that hazy, dreamlike state. Or it might work well to use the stills for choruses and have verses be in the active motion clips, I don't know, because I haven't tried noodling with it yet. (Insert offer for anyone who'd want to team up and work with me on this here.)