vanillalime

Oh hey, I actually wrote something again. It's been a while! I think it's put me in the mood to do some upcoming holiday writing... ;D

Title: The Cat in the Pumpkin Patch
Main Character: Steve Harrington (with Jim Hopper and Eleven in supporting roles)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,915
Creature Prompt: Evil Cat
Summary: It's a good thing Steve isn't superstitious. But maybe he should be.
Notes: Written for the 2022 Spook Me Mult-Fandom Halloween Ficathon. Cross-posted to AO3 and Livejournal. The artwork prompt used for the story is included at the end.

______________________________________

Steve wasn’t superstitious. Like, at all.

( The Cat in the Pumpkin Patch )

Last month, I wrote some stories and created some artwork for the Fandom Giftbox fest over at Dreamwidth. The reveals were recently held, and here's a list with links to my contributions.


Stranger Things (fic):

Peace of Mind on AO3 (G, 1,400 words)
Summary: Steve and Nancy share an awkward conversation after Barb's funeral. Later, Dustin makes Steve feel better, and Steve makes Dustin feel better.

Family Video Night on AO3 (G, 1,700 words)
Summary: When it comes to the Scoops Troop, the more things change, the more they stay the same.


Harry Potter (fic and artwork):

Resourcefulness on AO3 (G, 1,000 words)
Summary: Harry is sorted into Slytherin house, where he discovers the uniquely unifying power of sports.


M*A*S*H (artwork):

Heart + Soul + Mind on Dreamwidth


I also did a quick pinch hit for a rare fandom--the 2018 movie Game Night (starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams). Unfortunately, when I was getting ready to post the story, I realized its genre (kidfic) was one of the wisher's explicit Do Not Wants. Oops. It wasn't something I could just edit out, so I now have this extra story just lying around. Maybe I'll post it around Christmas (which is when the story is set) to AO3, even though there is literally only one story in that fandom posted there. Ah well, lesson learned! :/

I am going to finish this Oz Groundhog Day fic if it kills me. IF IT KILLS ME

It is giving me fits, people. FITS

What in the world possesed me to write this in present tense? There had to be a good reason at one point.

Blurghhhh. I cannot even write a coherent sentence at this point. Or if I do, it has at least 18 adverbs in it. Which is probably a few too many.

Oh, but hey, the trailer for Stranger Things Season 3 came out yesterday, and IT IS AMAZING. And not just because they used an awesome remix of Baba O'Reily. Maybe I'll procrastineate by watching that a couple hundred more times instead.



Big Brother Steve + Little Brother Dustin =  ♥ ♥ ♥

And March Madness, baby! After one compete game, my bracket is PERFECT.

this will not last

Michigan FTW Go BLUE!!!

And hush, suespur, I don't want to hear about it.

Just an update on where my head is at these days.

1. Oz

Yeah, my love for this show isn’t going away any time soon. I envision myself participating in Oz Magi 2032, even if I have to fulfill my own wish. Heh.

The current Oz drabble tree reminded me that the very first Oz fic I wrote was for a drabble tree, back in February 2013. So this month is my 5-year anniversary of writing Oz fic! In some ways, it’s hard to believe that I’ve been writing in the fandom for that long. But on the other hand, when I go back and look at all the things I’ve written, there’s actually quite a lot there. Which leads me to…

What I really want to do this year is stretch myself and try writing a long fic. (Although I said the same thing last year, too, and the farthest I got was opening a document and giving it a title, LOL.) I’m too chicken to sign up for a big bang, but I’ve been poking around the 1_million_words comm that cmk418 has mentioned, and it might help by giving me the push I need. For a while now, I’ve had three different ideas for a long Oz story, and I’ve pretty much settled on which one I want to write. I have no idea how long it actually might be, but I always seriously underestimate my stories’ lengths (generally, they turn out twice as long as I think they’ll be when I start). So if I’m thinking the story is going to be long (over 10k? 15k maybe?), chances are it’ll be long.

Unfortunately, though, I’m a slooooow writer, and I constantly edit and re-edit (which is absolutely necessary because I’m not good enough to get anything right the first time, or even the first dozen times). In addition, I find it difficult and counter-productive to work on more than one story at a time, and I won’t do WIPs, either. So if I do this, it would likely be the only thing I write this year, and I’m not thrilled about the idea of that, especially if it turns out to be a big fail and I never even finish it.

Wow, it kind of sounds like I’m trying to talk myself out of the whole thing, doesn’t it? :|

Also, oz_daily. *sigh* I don’t want the comm to die, but after nearly 3 years, my LJ scrapbook is at 90% capacity, and I’ve sort of lost my enthusiasm for doing it. The thing that really set me off was Apple’s latest iOS update, which now prohibits me from taking screencaps from HBO (or Amazon or Netflix or whatever), which pisses me off to no end. If I want to take a screencap now, I have to use my old original iPad which is still on an earlier iOS. But that thing is agonizingly slow and doesn’t create very good quality caps. In addition, the traffic here at LJ isn’t what it used to be either, obviously, and at this point I don’t know how many peeps were even seeing the pics I was posting. If I bring it back, I think it’ll just be on a weekly basis, or maybe just do occasional themes, because those were always fun.


2. Homicide: Life on the Street

I got the DVDs for Christmas, and I just finished Season 1. (Yes, I’m the slowest binge-watcher in the world. Actually, I'm not even "binging," I'm just "watching.")

The show’s really good! I particularly love Melissa Leo’s character and, in a surprise, Daniel Baldwin’s. And Ned Beatty, as always, is just a delight. (I’m still not good with the character names.) The highlight was probably the classic "Three Men and Adena" episode, for which Tom Fontana won his third writing Emmy.

I get a little thrill whenever an Ozzie makes an appearance on the show. Lee appeared in five S1 episodes (albeit briefly, in some cases). He seemed so sweet and wholesome and YOUNG (I guess he would’ve been about 27?). I can see why all those casting agents back then wanted to cast him in boy-next-door roles, because he certainly fit the bill:


(credit: leetergesen.com)

Lee was incredibly moving in his scenes after his character has been shot. Edie Falco was in a few eps as his wife, as well as Sean Whitesell (Donald Groves), who played a doctor. (I think there was even a scene with the three of them together.) Luis Guzman also guest-starred in one ep, and Zeljko Ivanek has a recurring role as a prosecutor.

In summary, S1 Ozzie count: 5

Interestingly, the bi-annual New York PaleyFest, which hosted the Oz reunion last fall, just announced last week that they they are holding a Homicide reunion in May. I guess Fontana enjoyed himself so much at the Oz reunion, he wanted to do something again. ;)

Now, onto Season 2! It’s a truncated season of only 4 episodes, so I should be able to get through them a little quicker. :D


3. Stranger Things

I watched Season 1 in the fall and finished Season 2 a few weeks ago. I really liked Season 1 and LOVED Season 2.

I’ve always been a sucker for coming-of-age mystery stories (supernatural or not), especially if they’re set during an earlier time period—Stand By Me, IT (the 90s miniseries, anyway, I still haven't see last summer’s movie), Super 8, even Now and Then (a not-so-good, all-female Stand By Me rip-off).

Heck, when I think about it, To Kill a Mockingbird fits the category, too.

Anyway, I loved this show so much, I was actually feeling *fannish* about it, a feeling I haven't experienced since watching Oz. I’m not interested at all in shipping anyone from it, but I love so many of the general/platonic relationships within the show. I was seriously impressed by the acting abilities of all the kids, but my favorite character by far was Dustin. The actor has such great comedic timing. I also floved the whole redemption arc of the teenaged Steve character that began at the end of S1 and continued through S2. So then, imagine my excitement when the show developed a Dustin-Steve subplot in S2 that had this delightful "little brother-big brother" dynamic to it.

I was actually thinking of writing fic for the show, and I had an idea for a nice, short (HA!) Dustin-Steve missing scene story that would’ve been easy to write, something that I thought would be a good way to get my feet wet in a new fandom. Then I checked AO3, and I saw that there were already three versions of my missing scene fic written by three other people! Within the last month! Heh. That’s when I realized how big the fandom was and how many people were writing fic for the show. Some of which was very good, but much of it… not. There also seems to be a lot of fanfic with all kinds of weird out-of-character and/or underage pairings (a by-product of having such a large/young cast, I guess). Anyway, at that point, I got scared away and scurried back to the safe confines of Oz. Maybe I’ll try again later, but I’m not sure big fandoms are for me. LOL