vanillalime

So many good ones, so little time to write for them...

I swear, I blinked and summer is nearly over. But this also means FOOTBALL. And pumpkin spice food products!

Anyway, I absolutely love the remix idea that cmk418 came up with for hardtime100, but I have a seed of an idea for July's "camping" prompt (a moody B/K AU!) so I'm inclined to start with that, I think. Hopefully I finish it before oz_magi rolls around. ;D

ALSO Someone on Dreamwidth ("wholeyolk" -- I don't believe I know her?) listed Oz as one of her requested fandoms in the annual Fandom Giftbox fest, but neither of her prompts sparked anything in me. Maybe someone else might be interested in taking them on? It's not an exchange, you just post fic (100 word minimum) to whoever's giftbox by September 22. I wrote a couple of things a few years ago for ozsaur and trillingstar when they posted giftboxes. Very low pressure. Anyway, here is wholeyolk's giftbox, and these were her requested Oz prompts:

• Character/Pairing: Chris Keller/Vern Schillinger

Prompts: It’s not love, that’s for sure, but it’s definitely lust…plus a pinch of sadism, just for fun. I’d love some more of their history together, such as during the first time that Keller was put in prison as a teenager and Schillinger “protected” him. Missing scenes from their time in Oz would also be interesting—they certainly do a lot plotting together, so perhaps their liaisons continued in some form? If you wish to incorporate the characters’ canonical relationships/fucked up issues with Beecher into the story as well, that’s absolutely fine.

• Character/Pairing: Miguel Alvarez/Alonzo Torquemada

Prompts: Alonzo’s late, last season seduction of poor, try-hard Miguel is fascinating, and I’d love to know more! Loss of virginity for Alonzo + first time with a guy for Miguel = yummy, smutty times. :D I’m also especially interested in Miguel’s point of view and the despair/hopelessness/oblivion of it: What is it like to go back on drugs and give up on machismo in one fell swoop? What happens to them after the end of the last episode? Or, Miguel has been told that he’s never getting out of Oz, but Alonzo’s not in for life, so maybe he has some string he could pull…


A couple of people posted giftboxes with Stranger Things prompts that I absolutely loved, so I'm going try to put something together for those. In June, I rewatched the show's first 2 seasons, then I watched Season 3 when it came out last month, and I fell in love with it all over again. It's basically become my new obsession. And I think I've found a sub-group of fans whose interests run parallel to mine, so the fandom isn't quite so intimidating anymore. Whereas with the Marvel fandom... it's so big and scary there, man. When I try to wade my way through their stuff, I still feel like somone from small-town Iowa who's been dropped into the middle of New York City. Without a map. LOL

OH, I nearly forgot! spook_me sign-ups will be here before you know it! I CAN'T WAIT. I wonder what new special creature prompt ozsaur has planned for this year.

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.

Woot! I am back! From a very long, very busy vacation! Actually, considering the GO-GO-GO nature of our trip, maybe "rested" is not the right word... rejuvenated is probably better!

We spent most of our time hiking and kayaking through several National Parks in the US southwest (plus, at my insistence, a day in Vegas lounging by the pool, reading a book :D). Here I am with my husband on top of Devil's Bridge in Sedona, Arizona (from this distance, you can't tell how sweaty and exhausted I was, LOL):



(I was too chicken to walk over to the center of the bridge where it's the narrowest. I figured I was close enough. O_O)

Anyway, now that I've washed all the laundry, and bought some groceries, and sorted the mail, and searched social media for new pictures of Lee, I'm checking back into LJ! Where I'm feeling motivated to write again!

Ooooh there are new hardtime100 prompts! Plus I still have a story idea from the seasonal prompts cmk418 gave me! And I'm going to write up another episode recap from my Oz rewatch!

But best of all, I am energized to jump back into the long Oz fic I was working on. I took a break from it in early June when I reached a good stopping point, right before the action really gets going, so that I could write my Victoria Beecher story. Then when I went back to it, I was like, "OMG, you've written nearly 7,000 words and nothing has even happened yet! The pacing sucks! The story sucks! You suck!" And it sort of put a big damper on the whole project. :( But now I've re-read it with fresh eyes, and maybe it doesn't suck! So I'm going to do my best to get going on it again!

YAY!

I'm glad to be back amongst the other 5 Oz fans who have not yet abandoned LJ! We're keeping LJ cool!  ♥

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

Credit to mxduki's tumblr.

(The Oxford comma should always be used. Always, always, ALWAYS.)

Chris Meloni retweeted this yesterday, and the plot bunnies are hopping! *g*



(Although, I think trillingstar might have already written a story about this?)