I never do these on time or all of them, but let's do a few.

Fannish update!

I'm not watching/reading a whole lot of new material; like many, my cope is running low. I am still following Meitantei Conan (the small resolutions are soothing), and I'm accumulating Soul Land 2 until I think I have at least one whole arc. I did pull down the new Bleach and reboot Kenshin material for when I have cope again. I continue to keep an eye out for new seasons of Bungo Stray Dogs and Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei. A bit more desultorily, I keep an eye out for CCS Clear Card issues, if only to see whether CLAMP will actually manage to end this one. And, of course, there's Wayne Family Adventures, because thank goodness for some writers with an actual sense of humor for a change.

Tangentially, I have switched my media storage drives over to SSD, and continue very satisfied with that.

Writing has been very sporadic for the last few years, but I do get nibbles on the WIPs every now and then, sometimes from very old fandoms (see also finally getting Every Night and Alle done after being away from Tenipuri for years). Possibly the Touken Ranbu Hanamaru story will come back around soon, because that series is adorably silly and also chock full of fanservice, which is generally good bunny-bait. We shall see.

Oh, what the heck. I need to be distracted from pre-term nerves.

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Meme time! It's been a while.


Give me a fandom and I'll reply with:

1. My favorite character.
2. ANOTHER favorite character!!
3. My favorite character relationship, and by "relationship" I don't necessarily mean pairing and certainly not OTP, but on the other hand, depending on the fandom MAYBE I DO!
4. The moment/character/THING/WHATEVER that first hooked me on the fandom.
5. One of my favorite moments.
6. A song or track that reminds me of this fandom.
7. One miscellaneous awesome thing about the fandom.
8. One completely random thought I have regarding this fandom.
9. One fic/essay rec, fanart, or fanvid that depending on the fandom I either had lovingly bookmarked or saved onto my hard drive, or only just now found during a two-minute Google search.

Have you ever gone back to an essay or a story or a picture and thought "Yeah; I totally nailed it"? Re-read something and decided that, yes indeed, you got the idea or tone or characterization or line just right?

I propose a meme: What was that thing? Let everyone know.

Mine, at the moment, is the story At A Cost, an FMA fic that came out of me wondering what would happen if the first anime ended with everyone getting exactly what they said they wanted. Roy-centric, though later stories in this arc are mostly Ed pov. And I nailed Roy and Hughes, here. *satisfied smile*

I am deeply amused by now many answers Em and I have in common.

1. Which is your favorite fic? Ahahaha, yeah right. Actually, a few months ago, I wrote up my favorite for each series I'd written much for, and even that involved a lot of cheating with honorable mentions. It does mean I have a reasonably short list, though! You know, out of four and a half hundred.

( A sample of favorites )

2. Which is your best-received fic? Hmmmm. All my early RoyxEd was very successful because I just hit the wave right then. I think Challenge was the one that was best received for being a good story rather than just catching a pairing wave, though.

3. Which is your worst-received fic? *dryly* Well, there was certainly a resounding silence surrounding Seishin, which was Hawkeye/Roy. I expect this was partially because I was too terrified of the RoyAi shippers to actively pimp it in that corner.

4. Which is your angstiest fic? That... is a good question. I don't do angst too often, and generally it's in the process of making things better. When I do write serious angst it's generally "someone's dead in canon so here's how their best friend/lover grieves". Even that usually has comfort in there somewhere. I think the most unmitigated angst I ever wrote was Nutshell, which is Yukimura-while-paralyzed fic.

5. Which is your funniest fic? Looking at it, I seem to write a lot of my humor as omake--it's kind of the art of the in-joke, based on whatever serious fic comes before. I think, among the stand alones, Population Adjustments is probably a front-runner. Poor Ivan.

6. Smuttiest? *gales of laughter* I'm a smut writer, come on. Let's try the kinkiest thing; I think that would be Tools of Persuasion, the Hibari/Dino I wrote for the last Porn Battle I did.

7. Fluffiest? ...this presents similar difficulties. However, I can say that Comfort Food is the only fic for which I have actually warned for the sheer tooth-rotting density of fluff.

8. Have you ever made someone cry with a fic? Indeed, I have been told I have on more than one fic. Usually but not always the aforementioned "someone is already dead and someone else has to cope" ones.

9. Which fic frustrates you the most? Any fic I'm trying to write at the same time I'm picking up more of a teaching load. Because that makes it hard to nail down the bunnies before they bugger off.

10. Which fic was the most fun to write? They're all fun, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. *thinks* I did have a very good time with the Translated stories, because I got to show that I was totally right and Tenipuri really is a samurai flick. I think, though, that the ones I giggled through the most would be the two By/Ivan stories. Poor Ivan.

11. Who is your favorite OC you've ever created? Hmmm. That might just be Arariel, for the River arc. Not least because I had people asking me where in canon they could find her, since they seemed to have missed her the first time around.

12. Are you better at oneshot or multipart? I think that would probably be multi-part, if only because that's how I usually frame my stories.

13. What character do you think you're the best at portraying? I like to think I'm good at all of them, since characterization is one of the things I pay very close attention to. *considers* I think I especially captured the voice of Kirihara. And Hughes. And Gokudera. And Hibari. And Atobe. *grins* Definitely Atobe.

14. What character is the most difficult to portray? I... don't generally have difficulty with character portrayal. If I do, then that's not a series I'm usually writing in.

15. Tag five other authors! No. Though these are fun to read.

synecdochic has an excellent post about why "modesty" is a bad thing. (ETA: As per Phoebe's comment, it is well to clarify: a bad thing to attempt to require of other people.)

My own take is a lot shorter: Naraht et al are wrong. Put a period on it.

And annotated_em has a lovely meme/contribution/exercise, which is to say something about one's awesomeness. Something you worked at. Something you're proud of, or possibly something you should be proud of if you weren't shamed into denying it.

(I remember when we did this a few years ago, and it was really hard to do then, also.)

So: I'm a very fine writer. I write stories with well-considered character development, and I research the heck out of them. I write tight, elegant articles with sharp, well-chosen quotes to demonstrate my analysis. I have written one way or another since I was in middle school, and I've worked at it and read a ton and experimented with writing like Them, and I'm still going.

I also (wow, it's like hauling bricks to do more than one of these...) write lovely website layouts. I worked through years of trial and error and reading up on standards and hunting down CSS methods, and it paid off: I write lovely layouts with clean code.

I taught myself php by making myself a website, and wanting to do things with it. I learned by immersion, and frustration, and having screaming tantrums at WordPress, and now I can read and edit most code, and even make some programs from scratch.

I have taken care of myself and gotten better. Emotionally, physically, mentally, I have done what I needed to survive, and after that I have done what I needed to start getting better and keep getting better and make my life worth living.

I am fucking awesome, and no one can take that away.

Fretting is bad; we do not have a big enough scratching post for me. So instead, I offer an adaptation of the favorite pairings/characters meme. Rather than favorites per se, who do you write about the most?

(This is facilitated, sometimes entertainingly, in my case by using my archive tags for characters and pairings and setting the font size proportionate to use. It kind of jumps out at you.)

So, in fandoms where I don't just go for Wild Orgy Time Write Everyone, these are the characters I write about most. Say, if you like, what patterns you see.

Angel Sanctuary: Mad Hatter by, like, miles
Bleach: Byakuya, Renji and Rukia
Card Captor Sakura: Touya, Yukito and Yue
D.N.Angel: Satoshi, Dark and Daisuke
Eyeshield 21: Hiruma
Fullmetal Alchemist: Roy, Ed and Hughes
Fushigi Yuugi: Yui
Hikaru no Go: Akira and Hikaru
Monochrome Factor: Shirogane and Akira
Meine Liebe: Ludwig
Prince of Tennis: Rikkai, Yukimura, Tezuka, Echizen, Kirihara
Petshop of Horrors: D
Saiunkoku Monogatari: Seien (...erm, that's the au Emperor Seien)
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle: Fai and Kurogane

Omake: particularly Wild Orgy Time fandoms
Final Fantasy VII
Katekyou Hitman Reborn
Prince of Tennis
Yami no Matsuei

This icon was not memed but I'm so darn proud of it I'm going to talk about it anyway.

This one is my own work, from shutter click to icon load. It started life as an oak tree beside the highway, next to a bunch of tractors and a Citgo sign. If you've thought that I have a Thing for trees, you're right, and this one was so perfect I just had to stop and take a few shots of it. Five or six of my icons are based on shots of this tree.

This one is actually two versions. There's the leafy version, and the winter version superimposed on it to bring out the branch structure. And the 'clouds' at the bottom? Are the sign and tractors worked over with the smudge tool. Total serendipity.

When I went to make this an icon, it really wanted something on the right, so I took a strip and color-inverted it to make the background for the text, and that worked really nicely too.

All together, this is probably the best image I have ever created from scratch. I'm not really a graphic designer, so when something goes this right? I glee over it a lot. ^_^

First meme of the new journal!

The Rules:

1. Reply to this post with 'Icons!', and I will pick five of your icons.

2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.

3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.

4. This will - allegedly - create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.

( Icons under here )