Love In The Asylum

Several Stupid Thor/Loki Stories That Are Never Going To Happen (and one I may or may not be writing right now)

1. The Bagman's Gambit!AU where Thor is a clean-cut, heroic secret agent of the Bond school who ends up a double agent for the sake of his lover/half-brother Loki, who is working for the Frost Giants and the Chitauri (and who is a manipulative jerk but also desperately frightened and seeing no way out but Thor).

2. The story where Thor is the biggest IKEA stan on Midgard. Much to everyone's embarrassment.

3. The story where Loki's childhood nickname for Thor is Ennilangr (from the Nafnaþulur, part of the Prose Edda - it means "the one with the wide forehead"). He uses it in a battle with the Avengers, just to be obnoxious, and they are all, Thooooor, what did he say, was that some weird Asgardian swear word? and Thor is like I DO NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT.

4. The fairy-tale AU where Odin is a viking king at war with the seal-folk, and Loki is a selkie that Odin finds and raises to marry his only son, Thor. This does not end as well as Odin might have hoped (does anything? Ever?).

“Rogue Flight throws the best parties,” Luke says, twisting around to sneak a swallow of Wedge’s drink. “This is so much better than Mos Eisley.”

Wedge snorts. “And how would you know, farm boy?” He asks. “Have you ever been to Mos Eisley?”

“Once. For a few minutes. Until Han shot a guy and someone tried to kill me. Then Ben said we had to leave. But still, I can tell about these things. I’m a Jedi, you know.” He nods very seriously, and then ruins it by leaning forward and licking Wedge’s nose.

“Hey,” Wedge protests, flustered, but that just gives Luke time to plaster himself more firmly against him, twisting a hand in the unzipped top of Wedge’s flight suit to give him leverage while he licks a wide damp stripe down the the side of Wedge’s neck.

Just spent two hours on the phone with colourofsaying plotting out a fic where Bertie Wooster is actually a serial killer. The scary thing is, we didn't really have to tweak that much of his background to make it reasonably plausible and in character.

We're now trying to figure out how to divvy up the workload if we were to turn it into a project. colourofsaying has a better period voice than I do, but yours truly could probably supply most of the forensic know-how. We're...both going to hell for even thinking about writing this, aren't we?

Three Things (The Lazy Tuesday Edition)

1. luzula made a podfic of my Yuletide story, "Lefty Sings the Blues." You should definitely check it out, she did an awesome job. It's really neat hearing my words in someone else's voice. :)

2. Today I made empanadas for the first time ever. Christmas-time tamales and homemade tortillas aside, we don't really do a lot of Mexican/New Mexican/Guatemalan food around here - I just don't like it that much, even though my dad makes great enchiladas and my mom's posole and green chile stew are infamous. But we had some pastry dough to use up and no particular desire to make pies, so empanadas it was. Filled with ground beef, potato, and onions, and an improvised variation of my general spice mix (smoked paprika, chile powder, salt, pepper, optional cumin, garlic). And they turned out pretty good! Better than I was expecting, honestly. Which is good, since we have enough left over to last through a short war.

3. I'm currently in the kind of mood where I have to force myself to stop listening to the same Decemberists songs over and over on repeat, because they are lovely songs but I know if I don't rein myself in I will be up at 4 in the morning foolishly enraptured by the perfect tragedy of You'll Not Feel the Drowning and The Engine Driver and I Was Born For the Stage and Oh Valencia and Yankee Bayonet, which I realized for the first time this week is a Zack Fair song and now I can't get it out of my head. It's not an unpleasant mood, this wallowing in poetic misery that isn't mine, but it isn't conducive to getting anything done.

Thanks to the fic I am working on at the moment, I now know more than could possibly ever be relevant to my life about Swedish ports and German-Swedish shipping lines. It's not even central to the story - I just needed a working idea of the geography involved for a page's worth of scene-setting at the beginning before the plot picked up in Malmo. But Google Maps was unforthcoming, so I had to do research.

And then I went and made all that completely pointless by changing my mind and setting the story in Milan instead.

This is what I get for offering to write a Bundesliga RPS Spy!AU. Even if does have surprise!baker!Zlatan. And all of his Italians. (NO I AM NOT GOING TO WATCH SERIE A SHUT UP)

Five AUs I Wish The Universe Would Write For Me:

1. BBC Sherlock

The one where John Watson is a college professor and Sherlock is a...uh...well...no one's really sure what he does (or which department he works for), but he brings in a lot of grant money so they don't ask too many questions. Lestrade is an assistant professor of criminology and Sherlock likes to show up at his lectures and correct him in front of his undergraduates. Mycroft is a dean of something at a rival university and doesn't understand why Sherlock insists on working at an undefined position at a different school. And Moriarty, of course, is an evil biology researcher who has very questionable standards about what you can do with your animal test subjects (and your graduate students). He and Sherlock are constantly publishing academic papers that are mostly full of bitchy comments about each other's research, and neither of them are allowed to attend academic conferences together after they got into a slap fight at the last one. Look, this mostly exists because I want John Watson in tweed, alright?

2. 19th Century Literature RPS of Extreme Crack

The one where all the great English poets of the 19th century are in a boy band together. I cannot even explain this one except to say that is the product of a three-year-ongoing joke with colourofsaying and has only got more elaborate and silly the more 19th century poets we've read as good little English majors. It also completely ignores a) all question of period (Yeats plays back-up, Percy Shelley is on drums, Byron is the pretty-boy front man and Tennyson writes all the lyrics) and b) good sense in favor of ridiculousness, boykissing, and stupid literary jokes. Oscar Wilde is a music critic who's had sex with almost everyone in the band at some point. Wordsworth tried to start his own weird acoustic folk-psychedelic thing with Samuel Coleridge to compete with them, but it didn't really catch on and Coleridge wandered off to be a solo artist. MY GOD WE ARE DORKS.

3. Due South/Torchwood Crossover of Doom

The one where Jack Harkness is Ben Fraser's biological father and they accidentally found Torchwood Chicago. I know I've posted about this before, because it is one of my pet not-remotely-related-to-canon-in-any-way crossover theories (like Lord Vetinari being the Master's older brother), because John Barrowman just looks weirdly like Paul Gross from certain angles. This one actually had a plot! Which is mostly about Team Torchwood going to Chicago to hunt aliens and running into a guy who looks suspiciously like their boss. And then the Fraser and Ray and Ray have to help them fight the alien mafia while Fraser comes to terms with being related to Jack and Jack deals with having a kid he didn't know about (we're still pretending CoE never happened) and Ianto quietly loses it because wtf is his life, seriously? At the end, Fraser and the Rays start Torchwood Chicago (I guess it is sort of a side department of the Chicago PD?), and everyone has plenty of sex, which is how every Torchwood story ends, I suppose.

4. German Football RPS

The one where Marko Marin is a spy and Denni Advic is the double agent with the tragic backstory assigned to work with him on a mission. I don't even like Werder Bremen, but Marko Marin is made of adorableness, and this is an awesome noir AU where he is a sweet, innocent guy being blackmailed into crime in order to rescue his evil ex-boyfriend from certain death. Denni Advic shows up to take the package Marin's supposed to drop off for the bad guys, and when he tries to leave Marin makes him take him with him, because he thinks he'll lead him back to the guy holding his boyfriend. And then explosions! Gun shots! People chasing them and trying to steal back the Macguffin! Advic falling for his naive charm and crack marksmanship while Marin is won over by his tragic backstory and unbelievable cheekbones! Eventually, they defeat the bad guys, Marin realizes his evil ex is evil, and Advic reveals that he was a double agent actually working for the government. Yay happy endings.

5. Tumbling (J-Drama)

The one where the boys are slightly older and supposedly don't know each other, except they are actually all superhero crime-fighters together. Yuuta is a quiet, super-organized, king-of-the-file-folders kind of secretary, and everyone at the company he works for is very confused when Wataru, motorcycle thug turned manga kissa owner, starts showing up at their office to bother him in the middle of the day, and Yuuta has to make up stories about how they are best friends from high school and not guys who spend their free time in tight spandex and body armor fighting supervillains. Tsurumi is a kind of sort of mostly reformed supervillain, and he and Yuuta share an apartment. Kiyama is a broody anti-hero that Wataru bribes into fighting on their side via sex. Basically, everything is the same, but with more transformation sequences.

For the record: I really love the new Kudos function on AO3. Like, a lot. I've been slowly and methodically (and alphabetically) working my way through Yuletide, and it's nice to have a middle-ground between dithering over a comment for an hour because it triggers my social anxiety fail, and feeling guilty because I didn't leave any feedback on a story that I enjoyed. And I have enjoyed a lot of these stories! In fact, I think this is due time for a brief rec list. (This is in no way comprehensive, just a list of stories I liked or that pushed my buttons. Also I've only gotten through S so far.)

( Twenty Recs: Sunao Ni Narenakute, Spindle's End, Slender Man, Six Characters In Search of an Author, Lord Peter Wimsey, Modern Family, In Plain Sight, FAKE, Football RPF, Futurama, Echo Bazaar, Despicable Me, Demon's Lexicon, Dark is Rising, Chrestomanci, Being Human, Blue Beetle, Brother Bear, Star Trek RPF, Arthurian Romance )

And now I'm back off to the Land of No Internet But Many Horses, and I will return a better, wiser person who has seen Deathly Hallows in the theater finally.

Someday, I will be mature enough to make chocolate chip cookies without in the process eating enough raw cookie dough to make me sick to my stomach.

Someday, but apparently not this day. Urgh, that was a mistake. A delicious, chocolatey mistake.



I've been reading Mark Reads Harry Potter for ages (and if you haven't read it GO DO THAT NOW because he is both insightful and funny as fuck and his Twilight reviews are made of snarky win), and all of a sudden it has made me really want to read Harry Potter fic. Particularly Percy/Oliver fic. I guess because the last few chapters he's mentioned a lot how much he hates Percy and...I get that, I do! Percy is an arrogant, short-sighted, stubborn, stick-up-his-arse little git who needed a good dose of sense knocked into him.

Buuuuut at the same time, I've never been quite happy with how the books treated Percy. I don't see what's so bad about having personal and professional ambitions, or in being uncomfortable being poor and having other people perceive you in a certain way, or being quiet and bookish and not inclined to push the rules. That doesn't make him a very exciting person, maybe, but it doesn't make him a bad person either. He made some bad choices, undoubtedly, but I do wonder how the Big Weasley Family Rift would have gone down if the rest of the family didn't denigrate his accomplishments (telling your son with self-value issues that he only got the promotion he's so proud of because his boss wants to use him as a spy and so now he's a traitor? that will end well) and the twins didn't bully him so badly (I love the Weasley twins dearly, but that doesn't change that a lot of their jokes cross the line into mean-spiritedness, especially when Percy is involved). Like I said, it's not like Percy isn't a jerk. But I don't think it's as clear-cut as the books maybe want it to be. And I still love Percy, like, a lot.

Anyway, it really makes me want there to be fic set during the War, in that weird place in-between place where Percy's realized he screwed up but isn't ready to face his family and apologize. So instead he gets drunk and randomly shows up on Oliver's doorstep because he doesn't have anywhere else to go and his boss would curse him as soon as look at him but if he leaves the Death Eaters will definitely kill him and he hasn't talked to his parents in months and no one knows where the twins are and everything is a terrifying mess and he just...can't. And he ends up sleeping on Oliver's couch for, like, weeks at a time. Which Oliver doesn't really mind because Percy's cute and a good cook, but it does involve a lot of hugging him and reassuring him that people will eventually forgive him for being a prat.

...trust me to take a fairly straight-forward pairing and fill it with emotional trauma. I may have to actually sit down and write this one. As soon as I figure out how to reconcile a couple different pieces of canon and head-canon.

Title: Keep Your Distance
Author: masterofmidgets
Pairing: Kirk/Spock
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: brief (non-graphic) torture
Wordcount: 13329
Summary: In which Jim is lonely (and bored), Spock goes above and beyond the call of duty, and McCoy is going to have a heart atack before he's forty.
Notes: Written for this prompt on the ST Kink Meme (anti-sex pollen makes it so Kirk and Spock can't be around each other), and somehow mutated into something with a plot. This would never have actually been finished if it weren't for hanjuuluver, hand-holder extraordinaire, and colourofsaying , who is awesome enough to beta from halfway around the world.

 

( When he hears the alarm, Spock is meditating in his quarters. )

DONE DONE DONE OMG DONE.

I decided when I started writing this afternoon that I wasn't going to stop until I finished the damn sex pollen fic, and 3,000 words later, it is finally, finally done. I am so glad to be through with this stupid thing. I mean, I know it's nothing on a Big Bang fic, but this was just supposed to be a quick one-off thing I wrote in one night to build up some kink meme karma. Five weeks and 13,000 words later...I think I have some damn good kink karma now. I hope so, anyway.

Handed it off to my wonderful and amazing beta for the fixing/making it presentable for people to read. And luckily colourofsaying  is living in Japan for the next nine months, because it's only 7pm there instead of 4am and she can get through it right off. Barring the necessity of drastic rewrites, I should be able to post it tomorrow.