#self-rec meme

rules: recommend five of your favourite fics you've written, and then tag at least five other people

In Defiance of all Geometry, Les Mis modern AU. Combeferre/Enjolras/Grantaire, 51k.

Amis House might not be the biggest student co-op, or the fanciest, but it's got something all its own. Specifically, smoke damage on the kitchen ceiling from that time Courfeyrac lit a political pamphlet on fire. In which there are secrets, pining, pancakes, and revelations, and sometimes the shortest distance between three points is not a triangle but a circle.

This is the very first fanfic I ever finished, so it holds a special place in my heart for that alone. I wrote it several years after undergrad and shortly before moving to Chicago, which is to say at a time I was feeling lonely and directionless, and definitely nostalgic for life in a university co-op. I think my incredibly warm feelings for that way of life really shine through in this story. You can always kind of tell in a highly specific AU if the writer really knows their subject, and I've been gratified to hear from other co-opers that this one nails it.

2. Fools in Love, Nothing Much to Do. Beatrice/Benedick and Balthazar/Pedro, 4.9k.

“Ughhhh,” said Ben a few minutes later. “Ugh, it’s so sappy and, and cliched and she’s gonna think I’m joking—“ Apparently, they could stop pretending this wasn’t about Beatrice. Balthazar appreciated that. “Maybe tell her you’re not, then.” Ben’s eyebrows knit together. “Like, in the lyrics themselves? Or some sort of fine print disclaimer beforehand that you hold up on a notecard while playing an intro on the kazoo?” “In the lyrics,” said Balthazar. He strummed a C chord, then a G. E minor. A minor. “When you’re writing a song for someone, probably helps to get specific. It’ll mean more to them, y’know?” He tried for F minor 7. It didn’t sound right. “If you stay vague and mysterious, they might not know it’s about them. In, like, a you-and-them sense.” He rearranged his fingers on the frets, pressed harder. “Or they kind of—have the option of pretending they don’t know.” (Or: two times Balthazar Jones helped his friends express their feelings via song, and one time he did not.)

Much Ado About Nothing has long been one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, and so, one day when I was sick in bed and found a New Zealand webseries telling the story through the lens of modern teens making in-universe YouTube videos, I gobbled that shit up. Balthazar is my favorite minor character in NMTD and I think I really did him justice here, both in terms of his dialogue feeling right, and in terms of figuring out what makes a somewhat inward-facing character tick.

3. Impatient to be Free, Les Mis 1950s AU where the Amis are all women. Enjolras/Grantaire, 19k.

In a way, it was almost a relief to see that nothing had changed since school. Seasons came and went but Grantaire was still Grantaire: a bundle of too-tight nerves and awkward elbows, scratchy throat, furtive gaze bouncing everywhere it shouldn’t. Still nursing a fascination with the most dangerous-looking female in the area. A puppy dog panting after a wolf. In 1957, female cartoonist Grantaire meets some interesting new people, joins a secret society, and attracts the notice of a woman named Enjolras. A 1950’s lesbian Amis AU.

I actually owe @theladyragnell a huge debt for this one because way back when, she wrote a 1950s AU where most of the characters were women. Hers was sort of "what if Grease but sapphic and also in no way a regressive bullshit mess," which is to say it was in all ways an 1000% improvement on Grease. And then I read that and went, "what if 1950s lesbians but I finally get to unload everything I remember about studying mid-century lesbian rights groups in college?" I did a bunch of additional research for this one and I think the period details really make it pop, from the music choices to the little historical Easter eggs, and I also think the chemistry between Enjolras and Grantaire is well-done.

4. Nine Moments in the Life of Captain America, Cultural Icon (and One Moment in the Life of Steve Rogers, Human Being), Captain America. Steve/Sam/Bucky, 7.8k.

Wrestling with the legacy of Captain America, via songs, movies, interviews, poorly animated children's shows, curious SHIELD merchandising choices, and ice cream flavors. Also, Steve, Sam, and Bucky work out how they feel about each other.

I love fics that play with time and perspective, and I think this one does interesting things with both. I really like thinking about how stories can kind of bounce around from one era to another and transform, telling us more about the era. I'm also very proud of the slapdash 90s cartoon about the Howling Commandos, which I maintain absolutely would've existed.

5. Ready For Love, Singin' in the Rain. Cosmo/Don/Kathy, 12.9k.

Don and Kathy would move in together. They would have a dog or two and then inevitably, a small parade of adorable little brats who would call him Uncle Cosmo, and they would spend less and less time with him, not on purpose but busy with the rest of their lives, and ultimately Cosmo would learn to make his peace with it because he’d have no other choice and he would have to try to move on and not live too much in his memories. He could picture it so clearly, he figured if the songwriting gig with Monumental didn’t pan out, he could always return to the backwater circuit with a new act: The Amazing Cosmo of the Cosmos—ladies and gentlemen, he sees the future, he reads the stars, he silently pines for his best married pal and all the while tap dancing! Don and Kathy inviting him along on their honeymoon, though—that part was a surprise.

I think that on a technical level, this is maybe the best fanfic I've ever written—in-character dialogue, jokes that feel like they fit in the world of the original and are funny in their own right, a narrative voice that is recognizably The Character, and a compelling love story expanding on canon. I get such a rush writing queer stories set decades ago; it's so fun to try to situate queer characters in another moment in history, plus it still feels exciting to say, "Hey, even if the words and exact identities were different, we've always been here."

rules: recommend five of your favorite fics you've written, and then tag at least five other people!

Thank you for the tag, @dollsome-does-tumblr!

Recency bias is almost certainly at play here. Also I'm trying to get up my energy for holiday gift-fic writing and revisiting writing of mine that I actually feel good about will almost certainly be helpful. (I hope?)

*****

and you're with me | ted lasso, ted/rebecca, m, 7.8k

Wrote this for secret santa this time a year ago, and I just let myself totally let loose and wrote exactly the future I'd want for them + basically every single feeling I have about Christmas (which is my absolute favorite holiday and which gives me great melancholy) as filtered through these characters.

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stay open | ted lasso, nate/ted/rebecca, e, 14k

If everything had to be deleted but one, I think I'd save this fic. After important conversations with gnen I felt hellbent on writing a story in which this relationship makes sense and feels like the most natural thing in the world!

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Be Kind, Be Honest | all creatures great and small 2020, audrey/siegfried, e, 11.9k

I got completely taken with the idea of writing a story about the progression of their sexual intimacy and how that intersects with and catalyzes necessary but upsetting processing of past relationships and, in Audrey's case, past abuse. These characters are increasingly dear to me and I completely loved spending time trying to get to know them better. That is true of all these stories, I loved writing them!

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More Than Life Itself | 9-5 (1980), judy/violet, m, 8.4k

One of my all-time favorite comfort movies and movies full-stop. Most of the fandom seems to be around the musical, and I can't imagine writing more than one fic about this movie, but I got inspired by a comment Jane and/or Lily made in an interview and had to do it.

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mid-flight | the pitt, dana/robby, e, 11k

I feel like rather than recommending these fics I am mostly just talking about how I was doing while writing them, but oh man I needed to write this fic. Like many people reading this I have been going through grief, and this summer when it was rawest and freshest and overwhelming, I straight-up took vacations from my own brain to write about Dana and Robby falling for each other on a vacation. I, KJ, the person I am, felt deeply connected to writing while I was writing it, but at the same time this story is the product of most disconnect between writing landscape and other mental landscape I've probably ever experienced.

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Embarrassing sixth rec because there's only one femslash story on here so far and that's disgusting and wrong and poorly representative of my fic-writing career 😌:

drawing life | ted lasso, keeley/rebecca, m, 5.3k

Pre-canon! Freshly divorced Rebecca is still plotting her next moves re: AFC Richmond when she decides to model for a life drawing class. Keeley is one of the students.

"Self-rec time! What are your favorite five fics that you've written and why? After replying to this ask, feel free to pass on to five other writers to spread the love. 💗"

This comes at an odd time for me because I feel very disconnected from my fic and deeply unimpressed by it. Every time I open the current chapter I'm working on, I think, "What an absolute slog." So maybe focusing on what I love (or remember loving) will rekindle the missing spark! Plus it's been umpteen weeks since I last posted here, and it would be good to show signs of life. (I'm not giving up on writing or my OTP. RL just kind of saps the will to live sometimes. Experience tells me this too shall pass.)

Tagging anyone who wishes to celebrate their faves because I'll be poking at this while at work, and it may take me hours*. *days, as it turns out.

Aw, thanks pal! And thanks to @behindthelabels and @theawkwardterrier who also sent me this.

It's tough to choose favourites - I'm proud of all my fics for different reasons. But here's a selection.

Flames We Never Lit This one will always have a special place in my heart! I started it in 2012, when all we knew about Peggy was her appearance in Captain America: The First Avenger, and I'm still proud of how much of her characterization I managed to get right. It's a Steve/Peggy story, but it is, first and foremost, my 75K-word love letter to Peggy Carter.

The Next Guy This one is a bit of a departure for me, and (IMO) some of the best writing I've ever done. There's something about teasing out a story like this, through the eyes of an observant but slightly unreliable narrator, that feels deeply satisfying when it all comes together.

All Day, Every Day Years ago, I blithely announced that the only thing I wanted from the MCU was to see Steve Rogers fight himself. When Endgame made my hopes and dreams come true, I just wanted more of that, forever. The entire point of this story was for Steve to fight himself in a bunch of alternate realities. I'm still surprised that I managed to give it a plot that actually works, and an emotional core that feels authentic, despite the ridiculous premise. This story is also my loving homage to @indiefic and the amazing stories she has given us over the years.

All That Remains I set out to write a clever little story about Peggy getting a tattoo that somehow wound up turning into an exploration of the nature of grief, and the futility of trying to "let go" of someone you love. This is another one where I'm especially proud of the writing in particular.

Spectral Thief is probably the work that I poured the most of myself into. Persona 5 fandom in general tends to delight in the aspects of found family and friendship, but when I played I seemed to also zero in on the harsh unfairness at every turn that the protagonist lives through. There was a lot of ugliness in the dialogue, character portraits, and small details (like his cardboard box of things being damaged). I love a good woobie fic, and I feel like I really learned a lot about my personal niche of erotic horror when writing this. I loved every second of crafting this Joker/Akira story even though it took me so long! But I'm so happy with the end product and allowing myself to really just embrace what I like writing.

Heart Stamp is another example of leaning into what I love writing. I am such a sucker for post-canon Iwaipego. I like my Iwaipego domestic as fuck. I love to see Iwai in his home, going about his routines, showing signs of both confidence and nerves. Persona 5 doesn't do well showing more than the skeletons of people and personalities, which is fine given the limited format, but there are so many hints and little details that make up these characters, that it was an absolute joy to show them off in an electrically charged, but desperately mundane scenario. I like my romance to feel like transcendence…but also like it could happen to anyone. I loved writing this vulnerable crush meets the perfect storm of possibility.

Another Iwaipego! Watch Out Boy, He'll Chew You Up is by far the weirdest thing I've written, but it was also a joy to create. It's based off a game called Homegrown Pet by TrisGhost where you essentially feed a small monster different things like human flesh, candy, vegetables, etc and what it grows into and what endings you receive are based on that diet. It was so out there, but I knew Hotsuqueen had been into the idea of it as well. When prompted to write something for them…I couldn't resist! What followed was the weirdest AU I've ever written. It was extraordinarily fun translating Akira into a blob only capable of mannerisms and cat/puppy like behaviors. It was fun to figure out how their relationship would progress when so limited. And it was fun to think about xeno anatomy and fun little things that were both gross and hilarious. It was a blast.

I was terrified to ever write for Dragon Age. It's so incredibly dense as far as lore goes. I was absolutely sure that I would get a detail wrong or forget something crucial that made the plot nonsensical (if you could call it a plot). In the end, I bit the bullet and just wrote. Getting Dorian's voice was a challenge and a pleasure, and getting to show my deep love for the environments and details in DA:I was so nice. I enjoyed lovingly detailing Felix's illness and recovery and describing the food. I just had a grand time with it, short and sweet as it was. And it really helped me have more faith in myself.

Night Blooming is my last pick for this list. It's definitely not a fic that I get a lot of views or other interaction with, but I feel like it will always be on a list like this. Hotsuqueen is a genius for thinking up Iwai (P5)/Sayoko (P4), and I take great pride and giddiness for having written it. The pairing is astronomically full of chemistry. I took great pleasure in these two older characters being written when they were young and even more impulsive than they are in their present-day canon. I loved worming in bits and pieces of their personalities and story into what is a short little moment of passion. I liked that it prompted some laughs and generally felt like a wonderful moment of two very sexy ships passing in the night. I want to write this pairing again in the future!

I’m sort of borrowing @claricechiarasorcha‘s throwback self-rec idea for the benefit of new (post-Ragnarok) Thorki shippers... but since all of my Thorki fics are connected in a bizarre continuous saga, I’m just updating my summary post again.

The series title is an abbreviation of a Nietzsche quote (obviously, because I’m me), “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil” (aphorism 153 of, you guessed it, Beyond Good and Evil), which is quoted at the end of “The Tree of Knowledge” and “Winter, Autumn, and Spring.”

Most of the stories stand reasonably well on their own, but the later ones do presuppose and build on the events of the earlier ones, so you’ll have the fullest understanding if you’ve read them as a series. All fics are canon-compliant until “Starting Over,” which was written before Thor: Ragnarok came out and goes in a different direction. (I assume I will write Ragnarok-compliant additions to the series; I guess that one will just have to be a canon-divergent offshoot?)

1. Desert Flowers “Loki, what are you doing in there? Dissecting a dead skunk?” Loki introduces Thor to marijuana and (finally) gets him to talk philosophy; the conversation goes in a somewhat unexpected direction. “Norns, Loki, the lengths you’ll go to just to win an argument…” [Spoiler alert: they kiss.] Notes: Rated T, not E, because there’s no sex yet.

2. The Tree of Knowledge “Loki kissed me. What in Hel was that about? was the first thought that entered Thor’s mind when he woke up. And I kissed him back.” The day after Loki and Thor got stoned together and Loki kissed Thor – purportedly just to prove a philosophical point – Thor looks for an explanation from his evasive brother, and comes to realize that his own feelings for Loki are not what he had thought they were. Notes: There is sex in this one, but they start slow (just hands). This one is a pretty close follow-on to “Desert,” and wouldn’t make a lot of sense without having read it.

3. The Paradox of Desire Shortly after they first become lovers, Thor and Loki negotiate some of the details of the relationship. Thor tries to play the older, wiser, protective big brother; Loki isn’t buying it. [Or, the first one in which they discuss the dynamics of topping and bottoming.] Notes: And now we add mouths to the sex situation. Relatively independent from its predecessors, but does make some references to “Tree.”

4. First Things [in progress] A reader requested Loki’s first time (with penetrative sex), so here we are. The first try does not go quite as planned, so Thor asks some advice from a friend who happens to work at a brothel and has given him some quality sex advice before. Notes: Anal sex is the end game, obviously, but in the meantime we get some heavy fingering, intercrural sex, and butt plugs. References mostly to “Paradox.”

5. “Rarely Looks Up, Rarely Loves” Loki just wants to lie on his bed and read after dinner; Thor has other activities in mind. They arrive at a compromise. Notes: Just oral sex again. Originally posted as a silly little Tumblr ficlet inspired by some fanart, but it fit into my little canon-compliant universe where Loki is a big Nietzsche fan, and it was long enough, so I gave it its own installment. Depends on nothing else, nothing depends on it.

6. Lovers’ Leap Hoping to get his anxious, moody brother to relax (for once), Thor looks for advice from Frigga -- who spent an adventurous youth in Vanaheim -- as to what substances might help. She recommends “lovers’ leaf” (a pun, she thinks, on “lovers’ leap”) which she assures him is not an aphrodisiac, but “approximates the feeling of falling in love—or rushing headlong into love, more like. Giddiness, euphoria, the sense that all is right with the world. It tends to come with loquaciousness and relaxed inhibitions, and often an intense craving for touch. So don’t be alarmed if you find Loki becoming unusually… cuddly.” Notes: No sex, just naked cuddling. Pretty much entirely independent of the others. Written to a prompt from darklittlestories, who won it in a fic giveaway: “Thor brings Lo some exotic offworld drink/drug that *melts* stressball/buttoned-up!Loki & has ecstasy-esque snuggly (or sexy?) properties and some sort of affection ensues :D Loki gets to chill.”

7. Winter, Autumn, and Spring Ten years before Thor’s coronation, Loki realizes that they’ll no longer be able to hide their affair and decides they have to break it off, after a pre-arranged last night together. Just before the coronation, Loki’s resolve is tested. Notes: No-holds-barred sex; pretty much everything is involved. Can be read on its own, but does quote from “Tree” and “Paradox” and allude to “Desert.”

8. Fraternizing with the Enemy Set during Thor: The Dark World. After Thor goes to free Loki from prison and before they rendezvous with their co-conspirators, they revisit what they once were to each other, and try (painfully and indirectly, of course) to figure out what they are to each other now. Notes: Just your standard anal sex smut. Written before any of its five immediate predecessors in the timeline, so most references are to “Tree.”

I was tagged by @bisexualpirateheart Thanks again and btw I love that you’ve written Cherik!

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you’ve written, then pass on to at least five other writers.

All of these are Black Sails ‘cause that’s all I’ve done.

1. Queer Theory- silverflint student/professor au

2. A Hellish Alchemy- flinthamilton canon divergence reunion (my fave of all faves I’d love it if you’d check it out if you haven’t already)

3. Pangs- Billy/Flint missing scenes from 3x07ish (which I still love and honestly I hope ppl check out if they’ve ever considered blint)

4. An Appeal to Emotion from Lieutenant McGraw to Lord Hamilton- ugh prob my second favorite; I still think it has my best dialogue between the two of them

5. The Fate of Ghosts-  my very first flinthamilton fic that I published so it holds a special place for me, and one of the earlier Thomas Lives AUs. If you read it sorry about the lack of spacing I was so new to ao3 back then lol

I was tagged by @grundyscribbling. Thanks so much!

 I’ve written so few fics, this is easy. I junked two, which leaves just four still online (on both Fanfiction.net and Archive of our Own).

 The Golden and the Black (48 chapters)

My first, my favourite, and probably my best writing. Maeglin re-embodied as an elfmaid in Imladris in the Third Age. Guess who from Gondolin also lives in Imladris? Some humour, but the themes include forgiveness and redemption so it’s not all lightweight. Numerous First Age flashbacks. Bear with the first two chapters, where my writing is kind of rusty. It does get better. Promise. Ending still needs some work, but it’s complete.

 Golden Summer (4 chapters)

I wrote another piece (now junked) where Glorfindel is introduced to Eowyn by Gandalf in Minas Tirith, and two readers commented they wanted a Glorfindel/Eowyn fic. I wasn’t keen on that, but I did write about a summer when Eowyn was seventeen, and an elflord on a white horse came riding by. I think this is my second best, and it’s short and it’s sweet.

 After the Fire (2 chapters)

Nerdanel has her craft. But after 3000 years, she’s lonely. Written when wrestling with writer’s block for TGATB.

 Island of the Golden Flowers (4 chapters, unfinished)

Dashed off when faced with writer’s block for TGATB again. Early Third Age. Galadriel and Elrond send Glorfindel island-hopping on a quest for his own grave. I’m meh about this one. Sloppy. Silly. Don’t know if I’ll ever feel like finishing it.

 I don’t know many people on tumblr. I apologise if you’ve not a clue who I am and I’ve tagged you, but take it that I’m a fan. (If you’ve done this already, I’m sorry. Please, ignore.)

@dawnfelagund, @lintamande, @anghraine