I signed up for the smallfandombang, which I'm optimistic I'll be able to tackle since it's one story rather than multiple fills, and actual gives me an excuse to hyper-fixate on properties that no one aside from me really cares about. I've also made some headway on my buffyverse bingo fills - especially now that the deadline is later than I thought it was. At the very least I should have something fun to contribute to the amnesty round assuming my brain doesn't turn to pudding after the election.

I've been making my way through the other Halloween sequels and I'm starting to resign myself to the fact that no shlocky horror movie sequel is gonna hit quite like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 did. I did end up really digging The Boy though so maybe that sequel will offer up something I can latch onto. Assuming my schedule isn't thrown off I plan on spending part of this weekend watching those '00s horror movie reboots all in one sitting, so maybe one of those will surprise me too.

In semi-related news I'm gonna try to rewatch Hocus Pocus tomorrow so I can make an attempt to make it through the rest of that novelization/sequel that came out a couple of years back, especially in light of an actual sequel being greenlit. Since I know the "lead" of the novelization sequel is queer I'm kind of rooting for it to be an adaption of that, but either way I'm just hoping to enjoy the book. I did enjoy the author's take on some of the clumsier elements of the film.

☆ Having a depressive episode that I suspect will pass but I can't even really motivate myself to finish off the last few episodes of this season of Wynonna Earp and season 3 of Leverage atm. I have other stuff on my watch list (most notably Blake's 7 and Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra) but I may end up playing more fast-and-loose with it because I'm remembering that binge burnout I had back in June.

☆ I've gotten some writing done this month but haven't finished anything. I keep getting hit with plot bunnies for seasonofkink involving Finn/Will from Glee of all pairings (one I haven't even thought about since the early days of that fandom) but idek if it would be worth pursing. I keep going over my unfinished drafts and I really just wanna finish something this month, especially since I wanna do Fictober again this year since I'll theoretically have the time.

☆ I accidentally sliced open my finger with a pair of scissors on Sunday and had to get stitches, which means I haven't exorcised the last few days (which I'm especially annoyed about since I'd finally gotten back into the habit). I have the greenlight to start again though and I'm hoping I'll have the mental energy tomorrow to restart that. Stitches don't come out for a couple of weeks though.

☆ I don't get hit with this feeling often since I'm mostly fine being single but I really wish I had a boyfriend (the depressive episode is only exacerbating this). The "I'm nearly 30 and I've never had an actual relationship" of it all isn't exactly helping either. I'm terrible at using apps though and a quarantine isn't conductive to meeting people so I've mostly just been stewing in it all day, which is kind of baffling since my injured finger is really the thing I should be stewing about but w/e.

Taking a break from my crunch writing for nordipalooza. I got the hardest chunk of the story mostly out of the way so now I just need to actually sit and write the rest of it, while giving myself enough time to go back and clean up what I've already written a bit more.

I took a break on Saturday and wrote a Classic Who oneshot as a palette cleanser that I'm waiting to hear back on from a beta and I'm pretty happy with how that one turned out. I started another one last night but I'm trying to make myself focus on the Hetalia writing since that's the one with the deadline. Part of me is kind of annoyed I opted to do another College AU but at least I'm well past any desire to write in a high school setting ever again unless it's dictated by the original work.

The ninth anniversary of Personal Chaos is next month and I really just want to hammer out the last chapter of it. The last chapter was the hardest to do so this is also an instance of just needing to actually sit down and write the damn thing, but it's only the past couple of weeks where I've felt any motivation to actually write anything in the midst of everything happening in the world. I've also dusted off a couple of my old drafts that I'll hopefully get to work on once July hits. Aside from a couple of episodes of Classic Who a day I haven't really watched any TV the past week and I'm content to stay that way considering I spent the first two months of Quarantine just drowning myself in content.

So I'm writing this at 2AM on a Saturday night. I was supposed to be at an Anime Convention this weekend so I would've been awake anyway. I tried watching some Anime in honor of that but after a certain point I fell out of the mood and rewatched Captain Marvel on Disney+.

I started thinking again about the idea I battered around last year while on my writing kick of writing Doctor Who drabbles from 100-500 words in length, but this time I focused in on how that would work on AO3. That, combined with some sleep deprived Tardis Wiki browsing, made me think up an idea I kind of like. Basically, a framing device prologue/opening "chapter" where one character is shown aborted timelines/alternate "accounts"/AUs of where their life could've gone using some convoluted timey-wimey thing I can make up, and then each subsequent "chapter" is one of the drabbles with a focus on that character in some way. IDK, it feels like a neat way to trick myself into some regular prompt writing.

I feel like it's almost certain at this point the character I'm gonna start out with is Jamie for Second Doctor era drabbles, especially considering his longevity, the way his story ended, and the fact that I'm gay as hell and have a bias. I kind of want to do one for the Third Doctor era as well if it pans out, but I'm not sure who to focus on (though I'm slightly leaning towards Jo, Mike, or Benton).

(On a non-Doctor Who related note, I have some half finished stories from Fictober and NaNo - including two lengthy unfinished Buffyverse Bingo fills, that I'd like to get around to now that I'm stuck at home with time to kill and growing impatience with binging TV all day in between home office work.)

Either starting tomorrow or Monday I'm going to be starting Leela's run on Classic Who, and I'm honestly curious how long it's even gonna take me to get through the Fourth Doctor, since I made it through his first two and a half seasons in a month alone, and I only really sunk my teeth into it the past couple of weeks.

On a maintenance note, I think I may try to create a separate tag for my Classic Who reviews, since they've started to get lost in the shuffle of my other Doctor Who blogging.

The two fills I'm actively working on for buffyversebingo have mutated into what may be the longest one-shots I've ever written (like, probably over 10k words each). I'm hopeful I'll have them both done this week and then produce works that are more... restrained in order to get a bingo. I'm fairly optimistic about this since none of the other prompts on the potential rows have made my brain fire off the way these two have for some reason.

I've finished a couple of old drafts and thrown them up onto AO3, one from a Fictober fill I mostly finished but forgot about entirely, and the other being the original beginning for a longer, bizarre character study fic that would pretty much be impossible for me to finish as originally intended because I'm so far removed from the context in which I wrote it and the story was relevant:

Just Killing Time (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, Jesse Walsh/Ron Grady, M, 1204 words)
The Woman with the Lyrical Name (Pretty Little Liars, Aria Montgomery, G, 352 words)

I also was... inspired... by Planet of the Spiders to write some Doctor Who fic involving the scene where Mike Yates was tied up and left in that bedroom:

An Embarrassment of Friendship (Classic Doctor Who, John Benton/Mike Yates, E, 2857 words)

I'm honestly really happy with how inspired I am to write Who fic in general, though I'm intentionally holding off on tackling the two Christmas stories I want to write until it's closer to the end of the month since I want to be in a better headspace for it. I've also been toying with the idea of mirroring my who stories on Teaspoon, but I know that site has some past baggage that I haven't been able to parse out at all since I didn't get into Doctor Who until 2012, and I don't know how beneficial it would be since the four fics I've written are all currently up on AO3 and I don't know how active Teaspoon is anymore.

Going through my drafts, I found an Osomatsu-san fic that currently clocks in at 2600 words that I'm really mad I didn't finish at the time, since it captured the character voices in such a specific way that I've have to rewatch chunks of the show to even approach again. I think what held me up was that I was still very nervous writing romance that wasn't of the "confession at the very end of the story" variety, and along with finally finishing those two Hetalia fics I have open, this might be the story I want to finish and post this year the most. I have a handful of works that I'm not particularly proud of, so it'd be nice to polish off material that I can genuinely look back on with pride years later.

The title of this post would probably look better without the Oxford comma, but I'm keeping it in on principle.

I started the Third Doctor's final serial, Planet of the Spiders, during lunch today and I wasn't expecting the Jo Grant scene and it kind of knocked me flat even though she didn't actually appear. I know that, with a couple of exceptions, UNIT largely becomes a non-presence in the series after the Third Doctor regenerates so I'm really glad they seem to be honoring this part of the show's history (except for Liz Shaw... and the Master for obvious reasons.) One of the handful of new fics I was planning to write during NaNo was a Second Doctor-centric Christmas fic where he, Jamie, and Zoe find a way to visit Victoria for the Holiday (with some not-so-subtle Jamie/Victoria content) but now I kind of want to write a Christmas fic for Three's ensemble as well. It wouldn't be that hard logistically and it would help fill the Doctor Who void since I think if we do get a special this year it'll be another New Year's one. Which is... fine. But I really want to see Jodie Whittaker in character wearing a Santa hat.

As far as NaNo itself goes, I'm using it to finish incomplete works from the 2010s so I can start off 2020 with a clean slate, but so far I'm mostly beefing it because I spent last week finishing up some Fictober overrun and recovering from one of the worst work weeks I've ever had. I have a couple of mostly-finished works that I'm hopeful I can polish off today and get posted just to give myself a shot in the arm, and in the end it's not a huge deal since I'm not officially signed up with NaNo or the mini version. But hitting my (revised) Fictober goal of 13 fills really felt good and I'd like to keep that momentum going.

The other project I have going is Buffyverse Bingo, which I've started two fills on... only they're not on the same line. However, they both fall on lines that contain the free space, so I just have to choose which line I want to do and stick with it. One of them is a Willow/Tara fic that I've very excited about, especially since I haven't written a ton of F/F fic, and the other is a Xander/Oz fic that's a homage of sorts to a fic I really liked as a teenager... when I definitely wasn't gay nope I just read it for the art. A challenge I've run into that I wasn't really expecting was dealing with the "Buffyspeak" of it all, especially with Xander (who has a sizable speaking role in the Willow/Tara fic as well). I rewatched a handful of season 3 episodes last week which definitely helped, but I think I'm just gonna have to resign myself to the fact that some of the dialogue is not gonna be up to the standard I want.

Also, speaking to that Xander/Oz fic - it made me really happy that the author chose to archive and preserve their old writing from *checks notes* 1999 so that it was still accessible for fans like me. It motivated me to archive my own, very shitty fanfic that I wrote when I was a teenager on a dedicated AO3 account. One in particular I got very emotional about because I assumed it was gone forever since I wrote it exclusively for a forum that later banned me (and no longer exists) and never posted it to Fanfiction.Net... but it turns out I did mirror it on an old, forgotten deviantART account. Like, it's still very bad in that crappy OC, vaguely self-insert kind of way. But I remember working very, very hard on it at the time so it's nice to be able to have something to show for it.

As an aside, I've been tempted to start my free trial of Apple TV+ so I can binge Dickinson, but I've been holding off because Disney+ debuts tomorrow and I'm already watching too much TV. Once I finished the Third Doctor's run tonight, I'll also be putting Classic Doctor Who on hold for a while - theoretically until after season 12 ends if it's gonna come back in "very early 2020" as has been reported, but I may tweak those plans if that's changed. I'm looking forward to the premiere of The Mandalorian as much as I really can be, since the trailers don't really give away much for what the show is actually about. His Dark Materials premiered last week, but I'm still only halfway through reading The Subtle Knife, so I'm probably gonna hold off watching it until I'm at least finished with The Amber Spyglass. I fear I'm gonna run into the same issue with The Witcher, but I do want to make a concentrated effort to give these books their due rather than simply diving right into the show. And it's not like there isn't gonna be a huge gap between seasons I'll have time to get caught up during.

So much to do, so much to read, so much to write. Thank god Buffyverse Bingo has an Amnesty period in December.

So I finally got a fill with an actual Halloween theme done! Though there's a chance I could get another one done and posted later tonight, but I really wanted to make this post before midnight.

Title: The Coach and the Pretty Boy, Part 2
Fandom: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
Challenge: Kinktober, Day 31: Mix/Match Your Own Prompts (I used... a lot)
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 4492
Characters/Pairings: Coach Schneider/Jesse Walsh, Ron Grady/Jesse Walsh, Kerry Hellman, Freddy Krueger
Notes/Warnings: Jesse is canonically eighteen, but this story depicts a graphic sexual relationship between a teacher and a high school student. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Summary: Jesse enters into a risky and intense sexual relationship with Coach Schneider. But as the arrangement starts to get more intense, Jesse is left questioning his own motivations for being a part of it.

Read @ AO3

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Title: Locked Out
Fandom: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
Challenge: spooktoberchallenge, Day 27: Lock
Rating: General Audiences (A single use of the word "Fuck")
Word Count: 1508
Characters/Pairings: Ron Grady/Jesse Walsh, Lisa Webber
Notes/Warnings: Fluff I wrote as part of a way to detox from the above fic.
Summary: Lisa walks in on Jesse and Grady kissing at her Halloween Party.

Read @ AO3

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Getting down to the wire. Polished these off today and I'm hoping to get a couple of more drafts finished before I go to sleep tonight (especially since I sacrificed working out in order to write).

I never expected to write Homestuck again, but the arrival of Homestuck^2 brought an old plot bunny back to the surface and I ended up hammering out this fill pretty quickly. The other fill might be the filthiest thing I've ever written in my life, and it ended up running so long that I've split it up across two different fills.

So far, there's been a disturbing lack of explicit references to Halloween. The drafts for the latter fills I have done have rectified this, though I have to say a lot of this is a symptom of me having a hard time getting into the Holiday spirit this year. I suspect this weekend I'll be kicking myself for not making more of an effort.

Title: A Loud and Sloppy Interspecies Makeout
Fandom: Homestuck
Challenge: spooktoberchallenge, Day 4: Tentacles
Rating: Mature
Word Count: 1295
Characters/Pairings: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Notes/Warnings: Takes Place during the meteor trip after the retcon in Act 6. Contains humorous speculations on troll anatomy.
Summary: Karkat and Dave hook up for the first time during their meteor trip, but Dave won't stop talking the entire time.

Read @ AO3

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Title: The Coach and the Pretty Boy, Part 1
Fandom: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
Challenge: Kinktober, Day 27: Exhibitionism/Voyeurism
Rating: Explicit
Word Count: 4163
Characters/Pairings: Coach Schneider/Jesse Walsh, Ron Grady/Jesse Walsh
Notes/Warnings: Jesse is canonically eighteen, but this story depicts a graphic sexual relationship between a teacher and a high school student. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.
Summary: Jesse enters into a risky and intense sexual relationship with Coach Schneider. But as the arrangement starts to get more intense, Jesse is left questioning his own motivations for being a part of it.

Read @ AO3

( Read more... )

The time I've been pretty sure was inevitable has arrived: I will not be able to complete a 31 day fic challenge. Instead, I've decided to change my goal so instead I'll be doing 13 fills - of which I've already completed 5, so it's much more doable while still being on theme numbers-wise. Additionally, I've gonna make more of an effort to make my remaining fills more seasonally appropriate.

That said, I just got home from my weekend Salem Trip, which was pretty fun but we ended up seeing much less of it than I thought we would. I have Five Friday the 13th movies left (incl. Freddy vs. Jason), Six A Nightmare on Elm Street films left (incl. Freddy vs. Jason), and Nine Halloween films left to watch this month before the season ends as well, and hopefully the latter will get me more into the Holiday spirit, since I haven't really been feeling it the last couple of weeks. Mostly I've just felt busy and exhausted, but the rest of my month is going to be pretty lowkey so hopefully I'll have some fun!

I have mixed feelings about this fill, probably because it only took me a (relatively) short time to write compared to the previous two fills. I suspect a lot of it has to do with guilt for not yet writing anything for Spooktober that's specifically Autumn or Halloween-centric.

As always, this is unbeta'd and hopefully halfway decent/readable.

Title: The Man Beside Her
Fandom: Classic Doctor Who
Challenge:spooktoberchallenge, Day 3: Full Moon
Rating: General Audiences
Word Count: 747
Characters/Pairings: Jo Grant/Third Doctor, Jo Grant/Mike Yates, Jo Grant/Cliff Jones
Notes/Warnings: Multiple instances of one-sided attraction. Spoilers for The Green Death, and foreshadowing (YMMV) for Invasion of the Dinosaurs.
Summary: On the night of her engagement, Jo Grant takes a walk with a friend and reflects on her choices and relationships.

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