The Middle Distance

Written for the Porn Battle Amnesty challenge on Dreamwidth.

Fandom: Lord of the Rings
Pairing: Aragorn/Watcher in the Water
Rating: NC-17/E
Warnings/Content notes: Rape/non-con, tentacles, nonconsentacles, tentacle porn with no redeeming social value.

Summary: During the all-too-brief years of Balin's reclamation of Khazad-dûm, the Ranger Aragorn of the Dúnedain embarks on a mission to gather information and warn the Dwarves of peril. The Doors of Durin are still shut, and the peril that lurks nearby is one no one had imagined.

Prompt: Aragorn/Watcher in the Water, tentacles, lust, pheromones, wet, indignity, body, shame, undressed, slime, dark, mud

A Ranger, Caught Off His Guard at AO3

I don't think I've ever written straight-up tentacle porn before, believe it or not!

I just got a kudo on Goldberry's Song at AO3. First one since I posted it there.

I'm not saying it's the greatest fanwork I ever wrote, I know it isn't. It's close to my heart, though; I'd just heard one too many arguments about how Goldberry was supposedly some voiceless male wish-fulfillment hippie-chick cipher, but she had never struck me that way at all. I thought she was something ancient and mysterious and never fully explained (just like Tom Bombadil) and loved him for reasons of her own. At least in my head, she was always clearly a river-nymph sort of spirit, and he a Green Man figure, so why wouldn't they be together as equals representing different but interdependent elements?

So I dug into The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and aimed at pastiching that sort of rhyming style to tell her courtship story from her point of view.

I'm ecstatic about the response "Lomendánar" has gotten. I can't thank everyone who's helped and reviewed and recced enough - I was so afraid I'd lost my way in Middle-earth.

Speaking of recs, I'm doing Good Omens this month at crack_van. Only 12 recs allowed? Ouch. I will try to achieve a representative sampling while still keeping my picks stubbornly idiosyncratic.

Ah, success. My lgbtfest fic is done and posted!

The premise of the fest is to write stories that aren't just slash, but deal with possible actual cultural ramifications of what it means to be LGBT in different fictional milieus. The prompt I chose was for characters who not only live in a very different culture, but also have a reproduction method and sexuality that probably isn't very humanlike at all. They clearly do know love, and the loss thereof, though, in a way we can try to relate to.

Lomendánar (Little Love for the Things of My Love)

Fandom: Lord of the Rings (with some Silmarillion allusions)
Rating: PG
Prompt: What is life like for a gay Ent?

Huge thanks to my betas thrihyrne and tyellas. May your Entdraught never run dry!

So, because I'm a procrastinator...

Will anyone be around on Saturday to do a quick and dirty beta of my lgbtfest fic? It'll probably be about 3,000 words (absolutely no more than 5k).

LOTR, with allusions to the Valar and events in the Silmarillion time-frame. Rating probably PG-13.

Slashy, sad, and ENT-CENTRIC. (Major characters: Skinbark, Quickbeam, Treebeard. At this point in the writing there is about a 93% chance of a brief Tom Bombadil appearance.)

I deliberately requested a posting date as close to Beltane as possible. Although it is unavoidably turning out to not be a happy-happy-joy-joy kind of story, it is still my gift to Yavanna and the Green Man.

Am working on lgbtfest fic, which is in LOTR fandom, and remembering that what I loved to write about most in Middle-earth are the characters on the edges and corners and margins who never got anything resembling their full stories told, because they are the ones who made Tolkien's worldbuilding as vivid and deep and enduring as it is. Every fictional world should be like that: the sense that the main narrative is by necessity only a tiny tip of the iceberg.

I'm feeling melancholy, though. Often, writers say that they look at their old stories and are embarrassed by how bad they are. Sometimes, I look at my old stories and think, "I wrote that?" and start to feel that I was once so much more confident and imaginative than I am now, and worry I might never be that good again.

...and I kinda feel it too, because that's how tired I am. I'm waayyy behind on the drabbling, but that's because of the last 48 hours, I've been at home and awake for about maybe 5 of them. Yes, my friends have been feasting and feting (and other f'things) me pretty splendidly, including an 8-hour marathon of a BBQ in a beautiful yard in Humboldt Park yesterday. I woke up at 2 PM today with a huge grin on my face, feeling loved.


And someone anonymously bought me two months of paid LJ time! *squee* Thank you thank you thank you!


So here's the first five b-day drabbles, anyway. I WILL do them all if it takes me to next b-day. (And I'm doing them in the order the ideas hit me, not the order received, sorry!)

For musesfool: GO - Something with the Them and a birthday party

For kkpixie: TDS - happy, fuzzy Stewart/Colbert

For celandineb: GO - Aziraphale/Crowley, bananas

For teh_jenna: HP/US Politics - something involving Snape and George Bush

For use_theforce_em: TDS/LOTR - members of the Fellowship on the Daily Show

OK, more to come in days to come - enjoy!

Wow, SGA is the smuttiest fandom ever!

Here's my entry #2--yes, I'm way behind, but I have two other WIPs I hope will roll tomorrow.

How about a canon het pairing for a change? It's Lord of the Rings, angsty Éowyn/Faramir.

My esteemed collaborator quantum_witch posted me a birthday present today! (Four days early but I needed a smile right now)

Like most of our collaborations, it's a smutty illustrated Good Omens slashfic - but she did all the work herself! (I hope she doesn't ever expect me to do any drawing, because nobody wants to see that!)

Anyway, it takes a few-sentence bit from one of our collaborations and expands it into a full story. it's sweet, it's hot, it's funny, it's just wow. Go look!

Twice-Changed World

(Aziraphale/Crowley, NC-17, NWS illustrations, etc.)

***

And happy actual birthday, tehta! May this year be a great one.

I love maggiehoneybite's birthday fic for her - in which Helob and Morliant, her slashy Tolkien-verse Giant Spider antiheroes, save their species' honor in The Middle-earth Minions of Evil Football Final!. Just brilliant.

It may be just a virus. Yesterday was a solid 8 on the death-warmed-over scale, today's more like a 6.7. We'll see. More tea.

Good thing, as I'm busybusybusy.

In other news, a fic of mine made GAFF!!

Finally! I was starting to feel like the most obscure NNF (No-Name Fan) ever.

It is, of course, an intentional crackfic--and a smutty one at that-- and it is three years old (but then I wouldn't have put it up at Skyehawke recently if I were nearly as ashamed of it as I should be), but hey! The biggest ego-stroke was the poster who said it was actually well-written and in-character, and that made it worse.

Heh.

Now, stories of mine have been mentioned in their "The Antidote" section twice that I know of, but that's just not the same. (And what amuses me about that is that the two stories were "The Ring and the Crown" and "Wrong Turn at Yesod." Not only can I not think of two pieces of anything I've ever written more different from each other, I can't conceive of how two pieces could be more different. I guess only if one of them lacked porn...)

More pseudoephedrine, please!

Also, congratulations to the first person to finish her go_exchange assignment. She knows who she is, and she rocks.