Beyond the Roundels

1. intoabar is open for sign-ups! I need to contemplate who to send into the bar this year - always the tricky bit!

Anyway, it is a great long-running fest where you sign up with a chosen character from one fandom plus a selection of 1-6 other fandoms, and then the mod(s) randomise you a character from one of those fandoms for your character to meet in the bar or bar-equivalent. Hopefully I will make the deadline this year for a change, but I usually manage to do it in amnesty if not, and it's too much of a favourite for me to miss it.

I need to decide whether or not to do what I did last year with particular-character-from-tiny-fandom + my regular fandoms as potential crossovers, OR choose a character from one of the regular go-anywhere fandoms and some smaller fandoms, which I have narrowed down to "fandoms I haven't already used for 51pluscrossoverfandoms" because that seems like a sensible plan. I'm leaning to the second at the moment, in which case I miiight do Fifteen, but I'll swear to nothing until the day that sign-ups close.


2. tardis_remix went live yesterday with 10 works, and I've very much enjoyed what I've read so far. I haven't quite finished yet.

romanajo123 did a fun little remix one of my old meme ficlets, even though I didn't write anything myself (which I am a little sad about; I adore a Remix, but it was not realistic this time around):

Bedside Manner (The (Im)Patient Peri Remix) (734 words) by human_nature
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Peri Brown & Sixth Doctor
Characters: Sixth Doctor (Doctor Who), Peri Brown
Additional Tags: Remix, POV First Person
Summary: Peri's really not feeling well...


3. edwardianspinsteraunt has also written another lovely The Winslow Boy fic, so it has been a good weekend for nice fannish reading!

Hopeless Causes (9633 words) by edwardianspinsteraunt
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Winslow Boy (1999)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Robert Morton/Catherine Winslow
Characters: Catherine Winslow, Robert Morton (Winslow Boy), Grace Winslow
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Getting Together, Slow Burn, Developing Relationship, Minor Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Women's Suffrage, Period Typical Attitudes, Emotionally Repressed, Marriage Proposal
Summary: Arthur Winslow dies before Winslow versus Rex can come to court. Sir Robert attempts to help the surviving members of the family and - with rather less success - to prevent his feelings for Miss Winslow from getting the better of him.

1. A random little ficlet!

I wrote this about 18 months ago as part of my "scribble anything for whatever I've just been watching/reading/listening to" thing I was doing, after I read Towers in the Mist by Elizabeth Goudge for the first time, and then never got to the typing up part. And then yesterday I finally decided to, because I thought it came out all right and it's been hanging around wanting typing up ever since, and I did like these two quite a lot.

In Sunlit Fields (487 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Towers in the Mist - Elizabeth Goudge
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Joyeuce Leigh/Nicolas de Worde
Characters: Joyeuce Leigh, Nicolas de Worde
Additional Tags: Ficlet, Tudor Era, 16th Century CE, Post-Canon, Fluff, Community: 100fandoms, Community: 100ships
Summary: Nicolas and Joyeuce, looking to an unlikely future for Canon Leigh's daughter.

(It's deeply ironic that I can never do bethefirst but I go round being randomly and obscurely the first all by myself at other times anyway. Which is to say that, unsurprisingly, nobody else ever wrote for this before, or at least, not on AO3.)


2. In other writing news, I got my intoabar assignment! I had been so much in two minds as to whether or not to throw S&S in the mix I thought I hadn't until my prompt arrived in my inbox, and it was "Henslowe Fisk walks into a bar and meets Steel!" lol

(Thanks to blathering at astrogirl the other day, I do have an idea, which is good because my first one was just that I'd never managed to come up with a pair of characters I could get into a bar with ease, but I wasn't sure I could get them to talk to each other! XD)

Although, I have of course, been not well enough to write properly. I have some scribbles already and hopefully I can get it into something - I feel reasonably hopeful this time round anyway, fingers crossed.

I managed to finish my intoabar fic on time! I nearly had it done before my family came up, but not quite and it took a bit of recovering for me to fix it. (I was so ill that one of the times I looked at it I accidentally POSTED it and woke up to weird dream unreality of comments on unwritten fic, both of which were evidently too polite to point out that the last bit was largely unedited and the ending was absent. I hastily deleted it, thank goodness it wasn't a Top Sekrit Exchange fic! Apologies to anyone who saw it. This is the real version, even if I still didn't manage to come up with a better title. /o\)

When the Bartender Gives You Lemons (2795 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005), The Librarians (TV 2014)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Thirteenth Doctor, Ezekiel Jones
Additional Tags: Community: intoabar, Crossover, Humor, Alien Technology, (which the Doctor says is definitely not), Magic, Thieves together
Summary: All the Doctor wants is a nice glass of tap water with one of those little umbrellas and a slice of orange – and to find a malfunctioning Zygon device before it hurts anyone. Unfortunately, it's never that simple...

(I don't think it's spoilery, other than for general concept of both shows and characters. There was a potential really interesting Ezekiel-Thirteen connection, but I came up with this first, and never did think of anywhere to go with the more serious one.)

I finally managed to do my last bit of editing and send my intoabar fic to persiflage_1 to beta, and here it is. Also written for genprompt_bingo square "Imprisonment."

Locks and Keys (1903 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sapphire and Steel, Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Silver (S&S), Evil Queen | Regina Mills
Additional Tags: Community: intoabar, Crossover, Vague references to assignment six, During Evil Queen | Regina Mills's First Dark Curse, Cursed Storybrooke (Once Upon a Time)
Summary: Silver travels from one unreal diner to another.

I was originally thinking of setting this pre-S7 (during the Hyperion Heights curse) but then it occurred to me that the original curse actually puts Storybrooke on Earth not very long after S&S finished, and then it all came together.

(I'm stupidly amused at "Cursed Storybrooke" as a tag, because obviously that is a useful fandom freeform, but also LOL.)

1. intoabar is open for sign-ups!

This is a fun old school ficathon (no exchange troubles here) where you choose a character you like and then choose 1-4 other fandoms you can write and the mods will randomly generate a character from those for your other character to meet (in a bar, hence the name). I wasn't sure which character to choose - I was going to have Obi-Wan Kenobi, and then I thought maybe Clara or even Jenkins, but then I decided that this was clearly the year to have Silver, so that's what I did (and chose SW Prequels, DW (12th Doctor Era), OUaT and Ripper Street as the fandoms. (I might regret Ripper Street, but I suddenly thought it could be really cool in this context.)


2. justmarriedexchange is now open for nominations! (Cracky marriage tropes for all! Or possibly if you're not me, romantic shippy marriage tropes for everyone but people who evilly contemplate nomming S&S!)


3. as is littleblackdressex which is for characters you ship with everyone/anyone. (The fandom bicycles, basically.) It's running at the same time as Just Married, so I won't be able to do it, but that does seem like a fun idea. (I definitely have some characters like that, though - Silver, Ruth Evershed, Clara Oswald, Obi-Wan Kenobi...)


4. hc_bingo have got the last of their Amnesty challenges running (with no obligation to take part in any other aspect of the bingo) - the May Small Fandoms challenge, where you get a bingo 'stamp' of four prompts and you create something in a small fandom using 1-4 of those prompts.

I got one with "mind control/possession," "orphans," "deadline/time bomb," and "sensory deprivation" and thought, hmm, this is that Copper fic I wrote for hc_bingo proper a while back, minus the orphans. At the moment, I'm thinking of using Dracula (TV 1968) as I have an idea and that should be under the 400 limit (which S&S probably isn't any more).


5. And, on top of all that, unconventionalcourtship is deciding when to have its next round. (UC is a lot of fun - you take a Mills & Boon type romance novel summary and turn it into fic, either straight or with a lot of ridiculous and subverting and as gen or shippy as you wish. With bonus fandom book covers.) It's in summer, so I suspect that'll be out, but I do love it, so we'll see. (I have a perfect summary for Obi-Wan/Padme and an idea, but OTOH I have now written that a lot since January and it was tiring so someone should just write 10k of that for me.)

I managed to get my intoabar fic done before the warm weather hit, and got it tidied up to post today. My prompt was Twelve meeting Snow | Mary Margaret, which was a lovely prompt and very easy to do something for:

Myths & Legends (1716 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005), Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Snow White | Mary Margaret Blanchard, Twelfth Doctor
Additional Tags: Crossover, Community: intoabar, Episode: s10e01 The Pilot, Post-Canon
Summary: We're all stories in the end, it's true - and, sooner or later, all stories find themselves in Storybrooke.

So, after I started feeling a little better a couple of weeks ago, I gradually picked up some things I'd already finished/nearly finished and started poking at them & as a result have posted most of them in the appropriate places, but not linked here.

1. A Ruth Evershed Character Manifesto (Spooks) for het_reccers (containing 13 recs, much blathering about the greatness of Ruth and ships and possible ships, plus some pics and gifs). (I've been chipping away at this for at least a year now.)


2. I looked at my dw_guestfest WIP and found it was much more complete and okay than I'd thought and tidied it up. It's here:

Self-Made Man (956 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: The Kandyman & Gilbert M
Characters: Gilbert M (Doctor Who), The Kandyman (Doctor Who)
Additional Tags: Serial: s149 The Happiness Patrol, Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Community: dw_guestfest, Community: trope_bingo
Summary: "Close to the Kandyman, were you?" / "I made him." Gilbert M and the Kandyman.


3. Someone reminded me that I once wrote a crossover fic for intoabar, which at the time I defaulted on due to being too ill to cope with the editing from my beta. I poked around my memory stick full of fic and found it and the beta-notes (which weren't actually difficult; I was just that ill back then) and posted that too:

Bar-Room Brawl (2512 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Downton Abbey, Doctor Who (1963)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Tegan Jovanka, Tom Branson, Fifth Doctor, Vislor Turlough
Additional Tags: Crossover, Community: intoabar, Walk Into A Bar, Aliens, Fights, 1920s
Summary: Tegan Jovanka walks into a bar… and meets Tom Branson!


4. And then I did manage to finish typing up a thing for runaway_tales, which is also filling a square for trope_bingo (au: historical), and I think most things are now at least back to my usual sort of hit and miss abilities. \o/

Midnight Escapade (All ages, 1905 words. Edward Iveson/Julia Graves, Christy Graves, Amyas Harding.) It's a gratuitous Regency AU that I wrote at Christmas when I was reading too many terrible Regency romances.