I've been not posting again, sorry. There wasn't even any particular reason, for the most part.

I was talking about Image of Fendahl in passing, which reminded me of the ridiculous wordage I wrote after watching it the first time, back in the day, which in turn led me to reassessing UNIT: Transition. Aside from the fact that it does need the reader to have some idea of what went down in Image, it isn't actually bad. Nothing a little tidying wouldn't at least make passable, and that led me back to the question of whether or not to put my 1980s UNIT series that followed on AO3.

Anyway, after losing a lot of time to reading my old stuff, I am now in progress of making the whole series available there, with a little tidying, but no major alterations. I'm not sure how to handle the exact order once I do get everything across, but I'll post them in original posting order as far as I can (Transition aside), and worry about where to put the extras and the Christmas prequel with the puns and the mince pies later.

So, if you want to know how the hell Colonel Crichton managed to get on without the Doctor, or just enjoy the same old UNIT cliches* with a new team, and actual plot(s) (even if some of my other writing tics of the era leave room for improvement), and Torchwood being villainous, plus one stranded Victorian housemaid who isn't important at all, installment #1 (fully standalone) is here:

UNIT: Strange Weapons (34661 words) by thisbluespirit, vvj5
Chapters: 9/9
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Charles Crichton & Sarah Jane Smith, K9 & Sarah Jane Smith
Characters: K-9, Sarah Jane Smith, Charles Crichton, Original Characters, Winifred Bambera
Additional Tags: United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (Doctor Who), Torchwood One, 1980s, 1980s UNIT, 1980s Torchwood, Original Character-centric, Original Character Death(s), Case Fic, Action/Adventure, Military, Aliens, Plot, Cliffhangers, Angst, Zombies (sort of), Infection, Peril, Explosions, Period Typical Attitudes, (here and there anyway), and one lost victorian housemaid
Series: Part 1 of 1980s UNIT
Summary: April 1985: Good scientific advisors are hard to find. Dr Webber discovers why when he's expected to deal with zombies, aliens and Torchwood on his second day, and his only help is a tin dog and a ghost. Colonel Crichton and Sarah Jane are planning an exit strategy of sorts, while Captain Bambera is trying to keep her men from joining the opposing forces. They'll all be lucky to stay alive.

The other thing I've been doing is a lot of hunting down radio plays using the BBC's Genome, which was part of what led to discussing Image of the Fendahl but I have now typed too much about 1980s UNIT again, so I shall go and have lunch and say things about that another time.


* Sergeants don't have first names, green slime is never good (or any shade of good, all of which is available), etc. etc.

(I'll get there eventually!)

( DW - Sarah Jane Smith )

( Miss Marple )

( DW - Donna Noble )

el_staplador requested Meet Me at Midnight for the Fic Commentary Meme.

This was a recent one, written to finish off one of my remaining who_allsorts prompts on my Fourth Doctor claim, the prompt being, "I will go alone," which, in conjunction with Four, made me think of the line from Androids of Tara where the Doctor says, "They always want you to go alone when you're walking into a trap, have you noticed that?" So I thought it could be fun to play with that being the Doctor's voice of experience speaking there.

I picked the prompt set out a couple of years ago now, and the vague idea had been lurking for a while, and then suddenly the full idea just struck me, and I wrote it and it was a lot of fun. I do have my original notebook version, but it didn't see a lot of changes, overall.

Each segment was, hopefully (and judging by comments, fairly successfully), a typical scene with each Team TARDIS of Four's era. (Well, barring Four, Romana & Adric, but the E-Space trilogy is still on my to-watch pile.)


( Cut for various traps )

My now-regular Thursday feature! (We'll see how long this lasts. ;-p)

1. For some reason I'd been feeling a bit down the last couple of days, but you know what is always at least a little bit cheering at such moments? Multi-era Doctor Who fanvids. I was cheering myself with Marching On by xxdrosexx and then wondering why I didn't have any yet that went up to Twelve, so I went looking, and found this, which is also great:

( Cut for embed )

Because Doctor Who is, after all, that great big improbable and ridiculous thing of joy and monsters. :-)


And I'm continuing to enjoy watching (or reading) from the sidelines as the Public Call fics get revealed, so here's two more good ones:

2. A Taste of Home by dbskyler (G, 1784 words. Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, Harry Sullivan.) Sarah, the Doctor, and home. Lovely glimpse of some 'missing scenes' from Terror of the Zygons.


3. Side Quest by annariel (G, 6388 words. Harry Sullivan, Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith.) Harry is collecting equipment for the Doctor when he runs into an adventure of his own. Can he foil the evil Dr. Richards, while at the same time helping the Doctor and Sarah fend off an alien invasion they somehow never quite have the time to explain properly to him? Excellent missing adventure, with Harry getting to prove his worth.


4. The Terrible Doom That Came To Honeysuckle Cottage by Psychomachia (Teen, 2592 words.) There's a saying old says that love is blind
Still we're often told, seek and ye shall find
So I'm going to seek a certain lad I've had in mind. One of the best and funniest fics to come out of last year's Yuletide: the Cthulhu Mythos meets P.G. Wodehouse's Honeysuckle cottage. (Definitely a don't-need-to-know-canon fic.)


5. By Wise Council You Shall Make Your War by beer_good_foamy (Teen, 722 words. Edmund Blackadder, George Colthurst St. Barleigh, Baldrick, Bob. Crossover with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) In each generation, a Slayer is born. She alone will stand against the etc etc. In 1917, that was a young woman named... um... Bob? Good thing the Watcher's Council have an auxiliary member already in place in the trenches. What it says, oh yes, oh yes. :-D

Before I forget, here are some great vids I've enjoyed that were posted over the holiday period:

( 4 Doctor Who & Star Wars )

1. Two more runaway_tales installments:

Errors, Corrections (All ages, 661 words. Charles Terrell, undercover for the revolution – compiling lists.)

The More Things Change... (PG, 1198 words. Charles Terrell, Anna Miller, Edward Woodfield. For some people, it seems the rebellion isn’t over.


2. I was poking around at some very old fic the other day, including some efforts from This Time Round (the pub outside reality where Doctor Who characters go in between stories, courtesy of alt.drwho.creative on usenet), and while most of my TTR fics don't really transfer so well out of the Round, I found this Harry and Sarah do a classic Agatha Christie fic and though, despite being rather meta-ish at the edges, it's comprehensible as an AU and hopefully fairly entertaining & so I've been tweaking it and uploading it to AO3.

(Some of the characters are aware of the narrative they're in though, and there's some playing around with that. I seem to recall the original idea was that there were things called 'genre bubbles' that could occur around Nameless, and the characters in the vicinity would all start acting in accordance to narrative rules of that genre. Hence Harry and Sarah in a Miss Marple story.) I seem to have written it some time during or soon after S4 of New Who.

Murder at Mill Cottage (23135 words) by vvj5
Chapters: 11/12
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963), Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Sarah Jane Smith/Harry Sullivan, Ben Jackson/Polly Wright
Characters: Harry Sullivan, Sarah Jane Smith, First Doctor, Charley Pollard, Eighth Doctor, Polly Wright, Ben Jackson (Doctor Who), Jamie McCrimmon, Jane Marple, Various Characters, Amelia Rumford, Louisa Pollard, The Master (Delgado), Inspector Mackenzie (Doctor Who), Mehendri Solon
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Metafiction, Humor, POV First Person, This Time Round, Murder Mystery
Summary: Dr Sullivan's finally got a nice little practice in the country, just like he always wanted - except it turns out there's a murderer at large. It's lucky for him he's got help from a visiting journalist, and, of course, his favourite little old lady, Miss Marple...

It's amazing what grows slowly on your hard-drive, like some sort of 70s DW themed invasion of pixels... And maybe count it as my tribute to Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen. And belatedly to Barry Letts.

Teasers:

Total Icon Count: 80

( All praise to the Great One! )

The usual: want, take, have, credit. Comments are ♥

Credits: V few textures (other than mine/the program's) but some textures by:
leilax @ the preamble
livvielocke
how_we_fade @ fade_art.

The first few (not necessarily in order, though - sorry!):

For pitry: ( Screwdriver )


For primsong: ( Job Satisfaction )


For paranoidangel42: ( Outmanoeuvred )


For persiflage_1: ( Burned )

I promise the rest won't be too long in following (and I've still got 2 spare gaps - and I'm not going to tell on anyone who doesn't run the meme in return, really...)

Title: UNIT: The Great Mince Pie Mystery
Author: lost_spook
Rating: All ages
Word Count: 6033
Characters: Colonel Crichton, Sarah Jane Smith, K9, Winifred Bambera, Other

Summary:December 1984: Colonel Crichton is trying to see Sarah Jane and K9 off the premises; elsewhere some vicious little aliens are causing trouble - and they'll eat anything from mince pies to members of staff. It must be Christmas.

A few notes - don't worry, despite being another 1980s UNIT story, it's set earlier and is a standalone bit of nonsense. (For those who have been reading, it does give us the chance to meet another one of the Doctor's successors...)

And since it was set in December 1984 and it seemed wrong not to refer to Band Aid, I... Well, it then seemed good to me to put in references to as many Christmas songs as I could. (Or: It Seemed Funny At The Time).

So, a competition: whoever spots the most songs gets to give me a prompt & I'll write a ficlet or short story over the festive period. Pm me here or via Teaspoon with your answers and prompt and we'll see what happens. (This seems really egotistical, but I think as soon as I say there are refs to songs, some people will look for them & all I can do to make it up to them online is to offer fic. I can't even do icons).

If you want to, pm me by Dec 19th with yr answers & prompt or two &, (given the fact that there won't be a lot of takers), you'll be in with a good chance. Obviously, no adult-rated, graphic prompts (you won't get them and you wouldn't like them if you did) and, sadly, slashy stuff is not my thing either. It doesn't have to be Doctor Who. (I wrote a list of things I will try here, for a meme). I imagine I'd write it rough while I'm home and type it up after I get back, so it would appear around New Year. No one will know who won till then. Most of the quotes/refs are so obvious I might as well have hung tinsel round them, but some are more obscure. Count this 'comp' as my apology. (Christmas stories should be more dark night, candlelight and starlight and hope, but I fail yet again.)

It's an offer and if no one does pm I shall pretend someone does and I'm emailing the fic to them, la la la.

Usual disclaimer: This has not been okayed on to Teaspoon yet. If it doesn't appear, I'll look even sillier.

Title: UNIT: Strange Weapons
Author: lost_spook
Rating: All Ages / Teen
Characters: Colonel Crichton, Bambera, Sarah Jane Smith, K9

Summary: UNIT 1985: Good scientific advisors are hard to find. Dr Webber discovers why when he’s expected to deal with zombies, aliens and Torchwood on his second day and his only help is a tin dog and a ghost. Colonel Crichton and Sarah Jane are planning an exit strategy of sorts and Bambera is trying to keep her men from joining the opposing forces. They'll all be lucky to survive.

( Some explanation under here ).

As of this evening, still awaiting approval on Teaspoon.