I didn't sign up for yuletide this year. It probably would have been good for me? Like, force myself to read and/or write some things that aren't twitter/news/screaming into the void about politics, but I also straight up forgot to nominate anything, and most of the stuff I would have requested were the niche unwritten fandoms from past years.

Might treat some people still, I hope. I haven't looked at any letters yet, but I noted five or six fandoms that seemed possible when I thought I might still pull it together. Or I could also figure out wth is going on with pinch hits this year, preferably before matching finishes in a hot second here.

The best thing about great new fic in an old, beloved fandom is great new fic in an old, beloved fandom. The second best thing is a tiny wave of kudos on one's own ancient fic.

Pre-Existing Condition (13138 words) by Helenish
Fandom: Die Hard (Movies)
Relationships: Matt Farrell/John McClane
Additional Tags: Marriage of Convenience
Summary:

“Anyway, he’s staying with me for a while,” John says.

“My place got firebombed,” Matt says, reflexively.

So good, omg.

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I am watching a lot of news, y'all. I never anticipated that [redacted]-year-old me would be consuming so much political commentary. Some, for sure, but this feels excessive.

---

I've got a date tonight, for which I have the lowest of possible expectations for a thing I agreed to do, but I am hopeful the food will be good and his half of the conversation will be entertaining. It is a million percent humid and sunny and warmish, and so I sort of want to wear a dress, but I also dont want to be the girl wearing a dress on a casual first date and why must everything be so complicated.

Because I am Old, which mostly means that I am slowly accumulating wear and tear and I also don't heal like I used to, my exercise of necessity for the past 6 months or so has been walking, rather than running. It's. Fine? And because I need to walk for waaaaaay longer than the 30 minutes or so I used to run, and also because elections, I've been slowly accumulating podcasts to fill that time.

Also catching Pokémon. Still.

ANYway, the reason I showed up to post today is that I finally got around to listening to the Marketplace What if Superheroes were real episode, and it's pretty delightful, both the stories and the sponsorship messages between them.

(The one maybe-exception, the Wonder Woman segment? But pretty much all I know about Wonder Woman is via osmosis and brief exposure to the live action TV show of my youth, so eh. Idk if it just didn't work for me or if it was a poor choice of anecdote.)

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Not that anyone is here for podcast recs, but also pretty great so far is Homecoming, of which I will admit I listened to the first three episodes at once, the fourth the day it came out, and then have been holding onto the final two for like a month now because I'm worried they're going to screw it up.

Also slightly... pretentious-seeming is their behind-the-scenes discussion, yadda yadda new media, or of how they recorded things on location, etc. instead of being in a studio with some dude using hollowed coconuts for sound effects. They have a brief "after-pod" or something tacked on to the end of every episode, discussing the episode, and I have never cared less about the methods that went into creating something than I do this thing. The thing itself has still been compelling listening, though.

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Apparently I haven't posted since the election. That is still very much a thing that happened. Watching a lotta Maddow, listening to a fair number of politics podcasts, The real estate agent at the bottom of the hill is a Trump supporter and has had a large-ish handmade Trump sign since probably sometime this summer, and it's still up. Someone faintly penciled in a Hitler moustache at some point in the fall, but it has survived otherwise surprisingly unvandalized, more because suburbia than because freedom of speech, I think.

There's more to say, probably, but I just deleted most of it. It's been weird around here, but we're mostly fine around here, in a relative sense, so far. Watchful.

Copied ever-more-hastily from previous years. I'll try to pad this tonight, but also feel free to just go write, if you're a go-write type. Thank you!


As always, my previous exchange letters are filed under my dear author tag, recs are at AO3 or pinboard and pretty much anything there in terms of preference or even story ideas for other fandoms is fair game if you're looking for inspiration.


( Colditz (2005); BBC Historical Farm RPF; Tennis RPF; Enlisted (TV) )

So I am attempting to refrain from having an opinion about Truth Slash Fiction until some other day, but I'm a little sad the boyband is of the gamboling puppies One Direction variety, because Matt Doyle didn't get a chance to put his training to use.

( behold )

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And as I was looking for that the news about Anton Yelchin broke :( Wow.

Everyone has those stories by now, right? With youtube or netflix or amazon, where the recommendations make you go O.o and then, suddenly. It's like they get you, and it's the best thing that happens that week?

(At which point it has just occurred to me, youtube hasn't recommended a Tom Hardy interview to me in a long time. I must be slacking.)

So yesterday, I don't remember what brought me to youtube in the first place. Cat video, probably. And then:

( Aaron Tveit and Gavin Creel - Take me or Leave Me )

I'm not especially an Aaron Tveit fan? I think I've only seen him in the Les Mis movie, and I didn't watch the live Grease because honestly I just forgot, but I think I remember reviews saying that it went with too much of a campy wink. BUT. Much like the hype around Channing Tatum and Magic Mike XXL, I would be totally okay with Tveit taking periodic breaks from his Important Acting to just be fun and hot and into it for 5 minutes, more often.

(stray thought #2. Have you guys heard about this Magic Mike Vegas thing? Idek. Google it.)

and THEN most likely by the combined powers of having watched Kristen Chenoweth singing 'For Good' with audience member Sarah Horn a lot of times, and yesterday's broadway spiral:

Hot off the presses, or at least it was this morning when I went back to watch Aaron and Gavin strut around some more: ( #OutOfOz Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel - For Good )

It's not like either of them were Plucked from Obscurity for their roles in Wicked to change their lives, but there's something really, really lovely about them singing "For Good" together, again, a decade later and out(ish) of character. Out of costume at any rate.

Stolen from many people, but most recently marginaliana

Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.

( so. many. abandoned. files )

( it's cute how this folder says 'active WIP' )

And I dumped off two Mike/Jeff snippets onto AO3 the other day. From the "active" folder. So.

I really wish I could make myself write some of those Arthur/Eames ones. There are a whole lotta words in some of them, but it's been so long, argh.

I feel like I should combine this with some other form of talking-about-writing meme. Many, if not most, of those files have shown up in some past list meme.

Edit: wow, I found an wip old meme, which I had locked because I think I repurposed one of the story bits for yuletide, and I am... not sure where some of those files are anymore. So there's more than *waves hands* all this, somewhere.

It just, absolutely and completely literally, took me 40 minutes to drive 1.5 miles.


The Snow is projected to start falling in roughly 12 hours from now, and everyone has lost their damn minds.


My blizzard preparations are now complete: a bag of cedar balls for my clothes sorting/storing project, and a Chipotle burrito because I like to live dangerously.

...(but trust me, I made an unusual number of atypical choices this afternoon) I just spent a literal hour literally standing in Starbucks talking to a guy who I have not seen, or indeed even thought of, since we graduated from high school over 20 years ago.

Probably just as well that if that conversation was going to happen, that we had it while caffeinated, as opposed to slightly drunk, as would have happened if I'd bothered going to our reunion.

Although I probably would have been able to break away in way less than an hour.

Life is weird, yo.

( blathering about a kitten, and dudes who are intensely uncurious, or something. The kitten is fine, now )

Also, vet who is not my usual vet, thank God - fuck you, wanting a defenseless animal to be safe doesn't need to be my "maternal instinct kicking in."

---

So yeah, hi.

I'm still around, mostly. Stuff's been weird, in general. IDK. There's a lot that I'm basically writing off until new years resolution time, and I'm real glad I canceled my signup for Hockey Holidays, even if I had prompts and pairings in my requests that would have made for great fic. Managing Yuletide is going to be enough of a challenge without splitting my energy, and I have missed fully a week+ of my mini-wrimo commitment, after a really good start, sigh.