Title: Games We Don't Play
Characters & Pairings: Joan, Sherlock, Joan Watson/Marcus Bell
Rating: Teen
Summary: In which Joan solves a murder, goes on an unexpected date, outwits Sherlock, and survives his highly questionable attempts at emotional support. Written for the Rare Women Ficathon.
Word Count: 3000ish

Click to read

Spent the afternoon watching storms roll across my facebook feed. My friend's childhood home was badly damaged, but his father is unhurt. My cousin, having been terrorized by a close brush with a tornado last night, was rushing to the storm cellar in her mother-in-law's house this afternoon. If she'd stayed home, she would have been fine; instead she watched yet another tornado touch down a few blocks away. She's okay though. I texted REDCROSS to 90999 to donate my $10. It's hard to know that's all I can do.

Anyway, distract me with a meme?

I have 124 works archived at AO3. Pick a number from 1 (the most recent) to 124 (the first thing I posted there), and I'll tell you three things I currently like about it.

Feed me some prompts! Tell your friends!

Title: The Pregnancy Scare
Rating: PG
Pairing: Tony/Pepper
Summary: Pepper Potts has made it thirty-five years without a pregnancy scare. Unfortunately, she's not going to make it thirty-six. For wr1t3rbl0ck3d at the I haven't prompted this before meme.
Notes: 1,000 words. Read on AO3 if you prefer.

( We could have a baby. We could name it Ignatius.Collapse )

( I've been wanting to say this since Wednesday nightCollapse )

*Ahem* Now that that's off my chest, I loved the movie. I keep writing things and erasing them because my love cannot actually be textually rendered. WORDS. They are so inadequate. I keep trying to describe how Star Trek influenced my life, and I don't really even know where to start. I grew up in a small town. My mom got Born Again and banned a lot of TV shows that my friends watched. My parents -- and a lot of people in my community -- said things like, "black people are just different from us." And I was always skeptical of those statements, even when I was little, but Star Trek was my concrete evidence that the world didn't have to be like the place where I grew up. It taught me that inclusiveness was the highest goal of any society. At thrity-one, it's easy for me to be dismissive of pop culture and doubt whether TV shows really mean anything to people. But I know that when I was five, ten, fifteen years old and I didn't fit in and I didn't like the world I lived in, Star Trek gave me a window into some place better. It taught me to be curious about other things and other people, and I am happy beyond words to know that it has endured this long -- even if it's in a pretty different form than Gene Roddenberry's original vision.

( Happy thoughts and feelings, because I'm not interested in finding fault with this movieCollapse )

Visit where_no_woman for lady-centric discussion!

I want to write a Star Trek reaction post, but I'm going to wait until LJ is behaving normally again. Until then, I have some questions.

I made some promo graphics for where_no_woman, but I need some help to figure out how to use them. Right now, they live in my photobucket, so if I post them somewhere and people click on them, they will be taken back to my photobucket page. I'd much rather that clicking on photos leads people to where_no_woman instead. How does one accomplish that?

Second, I've noticed that some LJ entries contain little boxes filled with HTML which other people can copy and paste into their journals/comments to make a nicely formatted friending meme, or to post a promo picture that leads back to the comm. How does one make those little boxes?

Thanks!

Title: The Right Thing in the Wrong Way
Pairing: Tony/Pepper
Rating: Teen
Content advisory Discussion of death and grieving
Summary: People don't ask why Pepper sticks by Tony as often as they should, and if they did, she probably wouldn't tell them the truth: that he's never left her alone on the one day she needs him.
Notes: Set in the same universe as Someone I Used To Know but can be read as a stand-alone. Many thanks to redbrunja for the beta reading!

Read on AO3

The line for the drive-in was five blocks long last night, and an angry traffic cop almost steered us into the Gatsby line, but we made it to IM3 anyway. A drive-in movie theater is a fabulous venue for that film, by the way. I cannot wait to take a picnic there and see Star Trek.

( mostly happy, some bones to pickCollapse )

Also, note to self: finish your damn Tony/Pepper story! Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Stick an ending on it. Call it done. People read -- and like -- slightly flawed stories all the time. Ten months is too long to let something nice live in your documents folder.

1) Should I even bother to post fics on LJ anymore? I'm considering posting exclusively to AO3 and putting up a link on LJ. It seems like the vast majority of views/comments are on AO3.

2) Anyone know of comms for Elementary fic? I wrote one for Rare Women, but I'm not quite sure what to do with it.

3) Is it inherently problematic to write a story about Natasha being kidnapped by the North Korean government when a mission in Pyongyang goes wrong? I feel like the North Korean government would really like to possess a Natasha, but I also feel like using real political situations for entertainment purposes is dodgy.

4) Can you participate in 5 Acts if your kinks aren't very kinky? I mean, so non-kinky that they don't contain any sex at all.

Not a question: Female Fest looks cool and fun. Leave prompts!

Also not a question: I got my tickets for the midnight premiere of Star Trek! I should probably lay in a case of Red Bull or something so I can stay awake at work the next day. Or not go to work. Also, I wish we could call it ST: XII instead of STID. My brain keeps parsing that as STI or STD and getting confused by why people are excited about a venereal disease movie.

Title: Two Lies and a Bit of Truth
Fandom: Avengers
Rating: PG
Characters & Pairings: Maria Hill/Steve Rogers, Phil Coulson
Summary: Maria Hill has a lot of back stories. One of them is even true.
Notes: for tielan, who wanted Maria's back story and her growing closer to Steve after Phil's death grievous injury

Read on AO3
( Read on LJCollapse )