Dira Sudis

(Dreamwidth only: Random icon is random and also a reminder from the universe that I need to get started on my Lupercalia story. Speaking of WIPs.)

WIP Meme! Because, let's face it, I am constitutionally incapable of letting this one go by without participating.

From misspamela: Post a random sentence (or three whole paragraphs) from every WIP you're currently working on, even if it's very short. Then invite people to ask questions about your WIP. With any luck, you'll get talking about writing, and the motivation to take that WIP one step closer to completion will appear as if by magic!

Naturally I am going for the "three whole paragraphs" option. Feel free to ask questions! Even if they are more of a comment than a question.

( Lewis kidfic! )

( The unfunny Aral/Jole story. )

( The GK story that did not appear in yesterday's poll, for reasons. )

keerawa asked for Generation Kill zombie apocalypse AU, so I decided to plunk the guys down in my favorite zombie apocalypse: Mira Grant's Newsflesh Trilogy.

Which means they're all bloggers. :D


Gen. 565 words.
Nate was the editor in charge of twenty-two Recon bloggers: Bravo's Channel Two (Observe Everything. Admire Nothing.).

( The Moffatt Twp Bridge )

Sooooo on the 20th lamardeuse recced a lovely Lewis story called "The Hermit Crab" and, having read one or two of her squee posts about Lewis I read it. And then downloaded the first two episodes. And then drove to my parents' house, which meant A LOT OF HOURS IN THE CAR TO THINK, and then spent some time carving out alone-time at my parents' house by watching more Lewis and then MORE HOURS IN THE CAR and the upshot is: yeah, I'm probably going to write Lewis/Hathaway kidfic. It's all plotted out! It's very nearly totally finite in scope! I've mostly already done all the research I need to on UK paternity law thanks to watching Single Father last year!

Also Hathaway may actually have been invented just to make me happy, idk. He's a seminarian-turned-cop who responds to his manpain by despondently playing guitar alone in his flat. His crush on Lewis is visible from space as impeccably color-coordinated sparkles in the vicinity of Oxford. (OHAI OXFORD I MISS YOU.) This is the only adorable clip of them I can find on YouTube, but it is extremely adorable.

So, now that that's out of the way: here is a fandom-year-in-review meme that I swiped from... somebody.

Your main fandom of the year?
Stargate SG-1 dominated the first half of the year, overlapping slightly with Generation Kill which took over from then on. And the Vorkosigan Saga has been thrumming away patiently throughout.

Your favorite film you watched this year?
Captain America, I think, although I guess fannishly speaking X-Men: First Class wins out on actually having compelled me to write fic.

Also I feel I should make special mention of having finally for the first time, after about eleven years of active resistance, watched The Big Lebowski, which was pretty great and not at all the embarrassment-squick-farce-thing I was flinchingly anticipating. iulia was, as usual, right.

Your favorite book read this year?
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, and One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick--weirdly pretty much equal amounts of physically hugging the book because I adored it so much for each of those. And Mira Grant's Deadline!!! And The Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan's unfortunate personality notwithstanding. And all of Fables. And The Princess Curse and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and The Persian Boy and Born to Run and and and.

Your favorite tv show of the year?
Castle is the only full-network-season show I've kept up with all year, and I continue to enjoy its goofy, good-natured approach to cop drama. Critically speaking, Game of Thrones and Southland were both brilliant (and heart-wrenching), and I eagerly anticipate the next seasons of each.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Generation Kill, which in my experience encompasses the chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter breakthrough of adding A Companion to Wolves to anything, but especially GK. Also, as of this week, Lewis. ♥

Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
White Collar, where the show actually objectively seems to have changed, and Doctor Who, in which my view of the show changed.

Your fiction boyfriend of the year?
Brad Colbert.

Your fiction girlfriend of the year?
Sam Carter. (Now I really want Sam and Brad to hang out and blow shit up together. ♥)

Your biggest squee moment of the year?
I am pretty terrible at remembering these, but the one that leaps to mind is this moment in maybe the third episode of Lewis, when it has become moderately plot-relevant for Hathaway to reveal to Lewis that he plays in a group that does "world music plus jazz and medieval madrigals", and Hathaway says off-handedly that he will get Lewis some of the music to listen to. Lewis seems about as enthusiastic about this prospect as any sane person confronted with that description.

At the end of the episode, Hathaway pulls out an iPod and offers one earbud to Lewis, telling him it's that music he does, and Lewis gamely pops in the earbud while Hathaway pops in the other and they walk down the street in perfect sync, listening together. ♥__________♥

Your biggest fan anticipations for the coming year?
CAPTAIN VORPATRIL'S ALLIANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And I guess the actual Avengers movie is going to come out this summer so we can write movie-verse fic based on Steve and Tony actually interacting in movie canon? That's going to be neat.
But mostly, IVAN! HIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is the story that sprang into my head when I beheld my lovely santa-hatted Brad icon. So thank you howarethosenuts for bestowing the hat on Brad (and thank you dontcockblockme for the lovely original icon which cried out to be santa-hatted). Um. Which is not to imply that this story is in any way your fault.

Title is from Sufjan Stevens's Come On Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance.

Many thanks to riverlight for beta, and thanks to everyone else who audienced and listened while I was figuring out what to do with a story whose entire premise was "Brad wears a Santa hat for some reason and has sex with Nate."


Brad/Nate. Explicit. Ridiculous. 6200 words.
"I don't know why you're even fighting me on this. Santa is the most recon motherfucker who ever lived."


( Santa Is Here, Sleighbells Are Ringing )

Dear yagkyas writer (I cannot help thinking "yagkyas yak", but I know you are probably not a yak at all, not that it's any of my business if you are),

Ahem. Hi! Thank you in advance for the story! ( Request thoughts under the cut. )

And for everyone who is not my YAGKYAS writer--as well as my YAGKYAS writer, of course--here is a picture of the, uh, extremely manly Marine Corps Marathon route, which somebody shared on FB last night.

( Really very ... manly. )

Swiped from rubynye: Here's [a meme] where I'll post the working title of a story, and the first sentence, for my most current WIPs. No pairing or summary info.

Right now I have reasonably final titles for everything, but I'll use the handles I use when talking to other people about the stories, in their least summary/pairing-revealing versions.

Also, I only have three WIPs with first lines in place right now, and one of those is a biiiig reach in terms of actually being in progress. o.O

( WIPs! )

...Still not wolf-verse. Also, gen. In fact, this is basically a gen episode tag for something that aired three years ago--specifically, the bit in the first episode where Ray knows what the war's really all about and Brad wants to know how much Ripped Fuel Ray has ingested.

Also, maybe I need an Evan icon?

Many thanks to iulia and petra for listening, and templemarker for cheerleading and for beta in the face of inexplicable technical difficulties.

Gen. Evan and Brad. 1,000 words.
Sergeant Colbert catches Evan literally with his pants down on their first night in Iraq.

( Participant Observer )

First, an awesome, AWESOME thing: missmollyetc has made fanart for the Generation Kill wolf-verse and it is the single greatest thing I have ever seen, and obviously I have no bias here whatsoever. :D

We were talking about what happens when a human Marine and his wolf brother or sister leave the Corps, and I mentioned that there must be all-day briefings about adjusting to civilian life with, of course, power point. A few hours later....

Lupine Civilian Integration: Transition Challenges and Responsibilities

:D :D :D

I have it downloaded on my desktop and I still giggle every time I see it sitting there. Molly made me a POWERPOINT, you guys. <3_____<3


Secondly I am thiiiiiiiiisclose to finishing this GK story I'm working on--it's not quite 17,000 words, and I'm still pretty sure I can bring it home in under 20--but I'm kind of ... stuck? Apparently I don't know what to do with these guys when they're not as miserable as humanly possible. It's so weird.


Thirdly I may or may not have said something completely disastrous to iulia this weekend along the lines of "Man, I want to make a contribution to the genre of Erik/Charles fixit fic where there's no beach divorce, but what would I write?" and then we sat there for hours and hashed out exactly what I should write and figured out how to solve several of the obvious logistical problems and when I woke up this morning the last scene unfolded in my brain and ... this was not on my list of things to write, dammit.

29 – What is your current project or projects?

There are, hm, let's say five. I feel like sharing today, so some of the teasers are in the 300-500 word range.

Awaiting final beta and fixing and a smidge more writing, there's the Vorkosigan/Doctor Who crossover sequel to Signals That Sound in the Dark.

( In which Aral Vorkosigan meets Amy Pond )

Then there are the two I am midway through the actual writing of.

One is a not-wolf-verse Generation Kill story of which this snippet is almost but not quite entirely unrepresentative.

( After this there's a lot more misery, but I like this bit. )

The other one I'm writing is mostly about all the sex Aral and Cordelia don't have before they get married, because I have thought about this and they really never had time for any. So really it's about a lot of things including Aral during the week of the green silk room, wishing he were somewhere else.

( Not anywhere else. He has a destination in mind. )

And, since I've done a bit of writing on each of them, I suppose I can also consider the two Next Things to be also current projects.

The stuff I've got for the next Generation Kill wolf-verse story is pretty rough and will probably change a lot, but this bit should stay pretty much the same.

( How Nate Met Brad. )

And last and least-written but by no means least in any other sense, the next story in The World That You Need, which I have been in the process of circling back around to write since ... last November.

( In which Arkady is having a difficult day. )

21 – Sequels – Have you ever written a sequel to a fic you wrote, and if so, why, and if not, how do you feel about sequels?

Short answer: Yep! Because there was another story that I thought I would like to write that followed from the first one.

Longer answer:

So, here's the thing. I didn't start out overthinking this question, but I did start out thinking that this question had a very specific meaning. Intuitively, I read this question as meaning, Did you ever, after having written a fic and being all finished with it, then write another fic that was of roughly similar size and seriousness which followed sequentially and necessarily from that fic while also being a complete story in itself?

To which the answer is, yes, about three times, and one of those isn't posted yet. So as it turns out I have all these IDEAS about what the word sequel means.

To me a sequel is something different from a series-planned-as-a-series, in which case while each separate story is--hopefully--a sufficiently standalone story that people will not do themselves or me an injury while waiting for the next bit, the reason I keep writing subsequent stories is because the story isn't over yet. That's not the same as "the story was done and then I wrote another story that followed from the first one." So, in my head, the GK wolf-verse doesn't count, nor does The World That You Need, nor Brothelers, nor all those Hawks & Hands prequels, even if they do make me the internet's most prolific Kowalski/Gardino writer.

Speaking of which, The Future in Five Conversations also doesn't count. It's not a sequel to Hawks & Hands, even though it follows necessarily from H&H while also sort of standing on its own as a story because it's not the same magnitude of story. It's a coda, a (five years) belated epilogue tacked on at the end. If I had ever written the epic OT3-trapped-in-Ancient-Egypt story that With the Dying was setup for, it would have been the same thing in reverse.

So, as far as I can tell from a cursory look through my works on AO3, the only stories that do count as sequels in my head are:

Rumored, sequel to Unannounced (House/Wilson outside POV), and
Tell, sequel to Common Language (Stargate SG-1 Bechdel fix-its for the pilot).
Arguably also Spades, which doesn't have to be a sequel to Hunde (Spy Game, Muir/Bishop), but might as well be.

Plus, of course, The One I Haven't Posted Yet, which is a (GEN) sequel to Signals That Sound in the Dark.


( All 30 questions under the cut )