Dira Sudis

Snagged from rubynye:

I have 346 works archived at AO3. Pick a number from 1 (the most recent) to 346 (the first thing I posted there), and I'll tell you three things I currently like about it.

Because I am a sucker for memes. And this is about how much brain power I have left today. :D

From assorted people, the first lines of my last 21 stories, in reverse chronological order.


( 21 First Lines )

So, I have to confess, when I first started getting questions on the meme and comparing them to the list of characters I made before posting, I quickly realized that I had broken the meme. I mean, okay, in rapid succession Arya Stark woke up married to James Hathaway and then Teal'c. And Aral Vorkosigan had a past romantic relationship with Georgia Mason. It just ... no.

So I made a new list, had random.org generate a random order for me, and went again. With much less horrifying results, although there was still one totally unanswerable question.

Here's my (second) list of fifteen characters:

1. Aral Vorkosigan
2. Nate Fick (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Nate)
3. Sam Carter
4. Konstantin Bothari
5. Tim "Doc" Bryan (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Doc)
6. Daniel Jackson
7. Alys Vorpatril
8. Vala Mal Doran
9. Cameron Mitchell
10. Ray Person (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Ray)
11. Teal'c
12. Gregor Vorbarra
13. Simon Illyan
14. Brad Colbert (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Brad)
15. Walt Hasser (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Walt)


And here are the questions!

( All twenty-nine of them under the cut, including what happens when Gregor Vorbarra joins a band of space pirates, ways things could turn out better for Bothari, and which of these fifteen murders which other one. Plus assorted people waking up married and the one question I couldn't answer at all. )

One year ago today there was a meme going around and I posted about my top ten stories on the AO3 by hits. I was sort of curious to see how it changed over time, so now I will do it again!

( Under the cut... )

So six stories fell completely out of my top ten in the past year to be replaced by six new stories I wrote this year. That means I'm writing stuff people really like lately, or the AO3 is getting a lot more traffic to new fic this year than it did before, or, more likely, some analysis-defying combination of both.

And now I will go back to pretending I don't stare at my AO3 hits all the time. Until next year. *g*

"You" in this case being riverlight.

1) Tell me about a place you find particularly beautiful or that you particularly love.

One of my favorite spots in Milwaukee is the top of the hill in Kilbourn Park. The hill used to be the city's underground water reservoir, so it rises with very man-made suddenness from the landscape, diverting one of the city's major east-west roads in a curve around it. I was totally mystified and fascinated by it the first time I drove that way, and went back that night to climb the hill and wander around it. The top of the hill gives a view all the way out to Lake Michigan over the northern end of downtown, and if you're there on the hour you can hear church bells chiming, and it's very quiet and serene.

2) Tell me a little bit about your relationship with T.S. Eliot.

My relationship with Eliot began when I was fifteen ( ... )

3) Where would you like to travel next?

Boringly, I'd like to go back to England and see a bunch of places I saw eleven years ago again, and hit other places around the UK that I missed. Likewise New York, though in that case it was only four months ago. Which new place next, hm. Italy, I think; I'd love to see where my mother's family comes from, although this time of year hanging out on the sunnier bits of the Adriatic coast also sounds really appealing. *g*

4) When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

I remember being three or four and sitting at the dining room table while my older brothers did schoolwork, very intently pretend-writing on a sheet of paper. I didn't know how to read or write yet but I knew I wanted to put words down on paper. By the time I was seven, and my second grade teacher made stories we wrote into little books by spiral-binding them, I was intensely proud to be "published". So I don't remember ever first knowing. Writing was always there.

5) What's your favorite scent?

Oranges, of scented things. Frying onions or warm bread, of foods. Books, of course. *g*

6) What's your favorite joke? (Can you remember jokes? I can't; I really literally can only remember one.)

I can only remember terrible (in the stupid, not vile, way) jokes. My favorite is this one:

How is a duck the same as a bicycle?

( punchline! )

:D :D :D

7) If you could have lived in any historical era/setting, where would it have been?

Oh man, I wouldn't, unless you count the future and I could leap up. I'm too curious about what happens next to ever be willing to step backward (to say nothing of too conscious of how much hard-won progress has been made in living conditions and social justice to bring us to the present time--the past was a scary, scary place). Also I would be irresistibly tempted to meddle with everything if I were knowingly transported into the past.

That said, I sometimes feel sad about having been born too late to see the Moon landing and experience that first step of humanity into space; if I had to live anywhere in history having been born about forty years earlier would have been interesting and probably not unsurvivably awful.

But I'm an optimist, so I assume I'll live to see people set foot on Mars and send missions to extrasolar planets and every other what next that I can't imagine, which will be even better. :)

ETA: I have now spent half an hour grimly contemplating my absolute moral responsibility to do whatever I can to avert the 9/11 attacks in the event I am transported back in time. I am about to get in a car for six hours to go spend a weekend with my family. MUST THINK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. PUPPIES. MUST THINK ABOUT PUPPIES. /ETA


Anybody who made it to the end of that and would like to answer questions, say the word and I will ask some!

Pick up the nearest book to you.
Turn to page 45.
The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

It was also the most diverse Cabinet in history.


...That sounds a bit promising.

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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! )

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. )

27 – Where is your favorite place to write, and do you write by hand or on the computer?

Most of my writing is done sitting on my couch. Occasionally I move to my desk, when it's not hugely piled with stuff, or to the kitchen table, and occasionally I manage to take my laptop to bed and don't completely lose momentum and read fic until I fall asleep, but mainly I write while sitting on my couch. Usually sideways, facing west.

For me a piece of writing isn't "real" until it's on the computer. Anything I do longhand is just a first try--which means that writing longhand often is easier and often is really helpful, because I can get myself unstuck sometimes by lowering the wall, lowering the stakes, telling myself, well, it's just on paper, it's just a first try. And then even if what I write down is totally wrong, I'm that much closer to figuring out what I do want to do. And even when I'm comparatively close to what I want in a paper draft, things get tweaked a lot as I type them up. So I do longhand writing when I'm epically stuck, or when I'm away from my own computer but have paper and a pen handy, but then it has to be on my computer before it's really written.


( All 30 questions under the cut )