last secret mutant post of 2012, i promise!
Hi, internet! Happy belated Christmas! And early New Year's!
I'm so sorry for the radio silence--I've been swamped with secret_mutant stuff and it finally finished while I was home in Jersey for Christmas at which point I had, you know, family stuff to do. But I've officially put the lid on secret_mutant for the year, so...yes. I'm mostly back, although I'm leaving to see liveonthesun tomorrow, so take that with a grain of salt.
Secret Mutant was WAY less stressful this year, mostly because AO3 did the hardest bit for me, and that would be that everyone coded their own stories. The biggest stress-inducing thing from last year's exchange was going through about 2/3s of the submitted stories and hand-coding the HTML that people didn't put in themselves. I spent a lot of time drinking and crying. But not this year! THANKS, AO3 ♥
I've already got a couple improvements for next year, as long as the fandom isn't just me, awkwardly clinging to a dormant canon. All deadlines will be Saturdays around noon so I can actually sleep. Final pinch-hit deadline will be the day BEFORE the archive is opening. I'll probably back the whole thing up about a week to give myself some time to do actual holiday baking/shopping/celebrating. And I will DEFINITELY be adding a provision that not all the prompts can be holiday-based to try and avoid assigning four Christmas prompts to a Jewish writer, and also put in a reminder that ERIK IS JEWISH to cut down on the number of "Erik celebrates Christmas" prompts that were giving me rage aneurysms all month.
(I'm still having them every time I refresh AO3. I normally love the influx of holiday fic, but I can't wait til it peters out this year because so much of it seems to involve Erik and Christmas. It's destroying my faith in humanity.)
But, that's all for next year. For now I'm going to actually go through the archive and read all the stories because I've only read a handful so far. (I'm a terrible mod, I know.) And then I'll start on Yuletide!
For completion's sake, I wrote three stories for Secret Mutant Madness:
Adopted Dad Logan On: Famous Cats in History
G, 178 words and 5 pictures, gen - for bessiemaemucho
This was total crack inside joke fic for bessiemaemucho. I occasionally write fanfiction about her cat. She writes Adopted Dad Logan. I thought the logical step was to write Adopted Dad Logan fanfiction about her cat. (One of her prompts was "Logan" and another was "write about kittens.")
to rent this little nest and get a bit of rest
g, 1k, Charles/Erik - for ilovetakahana
PJ pours so much love and positive energy into fandom that I HAD to write her a little something, especially given that one of her prompts was "sleep cute," which is a favorite trope of mine. This is contemplative, older Erik and Charles napping together at their summer home. A thousand words of fluff, pure and simple.
Words and Pictures
PG13, 6k, Charles/Erik - for pearl_o
Okay, so, if the story that was just photoshopped pictures of Renata's cat somehow wasn't the biggest giveaway, this one would have been. Even aside from the header, which was a note proclaiming my everlasting love for Pearl, my apologies for missing her birthday, and generally hearts and flowers, the fact that it's a story about Charles writing and illustrating picture books would have been a neon flashing sign. I also name-drop several of my favorite books and go into detail about my feelings on what makes a good teaching book for young kids and how the best "issue" books are written by not highlighting the "issue" explicitly. Add to that Erik crushing hard on Charles, Erik and Moira being BFF, Moira/Fury, and Lorna...yeah, I wrote this.
Originally it was going to be about twice as long, but I just ran out of time. It works well as a single story, though there are some bits of world building/foreshadowing that are just left hanging, and I can easily write the second part once I get time.
So, that's a lid on Secret Mutant. Next up - an update on my actual life!
I'm so sorry for the radio silence--I've been swamped with secret_mutant stuff and it finally finished while I was home in Jersey for Christmas at which point I had, you know, family stuff to do. But I've officially put the lid on secret_mutant for the year, so...yes. I'm mostly back, although I'm leaving to see liveonthesun tomorrow, so take that with a grain of salt.
Secret Mutant was WAY less stressful this year, mostly because AO3 did the hardest bit for me, and that would be that everyone coded their own stories. The biggest stress-inducing thing from last year's exchange was going through about 2/3s of the submitted stories and hand-coding the HTML that people didn't put in themselves. I spent a lot of time drinking and crying. But not this year! THANKS, AO3 ♥
I've already got a couple improvements for next year, as long as the fandom isn't just me, awkwardly clinging to a dormant canon. All deadlines will be Saturdays around noon so I can actually sleep. Final pinch-hit deadline will be the day BEFORE the archive is opening. I'll probably back the whole thing up about a week to give myself some time to do actual holiday baking/shopping/celebrating. And I will DEFINITELY be adding a provision that not all the prompts can be holiday-based to try and avoid assigning four Christmas prompts to a Jewish writer, and also put in a reminder that ERIK IS JEWISH to cut down on the number of "Erik celebrates Christmas" prompts that were giving me rage aneurysms all month.
(I'm still having them every time I refresh AO3. I normally love the influx of holiday fic, but I can't wait til it peters out this year because so much of it seems to involve Erik and Christmas. It's destroying my faith in humanity.)
But, that's all for next year. For now I'm going to actually go through the archive and read all the stories because I've only read a handful so far. (I'm a terrible mod, I know.) And then I'll start on Yuletide!
For completion's sake, I wrote three stories for Secret Mutant Madness:
Adopted Dad Logan On: Famous Cats in History
G, 178 words and 5 pictures, gen - for bessiemaemucho
This was total crack inside joke fic for bessiemaemucho. I occasionally write fanfiction about her cat. She writes Adopted Dad Logan. I thought the logical step was to write Adopted Dad Logan fanfiction about her cat. (One of her prompts was "Logan" and another was "write about kittens.")
to rent this little nest and get a bit of rest
g, 1k, Charles/Erik - for ilovetakahana
PJ pours so much love and positive energy into fandom that I HAD to write her a little something, especially given that one of her prompts was "sleep cute," which is a favorite trope of mine. This is contemplative, older Erik and Charles napping together at their summer home. A thousand words of fluff, pure and simple.
Words and Pictures
PG13, 6k, Charles/Erik - for pearl_o
Okay, so, if the story that was just photoshopped pictures of Renata's cat somehow wasn't the biggest giveaway, this one would have been. Even aside from the header, which was a note proclaiming my everlasting love for Pearl, my apologies for missing her birthday, and generally hearts and flowers, the fact that it's a story about Charles writing and illustrating picture books would have been a neon flashing sign. I also name-drop several of my favorite books and go into detail about my feelings on what makes a good teaching book for young kids and how the best "issue" books are written by not highlighting the "issue" explicitly. Add to that Erik crushing hard on Charles, Erik and Moira being BFF, Moira/Fury, and Lorna...yeah, I wrote this.
Originally it was going to be about twice as long, but I just ran out of time. It works well as a single story, though there are some bits of world building/foreshadowing that are just left hanging, and I can easily write the second part once I get time.
So, that's a lid on Secret Mutant. Next up - an update on my actual life!