This entry is dedicated to my Best Beloved, who is in a world of hurt thanks to a certain molar that I will not name, now broken, and who routinely reminds me that the best relationship in the world is one that's been around a while ( Read more... )

I was going to do something special for the 100th nominations set, because - that's more than four hundred stories I've recommended. More than four hundred story summaries I've written. You guys have to be getting sick of this, and it seemed like I'd better take the opportunity to do something different ( Read more... )

This is officially the Recs Set That Kicked My Ass. I don't even know why. I love these stories. I want everyone else in the world to love them, too. Usually that's all it takes for me to get into auto-type mode. But this is the fifth incarnation of this set; I've had some variation of it - same theme, slightly different stories - in waiting ( Read more... )

For the record, I totally disagree with the title of this entry, and consider that statement definitive proof that Virginia Woolf was off her rocker, because telephones are not romantic. They are evil. There's a creeping, insidious malevolence about the telephone that most people just don't understand, probably because they were victims, early in ( Read more... )

Best FF That Destroyed Cherished Childhood Memories of Mine, but Will Not Destroy Any Memories of Yours, Unless Your Father Also Sang You to Sleep with "Pinball Wizard." And If He Did, Email Me, Because We Probably Had the Same Father; I Mean, There Couldn't Be Two Men Like That. Tilt, by Resonant, aka resonant8. Due South, Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski. ( Read more... )

A long, long, long time ago I promised my beloved makesmewannadie a post on FF I'd seen that violated a credo of the genre and yet somehow was still good. There really are such stories out there. We've all read them; stories where, for example, Benton Fraser grows tentacles and gets pregnant, even though he is technically male, by Ray Kowalski, who turns out to ( Read more... )

Canon repair is one of the most common and most irritating types of fan fiction. Why common? Well, canon creators seem to delight in breaking our hearts, hurting the characters and destroying the worlds we love. It's only natural to want to make it right, to fix the owie owie badness somehow. (Or, alternatively, bite the creators. Or, in many ( Read more... )

Sometimes it seems to me that the only thing worse than having a family would be not having one. This is, of course, only in reference to those families we don't choose, our families-of-origin. You know who I mean, right? The people you spent three years talking about in therapy? Good ( Read more... )

Do you trust me?

Well, OK. No, really, I don't blame you, and I'm not at all hurt. But do you trust me a little? Even a tiny bit? At least when it comes to fan fiction? Because I am about to ask you to take a link of faith, so to speak. The following stories have only one thing in common: they will be spoiled if you know the usual ( Read more... )

This set is all about what we wear and what it says about us, or rather, what our beloved characters wear and what that says about them, because this is fandom, where we don't so much navel-gaze as gaze into the navels of entirely other people, many of whom are fictional. And we don't limit ourselves to just navels, either ( Read more... )