I misunderstood the point of this ride

Taking a breather mid-work-day after a somewhat nerve-wracking meeting with my boss, so, hello out there. I hope you lot are doing all right.

In the world of Lilith Does Too Many Exchanges, a lull of sorts approaches; the chocolateboxcomm archive is live, and the rarefemslashexchange archive will be soon (hopefully tomorrow). I'm not doing anything but once_upon_fic, which has a pleasantly long creation period, until May at least. Whew. I'm hoping to come out of the winter blues with a more balanced professional life (as I keep getting the hang of this position) and fresh energy to put towards my original projects. Fingers crossed.

Oh, but speaking of Chocolate Box! My gifts are amazing and deserve all the eyes on them.

In The Script of the Future, X-Men Comics, Mystique/Destiny, 721 words, G
A sweet look at the earliest days of their relationship, through Raven's eyes, which includes one of the best and most intimate, lovely uses of her powers as an accessible adaptation and it's so romantic and I just can't. I love them so much.

Gravitating towards you, Sailor Moon, Hotaru/ChibiUsa, G
A beautiful portrait of this pairing; in the creator's own words, a "royal portrait, sort of. Because they can't stop looking at each other instead of the painter." Delicate, graceful lines and gesture, a deeply intimate mood, and an excellent use of a limited palette. Could be appreciated with no canon knowledge whatsoever, I suspect.

In other news, I stumbled across an old fannish friend out of the blue on tumblr this weekend, someone I hadn't spoken to in 10+ years, and I've been feeling a little giddy about it off and on. I mean, on the one hand, help, I'm old. On the other, she's still writing (and tormenting a fascinated audience with her cruel chapter cliffhangers and intense emotional scenes) and it's just so lovely to rediscover a lost connection. It makes me feel more hopeful about the world, or life, or something.

Onwards and upwards and all that jazz!

My ex asked me this weekend whether I'd finished my Yuletide story. No indeed, but it's moving along. (Though I will say - knowing that there's a relatively concrete neuropsychological reason why I struggle so much with time management does not magically solve the problem!)

This fall has been a lot. The hibernation urge is strong as we move into winter. That said, I haven't been entirely unproductive! femslashex reveals went up yesterday:


( Vulcan kisses and Fairy Tale AUs )

It was a fun exercise in drawing for fandoms I've been meaning to for ages, and never gotten around to. I should really do more TOS art (how were these my first??); the retro sci-fi costuming is so much fun! Also I've been loving all the canon Harley/Ivy comics I keep catching glimpses of on tumblr ... every once in awhile I feel so genuinely grateful for the way some segments of culture really have changed (or started to) from the norms of even a decade ago.

My own gift was this lovely little Sailor Moon S interlude, A Little More Time, by SugarFey - a depiction of Haruka and Michiru (with a little Setsuna) in between the two major arcs of that season. I've been having a lot of resurgent Sailor Moon feelings this year, and I was so delighted to get this gift. It's just the right mix of sweetness, hotness and angst!

It's very strange how thoroughly out of the habit of reading fanfic I am lately, even though I've participated in so many exchanges this year. I'm always excited to read my gifts, when I get fic, and writing now and then is a delightful and tantalizing challenge, but ... IDK. I do think Yuletide will be different (even though I never manage to read more than a fraction of the archive), because it's very much its own thing. So much variety! Such novelty! And reading the archive is just a favorite holiday tradition, of course.

The malaise is probably a combination of the fact that I don't have a "main" fandom, that the ones I'm most interested in lately are fairly rare, and that I mostly want to listen to audiobooks while I draw (or ride my bike, or do almost anything else). I should find myself some podfic. I'm sure there must be some for The Locked Tomb, at least?

I'm especially excited for multifandomdoodle. I would love to have more all-art exchanges; I crave ALL THE FANART even more than I used to. I go looking for some after almost every book I read lately (the genre ones, in any case). If I didn't hate running things like this, I would totally start a book fandoms fanart exchange.

So I did a little rehauling of my fanart masterlist recently; I gave bandom and Star Trek expandable sections instead of their own cut tags, and decided I wanted to add dates (well, years) to each piece, since there's such a range (15 years!) and I wanted to preserve the alphabetical organization by fandom

Sadly, a lot of the art is currently covered in Photobucket watermarks, and some of the links are broken (mostly due to the journals where they were posted being locked/deleted), all of which is going to take longer to rectify. I continue to think wistfully about the ever-more-unlikely possibility of local image hosting at the AO3. Ah well.

Doing all that got me thinking about my fannish output by the numbers, though, so I did some VERY self-indulgent messing about.

( A few takeaways, and a personal fannish engagement timeline, 2006-present )

So ... that all happened (and continues to happen).

Appropos of very little: is my writing style kind of ... pompous? I don't necessarily mean fic, just uh. Journaling and such.

Huh. A bit belatedly, I've been reading around through the recent posts people were making about fandom and monetization and "gift economies" etc etc. It's interesting, complicated stuff. ( Herein lies some unedited rambling about personal experiences, and a brief discussion of the differing commercial histories of contemporary fanart and fanfiction. )

Happy New Year, folks. I’m starting off 2019 jet lagged and disoriented, but happy. I missed England so much; the visit was way too short, but lovely.

Yuletide reveals are up, but before I talk about what I wrote, I'd like to mention the three lovely stories I received:

Snapshots, by evewithanapple (That Inevitable Victorian Thing)
A lovely, sweet look at life a few years after the book; cozy polyamorous domestic bliss hidden away from the public eye, but incorporating and transforming the (inevitable) publicity itself.

Good Morning, Ruby Crowns, by smolder (Wayward Children series)
A look at the denizens of the Maine house—the one inhabited by the children who did not wish to return to their other worlds—with some very familiar residents. Takes the two cherished prompts I’ve had in mind since first reading Every Heart A Doorway, combines them, and paints an especially poignant picture of an angry, unbowed post-Narnia Susan Pevensie.

In The Long Ago, by tablelamp (Wayward Children series)
Another take on crossover characters at the Maine house! Includes cross-time mirror travel and a grande dame Alice Liddell, caring for the other lost kids across the years and miles. Delightful.

My own assignment was a delightful blast from the past! I wrote Mina de Malfois and the Changing of the Guard (gen with a bit of Mina/Arc on the side), bringing the eponymous Mina into the contemporary fandom landscape, as well as imagining a bit about her future authorial career and relationship with Archivist12.

It was a pretty fascinating process to write, actually, so ( I’m gonna ramble a bit. )

Sorry, that was very self-indulgent! But if anyone out there wants to talk about Mina de Malfois or the changes in fandom, etc etc, the whole experience has left me a bit hungry for discussion on those subjects. ;) It seems especially pertinent, with the question of platform all up in the air again (although having been mostly out of commission for the last nine or ten days, I have no idea if there have been any new developments in that area). And certainly, it's all making me want to interact with fandom more directly again. I wonder where people are posting their meta these days ...

Oh hey, my first yuletart piece, a Revolutionary Girl Utena jazz age AU, went up on Friday! I had a wonderful time revisiting one of my favorite old anime fandoms, and doing a bit of costume research is always a good time. ALSO, check out my flipping gorgeous giftart from ataratah! A deeply evocative moment between Teen Wolf's leading ladies (while Stiles snoozes, oblivious). <3

Here's some quick processfest catchup!

Day Four: Challenges. ( Head, meet wall. )

Day Five: Collaboration. ( If there's an umlaut, we flip a coin. )

Okay, I feel like that's plenty for one day; I'll try and get to today's prompt tomorrow, I think. I'm ready to go write now. Is the work day over yet?

Um, hey guys! Did not mean to disappear off the face of the earth quite so completely there. I have a lot of things I've been meaning to post about my life, and fan stuff, but ... apparently I have things to say about creator rights, pay for artists, and design contests, specifically regarding the Welcome To Night Vale t-shirt design contest.

I considered locking this post, and reposting it on my public, real-name tumblr, but ... I want to come at this not only from a professional artist standpoint (something that only kind of applies to me anyway), but also as a fan, someone who is always making creative work for the sheer joy of sharing my enthusiasm with other fans. (Maybe a little less often than I wish I could.) Over the last few years, I've increasingly found myself in the middle of a fan/creator divide on certain issues (this comes up a LOT with MCU fandom, sigh), and this seems like a good opportunity to address some of that!

So. This post came to my attention earlier today (via were_duck's twitter). The writer calls out the people of Commonplace Books (/Night Vale) for their design contest, which (they say) constitutes what is called "spec work:" design work undertaken for the possibility of future pay (where there is at least an equal possibility of putting in extensive labor for no compensation).

( An attempt to further explain spec work. )

Now, I think the Night Vale contest is different, ( because it's a fan contest. )

THAT SAID, ( here's why this still matters. )

There is one point made in that above tumblr post that is really important even in this specific situation, this fan/professional grey area (because I do think that doing the work for an official context starts to move across that boundary!): ( who owns the rights? )

Whew, I know that was long, sorry. Maybe I can try and make it a little more concise, later ... I'm behind on my project schedule for the day! Also, I mean, I'm not claiming to be the ultimate authority on any of this: I'm not an experienced working artist or designer. I've done very little paid work (mostly because I don't want my livelihood to depend on navigating this kind of landscape, tbh). I do, however, belong to a sprawling community of creators who base various percentages of their living on work for hire, and the faculty I've just been learning from all have decades of experience with these issues, which they worked hard to pass on to us. I welcome other perspectives, though! These are things I'd like to see discussed on the fannish side sometimes!

Also, for more on the kind of atmosphere that leads artists to be frustrated and wary of these kinds of situations, here's a twitter account dedicated to actual quotations from people trying to hire artists (mostly comic artists) to work for free. Ranges from funny to rage-inducing.

( Spoilery squee for the Elementary finale! )

Sadly, I found the Doctor Who finale to be a bit meh, but that's been fairly common this season.

Meanwhile, this whole Kindle Worlds thing has been showing up all over my fannish and professional circles, and ... I'm just having a lot of trouble mustering up the energy for it. I mean, I realize that this is a bit different, because it's a company as big as Amazon ... but I feel like we've seen all this bullshit before, and it never really seems to go very far. Mostly I think I don't feel like dealing with yet another round of people from the non-fan side of my life talking about fandom (especially since some creator-types inevitably get judgy, bleh). I guess I'll keep a lookout for a decent round-up post.

On a completely different note! Still on the lookout for any particularly funny/awesome/FAVORITE band/musical artist interviews and articles, if anyone feels like sharing! Badass ladies (of any age or genre) especially. :D?

Okay, so in 2015? I am going to muskratjamboree, okay. I had such an amazing time just staying in the hotel and hanging out with so many wonderful fans, but ... I want to go to that dance party next time. ;) And some panels.

I'm following a bunch of the lovely people I met on DW, LJ and/or twitter, and I'm going to post my information over in this post! So if you are new to me ( here is some quick stuff to please read? )

Also ... yes, so, on Saturday my favorite band broke up, in the middle of the convention. ( Cutting for being more or less positive, in case you're not ready for that. )

Anyway, I'm on a bus north, and I think I'm gonna lie back and listen to podfic for a bit. But if intensityboat still has any fans out there (of course we do) ... there may be something for you quite soon. :)

I clearly stayed home a little too long this time, because being back in Vermont is deeply surreal right now. It's so empty here (more than usual, with most of my classmates away). However, I have the apartment to myself (time for ALL THE CLEANING) and two more weeks without classes to keep mixing fannish things with my work schedule.

So hey, snowflake_challenge Day 6: [i]n your own space, pimp three comms or challenges and explain why you love them.

( Three fabulous comms plus reverse bang love! )

Ugh, I love fandom. I am never leaving, at least not for good.

On another note, can I just say that the locked poll I posted yesterday has really not been going the way I more or less expected? (Honestly, any outcome would have made me love my circle, but ... yeah. <3) I'm still waffling a little, though, so feel free to pop over and try to sway me if you haven't yet (ahem).