Title: Brewing Up Trouble
Author: halfshellvenus
Fandom: House M.D.
Characters: House, Wilson (Gen)
Rating: PG
Summary: Roomates, rogues… rivals.
Why you should go read it: The snark is just made of awesome, and really, that is what makes House fandom fun is the snark. [Disclaimer: I had requested this on a prompt-offer post with the prompt "House, Wilson, and bad coffee." (I'm looking at you for that inspiration, Dunkin' Donuts.) So I might be slightly biased, but it really is awesome, so go have a read and a smile. :-)]

Stolen from bethbethbeth. The deal is to pull up the stories that you have on AO3 (would work for any archive with hit counts enabled though) to see which are the top 10 in terms of hits. Then, I gather, later you compare to see what shifts. This sounds cool to me, as my overall impression is that there are more people reading (or at least leaving kudos and comments on) the smaller fandoms, like Vorkosigan and Temeraire, but that may not turn out to reflect who's reading, just who's more inclined to give feedback. So, here goes, though I'm going to go from 10-1:

10: The Morning After (HP, SS/HG/LM, Explicit, "Hermione rolled over to her left and found something in her way. Rolling over to her right, she found another obstruction. This woke her up enough to wonder what could be crowding her." 314 hits)

9: How Hermione Got Her Groove Back (HP, SS/HG, Explicit, "Hermione finds herself alone in the Headmistress’ office one afternoon with Snape’s portrait, and things get … interesting." 316 hits)

8: Burnt Offerings (Vorkosigan, Miles & Cordelia, Gen, "On the anniversary of his father’s death, Miles ponders the way they mark it." 317 hits)

7: Wherever I May Roam (DW, Jack/Doctor, Teen, "It was supposed to be a simple stop to pick up supplies at the famed market of Avicephalon." 331 hits)

6: Moulding to the Pitcher (Temeraire, Gong Su, Gen, "The chance to serve a Celestial had seemed a blessing to Gong Su, one normally reserved for those who served the imperial family. And it was, but frequently not in the ways he had imagined." 406 hits)

5. Keeping the Goal in Sight (Vorkosigan, Ekaterin/Miles, Gen, "There must be a reason she needs to learn Comparative Botanical Genetics, right?" 413 hits)

4. Never Chose This Way (Vorkosigan/BtVS, Ivan/Byerly, Teen, "Ivan and Byerly are on their way home from Beta Colony when something goes very wrong. Gigantically wrong, you might say." 442 hits)

3. The Doors We Open and Close Each Day (HP, SS/RL, Teen, "Young Severus Snape was packed off to Hogwarts with instructions to ingratiate himself to the pureblooded Slytherins who would surely be his House-mates. By the time it’s his turn to sit under the Sorting Hat, he has other ideas." 458 hits)

2. A Perfectly Normal Day (HP/Temeraire, CW/HG, Gen, "Just when Charlie thought he'd seen everything, along came Iskierka." 460 hits)

1. An Ordinary Man (Vorkosigan, Ivan/Byerly, Explicit, "Byerly gets Ivan drunk, and one thing leads to another." 557 hits)

==================================================================

Some musings. An Ordinary Man is the first completed fanfic I posted online. So my first thought was, "It has the most hits because it's the oldest, so it had more time to collect them." However, it was not the first uploaded to AO3. That honor goes to #2, A Perfetly Normal Day. It'd be interesting to compare in a few months or a year to see how things shift (or don't).

Stats as of right now:

Fandoms: Vorkosigan 4, HP 3, Temeraire 2, Crossover 2, DW 1, BtVS 1
Ratings: Gen 4, Explicit 3, Teen 3
Ship type: Slash 4, Het 3, None 2, Multi 1 (Misleading, because some have implied or background ships but are basically genfic. Could also read as Slash 4, None 4, Het 1, Multi 1.)

I'm not sure any of those stats reflect the overall percentages of my fic. Even though I think of myself as a slasher, since that's where I started out, I've written far more het, mostly SS/HG, though of late there's been more and more gen or quasi-gen. It is interesting that VK fandom does have the most hits represented, as that was the impression I had going in, even though I've written comparatively little of it.

Meanwhile, I need to try and do a little writing this afternoon before it's time to run off to dinner and a blues concert.

Is there one? I mean, come on, if ever a "what did they declare this day for" thingy demanded a ficathon, surely it's National Whipped Cream Day. I mean, if we added a ficathon, we could probably very quickly make it International Whipped Cream Day.

So, who's with me? Either find someplace already running one, or have our own in comments here! Any and all fandoms and pairings (or more, or gen), obviously. Someone on Twitter already asked me for Jane/Maura whipped cream fic. Alas, I don't even know a fandom that has both a Jane and a Maura. But surely someone does!

ETA: Apparently that'd be Rizzoli & Isles, the new Cagney & Lacey, which I'm going to have to check out. Meanwhile, attempting to churn out (heh) at least one ficlet to get things rolling before I have to run to work.

ETA2: Mini-masterlist

I Can Make It Better by huskyfriends (Firefly, River/Kaylee, PGish?)

Sweet Enough by firefly124 (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow/Tara, R)

Intolerance by sc010f (Sherlock, John & Sherlock & Lestrade, PG-13)

Hot Chocolate by firefly124 (Harry Potter, Snape/Hermione, PG-13)

Mouthwatering by alisanne (Harry Potter, Bill/Neville, G)

Something New by firefly124 (Doctor Who, Nine/Rose/Jack, PG-13)

Sweet Dessert by huskyfriends (Torchwood, Jack/Ianto, NC-17)



Off to work now. Keep 'em coming!

ETA 3: Links to old fics that involve whipped cream are fair game too!

What a lovely way to spend a lazy New Year's morning: reading River fic. And I'm just over halfway through, so people really got tons written in a single day. (I suspect use of Vortex Manipulators. Very bad for you. Ought to give it up.)

There's River/Doctor (and not just Ten and Eleven), River/Amy, River/Jack, and genfic. Lots of good stuff, whatever your pleasure. If that sounds like fun, pop over to the spoiler_song One Night of Writing masterlist and start reading!

ETA: Title edited for clarity, because while River Tam is awesome in her own right and totally deserves her own ficathon, this one was for River Song.

I received a couple of fic-related pretties.



Song is the Snupin DH fix-it I wrote for skitty_kat's lovely and inspiring drawing Bribing the Ferryman during the Trading Places Challenge at lupin_snape. I'm tickled to learn it's a featured story this month.

Thank you, mods at TPP!

But wait, there's more!



I'm also on this week's quiz at quiz_sshg. This week's theme is crossovers, and the story there is Who Are You?, a Doctor Who crossover written for aleysiasnape during Zibitcon Envy at hpcon_envy to the prompt "Severus and Hermione meeting the 10th Doctor and making an entirely understandable—and incorrect—assumption about his identity."

Thank you, mods at quiz_sshg! Now, the rest of you, go play, and see if you can figure out which passage (if any) come from "Who Are You?" and the other featured stories!

There's actually a third fic-related thing this week, but no graphic to go with: as of Monday, I've completed a full year of consistently meeting the 5_for_five writing challenge of writing at least 500 words at least five times a week.

Thank you, lady_rhian for coming up with the idea and sshg316 for creating the 5_for_five comm as a motivator to Just Keep Writing!

That'd also make this post today's grats for the Gratitude Project, though I've got quite a lot of catching up to do with that. Oops.

Title: The Box Below
Author: dsudis
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters/Rating: Amelia, Eleventh Doctor, G
Summary: If time can be rewritten, then this is an early draft.
Why to read it: This is a great peek into wee Amelia's mind and an alternate look at how things could have gone.

Title: The Avengers
Author: ubiquirk
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Giles, Faith
Summary: Each estranged in their lives, Faith and Giles have formed a ‘working partnership between equals.’ But something’s got the demons of London in an uproar, and the duo’s first big case as ‘Peel and Steed’ proves tougher than expected … on multiple levels.
Why you should read this: It's a very cool story that's both a bit actiony and big on the character development. It's third in a series, but it stands alone as well. It takes a comment made by Giles at the end of the "No Future for You" arc in the comics and explores what that might mean for these two as they learn to work together as partners rather than Watcher and Slayer.

So, my understanding of how drawbles work is that they're supposed to take less than 30 min. In that case, this isn't a drawble, because while the actual drawing took about that, scanning it in and then making it visible once scanned in took another half hour. Honestly, my lines don't even look that light on the paper, but they looked barely there when I scanned it in. I fiddled with contrast and brightness a little on Photobucket to make it visible, so it looks like the paper is kind of gray, which it isn't. It's basic white Strathmore sketch paper, with an HB graphite pencil. And I started with this request, because it was very easy to find a post-Dopplegangland Willow screencap for reference.

I don't think she looks particularly like Willow, but she does look passably human and female, which is a start. The reference line to angle the eyes for the way she has her head turned really did not work at all though. Or I didn't follow it properly. Or something. ( Drawble beneath cut. )

May try charcoal for the next. Both because I used to like that the best back when I was taking art classes and because maybe it'll scan in better. Or else it'll smear all over the scanner. Hmm. Might need to rethink that.