Electromagnetic Candy

God, 2026 simultaneously seems to be going by very fast and to have lasted at least a decade so far. By the calendar, though, we have now finished February, so here's the usual monthly book round-up.

( 10. Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts )

( 11. Twelve Months by Jim Butcher )

( 12. The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike )

( 13. Mule Boy by Andrew Krivak )

( 14. Monstress Volume 10: Hollow Gods by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda )

( 15. Space Posters & Paintings: Art About NASA by Bill Schwartz )

Looky, I've finally finished with my genprompt_bingo card for last round! Maybe eventually I'll even manage to start on the current one. And perhaps that will involve less of me writing about things like eating spiders or fantasizing about killing children, but, hey, I also wrote about baking cookies and a girl and her uncle being sweater buddies and watching Shrek, so, eh. It all evens out, right?

Title: Some Children to Make Into Corpses
Fandom: Gravity Falls
Characters/Relationships: Bill Cipher, Bill's hatred for Dipper and Mabel
Rating/Warnings: Teen. I've used "Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings" on this one, because I feel like not giving it a "Major Character Death' warning would be wrong, but giving it one would be misleading. But this does feature deaths of alternate versions of the kids, as well as versions in Bill's imagination, and while it's not super gory, if children dying horribly isn't something you want in your psyche at all, now's the time to bail out.
Tags: Bill Cipher in the Theraprism, POV Bill Cipher, Bill's All-Seeing Eye, The Multiverse, Bill hates those kids, Descriptions of violence against children, Descriptions of child death
Length: ~1100 words
Summary: There aren't any universes where he wins.
Author's Notes: This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "child endangerment." The prompt got me thinking about that page in TBOB where Bill declares that there's only one universe in which the kids survived the summer, and the question of whether that's true or not... which led me to further questions I've pondered about the nature of the multiverse in GF and Bill's place in it, which in turn led to this. Whatever this is.

Some Children to Make Into Corpses

The threesentenceficathon is still ongoing -- well, technically it's always ongoing, I suppose, as it never closes for fills -- but after a several-days-long burst of activity on it, I kind of petered out and never got around to going back to it, so I suppose that means it's time to repost what I wrote for it here.

Unsurprisingly, it's mostly Gravity Falls stuff, as GF is still firmly holding onto its Current Obsession status, but I at least managed a few other things, as well. Note that the GF stuff in particular is mostly super spoilery and some of it is maybe a bit dubconny.

Anyway, here we are, my Three Sentence output:

( Disco Elysium )

( Doctor Who )

( Gravity Falls )

Yeah, OK, here's another bingo card drabble. Only one more square before I finish this card and can move on to the new(er) one! Pity I have absolutely no idea what to to with it yet.

Title: All Part of Mabel's Multi-Media Memory Extravaganza!
Fandom: Gravity Falls
Characters/Relationships: Mabel Pines
Rating/Warnings: G, none
Tags: Baking, Cookies, Post-Canon, Mabel is adorable but also a little intense and I love that about her, Fluff, Drabble
Length: 100 words
Summary: Sometimes you just have to express yourself with cookies.
Author's Notes: A lil' 100-word drabble written for Gen Prompt Bingo. The prompt was "baking," and I just could not make myself write anything but Mabel for it.

All Part of Mabel's Multi-Media Memory Extravaganza!

All right, only very slightly belated, here's my year-end fic-writing round-up, as promised!

First, the list of what I posted this year (which includes a couple of things written at the end of last year for a challenge thingy that didn't reveal until January):

"Song in the Dark" (Gravity Falls, Ford/OFC Siren, Bill/Ford, 2,317 words, written for the Western Title Challenge)

"Run Away Home" (Gravity Falls, Stan, 100 words, written for the Western Title Challenge)

"Back from Outer Space" (Gravity Falls, Bill/Ford, Stan, 7,354 words)

"Here Lies Stan" (Gravity Falls, Stan, Caryn Pines, 98 words, written for the 3 Sentence Ficathon)

"Meddling in the Affairs of Humans" (Doctor Who, Susan, Barbara/Ian, 3,986 words, written for Candy Hearts Exchange)

"You" (Gravity Falls, Stan & Ford, 1,167 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo)

"A Stimulant in the Morning (The Impossible People Remix)" (Doctor Who, Twelfth Doctor/Missy, Twelfth Doctor & Clara, 1,678 words, written for Doctor Who and Related Fandoms Remix)

"A Series of Notes Attached to a UNIT Equipment Requisition Form" (Doctor Who, Third Doctor & the Brigadier, 1,093 words, written for the Unsent Letters Exchange)

"Congratulations on Your Apotheosis" (Gravity Falls, Bill/Ford, 28,413 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo)

"Meanwhile, Donna" (Doctor Who, Donna & Rose Noble, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo)

"We Don't Talk About That Here" (The Orville/Gravity Falls, Isaac, Sheriff Blubs, mentioned Blubs/Durland and Claire/Isaac, 1,611 words, written for A Ficathon Goes Into a Bar)

"At Least You Don't Have Food Poisoning" (RimWorld, OCs, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo)

"Maybe This Time" (Doctor Who, Twelfth Doctor/Missy, 2,599 words, written for the Just Married Exchange)

"Shooting Stars Break the Mold" (Gravity Falls, Ford & Mabel, 1,521 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo)

"A Reevaluation of Prior Data" (The Orville, Kaylon Primary, 100 words, written as a treat for Seasons of Drabbles)

"Only Mistaken" (Gravity Falls, Ford & various, 600 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo)

And now, the usual questions and answers. Once again, I've copied the same ones over from last year, because I'm far too lazy to go looking for new ones.

( Q&A )

Whoops, I got this new genprompt_bingo bingo card a few days ago, and then neglected to post it here.

Of course, I've still only written two things for the previous bingo card, but I'll catch up eventually. Surely. I mean, I did last time, right?

Anyway, here it is:

( New card )

As usual, I'm not at all sure at first glance what to do with that, but I'm kind of eying the bottom row.

Somehow it's this late in the year already, so here's the list for November:

( 73. 10-Minute Strength Training Exercises for Seniors by Ed Deboo )

( 74. False Value by Ben Aaronovitch )

( 75. Physics for Cats by Tom Gauld )

( 76. Wastelands: The New Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams )

( 77. Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach )

( 78. Doctor Who and the War Games by Malcolm Hulke )

( 79. Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan )

( 80. Out There: The Science Behind Sci-Fi Film and TV by Ariel Waldman )

Another AO3 meme that's been going around. I'm sure I've done this one before, but it was probably quite a long time ago. Not sure it's anywhere near as interesting as some of the other such exercises, or, rather, I doubt my results will be as interesting. But lets' see how it shakes out:

From your AO3 Works page, look at the tags and find the answers to these questions.

Current number of works on AO3: 363

1. Under what rating do you write most?

Ratings break down like this:

General Audiences (165)
Teen And Up Audiences (160)
Mature (23)
Explicit (15)

I'll admit, I often just sort of slap a "teen" on things by default, because there are, or might be, adult themes and situations and swearing and disturbing elements and other things you don't necessarily want to put in front of little kids, even if only in passing. Interesting to see that "general audiences still beats it out, if only just barely.

I'm always kind of surprised when I realize just how little E-rated fic I've written. I guess because it stands out in my mind. But clearly I'm falling down on the smut.

2. What are your top 3 fandoms?

Depends on how you count the two main incarnations of Doctor Who. I tag for whether it's Doctor Who (2005) or Doctor Who (1963), of course, but it's all Doctor Who to me, and it all also gets the blanket Doctor Who tag. So, since Who shows up on this list twice, I'm going to give you top four:

Doctor Who (91)
Good Omens (TV) (76)
Doctor Who (2005) (59)
Farscape (55)

That Good Omens tops the list if you remove the general Doctor Who tag isn't surprising, as the height of my GO obsession coincided with the point where I was doing blackout bingos on genprompt_bingo, so I wrote a gazillion ficlets for it.

I am more than a little surprised that Farscape is still hanging in there! I wrote a lot of fic for it back in the day (obviously), but it's been a very long time. The next fandom on the list, though -- Disco Elysium -- doesn't even come close.

3. Which character do you write about most?

Aziraphale with 60 fics. He is one busy little angel! Crowley is right behind him with 58.

4. What are the 3 top pairings you've written?

Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) (55)
Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi (20)
Claire Finn/Isaac (The Orville) (8)

Like I said, Aziraphale is one busy little angel. Although I think a lot of those A/C fics are just sort of... rather gently shippy. Like much of the show.

5. What are the top 3 additional tags?

Angst (38)
Episode Related (37)
Crossover (34)

I feel like I'm not nearly as much of an angst writer these days as I was, say, when I was in Blake's 7 fandom. (Which, let's be honest, was asking for it!) But it seems my angsty legacy is still going strong.

I doubt these tags actually tell you a whole lot, though, because I am admittedly an undertagger. I've been trying to be a bit less minimalist these days, especially in the more recent, younger-skewing fandoms, because people seem to expect more tagging. But I'm never gonna go giant-wall-o'-tags like the Kids These Days. Nor do I want to. Anyway, the point here is that crossovers will always get tagged as crossovers, because I consider that an important and essential tag, and I do try to remember to use the episode-related tag for fics that relate to a specific episode (missing scenes, etc). But there are plenty of things it's probably not even going to occur to me to tag, no matter how many times they come up.

I can never resist a fic-related meme, so of course I had to do this one I've seen going around lately:

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? One fic per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

For each letter, I've just picked the one that comes first alphabetically. I will note that this leaves a couple of my stories out of consideration entirely because they start with non-letter characters. But never mind those, let's se what the alphabet gives us.

A - After the World (Good Omens (TV)/Disco Elysium, Aziraphale, Crowley, Harry du Bois (sort of))
B - Back from Outer Space (Gravity Falls, Bill Cipher/Ford Pines)
C - Captive Audience (The Good Place, Vicky, Janet)
D - The Dad Joke (Undertale, Sans/Toriel, Frisk)
E - Earthly Pleasures (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale/Crowley)
F - Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope (Disco Elysium, Harry du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi)
G - Galactic Peace Never Solved Anything (Farscape, John Crichton)
H - Hair Today, Gun Tomorrow (Blake's 7, Jenna Stannis, Jarriere, Jarvik)
I - I Could Give All to Time Except (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale)
J - Just a Few Bonecalls (Undertale, Sans/Toriel, Papyrus)
K - Keep One Place, Just for Us (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale, Crowley)
L - The Last Stop on the Tour (Doctor Who/Once Upon a Time, Clara Oswald, Emma Swan)
M - Maybe This Time (Doctor Who, Twelfth Doctor/Missy)
N - The Natural Attraction of Opposites (physics anthropomorfic, electron/positron)
O - The Observer Effect (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale/Crowley, Gabriel, Beelzebub)
P - The Pale, the Sea, and the Shore (Disco Elysium/Our Flag Means Death, Lena, Edward "Blackbeard" Teach)
Q - A Question of Interior Design (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale/Crowley)
R - A Re-Examination of the Origins of the Doctor Myth (Doctor Who, OCs)
S - Save the Date (Doctor Who, Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, multiple Doctors)
T - That Thing They Say About the Road to Hell (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale, hints of Aziraphale/Crowley)
U - Uncommanded and Unforbidden (Good Omens (TV), Aziraphale/Crowley)
V - Vaster Than Empires (Doctor Who/Farscape, Zotoh Zhaan/Jabe)
W - Waning (The A Capella Version) (Farscape, Stark)
X -
Y - You (Gravity Falls, Stan Pines, Ford Pines)
Z - The Zombie Master, or PGP of the Living Dead (Blake's 7, Kerr Avon, Roj Blake, Vila Restal, Del Tarrant, Dayna Mellanby, Soolin)

That's 25 letters represented out of 363 fics. You'd think by now I'd have written something starting with X, but no.

And, man, that's an interesting list of fics. I suppose it does actually represent my fic-writing range pretty well? Certainly there's a good mix of fandoms (with that period where I spewed forth insane numbers of Good Omens fics accurately represented). And quite a time span, too, with a couple of things I wrote just this year, and a few I wrote decades ago in what feels like an entirely different world, when I was an entirely different person and fandom was, you guessed it, entirely different. Or at least very different, anyway.

You know I have to post about this sort of thing here when it happens, because it makes me go "Eeeeeeeeeee!" a lot in excited, delighted tones, and I can't not share: someone did a little fanart sketch for my Gravity Falls fic "Congratulations on Your Apotheosis." And it is awesome to see not just a visual representation of something in my fic, but of this particular moment in this particular fic. Eeeeee!

Note: Art is spoilery for a climactic moment in said fic, may seem a bit weird if you're not familiar with the show (or maybe even if you are, depending on your shipping opinions, I suppose), and may not be viewable if you don't have a Tumblr account (which is one of the reasons why I have one, even though I never post there).

Since authors have been revealed now, I can admit to writing this little thing for the Just Married exchange:

Title: Maybe This Time
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters/Relationships: Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Rating: Apparently I rated it Teen, but it might not even merit that much.
Summary: Doctor/Master divorces: one. Annulments: several. Marriages: it seems even they've lost count. But, hey, at least this marriage wasn't their fault! Well, OK. It was only indirectly their fault.
Tags: Accidental marriage(s), Annulment(s), previous Doctor/Master divorce, Banter, Missy's time in the Vault, Humor, A little bittersweet at the end
Length: ~2600 words
Author's Notes: Written for natequarter for the Just Married exchange, for the absolutely delightful prompt suggestion of "accidentally got married yet again and are trying to annul the latest marriage, but can't get it done because all their other marriages keep on getting in the way."

Maybe This Time

This month's recurring elements: children and space. No space children, though, as far as I recall.

( 52. The Body Library by Jeff Noon )

( 53. Such a Fun Age by Kylie Reid )

( 54. They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers by Sarah Scoles )

( 55. The Best of Damon Knight by Damon Knight )

( 56. The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing )

( 57. Accidental Astronomy: How Random Discoveries Shape the Science of Space by Chris Lintott )

( 58. The Box-Car Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner )

( 59. The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi )

( 60. Wandering in the Clear Light of New Mexico by David Ryan )

And that's half a year's reading down! Here's the latest:

( 39.Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe )

( 40. Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer )

( 41. Unseen Universe by Caroline Harper )

( 42. Mrs, Presumed Dead by Simon Brett )

( 43. The Pursuit of Grouchiness: Oscar the Grouch's Guide to Life by Oscar the Grouch )

( 44. The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay )

( 45. One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene Weingarten )

Dear Just Married Creator,

First off, let me assure you that my tastes are really broad. I like everything from heart-warming fluff to full-bore tragedy, and the whole spectrum in between. I also tend to be very character-focused, so while plot is fine and there are some requested prompts here that could make for fun plotty stuff, I do regard it as entirely optional and I can be 100% happy with, say, fic that's nothing but two characters talking to each other, or that's largely just introspection. Any rating is fine, but when it comes to sex scenes, I prefer them to feel like they're strongly based in the characters, rather than the characters mostly just being there as a vehicle for the porn, if that makes sense. Honestly, I care less about precisely what they're be doing in bed than about whether they feel like themselves while they're doing it.

( general likes, DNWs, etc )

THE REQUESTS

I've included a few thoughts and general comments here, although I think overall the requested tags lists should provide enough in the way of prompts, and should speak for themselves pretty well, so I mostly haven't discussed them in detail. I will add here that you can feel absolutely free to interpret any of those prompts in any way you like. Stretch 'em, subvert 'em, come at 'em from weird angles or in ways that only technically fit... or play them absolutely straight. It's all good!

( Disco Elysium )


( Doctor Who (1963) )


( Doctor Who (2005) )


( Farscape )


( Gravity Falls )


( The Orville )

Still working on my old bingo card. I'm determined to get it finished before I tackle the newer one. Only one more square to go, now! If only I had any faintest idea what to do with it, other than what I did with it the last time the prompt came up on one of these cards. Anybody have any suggestions for what you might like to see me write for "We're Surrounded!" that don't involve writing a lot of action or plot? I mean, I don't know what the odds of me taking any suggestions are, but at this point anything to get the ol' creative juices flowing is probably welcome.

Anyway, here's the penultimate one:

Title: Meanwhile, Donna
Fandom: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Characters/Relationships: Donna Noble & Rose Noble
Rating: General Audiences
Summary: She's forgotten something important. Again.
Tags: Episode Related, Wish World, Drabble
Length: 100 words
Author's Notes: Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "May morning." I have to say, I found "The Reality War" very disappointing, but I did love "Wish World" taken on its own, and how could I not write something involving it for that prompt? So, here's a drabble.

Meanwhile, Donna