ariadnes_string

I’m so sorry for the late letter! If you’ve already started something, and it doesn’t intersect with these prompts/ideas, don’t worry about it--just go with your idea!

In any case, thank you so much for writing a story for me! Any fic in these fandoms would make me happy, so please just write what seems fun and interesting to you! I saw this phrase in someone’s dear author letter once, and it perfectly expresses my feelings: If you come to a place where you think you can either write a good story or make me happy, write a good story.

If it’s helpful, here are some things about my general preferences:

( general preferences )

Optional prompts in alphabetical order

( Divergent series )

( Killjoys )


( The Pacific )


( Twelve Houses )

Have fun!

Serendipitously, several wonderful stories have just appeared based on prompts from the 2013 Running Hot fever fic meme.

The Sleepover (1624 words) by thirdbird
Chapters: 1/2
Fandom: Cabin Pressure
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Martin Crieff & Douglas Richardson
Characters: Martin Crieff, Douglas Richardson, Arthur Shappey, Helena Richardson
Additional Tags: Humor, Sickfic, Fever, Friendship, gen - Freeform
Summary:

For ariadnes_string's prompt in her Running Hot 3 fever fic meme(oh god TWO years ago?? can it be?): "Douglas is ill. What is Douglas like when he's ill? I can't imagine--but I'm sure you can, dear writer! He's feverish, coughing, sniffling, & etc. And the worst part is, he can't go home to Helena (this takes place in the era of Helena) because there's only one thing Helena loathes more than people who aren't pilots, and that's sick people. So he decides to spend the night in Gertie. Not the best plan, I'll grant you, but he's sick, isn't he? And [person/persons] discover he's there. Comfort (and/or hurt) follows."

off the clock (2292 words) by topaz, t_fic, topaz119
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Unusuals
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Allison Beaumont/Jason Walsh, Casey Shraeger & Jason Walsh, Davis Nixon/Casey Shraeger
Characters: Allison Beaumont, Casey Shraeger, Jason Walsh
Additional Tags: Partnership, Male-Female Friendship, Female Friendship
Summary:

"Oh, my God." Casey came to a dead halt two steps into the diner. "Seriously?"

Also:

Fire and Ice, by astrofig for this prompt: Tony is seriously, painfully sick and Loki doesn't have a second thought about shifting into his jotun form to use touch and body contact to cool him down.

I’ve never shut down the meme, and people have added a few more prompts recently. Please feel free to fill anything that’s on there.

Sadly, I’m way too busy this summer to launch another round of Running Hot, but if anybody wants to take responsibility for setting it up, please do so! There’re collections already set up on AO3.

The weather has been feverish around here for the past two weeks (ie., over 98.6), but in better news I finally saw Mad Max: Fury Road over the weekend!

Happy summer, folks!

I’m so sorry for the late letter! If you’ve already started something, and it doesn’t intersect with these prompts/ideas, don’t worry about it--just go with your idea!

In any case, thank you so much for writing a story for me! Any fic in these fandoms would make me happy, so please just write what seems fun and interesting to you! I saw this phrase in someone’s dear author letter once, and it perfectly expresses my feelings: If you come to a place where you think you can either write a good story or make me happy, write a good story.

If it’s helpful, here are some things about my general preferences:

( general preferences )

Optional prompts in alphabetical order

( City of Stairs )

( Imperial Radch )

( Raven Cycle )

( Rivers of London )


Thank you!

Oh wow...I see I haven't posted since the middle of March. I knew it had been a while, but I didn't realize it had been that long. Oops. It's been a busy spring, I guess.

In the meantime, the rarelywritten archive went live yesterday, and I got the most lovely Imperial Radch fic from teaotter. It's a beautifully written piece that manages to be both a slice-of-life glimpse of the world aboard Mercy of Kalr and take on some of the bigger existential questions of the novels.

whatever a sun will always sing (1107 words) by Teaotter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kalr Five & Mercy of Kalr
Characters: Kalr Five, Mercy of Kalr
Summary:

Old dreams, new opportunities: Kalr Five has a choice to make.

I wrote two fics for the challenge, my assignment and a pinch hit. My assignment was an Imperial Radch fic for teaotter, which means we wrote for each other--something that's never happened to me before.

Benefit (2308 words) by ariadnes_string
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Seivarden Vendaai, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen | Breq
Additional Tags: Pining, Masks, Post-Book(s)
Summary:

“How can it be, that you, who’ve worn so many faces, should remain always the same, while I, who’ve had the same face for a thousand years, have changed so much that I am unrecognizable to myself?”

And then I picked up a Cabin Pressure pinch hit, because Cabin Pressure pinch hits are the best. I had a great time writing this one.

The Loophole (2210 words) by ariadnes_string
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Cabin Pressure
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carolyn Knapp-Shappey, Douglas Richardson, Arthur Shappey, Snoopadoop
Additional Tags: Origin Story
Summary:

Every dog has an origin story.

Okay, hope everyone's doing well out there in DW/LJ-land. More soon, I hope!

I wrote my assignment plus a pinch hit for purimgifts this year--that's six (short) fics--so I'm going to put them in two different posts.

My assigned recipient was darkrosaleen--possibly the first time I've ever gotten a flistie as part of an exchange. I particularly wanted to write something good for her, because she's awesome, and because she'd written me the most amazing Ronan/Gansey bloodplay fic a few years ago for Yuletide. Luckily for me, she had a really fascinating prompt about a Jewish Kavinsky--so the ficlets turned out to be, if not easy, then at least really interesting to write.

In The Dream Thieves, Kavinsky, as the villain, is coded as, if not Jewish, then certainly not Anglo-Celtic-Christian the way the heroes are. His family is supposed to have come from Bulgaria, and they are neither poor, like some of Stiefvater's characters, nor rich, like others: instead, they are the kind of cartoon nouveau riche who live in McMansions in New Jersey, have mob money and wear sunglasses with white plastic frames. The Dream Thieves gets a disturbing amount of mileage from cultural markers like that. Lines like this one, describing Blue's distaste for Kavinsky, have always bothered me: "There was something erratic and vulgar about the full line of his lips, like he'd swallow her if he got close enough. She hated the smell of him." All the good guys in the novel have thin lips.

Anyway, I didn't want to rehabilitate Kavinsky as a misunderstood hero, or take the book to task for its fear of the ethnic, but I did want to give that immigrant, non-WASPy, background a bit more texture. And I really wanted to see what another magic system would look like mapped over/against the books' Celtic one. Jewish magic, at least of the Ashkenazi sort, is all about Hebrew letters and mystical names. It took a while to figure out how to integrate that with the dream forest magic that's canon in the books, but I liked the solution I came up with.

( three Jewish!Kavinsky fics )

First of all, thank you so much for writing a story for me! Any fic with these characters will make me happy, so please just write what seems fun and interesting to you! I saw this phrase in someone’s dear author letter once, and it perfectly expresses my feelings: If you come to a place where you think you can either write a good story or make me happy, write a good story.

If it’s helpful, here are some things about my general preferences:

( general preferences )

Requests, in alphabetical order


( Agent Carter )

( The Honourable Woman )

( Imperial Radch )

( Peaky Blinders )

( Rivers of London )

I got tagged yesterday morning for come_at_once, the 24-hour porn challenge. Here is what I came up with (more fluff than porn, I'm afraid).

Displacement: Or, A Watery Problem Solved (955 words) by ariadnes_string
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Bathtubs
Summary:

Watson put the whiskey glass on floor beside him, and leant his head back against the tub, enjoying the silence. No rapid-fire questions, no dizzying leaps of logic: peace.

It did not last.

Oh, I can’t resist!

I thought I had very few of these, but then I actually looked at the relevant folders. Oops! Mostly from long-abandoned fandoms, though. These are among the resuscitate-able, perhaps.


1.

A bear lay in a clearing. It was quite a large bear, but ragged, even flea-bitten. It lay there for a long while, too exhausted to flick away the fly that landed on its nose.

Time passed. From the pines surrounding the clearing, a wolf emerged.

The bear held its breath. It reflected that if anyone could tell the difference between a real bear and a false bear, it would be a wolf. The bear felt woefully ill-equipped: no sword, no pistols, even its hands were sadly bound up in bear skin. It decided it would go out gallantly regardless, though it hated to think of Stephen finding its mangled corpse.


2.

Abdul often reflected that Thomas Nightingale was exactly what one would expect from someone who had come of age at an English public school in the previous century; an expert and athletic lover, but emotionally restrained to the point of constipation the rest of the time. Abdul didn’t mind; he wasn’t much for overt displays of affection himself. On rare occasions, however, Thomas would give way to what Abdul’s father, with perfect proletarian contempt, would have called the sticky sentimentality of the upper classes. Abdul was probably the only person who ever saw these episodes, and, of course, he could never muster his father’s disapproval; they always went straight to his heart. Thomas appeared to be experiencing one of them now.


3.

“Let’s go dancing,” Freddie said one evening as they sat dissecting the day in the BBC canteen.

“You dance?” Bel raised her eyebrows.

“Course I do.”

And he did. The local girls had seen to that before he'd even smoked his first cigarette, laughing and crashing around crowded front rooms, radio blasting. He’d been half a head shorter than the smallest of them, so he’d always been facing cleavage when he grasped them 'round the waist. Not that he minded.



What I’m Reading

The Angel of Losses, by Stephanie Feldman. Jewish-themed magical realism, I think. I’ve only read a bit of it so far, but it’s something I’m in the mood for.

What I’ve Just Finished

Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, by Carl Hoffman. [from my Goodreads review] Extremely interesting and enjoyable. Kind of like what Serial would be if it were about cannibal tribes in New Guinea--which is to say, very interested in how hard it is to recover the truth about the past, especially across intercultural taboos against sharing secrets. It's the story of the investigator as much as the investigation, which usually drives me crazy, but I bought into it here and was very engaged by Hoffman's own story. Hoffman also raises some interesting questions about the export of primitive art as a form of extraction of resources.

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters (audiobook). I got to the end of my binge-listening of Hardcore History’s WW1 podcasts, “Blueprint for Armageddon,” and so had no choice but to finish listening to this. [from my Goodreads review]: I wanted to like this so much more than I did. It's beautifully written (and gorgeously read by Juliet Stevenson in the audiobook), but I often felt more irked than entranced by it. I loved the historical details of the setting, and the way the characters were dealing with the aftermath of the war (and especially how those issues came back at the very end), but I think narratives about obsessive love just aren't my cup of tea. I loved The Little Stranger, and so was anxious to read this one; I should have remembered that The Little Stranger is the only Waters book I've ever managed more than a few pages of. I think part of Waters’ talent is for revising genre pieces. The Little Stranger is kind of a revision of The Turn of the Screw; The Paying Guests seems (in part) a revision of something like Dorothy Sayer’s Unnatural Death, but where the lesbians aren’t homicidal ice queens. A good idea, but still, the former worked better for me than the latter.

What I’m Reading Next

Oh goodness knows! I’m going to stop even including this question!


There are so many good movies around, but all I’ve managed to see is Paddington, which at least was totally adorable. Ben Whishaw’s vocal performance as the bear himself is ridiculously sweet, and the movie’s vision of London is a treat.

How ‘bout y’all?

Dear Purimgifts Author:

First of all, thank you so much for writing a story for me! Any fic in these fandoms would make me happy, so please just write what seems fun and interesting to you!

If it’s helpful, here are some things I like:

( optional prompts )

Most importantly, though, have fun, and know that I really appreciate the time and energy you’re taking to do this!

So, I left on my post-Christmas trip before I had a chance to squee about the two gifts I received in the Yuletide Madness collection. But I'm back now (briefly--I'm leaving again Tuesday morning), and I wanted to make sure everyone knew about them!

Euston Corridor (100 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Peter Grant
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Drabble, London
Summary:

A little corner of Peter's patch.

An absolutely charming drabble about a corner of London--doing what the RoL books and fic do best.

Sonnet for George Finch (111 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Himalayan Mountain Climbers RPF
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: George Finch (Himalayan Mountain Climbers RPF), George Mallory (Himalayan Mountain Climbers RPF)
Additional Tags: Poetry, Sonnets, Canonical Character Death, Historical References, Yuletide
Summary:

What price glory?

Such a treat! Definitely the most unusual Yuletide gift I've ever gotten--a poem about George Finch, a fascinating figure, who pioneered the use of oxygen tanks in mountain climbing (a much contested innovation), and accompanied Mallory on the 1922 Everest expedition, but was excluded from the 1924 expedition. And it's a sonnet!

I am very grateful to have received such bounty this year!

Happy New Year's, everyone--I'll be back in town on the 2nd.