Title: Games People Play
Fandom: The Lord of the Rings, Labyrinth, The Mentalist, Castle, NCIS
Rating: PG-13
Length: 5x100 words
Content notes: Spoilers for episode 5x05 of The Mentalist and episode 5x24 of Castle.
Author notes: A collection of drabbles, each of them belonging to a different fandom. Written for the backward challenge on fan_flashworks.
Summary: They’re not – usually – backward in coming forward.

( Games People Play )

Title: fan_flashworks achievement tracking spreadsheet v2
Fandom: None/multi
Content notes: N/A

( Read more... )

Title: Stranger in a Strange Land (or, Desirée's Fannish Origin Story)
Fandoms: multi
Characters: DesireeArmfeldt
Rating: G (okay, I mention the word "porn" :) )
Length: ~900 words
Summary: In which Desirée natters about why she's here.
Author Notes: This was originally the throat-clearing of an entirely different essay, but it decided it wanted a life of its own.  The other essay will be along at some point.

( Stranger in a Strange Land )

Title: How to make your own playing cards
Fandom: Any


( How to make your own playing cards )

Title: fan_flashworks achievement tracking spreadsheet
Fandom: None?
Content notes: N/A
Creator's notes: So I guess I'm making fanwork for a fancomm about fanwork to track fanworks for fanbadges? Fanfan. nothing says solitary like sitting around in the dark making nerdy spreadsheets



( to the spreadsheet, batman )

Title: Genre Mixer Prompt Generator
Fandom: Any
Content notes: Prompts include sex, BDSM, non-con, and disturbing or violent imagery. These are only included by enabling NSFW prompts in the options.
Creator's notes: I've been mulling over creating this prompt generator for a while. It combines the two prompt styles that have proven to be most effective in breaking my writer's block: the first, a ficmeme that takes a list of characters and combines them randomly with cliché fic genres; the second, a bonus round in hs_olympics where prompts were formatted with a ship and two genres to be mashed together.

This generator works by taking a user-supplied list of characters, and choosing from that list and a list of clichés and genres to create a random prompt. I've gotten a lot of really golden prompts while testing this, and I hope that any one of you can get some use out of it as well. The main sources I curated the clichés and genres from are listed on the generator page, although props must go to my lovely moirail kittyfreud who is actually responsible for compiling the majority of the genres, and who helped extensively with testing.

Click here for the prompt generator, and please let me know if anything is broken or if you think of anything I can add!

Title: Old Friends, On Demand: A C6D Rec Set
Fandoms: Hard Core Logo, Due South, Slings and Arrows
Rec-er Notes: I thought I'd try my hand at a themed rec-set for the Old Friends challenge.  None of these stories is particularly recently-written, though they're not quite the "old friends" of argentum_ls's recent rec set, and I'm so new to fandom that my "old favorites" are not very old to me, though many of them were written in days gone by.  Anyway, this set was compiled not based on the age of the stories, but rather, because all of them have old friends as a major theme/focus of the story.  In addition, each of them was chosen to meet a particular need that I have expressed in conversation recently (or, in the case of the third fic, met a previously-unknown need of mine when I originally read it).


( Old Friends, On Demand )

Title: 3 Recs - Multifandom (due South/Highlander, The Flash, Highlander/Forever Knight/Quantum Leap/X-Files/Starman)
Notes: The stories recced here are "old friends." The oldest was posted in 1995 and the newest in 1999, and they're all stories that I've read time and again and have found myself returning to over the years when I can't find new stories to read, despite the fact that I've otherwise left all the fandoms behind.

( Set of 3 Recs )

Title: Fannish Crypto-Lists
Fandom: Multifandom/meta
Rating: G

Notes/explanation:

Three cryptograms, in list format. If you're unfamiliar with this kind of puzzle, basically it's a simple code in which one letter is substituted for another. (e.g., A might become R, B become L, C become Z, etc.) Each list uses the same code for all entries, but the code is different for each list. Every item in the list will fit the list theme.

The way to go about solving these is to look for patterns, and to pay attention to how frequently and in what combinations the letters pop up. It's a good idea to keep a key to help you as you go: write out the alphabet and note the real letters underneath the code letters as you figure them out.

For those who need it, the answer key is here. That's a back-dated entry on my own LJ. I've done it that way because the last time somebody posted a puzzle, I printed it out so that I could work on it, and even though the solution was blanked out in the post, it still showed up on the printout, and I almost spoiled myself for the answers. I hope that's OK.

( The puzzles! )

With mod approval I'm consolidating these as a collection of sorts in a single post to avoid spamming the comm with three posts in a row.

These are three short (five to ten minutes) podfics of stories by isis, who is entirely made of awesome, and who has my thanks for giving me permission to record.

"Five Kisses" is Iron Jawed Angels femslash (Lucy/Alice, PG)
"Five Roads Not Taken" is due South pre-slash (F/K and others, G)
"Four Tattoos They Didn't Get (And One They Did)" is Stargate Atlantis ensemble gen (PG)

All the details and download links for each podfic are under the cut, but if you'd prefer to snag all three in a single zip file, you can get it here at Mediafire.

( Podfic details and individual download links )

I've always loved AUs, and although they don't have to take place in an elaborately imagined and unfamiliar world to make me happy, it is kind of like stumbling across a free-pies-and-puppies store when they do. Building a fictional world -- whether you're creating it from the ground up or trying to recreate it from research and memory -- is not an easy thing to do. I struggle with it myself, and I have all kinds of admiration for those who can manage it adeptly enough that their effort is invisible.

These are some of the best examples of fannish worldbuilding I can remember coming across in various fandoms over the years. Some are recent and some are not.

( Five recs beneath the cut )

Also, because so many of them came up in my searches for fanworks to rec, ( here are a few resources for those of you who might be doing some worldbuilding of your own: )

I know there are probably plenty of examples of great worldbuilding I'm missing (and probably plenty of good resources, too). Please, leave your own related recs and links in the comments!

Title: Cliché Generators
Fandom: Any
Content notes: Explicit version uses explicit sexual terms and contains prompts of all kinds, including noncon, dubcon, BDSM, violent imagery and incest. I have included a non-explicit version for those who prefer to avoid these tropes.
Creator's notes:I've been struggling with fannish writing lately and couldn't finish anything for the challenge, so I made these instead. I plan to use them to inspire my future make-something-in-an-hour exercises -- and hopefully some of you can, too. :)

I used Anna S's Giant List of Fanfiction Kinks, Tropes and Clichés and the master list at cliche_bingo as references when I was drawing up these lists. If you have any suggestions for things I haven't included, please leave them here! Likewise, please let me know if you see any issues or errors.

( Links )