As the Cardinal Flies

And here's what I wrote for Crossovering 2014:

Let's Find Out
Fandoms: Doctor Who / Marvel Cinematic Universe [& Sarah Jane Adventures, Iron Man (Movies)]
Rating: G
Word Count: ~2500
Genre/Type: gen
Characters: Pepper Potts, Sarah Jane Smith, Maria Hill, Kate (Lethbridge-)Stewart
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark

Or, how Pepper and Sarah Jane meet in a fused version of Whovian and MCU continuity, with a couple of bonus Easter Eggs (because I could not resist putting in a certain bit about just who Nick Fury was looking at as a potential Avenger....).

Be it duly noted that there are a couple of stories that I considered but didn't end up writing for this exchange: specifically, the one in which Pepper had been recruited as a companion by Eight (largely because it felt to me rather too similar to the premise of Azar's excellent "Rebel Yell" series about the Doctor and NCIS' Abby Sciuto), and the one in which the Anthony Ainley version of the Master finds his way to Asgard and hooks up with Loki in an effort to steal the Casket of Ancient Winters, which of course one or another Doctor would have had to show up and foil (because while that would have been immensely entertaining, it felt like a much bigger story than I had time to draft for the challenge).

Also offered as a plot bunny, because it occurred to me along the way, this theory: Hugh Lofting's (and by extension Rex Harrison's) character  Doctor John Dolittle is, in fact, a Time Lord (and very possibly a previously unknown regeneration of the Doctor himself).

What I got for Rare Women 2014:

Destiny, by raktajinos
Ancient Egyptian RPF
G • gen • ~1500 words
Ankhesenamun, Nefertiti

Ankhesenamun reflects on the lessons her mother taught her about being Queen.

This was the longest of all possible long-shot matches, but the resulting vignette is a fascinating, intriguing look at one of the most elusive young women in the Egyptian archaeological record. Most of what we know about Ankhesenamun -- the young sister/wife of Tutankhamen -- comes from the latter part of her life; here, we get a speculative yet wholly captivating look at that life's beginning.  I am very happy indeed to have had this written for me.

And what I wrote:

Something in Common for prettysophist
Castle
G • gen • ~3100 words
Alexis Castle, Mandy Sutton

"Six hundred numbers in this phone, and guess how many of those I could call for help with this stuff." Before Alexis could answer, Mandy Sutton made a game-show buzzer noise. "That would be one."

I matched on Castle for the second time in a row; having done a Martha story last year, I put the focus this year on Alexis and followed up the threads from the 6th-season episode "Limelight", featuring pop star Mandy Sutton (a character presented as sort of a Miley Cyrus/Lindsay Lohan fusion).  

Posted at nearly the last moment for the latest round of A Ficathon Walks Into a Bar (I signed up on LJ, but the challenge is running in parallel on LJ (intoabar) and Dreamwidth (intoabar).

Title: Spell and Counterspell
Prompt: David Xanatos walks into a bar and meets...Dairine Callahan
Fandoms: Gargoyles / Young Wizards series - Diane Duane
Word count: 1687
Rating/Contents: G / gen; no warnings needed.

Rirhath B Crossings, just look at the stars,
How do you spell it without any Rs?

For anyone not in the loop: the 2012 Rare Women Fic Exchange is live.  General information is here, the list of eligible fandoms and characters is here, and signups are here.

And here we go; this is my 2nd year playing in this sandbox, and it looks to be at least as intriguing as the first.

The first order of business is (as always) thanks; I am grateful sincerely and in advance for the story I'm about to receive.  Whoever you are, I appreciate your efforts on my behalf, and I look forward to reading the results.

My tastes in fic are wide and eclectic -- I read and enjoy gen, het, and slash (both flavors) at all ratings and have very few outright squicks, but I am not typically attracted to stories for erotic content or angst quotient.  Rather, I like good characterization, authentic-sounding dialogue, effectively sneaky plotting, and well-developed wit.  I am equally intrigued by clever use of canon and thoughtfully developed AUs, and I am disturbingly fond of crossovers and well-woven meta threads.  As a rule, I tend to prefer canon-consistent romantic pairings (any exceptions will be noted further along), with the added note that in my book, well-sustained UST (heavy on the T) is often as good as or better than actual sex.  It's definitely true that my own writing also reflects the kinds of things I like to read; my AO3 archive is here, and you're welcome to prowl.

Now, then, to the requests:

Batman Beyond (Talia al-Ghul)( Read more... )

Castle (Alexis Castle, Martha Rodgers)( Read more... )

Diana Tregarde Investigations (Diana Tregarde)( Read more... )

Kim Possible (Dr. Director, Dr. Ann Possible, Nana Possible)( Read more... )

Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? (Carmen Sandiego)( Read more... )

And here's my other new piece, written for the Rare Women Fanfic Exchange.

Title: When the Bat in the Moonlight Flies
Author: graycardinal
Written For: SecondSilk
Rating: G
Wordcount: 1,731
Fandom: BtVS/Gargoyles
Characters: Jenny Calendar, Owen Burnett
Spoilers: None to speak of.  Occurs in late 1994, during the first part of the first season of Gargoyles and some time prior to the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Kalderash clan had long memories even by Rom standards. Women of the Kalderash had cursed vampires and outwitted wizards, and if they weren’t precisely friendly with the old races, they were well-versed in the legends surrounding them.

[deep breath]

This should be interesting.  I've been participating in Yuletide for some years now, but this will be one of my first voyages into the wider world of the challenge/exchange universe.  I'm looking forward to it, but it's definitely going to be a new experience.

As with Yuletide, the first order of business is thanks; I am grateful sincerely and in advance for the story I'm about to receive.  (Hmm, that sounds a bit like a Thanksgiving-dinner grace -- which is apt, I suppose, although with this sort of thing a case might be made that we're skipping straight to the dessert course.)  Whoever you are, I appreciate your efforts on my behalf, and I look forward to reading the results.

As to my tastes in fic generally, they are wide and eclectic.  I read and enjoy gen, het, and slash (both flavors) at all ratings and have very few outright squicks, but I am not typically attracted to stories for erotic content or angst quotient.  Rather, I like good characterization, authentic-sounding dialogue, effectively sneaky plotting, and well-developed wit.  I am equally intrigued by clever use of canon and thoughtfully developed AUs, and I am disturbingly fond of crossovers and well-woven meta threads.  As a rule, I tend to prefer canon-consistent romantic pairings (exceptions will be noted further along), with the added note that in my book, well-sustained UST (heavy on the T) is often as good as or better than actual sex.  It's definitely true that my own writing also reflects the kinds of things I like to read; my AO3 archive is here, and you're welcome to prowl.

( Now to the requests: )

I had to wade through to the sixth page of comments to find a request I could write, but since I did in fact find one, I'm now signed up for:



The above gets you to the main post with rules, dates, etc. (and six pages or so of comments to this point). My own requests are here.

Or possibly Solstice Lama, since only a truly enlightened soul would have matched with me on a Yuletide fandom.  Salaam, salaam, salami -- [pause, deep breath]. 

Okay, I'd better stop now, before someone reaches through the Internet and thwaps me upside the head for excessive punmanship.  Suffice to say "Welcome" to my Yuletide writer (and anyone else who may end up tossing something in via pinch-hit or Yuletide Madness), and a sincere and heartfelt thanks-in-advance for the effort and attention you'll be giving to one of these requests.

General notes first:  As I've noted in prior Dear Whoever letters, I am mellow and flexible in my reading preferences -- I read widely and in a number of different categories as well as fandoms.  I most appreciate strong character and/or story development, whether in something as compact as a drabble or as expansive as an epic.  If you poke around in this journal and my FFN material, you'll observe that I have a fondness for fandoms and fanfic featuring high levels of wit and snark; I'm not opposed to angst, but I don't tend to wallow in it.  I am definitely a crossover junkie, with the caveat that the crossover needs to do full justice to everyone involved.  Which can be done in more than one way, and I worship at the altar of those who cam pull off really insane crackfic with a straight face. 

I am in no way opposed to hot(!) sex(!) in my fanfic as a general principle, but I generally don't read fanfic for the sex, and most of my present Yuletide requests are not strongly pairing-oriented.  I've read and liked gen, het, slash, and a surprising amount of kink, but I just don't get either mpreg or most genderswap, have yet to meet a fandom-of-interest where incest made sense to me, and consider adult/child a definite squick.  Also, in my book, well-rendered UST is a thing of beauty, and resolving it often has a tendency to severely dim the sparkle in a lively pairing. 

( Now, then: )

As the fanfic world ramps up for Yuletide, posts elsewhere remind me that I ought to do a bit of fandom-promotion -- especially considering that I've nominated a whole slate of unreasonably obscure fandoms this time around.  Herewith the list:

Legend (tv)
Not the feature film with the unicorn, but the 1995 series starring Richard Dean Anderson and John de Lancie.  Yuletide's been fairly kind to fans of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. -- it's time we had some new adventures for Ernest "Nicodemus Legend" Pratt and Professor Janos Bartok.

Kate Chambers - Diana Winthrop series
If there is a more obscure fandom in the entire Yuletide database, I'd be surprised.  This was a series of a half-dozen slim "teen sleuth" mysteries first published in the 1980s; the setup most closely resembles the Nancy Drew universe, but the settings were more realistic, the plots more complex, and the characterization somewhat more adult (anticipating the "Nancy Drew Files" incarnation of that series a bit, perhaps); the individual books also featured dedications/homages to various classic mystery writers.  There doesn't seem to be a good Web resource for the series, though individual titles are findable from the major used-book vendors (in some cases, at insane-looking prices).  "Kate Chambers", incidentally, was one of several pen names for a writer named Nicole St. John [not, apparently, children's mystery writer Wylly Folk St. John, as I initially thought] whose best-known nom de plume was probably Norma Johnston.

Linda Haldeman - The Lastborn of Elvinwood
A very brief summary of this novel: English bachelor and actor Ian James is walking home from his village's theater one evening when he notices two of his neighbors slipping quietly into the nearby wood -- and when he follows them, he finds himself in a Faerie court straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Except that the faeries are fading away, and as penalty for snoopiness Ian is recruited to help them exchange one of their own for the infant child of a visiting American family.  While the book is long out of print, it's findable in larger libraries and on the used market, and is well worth seeking out -- fans of Tanya Huff's more humorous books and those of the Wrede/Stevermer para-Regency fantasies should find this utterly charming.

Muppets
All right, the Muppets aren't really obscure at all -- but after signups closed last year, I realized that Kermit and friends had somehow not made the cut, and we certainly can't have two Yuletides in a row with no Muppetational content.

Robyn Tallis - Planet Builders series
Not quite as thoroughly forgotten as the Diana Winthrop books, but close.  This was a series of ten paperback-original SF novels dating from 1988-1989, featuring a sizeable ensemble cast of teen heroes and heroines living on a newly colonized planet -- sort of as if someone had hired Andre Norton to write a season of Veronica Mars in Space.  In this case, though, the "Robyn Tallis" alias belonged to a collective including Sherwood Smith (Inda), Debra Doyle and James Macdonald (The Price of the Stars), Bruce Coville (the Magic Shop books and others) and Mary Frances Zambreno (veteran writer of fanfic and YA fantasy).  Great straight-ahead classic SF adventure with much admirable teen-aged snark.  Copies are likely findable via the Net, but I have no good sense of how rare they may be -- still, this did get a bit of exposure in the genre community when the series appeared, so it's not completely unknown.

Tom Swift - Fourth Series
My favorite of the several incarnations of Tom Swift, boy inventor -- and it's not a coincidence that some of the writers behind these books were prior Planet Builders authors.  This version is notable for incorporating some nifty SFnal ideas, as well as a strong recurring villain in Xavier Mace aka the Black Dragon; also, there were thoughtful nods to prior continuity.