#And now that I have dabbled in other fandoms I can truly see how lucky was to start out with the MXTX fans.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Valentine's Day! (and this blog's first post anniversary!)

[gumnut-logic]

Fanfic Asks 5

This one is for @louthestarspeaker who asked for D U X, @misssquidtracy who asked for H M O and @janetm74 who asked for W. Thank you for your kind questions ::hugs you all so much::

-o-o-o-

D. Do you prefer gen or romance?

If you asked me this two years ago, I would have said gen. Now…I see value in both. There is something just nice about having a couple who know each other so well that they can just fall into each other’s arms at the end of the day.

But I’ve always been a fan of bromance, two guys who will do anything for each other whether they are related or not. I’m a child of eighties TV and grew up on those kinds of relationships. Kirk and Spock are a prime example (yeah, I know they are from the 60s, but I didn’t exist then and the most of the movies came out in the eighties) .

Which leads onto the question of slash. I do read slash, but not so much in this fandom beyond a little Virgil/Brains. My heart truly lives in the friendship or family department. Even my ship could be considered monogamous happily ever after. This is not because I have any objections to one night stands or flings or whatever anyone enjoys, more of a case of I enjoy it (and Virgil’s character calls for it).

I’m a long term fanfic reader and have stumbled across a lot in my time in fandom. I just choose to read what I like and let everyone have their fun their way. I like a little whump, comfort and loyal and devoted friends. I guess I love the idea that people can stick together through anything.

As for writing, I like a challenge and will step outside my comfort zone time to time just to see if I can do it. However, you will always find a brother hanging around when Virg gets injured :D

 U. Do you prefer AUs or canon compliant fics?

I’m pretty open to all sorts of things…except for character breaking. If the character isn’t in character then it is no longer the character.

::chews nails worrying if I’ve broken Virgil’s character beyond redemption::

If it is well-written and hooks me, I’ll read pretty much anything (within my limits).

Writing…AUs require a lot of world building. My AUs tend to be branches off canon that diverge away, taking the built world with them. Things like coffee-shop AUs are a bit beyond my interest level (especially since I don’t drink coffee).

Marks & Wings is my first completely AU fic series. I did have to do some world building, but they are basically the Tracy bros with wings (except for Gordo, he is considerably different). To be honest, I use that universe as a place to write when I’m completely stuffed. The writing is more sensory than my other fics and I can just get arty farty and play with words.

But, as always, whatever I feel like at the time is what gets written.

 X. What fandom have you written the most fics for?

That would be Thunderbirds fandom. According to Ao3, I’m at 132 Thunderbirds fics with 750,000 words. Reactions plus a few other fics/chapters are yet to be posted.

That is over twice my combined other fandoms, heading toward three times. In two years.

You guys have just inspired me so much. Look what you’ve done! ::hugs you all like crazy::

 H. What is the longest fic you’ve written?

Written in 2003, The Asgard Sequence at 80,000 words (I thought it was shorter at 75,000 ::frowns at FF.net::) was my third Stargate SG-1 fanfic. Full of cliffhangers, it basically whumps Jack O’Neill within an inch of his life while exploring the Asgard people. Lots of plot written by the seat of my pants and nowhere at the quality I’m achieving today, but it remains my most popular fic on FF.net and I still get the occasional comment even 17 years after it was published. It was a landmark fic for me.

The question is…is there enough plotline left in the Kermadec Fic to overtake it? I don’t know. Possibly not, but we’ll see. I do have the tendency to ramble nowadays :D

 M. How do you come up with titles?

Write fic first and work out what to call it when at least partly written. I usually look for something short that sums up what the fic is about combined with an inkling of interest that might help draw the reader in. Sometimes I structure the fic (if I’m planning it) in a certain way that leads to the title.

Here are some working titles versus the final titles just for a little fun (the file names are all that remains – first name first, final name second):

Scott and Jeff – Suits

Riguadagnare – Il Mago

Virg and Gordo – A Good Day

The Visitor – Sky Candy

One of the brothers being ticklish – His Part

Marry Me – The Proposal

Hold Still – Lucky Shot

Gentle Showers – Gentle Rain

The Glacier – Access Denied

Tired Virgil – Tick Tock

Tropical rain is warm – Warm Rain

Veggie’s shower fic – To Hurt Us

Just a few from my computer. I still have several that don’t have titles at all.

 O. Is there any fandom you’ve been into that you haven’t written fic for? Why not?

Definitely. I’ve read:

Farscape

Avengers

How to Train Your Dragon

Arrow

Stargate Atlantis (did start a fic, haven’t finished it – also roleplayed a bit as Rodney McKay)

Sherlock

All the Next Gen Star Trek series (did dabble a little, but never finished anything, my heart lies in TOS)

There are probably more that I can’t think of at the moment. With the exception of Farscape and the Trek series, all of the above were read in the last ten years. They were simply relief from motherhood really. I love fanfic in general, hardly read anything else nowadays, but I wasn’t in the right place to write during my forays into the above fandoms. I was also very focussed on my professional art business.

TAG hit me at a point where I was struggling, in desperate need and I went down like a ton of bricks.

 W. Have you ever written anything that you are embarrassed by today?

Considering the thirty years since I started, sure, there are some fics that are a bit crappy. Heh, I still write crappy stuff from time to time ::eyes Reactions and kicks it with a toe::

But embarrassed? I may have been when I was younger. Especially outside of fandom. But now…I’m a perfectionist who has come to terms (mostly) that my stuff is never going to be perfect. All my stuff has had its purpose and is a step up the learning curve – that goes for everything.

Having said that, I do find myself hesitating to mention the one or two slash fics I have written in the past in other fandoms.

Mentioning that I wrote for Knight Rider gets the oddest looks. I wrote two slash fics in that fandom, but they are close to what I write here in content and plotlines.

I have also written a few explicit scenes in this fandom (of varying quality ::rolls eyes:: ).

Mentioning fanfic outside of fandom has its challenges and when it comes to the above mentions, these are likely not the ones I’d highlight to my workmates (though they all know I write fanfic). I had to stop myself from posting a link to Gentle Rain on Facebook a while back because while I’m happy with its novelish length and content, it does have that one scene…

So, yeah, maybe a little wary of what other people might think of things content-wise. Writing-wise, I’m fairly confident, except when I get the wibblies ::eyes floppy Virg and John…just John…no other Tracy gives me as much strife as Johnny::

-o-o-o-

Thank you to all the wonderful peeps who asked me all these questions. I hope I haven’t bored you silly with my answers (or scared you off with the last one ::chews nails:: ).

I also hope I haven’t missed anyone. Poke me if I have and I will apologise profusely and answer asap.

::eyes word count on questions:: Well, I’ve written 3,500 words about myself ::gulp::

And it is heading toward 1.30am with work tomorrow.

Nutty

(saluting off)

[blueandgoldoffice]

None of my Asks are showing up and it's starting to make me upset..

Good morning, dear

Today is your lucky day; you’re going to get a behind-the-scenes tour of how things run at the Blue and Gold!

Hi! I’m Mother Maple - I’m Canadian, and I’m a mother. 

It’s just after 0800 here where I live in Northern Alberta (side note- when is the snow going to melt? It’s been on the ground for six months and three days, people. I’m over it) and my husband, recently returned from his third deployment and/or training mission in the last year and a half, has just gone to work. 

I’ve fed him and packed his lunch, and now I have to contend with the fact that my house is in complete chaos because there is army crap EVERYWHERE. (Seriously, they teach them how to be tidy in basic training, so why does my house look like a kit bomb went off in it every time he comes back from a trip?)

My high-needs toddler is still sleeping, thanks to daylight savings time, but he’ll be up soon and demanding breakfast. He will not stop eating until he goes to bed. And he likes his veggies and fruit chopped. (Already have a savings account devoted to feeding him as a teenager, heaven help me.)

Once he has his first protein fix of the day, he’ll be unstoppable. He makes Taz look lazy - and the mess he’ll make will make my husband’s army chaos look like dropped coffee next to an Atlantic oil spill. His current obsession is Lego, and boy is he good at it, but if he can’t find that one block that he needs, he will dump that entire bucket of Lego on the carpet and burrow like a Niffler until he does. 

At some point, I should probably eat something too.

 Pyjamas aren’t exactly day wear, either. 

Keeping my kitchen clean is something of a pipe dream at this point, but I should make an effort at that. I ran out of plates one day last week and it was not pretty. 

Oh, and Monday is laundry day - and one would think that wearing a uniform to work lessens the load but it actually triples it. Fun fact.

My next-door-neighbour recently had a hip replacement, so I’m taking turns with some of the girls to do her shopping. Hubby took the car to work, so I’m taking Shank’s pony to the shops. I’m also taking my kid, who likes to browse. 

So that’s just my morning and I won’t bore you with the rest of my day but you get the gist. 

Jandy has kids, too. And a full-time job. I would imagine that her kids, who are older and who outnumber mine, wear more clothing and eat more food. They probably tidy up after themselves though, so she does have that going over me. K is equally busy.

Recently I made a post on my own blog that mentioned that my therapist has put strict time limits on how much time I can devote to fandom - that is reading, commenting and blue-and-golding. I max out at one hour, but we prefer 45 minutes.

So - how we answer asks. I mostly dabble in lost fics, which are pretty straight forward. We either know them or we don’t. If we do, we link them up and put them in the queue. (We queue all of our asks because some days we have a productive fit and answer twenty all at once, and some days we don’t find anything and there’s really no need to publish evidence of our ineptitude all over Tumblr.)

If we don’t - well that’s when it gets fun. Obviously, our first step is a filter search. For example, we recently queued up an ask looking for a fic in which Jughead is a firefighter etc. I happened to know it off the top of my head, but it was well tagged so even if I didn’t know it, it would have come up under a simple ‘bughead’ ‘firefighter’ search.  (@transparentpicklezonklover your ask is queued)

Now, if it hadn’t been well tagged, we would have had to turn to Google which is sometimes a real pain in the back end. Per the firefighter ask, I would have searched ‘ao3 Jughead firefighter auction’ and received a whole lot of Captain America fic for my troubles. But no matter! We persevere, putting stranger and stranger combinations of words into that little search bar until it finally cracks and gives up its secrets. 

My record is six days of searching for a single fic. I saw it in my dreams. It was behind my eyelids every time I blinked. I even asked my husband, who wouldn’t know Bughead if he walked in on them in the bunker, if he’d read it.

Of course, sometimes we just can’t find it and we put it out to the audience, and someone invariably links it within three-point-five seconds, making us question just how inevitable our obsolescence is. (Just kidding, I actually love the community aspect of it and I feel all warm and fuzzy when people help us out.)

So. Your most recent ask is looking for Jughead visiting Hal in jail. It’s not a lost fic, but the principle will be more or less the same because I don’t know any off the top of my head. Which means searching for them - and filtering out all the FP in jail fics that come up first. I or one of the other mods will read, or at least skim, dozens of prison fics that come up on google (ao3 search has failed us, alas) to see which Riverparent is in jail (honestly though, they should all be in jail) and if Jughead or Betty does the visiting. Betty visits FP and Hal a lot, so we have to weed through quite a few. 

You sent your ask on Friday, and this follow-up yesterday. You gave us less than two days to answer an ask that will take literal hours to complete - when we already have 20 other asks in our inbox that were there first. 

I will also add that I posted this last time you were in our inbox decrying our delay in answering your asks. I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt as a new blog, and took it as a teaching moment. 

You should also read this post that Jandy recently made on the same subject.

We will not respond to any further follow-up asks of this nature - particularly not from empty side blogs that seem to exist for the sole purpose of side-stepping our no-anons rule. 

If anyone truly believes that their ask has been lost - and we’re talking weeks of inactivity - please feel free to follow up (especially if you can provide more detail on which we thrive like ladybugs love aphids). We are here to help, and we don’t want to leave anyone out if it can be avoided. 

But, as I’ve said before, we are humans. We are not bots, and we only have so much time to devote to this. Please give us patience.

~MM