Rose's Rambles

From a fic idea that probably isn't going anywhere much, but I thought it might cheer you up anyway. ♥ Happy belated birthday.

Fandoms: SPN/Skin Horse

Premise: When Raphael tries to retrieve Virgil from French Mistake!verse and grabs the Winchesters by accident, something goes horribly wrong because in the multiverse next door, a malfunctioning quantum gateway is threatening to rip a hole in reality. Virgil remains trapped in FM!verse as in canon, but the Winchesters get thrown through the gateway into the Anasigma lab in Carbondale, PA, where overly inquisitive teen Jonah Yu and his not-yet-girlfriend Nera Vivaldi are living their own version of "Mystery Spot"....

( While Jonah and Nera wait in Sergio Mendoza's office: )

Gacked from jennytork: List the first lines from your last twenty fics -- not necessarily in order.

Going with solo fics in order of completion and adding the second sentence in cases where the opening was a fragment....
( Right, let's see: )

Gacked from amberdreams:

1. Go to page 7 (or 77) of your current WIP.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.

I think I'll do both...
( ... for the GG/SGA fic )

None of the other WIPs are far enough along to qualify, so. :D
I think, btw, that contrary to poll results, I might go ahead and post this one next before a certain point in the first chapter can be Jossed. But I'll probably post a run-off poll for #100, especially since I've had a Crossed Swords bunny chew its way into the hutch (Gil, Agatha, and Tarvek stumble through a rift into the tunnels just as Hogan gets the order to evacuate Stalag 13; also featuring Papa Schultzie at his finest). And then the Baby story and "Evan the Great" will most likely be Nos. 101 and 102 in some order.

Time once again for that old "post a bit from your WIPs" meme, which I'm going to expand a little with short summaries where appropriate:

( WIP Hot Stove Report )

There are a few other bunnies in the hutch, mostly "Changing Channels" crossovers in the When Is A Ghost Not A Ghost? series, but they're very much on hold. There might also be a few more timestamps to "De Profundis," but I'm not currently planning on it. The Crossed Swords multiverse is pretty open-ended, and I'm not planning to give a hard and fast end to the Tok'ra Apocalypse 'verse, but I don't have a lot of ideas for either AU.

Now, the reason I'm posting this list: I currently have 97 stories/collections up on FF.n, and I'm trying to decide what to post when so that #100 will be properly momentous. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean I'll *write* them in any particular order! But I am curious as to what y'all would like to see first. I'm planning not to do spn_cinema again and may be dropping out of sncross_bigbang, so it's not like I'll have deadlines, although my fourteenth (!) anniversary of posting there will be Feb. 6.

So, since apparently anyone can post a poll these days, here goes:
[Poll #2030245]

Rules are, post a snippet from three of your WIPs.

1. For spn_cinema:
Bobby blearily looked up at him. “Wha’th’ell are you doin’ here?”

“I’m looking at a tin star with a drunk pinned on it,” John growled.

“John Winchester.” Bobby laughed drunkenly. “How ’bout that? Good ol’ John. Help me up outta here, John,” he continued, holding up his left hand.

Warily, John did so—and barely managed to dodge when Bobby took a swing at his head. Bobby followed up with a punch to John’s gut, but John’s hand landed on a metal basin and brought it down on Bobby’s skull with a resounding clang. John then dropped the basin, grabbed the front of Bobby’s sodden union suit, and pulled his left fist back for a knockdown blow.

“John!” Rufus called from behind him. “He won’t feel it.”

John suddenly realized that Bobby’s eyes were crossed and vacant. “Well, I owe him one,” he stated and let go of Bobby, who collapsed backward onto the cot like a rag doll.


2. Dinéchesters:
Once Lisa caught her breath, she quipped, “Never thought I’d be worrying about a god bleeding out on my living room couch!”

Samandiriel returned then with Gabriel and Kali in tow. “What have my idiot brothers done now?” Gabriel asked.

Dean was too busy stitching to talk, so Lisa answered. “We don’t know. All he said was that it was an ambush, that it didn’t happen here, and that it had something to do with two rivers.”

“Two rivers. That’s nice and vague.”


3. Gwaith i Innas Lain (I know I've posted the first line of this before):
Sometime in the last yén of the Sixth Age, Rúmil of Lothlórien developed the ridiculous habit of adopting pet mortals. Not literally, of course, but he did start spotting children he liked and appointing himself their guardian and fretting over their misfortunes and so on. Thranduil Oropherion tried for a good decade to dissuade him, but when even World War II failed to break him of it, Thranduil threw up his hands and settled for reminding Rúmil every so often not to try to contact his favorites. Doing so could only end badly, especially if it ended up attracting the attention of a hunter and doubly so if that hunter refused to distinguish between the faded Eldar and all the other supernatural creatures that were out there. But for the most part, Rúmil was content to watch and occasionally sing a song of comfort outside a window.

That lasted until he nearly killed a would-be rapist in Massachusetts in Seventh Age 19.

Rather than waiting around to find out whether a hunter would even take notice of the incident, Thranduil ordered his band to pack up and move. Eventually they settled in a park outside Lawrence, Kansas. Rúmil meekly confined himself to the campsite for several weeks until Thranduil admitted that he would probably have done the same thing, and after that Rúmil wandered no further than the boundaries of the park, trying very hard to keep himself from going looking for someone else to protect.

Instead, his next pet very nearly ran straight into him when his mind was elsewhere. A golden-haired girl, no more than nine years old, ran screeching down the trail at top speed, pursued by a slightly older dark-haired boy holding a garter snake, and Rúmil only just managed to dodge to the shade of a tree in time to avoid a collision. Once he’d regained his composure, Rúmil watched the children run and realized that both bore traces of Dúnedain heritage, the girl more so than the boy. But there was something else about both of them, something both beautiful and tragic, some high doom that lay upon their houses... the girl, in particular, seemed marked for an early death. Rúmil’s foresight was not particularly strong by Elven standards, but if even he could sense something like that about that girl....

He didn’t realize he was brooding until he got back to camp and Thranduil elbowed him in the ribs.

“OW!” he yelped, completely forgetting his station for a moment. “What was that for?!”

“You’ve got that look again, Marchwarden,” replied Celebmaethor. “Who is it?”

Finally got my fic website updated tonight--eleven major fics, plus twelve ficlets from the main "Bits and Bobs" series and one in the Marine!Dean "Bits and Bobs" collection. Thasalotta fanfic.
So, rather than cluttering up your friends page with the full roundup, I'll just direct you to the pages for SPN and crossovers--all the new stuff is marked with a red "New!" in front of it.

My FF.n stats show I'm closing in on 800,000 words posted there. On the one hand, their word count feature can artificially inflate numbers... but on the other hand, not all of my stuff is archived there. I'm a bit boggled, honestly--who knew I wrote that much?

In other news, I think I've gotten unstuck on "Stole Soul Picnic" (finally). Can't promise how soon I'll actually get the next chapter written, but at least I've got a clearer idea of where I'm going with it. I am committed to finishing it, and I've got my spnaubigbang fic coming up in February and a collaboration in progress with En for history_bigbang, but beyond that, I make zero promises as to whether I'll get any other fanfic written this year. And I'm sorry. Still, never say never....

The rules: Post a line from each of your active WIPs. No fandom, no context, nothing.

Hoo boy.

( This is long, and I make no promises on when/whether any of these will get finished. )

Two one-shot AUs--The Nature of My Game (thematic elements warning) and The Road Less Traveled By--and the next Deaf!Dean installment, All Quiet on the Western Front, are all posted for your enjoyment.

In other news, is anyone interested in reading me maundering on about hidden object games and why, for example, the House of 1000 Doors series is much better than Brink of Consciousness: Dorian Grey Syndrome? I think I've got a post percolating, but I don't want to bore anyone.

Really glad I dropped out of sncross_bigbang now. RL hasn't calmed down much yet (one more week and I should be through the really busy part), but my muse... kinda... took off on me, in a 'verse I wasn't expecting.
First, I wrote Fides, Spes, Caritas, featuring Marine!Dean wandering off in a brain fog. Then a reviewer mentioned that he hadn't been in such bad shape in Semper Fi, which I knew, but it got me thinking and digging, and the result was Fides Quaerens Intellectus, which got longer and plottier than I'd expected. And then I got a small Lisa interlude, and then the baby showed up....
Result: 25k words written inside of two weeks.

I don't know how I did that.

I have started Chapter 3 of "Stole Soul Picnic," I promise! Once things calm down, I'll try to get that chapter finished and figure out where it's going from there.

'S been a hectic few days--flying trip to my alma mater the last couple of days, and to San Antonio to see the Travis Letter before that--and I might or might not have more musings on each or both later, especially since today's the day the Alamo fell. But that'll have to wait until I'm past this weather headache.
For now, though, I've got some more fic news: "A Cage Full of Heroes" has been nominated for a Papa Bear Award! Haven't read the competition yet, but here's hoping...