Otter's Rock

A listing of all my fic.  My personal favorites are marked with asterisks.





Crossovers:
*    Parallels.  Babylon 5/Star Trek: Deep Space 9.  “Surely you’ve heard enough stories of glorious triumphs to recognize the pattern.  And to know of the horrors you don’t see on the surface.”  Vir on Minbar, before Sic Transit Vir.
     An Apocalypse in Metropolis.  BtVS/Superman Returns.  Faith, Andrew, and a newbie Slayer get sent to Metropolis when the Council's seers predict an apocalypse.
     White House Slayer.  BtVS/West Wing.  "Chosen" has repurcussions for Donnatella Moss.
     What She Wants.  BtVS/Atlantis.  Faith gets what she wants, and she wants McKay.
*    Witching Hour (the Oops Remix).  A find-your-soulmate spell goes wrong (just prior to Lover's Walk, during the whole "clothes fluke" thing).
     Reboot: the Chase.  Star Trek: the Next Generation/Stargate: Atlantis. 
     Stranded.  (Drabble)  BtVS/HP.
     1969.  (Drabble) BtVS/SG-1.
     A Quick Snatch and Grab.  (Drabble) BtVS/Atlantis.
     Reflexes.  (Drabble) BtVS/Atlantis.

Stargate: SG-1:
     Settling In.  What was it like for Jacob, in the early days?
     Do Not a Prison Make.  Her mind had been a trap for too long. Sarah, after Osiris.
     In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening (the Neighbors Remix).  What Jack fights for.  Post-season 8.
*   Pale Battalions.  Teal'c goes home after a glorious battle in Apophis' name.
     Consequences.  Broca AU.  It's sequel is New Lives.

Stargate: Atlantis:
     Arrows.  A mission gone wrong.  John/Teyla.
     Smooth.  Mensa-verse AU.  What Rod didn't notice at the time.
*    Adrift.  Misbegotten missing scene.  To fly a Wraith hive ship, you must be a Wraith.
     Scribbles.  What Kaleb Miller thinks about his wife's math and the events of McKay and Mrs. Miller. Note that Jeannie is the one who calls it 'scribbles.'

Batman Begins:
     Legacy.  After the funeral of Thomas and Martha Wayne, Alfred and Lucius have a quiet talk.
     A Night at the Manor.  Black-tie parties aren't really Jim Gordon's thing.

Battlestar Galactica:
*   Four Times Saul Tigh needed a drink (and one time he didn't).  Spoilers for Crossroads Part II
     Alone in the Silence.  Post-Resurrection Ship 2.  Lee Adama is a Cylon.

Buffy: the Vampire Slayer:
*    What a Father Is (the DNA Remix).  "I realize you’ve a dearth of male role models in your life, but a father is more than just an older man who happens to be around or who just happened to supply half your DNA." What the monks didn't tell about Dawn.

Star Wars:
*   Lessons Learned.  Anakin and Obi-Wan.  Third birthdays, in the temple creche and a slave ship.

Honor Harrington:
     A Picture of Happiness.  Honor and Paul visit home. Missing scene from Field of Dishonor.

Terminator:
     the end of the world as we know it.  Post-Terminator 3.  Their first night in the bunker, having to learn about each other.

• Even the weekend before Thanksgiving, there are still tourists in Gettysburg.  You know how I know this?  Because the idiots can't figure out how to drive in a traffic circle.  It's really very simple.  If there's a car coming across the circle, wait your turn.  If there's a break, go.  Don't get half-way out into the circle, then realize there's a car coming, and stop.  If everyone drives responsibly, it's a safe and efficient way of handling an intersection.  If they don't it's a mess.  It was a mess today.
• The Christmas tree was up in the town square already.  And see point #1, it's not even Thanksgiving, yet.
• I hate, hate, hate shopping for any kind of pants, but particularly jeans.  It always ends with me trying on a bazillion pairs to find one that fits.  Apparently, I have a small waist for my size (or I have a big butt for my  waist size, but I much prefer the small waist, you know?).  So if I find a pair of pants (particularly jeans) that are big enough to get over my hips and butt, there's usually a huge gap in the small of my back.  And my torso is long enough that low-rider jeans are too low, so I can't solve the problem that way.  When you've tried on every single pair of jeans in your size in a department store and none of them fit, that's frustrating.  I ended up having to go to the Spawn of Satan (aka Walmart).  But at least I found not one but three pairs of jeans that would work.  Which was good, because I was down to one pair fit to be seen in public.  And the winners are: Signature by Levi Strauss and Co. Totally Slimming at Waist, Riders by Lee Comfort no-gap Waistband and Riders by Lee Slender Stretch Mid-rise boot cut.

On the bright side, only in Gettysburg would you see two ladies in Civil War clothes in the womens' changing rooms at Walmart.  And I now have jeans!
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So, I was curious and downloaded the Eighth Doctor's one adventure, the made-for-tv movie from 1996.  It's ... wow.  The effects, sets, costumes, music, cinematography, all production values are like 100x better than the TV show which preceded it.  (Well, except for the cover of the theme song, which sucks.)  But the acting and the writing are ... bad.  Very bad.  Not consistently--there are some great scenes--but I can see why this never managed to launch a new series like they hoped.  Though it would have been cool if it had; there's potential.  It's just--they're going for an epic feel to it, which it didn't manage to carry off.  Question: is the Asian kid the first companion of color?  Even if he only lasted one episode.

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...and I have no idea what I'm gonna write.  I have an embarrassment of riches, this year; my recipient asked for not one but two fandoms I could totally write a story for.  But that doesn't mean I have story ideas bouncing around for them, you know?  One of them is an old movie that I know backwards and forwards because I watched it with my grandparents many, many times.  But I haven't watched it all the way through in, oh, maybe ten years?  At least not since I really got into fandom and fanfic.  I could still probably quote major sections, but I really need to watch it again before I start writing or I'll spend more time second-guessing my memories of the movie than actually writing.  Which means I probably won't be able to write the story until I get home for Christmas break, because I don't have a copy of the movie myself.

(The other isn't a fandom that I signed up for, but it's a relatively recent movie that was on TV just a few weeks ago, and the request is one I could do, it just doesn't interest me as much as the other.  And would require more research.  And, okay, all four fandoms are movies and I could write any of them in a pinch, but only the one from my childhood sings to me, you know?)

And I just realized that I have no cowboy icons.  If I am to write a cowboy story, I must have cowboy icons (hopefully from The Fandom I Am Writing In, because my recipient is right, there is definitely Teh Pretty in that movie).  Time to search LJ and DW.

ETA: and while I could find no icons of that movie (not even a single one!), looking at stills and classic movie blogs is definitely priming the pump.

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So, I love seasons six and seven of the West Wing.  The earlier seasons are good, but as a Republican, I get seriously tweaked over the way that almost all Republicans in the first few seasons are Evil! or Corrupt! or Stupid! or some combination thereof, and there's no possible way to be Good or Smart or Honest without being a Democrat and supporting all the same political positions the show and characters do.  But the last two seasons, while the Democrats are still the good guys, there are plenty of good Republicans, too, and differences of opinion are just that--differences of opinion, and not proof of evil.  And the wit isn't that much less, imho, and the cinematography is just as gorgeous, and really, that is one presidential election I would love to have in reality, because it was genuinely a choice between two good options.

Anyway.  To cut to the chase, Bravo sometimes shows West Wing in the mornings, which is cool, and they just finished the series and went back to the beginning, and I was reminded of how much I love the show, and went to re-read some West Wing fanfic.  And the fanfic is mostly Josh/Donna, because they had a great relationship in the last season.  I loved that, how that was handled.  She was strong, and not mooning over him, and mature, and he wasn't the beginning and ending of her world, and a romance between boss and subordinate can be skeevy and they handled it in a very non-skeevy way.  So I like Josh/Donna.  And went to re-read one particular fic I haven't re-read in a couple years.

Yeah.  It's no longer in my bookmarks.  It's set in the first couple of seasons, and the author keeps saying how strong and wonderful Donna is, but her entire life revolves around her Epic Love for Josh.  She's got it all planned out--she's going to wait the six years until Bartlett's out of office (assuming re-election), and then she and Josh can be together.  She won't see if she can, say, transfer to another post at the White House where he wouldn't be her boss and then see if they can make a relationship work, because then she and Josh would be parted!  She'll date, while she's waiting, because she's not dependent on a man or anything, but Josh is her One True Love so that doesn't really count.  Then Josh realizes he loves her, and they get married.  Then the Republicans hear about this, and crucify them in the press trying to use this as the wedge to bring down the Bartlett White House.  And Josh gets sued for discriminating against some other woman when he hired Donna.  And by the way, did I mention the fact that workplace codes of conduct designed to protect women from discrimination and harassment are viewed consistently as horrible things designed to get in the way of True Love?  Things that only Evil Republicans could possibly support?  And the Republicans are Evil?  And the lawsuit about discriminatory hiring practices is horrible and vile and only Republicans could possibly think that a man with a history of workplace romances who later married his assistant might possibly be influenced by attractiveness and how receptive a prospective assistant might be to his advances.  Basically, they try to throw out thirty years of feminist progress.  (Okay, there is one mention of how most lawsuits aren't frivolous, but it's one mention in a very, very long story.)  And the anti-Republicanism is virulent.  I didn't quite realize how much before, and I definitely didn't realize how problematic their take on women in the workplace was.  They do have witty banter, which I think is why I bookmarked this thing in the first place, but really that's no longer enough to cover the anti-feminism and destruction of Donna's character.

I can't believe I ever liked this thing.
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There are less than seven hours left to sign up for Yuletide.

If you like stories about books, movies, tv shows, songs, whatever, that don't get much fanfic, if you like writing, what are you waiting for?  Go!  It's lots of fun!
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You must check out a manip of Wonder Woman that hradzka found. It is awesome beyond belief. That is what an Amazon should look like, ladies and gents!

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As a general rule, fics with bad grammar/spelling drive me nuts, and also ones with major plot holes (for instance, when characters are made stupider than they otherwise would be so they don't notice the obvious so dramatic tension can be increased). Basically, just make sure you have a good beta to help you and you should be fine. Passing the Bechdel Test (i.e. having at least two women in your story who talk to each other about something other than the men in their lives) will win you bonus points with me. Please, no slash or explicit sex.

Ballet Shoes: I loved this book when I was a child, and recently re-read it and realized I still do. I love that the girls love each other even when they don't understand each other. I love that the girls take care of each other and their family. I love that the girls go for their dreams. I love that being a mechanic/chauffeur/pilot is just as good a career choice for a girl as being a film star or a ballerina. I love that ambition is good, and rewarded, but that doesn't mean you should be a bitch about it.

Chalion series: what I love about this series is the way it brings theology to life without being preachy about it. The way theology is shown to have concrete impact on the way people act, and the way they respond to the world. It's not just gods and goddesses throwing lightning bolts around, but a truly deep spirituality that is fully integrated into the world and the characters. What I also love about the characters is that they are realistic and flawed and still manage great things despite (and sometimes because of) their flaws. What I love about Lois' works in general is the lyrical nature of her prose, the depth and breadth and weight of the way she uses words and themes and mood, though that's harder to pull off. If that's not your style of writing, I'd rather something plainly written than something overflowing with purple prose because you're not used to writing that way.

Heinlein--The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: I love the politics, and the relationship between Mike and Manny (I cry every time I read the end), and the economics of this book (TANSTAAFL!). But let's face it, Heinlein's attempts to write strong women sucked. He tried, which is more than most authors of his generation, but did not succeed. I would love to see a Wyoh who is recognizably herself, and yet made more realistic and given flesh through a deeper treatment. I would also love to see some deeper exploration of what it is to be a woman in Luna society, how that affects and is affected by economics, politics, interpersonal relations, etc.

Wonder Woman--She's Wonder Woman. What more needs to be said?
Okay, okay. I love the whole superhero shtick. Costume, secret identity, fighting evil, alter ego, the works. But I also love people who are realistic, who live in the real world. Sure, Diana can fly. What's life like for her on the ground? In the day-to-day stuff besides fighting evil, and what's it like to go from fighting evil to normal life and back again? How's it different living in Man's World than Themiscyra? Not just the big stuff or the obvious stuff, but the little things that trip you up the most. I want to see her friendships, how they affect her and how she affects her friends.

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Am now officially signed up for yuletide. Yay! I never bother to suggest fandoms to add, because there are always more fandoms that I want to request than I have request slots available, and it is always agonizing paring fandoms down to four; there's no need to make it harder than it already is. I also like to check the requested fandoms page to see which of my requests is most likely to be the one matched on. (The matching algorithm matches the least offered/requested fandoms first, so the fewer numbers after the fandom, the more likely you are to be matched on that fandom--although that also depends on the characters requested and offered, which you can't tell from the list.) I've never managed to guess which fandom I actually ended up getting a story in, but it's fun all the same. Right now, I'm most likely to be matched up on Wonder Woman, because there's only my request and one offer to write. Who knows how that will change by the time signups are closed, and how my requests will interact with all the other requests and offers in the matching algorithm. Also, it's possible my assigned writer will default, in which case the most popular fandom would probably, though not certainly, be the one that I ended up getting. Judging by signups so far, Curse of Chalion is the most popular of the four I requested.

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For some reason, since yesterday I cannot access my webmail account in Mozilla Firefox.  I try and nothing comes up--no error message, just a blank screen.  Everything else comes up just fine.  When I try to access it through America Online, it works just fine.  What the heck is up with it, and how do I fix it?

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This is hysterically funny.
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So, we all know that Giles drinks tea.  But what about Buffy?  Are we ever told what her favorite beverage is?  Alcoholic or non-alcoholic, canon or fanon--lay it on me.

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Okay, you all know about Project Gutenberg, right?  Project Gutenberg works to get books and magazines that are out of copyright online for free in text form.  They've got almost 30,000 books available, with more being added every month, and there are a lot of sites that take books Gutenberg has put up and offer them on their own site.  It's awesome.  And the process of getting books ready is pretty cool, too.  Distributed Proofreaders is a system whereby texts are scanned, OCRed, proofread multiple times, formatted, and made ready for posting.  The whole system is designed so that people who want to volunteer their time can do as much or as little as they want, and still contribute.  Have twenty minutes to spare?  Log on, find a book that interests you, and proofread a single page.  Have more time?  Do more pages.  Alas, there are some steps that simply can't be broken down like that, and content providing--i.e. finding books, scanning, and OCRing them--is one.  (Well.  A lot of the time, you can use Google Books or The Internet Achive or various university libraries to 'harvest' page scans from, and that speeds things up considerably.)

Well.  To make a long story short, I have just finished scanning a book.  It is now ready to be handed off to someone else to OCR.  The book is True Christianity, by Johann Arndt, which was one of the major Lutheran devotional works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was the first spark in what became the Pietism movement within Lutheranism.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if a Lutheran household was going to have only two books, chances were one of them was the Bible and the other was True Christianity.  Which makes True Christianity a major work, and one that should be easily available, for scholarly research if no other reason.  And while part of the book is on Google Books, it is nowhere complete, and the Google Books version isn't that readable, as is so often the case.  So I checked an 1863 copy out of the seminary library, borrowed a scanner from a friend, and have spent the last month scanning pages while doing my homework.  And it is now finished!  Yay!  All 542 pages!
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So, I spent a lot of time channel surfing during this week's SGU ep.  The horrible desert scenes--gaah.  At least the military guys are supposed to have desert survival training, even if everyone else is clueless, right?  So they should know that it's better to drink whenever you feel thirsty (even if it means you run out of water sooner) than to conserve water, right?  Because trying to ration it only weakens you quicker.  And splitting up such that some people are on their own in the middle of the desert is a bad thing.  No, really, it is.  As for the emo hallucination scenes--frankly, I don't care about any of these characters enough for their emo-ness to be interesting.  As for the confrontation between the main scientist dude and the black soldier (I can't remember anybody's names yet), I think they were trying to point out the scientist dude's racist assumption about African-American men, which would be cool that they were paying attention to such things.  But I'm pretty sure they didn't actually succeed in showing that his racist assumption was unjustified, which kinda loses them all the points they almost made by reiforcing the point they're trying to argue against.  Still.  I appreciate that they tried.  And it was nice that the medic chick actually grew some balls.  I have absolutely no frickin' clue why the scientist dude is in charge of things; he has no leadership abilities that we've seen, and everybody but the Last Starfighter-geek actively hates and distrusts him.  Even if he were the smartest and most qualified guy on board, that doesn't mean he's suited to command, and even if he were suited to command the group will spend more time intriguing against him than actually getting things done.  Defeatist as the senior military guy is, he'd probably be much better at actually getting people to work together constructively, and we have no clue if one of the civilian types might have leadership potential.
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Title: To the Lord I will Sing

Written by: beatrice_otter

Rating: PG

Book/character: Miriam (Exodus) and Deborah (Judges)

Warnings: brief non-graphic mention of torture.

Summary: Deborah and Miriam: singing the word of the Lord in times of trial.

Word Count: 3,739

Betaed by: devohoneybee

Notes: Written for in_the_beginning .  The English translation of the Song of Deborah (Judges Chapter 5) is taken from the NRSV translation.  The Song of Miriam (Exodus 15:2-21, and I am using the scholarly theory that the whole thing originally belonged to Miriam and not just the last verse) is taken from Everett Fox’s translation The Five Books of Moses.  The word of God is always a direct quote.  Verses quoted in order are: Judges 5:3, Exodus 15:2, Judges 5:11, Exodus 15:21, Exodus 15:7, Judges 4:6-7, Judges 5:12, and Exodus 15:13.  The Hebrew text is taken from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia; all errors are mine.

 

( Hear, O kings; give ear, O princes; )

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Title: Lion-Headed Goddess with Bandages in Her Mouth
Author: Katt (xenokattz)
Rating: Teen (strong language)
Fandom: DCU (aka comic!verse)
Characters: Lois Lane
Summary: I'm Lois Lane. I'm the best investigative reporter living.

Go now.  Run, do not walk, to read this story.

Even if you have no interest in comic books or the media based on them, you MUST read this story.  This is perhaps the best story about a professional woman I've ever read.  This is the Lois I love, the woman who is kickass and Made of Awesome and sharp and witty and strong and is able to balance being her own woman with sharing her life and love with Superman and isn't a bitch.  (I have a strong problems with stories where women can only be strong if they are bitchy, and if they're not bitchy the story is all hearts and flowers and puppy dogs.  Yeah.  This story?  This story is how to do a strong woman right.)

What are you waiting for?  Go!  Read!
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So, school has started, and since I'm taking classes for grades this semester instead of pass/fail, my schoolwork is taking more time than it has in the past. (My seminary is not geared towards academics, it's geared towards people who want to be in parish ministry their whole careers, I'd say more people take their classes pass/fail than for grades. Not that I ever used the pass/fail thing as an excuse to slack off; but I wasn't obsessive, you know?) Anyway, my writing time is much curtailed.

I'm still excited about in_the_beginning but I'm definitely only going to be writing one of the two prompts I claimed. Moses and his identity issues will have to wait; Miriam and Deborah and the Word of God need to be finished ASAP so they can get sent off to beta.

sg_rarepairings is going to be run on a prompt-claim basis this year, which is both slightly disappointing and slightly relieving. I'm looking forward to it. And to the knowledge that I definitely won't be writing Sarah Gardner/Daniel Jackson this year, having written that two years running due to being assigned to the same person. But given its timing, it will be overlapping with yuletide, and both of course overlap with the end of the semester and the Christmas rush, and gah. It'll all work itself out, right? Right?

Meanwhile, I've got a Reboot Spock/Uhura piece dealing with some harsh Vulcan realities that's almost certainly going to have one of those completely open-ended 'endings' that I like because they're realistic and other people don't like because they don't give closure sitting on my harddrive. It needs a scene and a half, some tweaking, and a betaing, but between classes and my in_the_beginning fic, it's not going anywhere soon. (Okay, okay, I only like the open endings in my own fic, it drives me crazy in other peoples', and part of it is sheer laziness: I don't want to have to write the years of relationship and career exploration they're going to have on the Enterprise's mission that will have a huge effect on what choices the two of them make together and separately about where they're going and how they're going to live the rest of their lives taking into account Spock's biology and the pressure to repopulate the Vulcan species.)

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Title: Looking In
Author: beatrice_otter 
Summary: They are all children of Earth.
Fandom: Torchwood
Character: Jack Harkness
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,227
Betaed by: alixtii 
Notes: Post-CoE, but NOT a fixit.

( The first place Jack went was a nice house in a quiet neighborhood. ) This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/148011.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

In case you haven't heard, Disney just bought the Marvel Universe.  hradzka wrote a synopsis for an in-universe explanation for How It Happened that is the most hysterical thing ever.  Go.  Read.  Now.
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UK Daily Mail: Bed shortage forces 4,000 mothers to give birth in lifts, offices and hospital toilets.  And being refused ambulances.  And turned out of the hospital to give birth in bathrooms.

But wait, you say, we're Americans!  We can do better than our cousins across the pond!  But you see, we already have one national health care system, the Veterans Affairs system.  You know, like Walter Reed Hospital?  The one that has all the problems?  Oh, wait ... it's not just Walter Reed.  It's the whole system.  Maybe it's just me, but I don't want the people who run a health-care system that's just waiting for it's patients to die and then downplaying the problems to be the only health-care system available.

Should everyone have access to needed health care?  Absolutely.  Should the Government be in charge of it?  Hell no.  Not unless they can find their ass with at least one hand.  Which, judging by the available evidence, they can't.

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