3 things: Sky High, "Secrets" ch. 14, upcoming summer vacation

[edenfalling]

Things I have been doing recently-ish:

1. So on Saturday the 12th, while I was in Denison (I cannot remember offhand whether this was before, after, or in the middle of hacking up ch. 14 of "Secrets" with red pen), I spent an hour or so flipping channels between the final third of Sky High and Argentina vs. Nigeria. (Boring game, btw.) And this left me, as stories often do, wondering if there was fanfiction for Sky High. Apparently there is. Except, alas, something like 80 percent of it seems to be "My totally cool OFC goes to Sky High and falls in love with Warren Peace!!!" dreck, and what remains is often Warren/Layla.

(Which, okay, Warren/Layla is not bad, but it's not what I am looking for... you know, tangentially, I think there is a pairing type a lot of people find attractive, which is main!female!character with badboy!secondary!male!character -- Hermione/Draco, Katara/Zuko, Layla/Warren, Jean/Logan, etc. -- and it tends to leave me cold, especially when done in a shallow, trope-reliant way. And especially especially when the main!female!character has a canon love interest whom I also like, and whom she explicitly chooses. But that may just be me, and I may well be generalizing from too few examples, and also, this is way tangential.)

Anyway. So I have been trying to find good stuff among the dreck, and also hitting the Yuletide archives and crack_van and doing lj interest searches and stuff. I tend to overdose on fic when I find a new canon that interests me, but it's very frustrating when there just isn't stuff there to drown in. :-(

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2. After losing sleep the past few days (because of trying to find good Sky High fic), I caught up on some rest last night and used my renewed brainpower to finish transferring my red-pen edits of "Secrets" ch. 14 from paper to the computer file -- and made a few more changes as I went, which is par for the course -- and sent it off to beta. So hopefully I will get that back in a week or two, and have the chapter up... I dunno, around the 4th of July if I'm lucky?

But don't count on it. My estimated editing times always stretch out longer than I think they will. (Mostly this is because I am usually sick to death of a story or chapter by the time I'm making a third draft of it -- and yes, I really do make three actual separate drafts of each chapter of "Secrets," in comparison to the one or two drafts I make of anything else. This is mostly because the story is so damn long that I need the extra care.)

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3. My parents are hitting the road Tuesday morning and driving out to the Twin Cities for General Assembly. I will fly out on Saturday, and on Sunday we'll drive up to the lake. Hurrah for a vacation that is actually a proper vacation! We will most likely drive back down Friday night, since my return flight to Ithaca leaves Saturday morning and you don't want to risk bad weather on the lake plus bad 4th of July weekend traffic when you have a plane waiting.

But I am going to Star Island. Everything else is irrelevant. \o/

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...Judging by the lack of brain-to-keyboard filter going on here, I think I should go catch up on more sleep. Stupid enervating summer humidity.

Comments

[pineapplechild]

On a random, drive by, note, I've gotta say that Katara/Zuko leaves me absolutely cold. I see them with their base line assumptions about things like good, purpose, etc, at such cross purposes that most Katara/Zuko (which I have not made an extensive compiling of, admittedly, but sometimes I just want some Zuko-fic) does not deal with. Same thing with Hermione/Draco, except I have found the rare fic that makes it work for me.

[edenfalling]

Zutara just doesn't interest me. At all. I haven't even thought about it in the level of detail that you have -- I simply do not see any attraction between them, I like their canon pairings, and I am not much interested in romance anyway.

This can be rather frustrating since Zuko is one of my favorites, and it is damnably hard to find Zuko-centric fic that isn't also Zutara. *headdesk*

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Aha, I'm too lazy to open my email right now, but JSYK, I'm rereading all of Secrets before I start editing, so I'll probably end up starting in ~2 days.

Anyway, do you want edits in chunks (like, ~2000 words each) or as a whole?

[edenfalling]

As a whole is easier for me. :-) Thank you again for agreeing to do this!

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

War and Peace In Mind (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3263773/1/War_and_Peace_In_Mind) is my rec for Sky High. There is a Warren/OC romance down the road, but the fic is really amazing in world building and the OC even actually (gasp) contributes to the plot.

I like Matchbox Dragon's Work (http://www.fanfiction.net/~matchboxdragon), although it is a bit Warren Centered as well.

All Was Golden In The Sky (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4809278/1/All_Was_Golden_In_The_Sky) is a haunting Warren character study, and most everything else the writer produced was pretty good.

This writer was pretty decent, too. (http://carolinecrane.livejournal.com/tag/fic:%20sky%20high)

Temira (http://temira.livejournal.com/104869.html) is always awesome, whatever her fandom.

Most of the best Sky High fics were produced for Yuletide.

I'm a Warren fangirl, so sue me.

[edenfalling]

I've read the first three already, and yes, they are very good! (Why is there not more of that quality???)

*rushes to check out the other two links*

I like Warren too. There is such a lot of implied depth behind him, with hardly any concrete details, and that is always fun to think about. (Plus, you know, he's hot. *wry*)

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

My Sky High phase only lasted about a week because the fandom just sucks that much. Every now and then, there's a decent story, but it's really a tweenie fandom so the writing just isn't that great.

Warren is like the only character with any depth, which might be why he gets the fic... and yes, he's the sexy guy. *g* I so would have hit that when I was in high school. Nowadays I kinda feel like a perv for admiring his very, very pretty face.

Hope you like whatever you hadn't read. Did you ever get into Glee? There's a Sky High/Glee fusion which is actually pretty awesome (though it's all about the Glee characters).

[edenfalling]

re: Glee -- I hardly ever watch television in the first place, and the premise... well, I am not usually into teen soap operas unless there is a fantastic gimmick (and by that I mean 'fantasy/sci-fi' rather than 'awesome'), and also it sounded like the kind of melodrama it specializes in is not the kind of melodrama that appeals to me. I dunno, maybe it would be awesome, but I can't bring myself to care enough to put in the time to watch any episodes.

(I am kind of prejudiced against tv and movies, honestly, because I cannot control the time it takes me to experience the story. It's a weird thing to dislike, I suppose, but there it is.)

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

I'm not usually into TV either, but Glee's gimmick is it's a musical, which I cannot resist. I am such a musical dork. The show is really a parody, so it's not to be taken too seriously. I think it's been described as what would happen if you took High School Musical and punched it in the stomach.

[edenfalling]

Ah, and apparently I have already read Temira's stuff too, without registering her name. *headdesk* Is it weird that I like her ship manifesto more than most of her actual fic? (Except "Five Times Warren Lied, and One Time He Told the Truth" -- that one's brilliant.)

[rianax.livejournal.com]

I want more Magenta fic honestly. Warren is smoking, but I adore Magenta's no nonsense attitude and want/want/want to see her in a setting that gives her credit. The girl is /wasted/ in the showboating superhero biz. She needs to be recruit for supersecret spy stuff or become a professional art thief. Being able to get around unnoticed in air ducts is a highly marketable skill.

I am a sucker for amazing but mundane abilities-- screwing fighting aliens, I want a talent that I can make a career at.

[edenfalling]

I would like more fic for all the canon characters! (And yes, Magenta would be awesome as a spy.)

I think I will make Sky High one of my Yuletide requests this year, replacing either The Acts of Caine or Song for the Basilisk since I got stories for those last year.