So I got my Ladystuck fic finished and posted. This took a bit of doing, as my internet connection has been intermittently failing all night -- and this is on Verizon's end, not mine or my upstairs neighbors' -- but I was able to get it up before the deadline, albeit in a weirdly truncated and broken-code fashion. I have since restored the missing sections and fixed the coding errors. :-)

I would like to have somebody look it over for general narrative flow and character voice issues. Is anybody willing to beta-read a story about female Homestuck characters that is between 3,000 and 8,000 words long?

Note: I am repurposing my stock Yuletide letter here, which is why some of the sections may seem slightly off-topic for a single fandom exchange.

Hi, and thank you in advance for creating a story or artwork for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a context-free sex scene or draw explicit porn, I'll be thrilled just to get something in response to one of my prompts. Optional details are optional, after all! *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

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( General Information )

Okay. On to specific prompts.

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( Jade English )

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( Terezi Pyrope & Nepeta Leijon )

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( Terezi Pyrope & Vriska Serket )

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( Roxy Lalonde )

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So yeah, this is basically what I asked for last year, minus the Alternian world-building via Mindfang. I tweaked the Jade request so it's more specifically focused on exciting adventures!!! but beyond that, hey, the heart wants what it wants. Besides, everything else I thought about requesting turned out, on deeper reflection, to be a story I wanted to write, not just a story I wanted to read (or art I wanted to see), so... yeah. This is what I want and I will love you forever for filling one of these prompts.

Ladystuck Dark reveal day, hurrah!

I wrote And the Big Bad Wolf: Jane has nothing to fear in the forest. The girl in the white fur dress is not so sure. Contains implied mind control and mild gore. (2,400 words)

[This story has also been crossposted to ff.net.]

It's basically a fairy-tale mashup, because there is no way on earth to look at the end of Act 6 Act 5 and not see Little Red Riding Hood references. Then I threw in a bit of generic "evil witch" because the Condesce may be a grandmother figure, but she's not anybody's idea of innocent. Also all the other characters are various beta session carapaces, partly so it was easier to keep Jane isolated (since she has no canon connections to them), but partly just because I could and it struck me as amusing in a terrible way.

This story is perhaps one of the least original things I've ever written. It is what happens when you execute the following equation: my long-standing interest in fairy-tales + the fatalism and color scheme (white-black-red-green) from Knives + forest descriptions from Star Island -- most specifically Inland, Walking South for the birches, Raspberry Red for the berry patch, and Lake Windigo for the maples around the unnamed lake in the fic. (Side note: here are some other island poems, if you are curious).

It's a bit rushed toward the end, because I have chronic deadline failure. It is also slightly less disturbing than I meant it to be -- I was originally planning to work in the implication that the Condesce has been eating parts of the dead bodies and also feeding them to Jane, but that fell by the wayside for lack of time. Ah well, such is life.

I am over the minimum wordcount for my Ladystuck Dark fic, but I am not finished by a long shot. I have... *checks outline* ...three more scenes to write. Maybe four, depending on how the last two play out in practice -- they are the ones that start to break the previously established pattern so who knows what might happen when the words hit the page!

This story is definitely in line with the dark!fic theme of this Ladystuck iteration, but I can't help finding it utterly ridiculous as well, if only because it is stolen lock, stock, and barrel from a hodge-podge of things I've previously written -- and which I will gleefully link to once authors are revealed.

Ah well, back to the salt mines!

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ETA, 1:15am - Success! Okay, so I missed the deadline by ten minutes -- I threw up an almost finished version ten minutes to 1 o'clock and then wrote the last 250 words or so in a frantic rush (and fixed some of the previous ones while I was at it), but hopefully that is close enough.

I think I may have ended up with more "creepy" than "dark," but again, that should be close enough.

Now I shall reward myself with milk and cookies, since I've already had quite enough alcohol for the night, whoops.

Ladystuck reveal!

Mad Science Family Reunion: Rose made sure Roxy's lab would be waiting for her at the end of the world, but she needed a bit of help to set up the equipment. Who better than Jade English, whose explorations of the Medium have given her a better understanding of Sburb's technological artifacts than any other human, to lend a hand? (And maybe steal a kiss in the process.) 3,300 words, written for whilst.

[This story has also been crossposted to ff.net.]

...

So, thoughts.

First of all, the title has next to nothing to do with the story. It was a working title I stuck on the file when I thought I was going to combine two prompts -- Alpha!Jade & Alpha!Rose interacting in a positive fashion, and Alpha!Rose meeting Beta!Roxy in a relatively canon-compliant fashion -- into one. (This is the reason for the little comment about Jade potentially causing a strange inter-universal paradox if the transmaterializer's power had been on when she sat on one of the buttons, btw. Alas for missed opportunities!) Then Rose changed the story's tone and direction on me (in other words, she got melancholy), so the combination of those prompts became unworkable at anything less than, say, twice the current length, but I was unable to think of anything that usefully described the story as it currently exists and so the title sits there, awkwardly out of place. :-/ Oh well, such is life.

Second, "Mad Science Family Reunion" uses the same background continuity as Every Child a Wanted Child, Food and Cheer and Song, and The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship. Probably also Hollywood Shenanigans, come to think of it; at any rate, there is certainly nothing in that story that contradicts the others. I think I should maybe collate them into a series on AO3 and call it Alpha Timeline Fluff or something to that effect.

Third, the story was basically ignored by readers at large. I am not sure if this is because I was not on-theme with the "deep long!fic" tone of the exchange in general (and did not qualify as crack!fic either), or because I tagged the story Jade English/Rose Lalonde instead of Jade Harley/Rose Lalonde and/or Alpha!Jade/Rose Lalonde and thus got left out of searches since "Jade English" doesn't seem to be a properly wrangled tag. (Which is stupid. It's her name, she's been a known character for ages now, why is she not a drop-down option???) Anyway, I don't think it's because the story is badly written (because, while I am obviously biased as the writer, I think it's a perfectly fine story), or because Jade/Rose is an unpopular pairing (particularly in the context of Ladystuck), so... who knows! Some stories just softly and silently slip into obscurity and no one can ever give a truly satisfactory explanation for why. *shrug*

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P.S. I should mention that after I made my post about my main gift (My Only Daughter a Smoking Gun, by shellfishDimes, which you should go read because it remains wonderful!), I also received a treat (which had multiple recipients, but I am pretending it was all for me because I love it that much). Just, by Farla: The first time they meet, Vriska saves Terezi's life. (800 words)

I finished my Ladystuck fic last night and got it posted with six minutes to spare! Victory is mine! (...And then I edited it extensively a couple hours thereafter, where 'edited' is defined as 'added another thousand words,' since the original version had an abrupt cut-off as opposed to a proper ending. *sigh*)

The stories, however, do not go live until New Year's, and having written this in such a rush, I am somewhat doubtful of how well it hangs together. So.

I come to the internet with my (metaphorical) hat in hand to ask if anyone is willing to beta-read between 2,000 and 5,000 words of Homestuck fanfiction, centered on some of the many awesome female characters in the comic. Knowledge of canon would be appreciated, since canon is fiddly and complicated in the extreme and I want to be sure I'm not actively contradicting anything we've seen or been told, but even a basic check for general story flow and mechanical issues would be helpful!

Unlike a lot of my fanfiction, this story is... um... less than accessible if you are unfamiliar with canon, due to extensive discussion of esoteric aspects of canon, but I think I can summarize any necessary background information in a paragraph or less. Also the emotional throughline should be clear without any real need for context. (In fact, if the emotional throughline isn't clear, I screwed up and need to fix it, so any comments on that aspect would be extremely welcome.)

If you are willing and able to look over the fic, please tell me so I can send it to you. (And if not, well, my quirks and flaws will just be a bit less curtained. Which is not exactly a new experience for me. *wry*)

Joy and happiness!

My recipient provided five prompts, of which three would be fairly easy to write, the fourth would be trickier but still doable, and the fifth is... frankly not something I'd ever thought about, but which is now giving me all kinds of ideas. Not a single one is a thing I would never and/or could never write. So yay for that!

Now I am off to stalk the Dear Ladystuck letters spreadsheet in search of more information. *steeples fingers, plots evilly*

So I signed up, and even got in on the first round despite the participation cap. Yay! (Ladystuck was popular enough last year that, in recognition of their own time and energy limits, the mods have capped participation at 300 this year. The first signup window -- which just closed -- was for 100 people. The second will open on Sunday and run until the cap is reached.)

This was probably an unwise life choice, but I don't care. I made prompts for some stories that I want to read very badly, and have offered a bunch of stuff that may hit me exactly in my writing comfort zone, or may stretch me in interesting ways. Both of which are fine outcomes!

So yeah, assignments go out on Oct. 25th, and between this and Yuletide I guess I will have my fandom marching orders through the end of the year. :-)