the deep moans round with many voices

I am trying to get a bunch of internet housekeeping tasks done tonight, so... better late than never? (Also, I am sorry, but I am not going to backtrack my links and add author names. I am, at heart, a terribly lazy person and the names are now on the stories themselves in any case.)

Anyway, here are twelve more stories I think you might enjoy. :-)

( cut for length )

I still need to read the two stories I failed to finish before the author reveal, but one is Eridan-centric and I don't care if he's somehow become a fandom woobie, I still think he's an annoying jerk and stupidly boring besides (boring being the much greater sin for a fictional character), and the other looks like it will probably be complicated and somewhat depressing and... I dunno, if I read it and it's fantastic, I may return and add it to this post, but I am kind of recced out for now, particularly since recs are NOT my usual mode of fannish engagement.

Argh, I so wanted to finish reading all the Ouroboros Mix stories before authors are revealed around Friday noon-ish, but I have thirteen left (plus originals, oh my god, why do I do this to myself...) and I'm sorry, there is just no way.

This is why I need to get better at time management, so I'm not always trying to do three or more things at once. *sigh*

Hmm. Maybe I can at least skim to tell whether I would rec them, and then just read those in detail now while saving the others for tomorrow night after work...?


ETA: Screw it, I give up. Two stories left, both of which are long (and one is a remix of an equally long fic), and they both look potentially interesting, so yeah, not gonna get my second rec post up tonight. Dammit.

I've been reading back-to-front through the Ouroboros Mix archive (meaning I started with the stories posted earliest) and backtracking to read a bunch of the original stories that inspired the remixes while I'm at it -- some I'd read before, but a bunch I hadn't, so that's been interesting. I've also been skipping a few fics that look awesome but are also LONG, since I'm more in the mood for bite-size reading experiences today. I will get to the longer stories tomorrow, I suppose.

I have vague intentions of making a rec post when I'm finished with the archive... although that will probably take at least another day or three (there are only 53 stories, but that's still a lot of words to read!), so perhaps I will do two rec posts: one when I get halfway up page two of the archive and another when I reach the end. *ponders*

I am also trying to leave kudos and/or comments on each fic, since remixes are typically low-feedback exchanges so every little bit helps. I'm not sure why I try so hard to comment when participating in fic exchanges, since I am terrible at leaving comments on pretty much everything the rest of the year, but whatever, it's been working for me thus far.

(Oh, also! My remixee liked what I did with her story! *huge sigh of relief* I know that a remix challenge is not a gift exchange, strictly speaking, but one still wants to produce something the original writer won't hate, at the very least.)

And now back to reading. :-)

Mildly strange experience of the day: receiving a review for a fic I wrote... five years ago? six? in a fandom I have since basically abandoned, in which the reviewer ignores the story at large in order to nitpick a minor issue, and in the process restates one of the themes of the story as if triumphantly proving to me that I have somehow missed this truth of human nature instead of, you know, writing a fic about it. O_o

I always wonder what people's motives are in leaving such responses. I mean, do they think an author will rewrite a story years after the fact? Do they just want to feel superior at a writer's expense? (I suspect the latter option is more likely to be correct.)

I sometimes also wonder if such reviews mean I've been too oblique in my writing, but I went back and reread the story in question (since it's been five or six years and I'd forgotten almost all the details) and no, it's pretty clear that the relationship in question was problematic before it broke off entirely and that things don't "suddenly 'get better'" -- instead, Character A explicitly chooses to forgive Character B despite their troubled past, and it's all but explicitly stated that Character B continues to backslide into old, bad patterns for a while thereafter. I just didn't dwell on that because it wasn't the main arc of the story. Horror of horrors, I occasionally try to maintain narrative focus!

Ah well, at least that kind of review is a sign that the fic hasn't completely sunk into the vast obscurity of the internet.

And on that note, I will return to editing my latest fic... which will go anonymously live tomorrow afternoon with the rest of the Ouroboros Mix fics, yay! I can't wait to see what my remixer did with one of my submitted stories. (And I really hope my remixee doesn't think I butchered her fic... *bites nails, twitches in nervous anticipation*)

I keep finding things wrong with my Ouroboros Mix fic. Like, yesterday I finished the scene I'd realized I needed to insert -- yay! -- and then this morning in the shower I realized the reason I keep being unhappy with the other scene I've been rewriting over and over is that it is the wrong scene. It's working completely against the emotional and thematic arc of the story, which is probably why it has grown longer and longer and longer and still never felt quite right.

So I will be ripping that out and redoing it yet again. Argh.

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In other news, last night I had a dream about two lesbian scholars/augurs/religious teachers who basically invented the germ theory of disease and a bunch of basic epidemiology on Firsthome, back a thousand years or so before Ekanu's day. It was the sort of dream where you wake up and think, "Okay, I have two main incidents and they both make reasonable narrative sense, but how the hell do I connect them into a single story because there are several years between them and... oh, right, flashbacks, duh."

Their names are Hesotha and Ujamulala, and they are from the same geographic region as Ayutha the carter from Clockwork. I should write an outline of their story before I forget the details. :-)

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And now, laundry!