Tag: memes

Last Sentence Meme:

Tagged by @iwt-v and @fand0mfan – thanks!

Rules: post the last sentence you wrote, and tag as many people as there are words in the sentence. (let’s be honest, my sentences are long. Too long. I just really love commas and dashes, ok?)

This is from the upcoming chapter of Reclamation: 

“He allows one hand to rise, carding through the short strands of James’ hair where they are growing in delightful curls that Thomas knows from experience will disappear as they lengthen.”

Tagging @bean-about-townn, @complaininginthedark, @captainfuckingflint, @squid-inspiration, and anyone else that wants!

I was tagged to say 10 favorite female characters from 10 fandoms by @otg2012. Thanks!

Here they are in no particular order:

1. Dutch from Killjoys

2. Mother Bernadette from The Exorcist

3. Madi from Black Sails (I love everyone else too but she’s just. so. amazing!)

4. Tauriel from the Hobbit movies 

5. Cheri Littlebottom from the City Watch series by Terry Pratchett

6. Cecilia from Dishonored (there are a bunch of awesome female characters from this series too but I love Cecilia bc she saved Corvo’s ass pretty much personally and is just a kid trying to survive, not an asshole like most of the characters)

7. Female Hawke from Dragon Age. Yes, that counts, I love her, your Honor.

8. Gabi from Man from UNCLE

9. Elise De La Serre from Assassin’s Creed Unity

10. Eve from Mass Effect 

Tagging whoever wants to do it – I’m not sure who has or hasn’t been tagged yet

She looks to Vane, who shrugs and gestures with the knife he had offered to use, and Hennessey, beside him, simply smiles, offering no comment. Miranda does not seem to need one – she has long since discovered that her father-in-law has a wicked sense of humor.

What I like about my version of Hennessey is that he’s got a sense of humor and it’s very much based around the fact that he’s not a noble. He’s not Lord so and so, he’s not the younger son of Lord So and So – he’s a former pig farmer who made good, and it shows here, because he knows perfectly well how to catch that chicken. The chicken knows it. Gates knows it if he thinks on it a moment. James most definitely knows it, and is wondering what exactly it would take to get Hennessey to bestir himself to catch the chicken. And meanwhile, there sits Hennessey, munching an apple and enjoying himself, and Miranda knows him perhaps best of all of them save Gates, because she knows what he’s about and is just glad to have a parental figure who has that sense of humor that’s not malicious, just mischievous at times.

“Toulouse!” Thomas scolds. “You are a chicken. That is a tree. How on earth do you expect to lay eggs there?” sorry it’s so late but please do the commentary for this line which I think is perhaps my favourite.

Happy to do this one!

So – Thomas is not a farmer. At all. He’s probably never held a chicken, or dealt with collecting eggs, or gotten pecked at all trying to collect the said eggs (and I must confess that I have not either. I am a town-dweller and the nearest chickens lived down the road when I was a kid. Now the nearest ones live across a field and we are unfortunately not acquainted. I miss the days when they had a rooster – I used to hear him crow in the mornings and it somehow made getting up seem less unreasonable bc hey – the rooster’s up, clearly day has arrived). As far as Thomas is concerned, chickens have one goal, and that is to furnish his breakfast table with eggs. Toulouse the chicken, on the other hand, apparently likes trees like most chickens do, and poor Thomas has not grasped the idea that chickens are, in fact, birds and therefore food motivated. Poor Thomas – he’s got one idea of how to chicken and Toulouse just isn’t interested in his ideas!

Rogers asks the question. The man standing in the half-light of evening is tall. Rogers can see that – taller than he, even, and blond, and somehow he does not look like a pirate. There is an air about him – one that Rogers recognizes, one that his father-in-law had possessed. It is a kind of faded nobility – the shoulders no longer held straight, hands at his sides not as if they belong there but as if they are used to being active, and yet there is still something commanding in his gaze, (1/)

and yet there is still something commanding in his gaze, and in the tone of his voice.

 “Governor Rogers,” he greets. “Oh good. Everyone I want to shout at in one place.” 

“You’re him.” Silver’s voice, Rogers thinks once again, is a sound he would be perfectly happy never to hear again. 

“I believe you told me to shut up,” he snaps. “Allow me to return the favor. Shut -” (2/)

“You’re him,” Silver repeats, and he can hear the sound of the other man grasping hold of the bars to pull himself up, the chains he is in rattling as he does so. “You’re Thomas Hamilton.” 

The man in the shadows steps forward, and Rogers inhales sharply. It is not possible – 

“I see James has told you something of me,” Thomas answers, and Rogers can hear his wife’s knitting needles actually cease their clacking for a moment. Everything goes still, and then – (3/)

“I can explain,” Silver starts, and Thomas snorts. He is, Rogers thinks, different, somehow, than he had pictured. There is an edge to Thomas Hamilton – one that Rogers could not have anticipated, and against all odds, he seems to recognize it where Long John Silver patently does not. (4/)

Experience, perhaps – he had had the misfortune of encountering Alfred Hamilton once, and only once, and suddenly he is reminded that Thomas, for all that he had been accounted a good man by those who knew him, is also Alfred’s son. Rogers sits up straighter, gaze snapping toward Silver, suddenly awake and alert and quite completely terrified. “Shut up,” Rogers hisses. “For the love of God -”(5/)

“Shut up,” Rogers hisses. “For the love of God -” “I very much doubt that,” Thomas addresses Silver directly, and somehow – somehow, Rogers knows that he will not be sharing these cells with the ruffian on the other side of the bars for much longer. “Please, though – do tell me why you thought you could abuse and sell the man I love and not have me come for your head.” For the fanfic commentary thing?

ooooh, I am so excited that you’ve chosen this for fic commentary!

I really, really, really love this section. Rogers POV is one that I did NOT expect to have in this fic, but I realized that an outside perspective on Thomas would actually be really useful, because it gives us an idea of what the past ten years has done to Thomas in terms of how he’s perceived by others. It also gives us an idea of how Thomas is going to be seen by people in the next chapter – what it is that Thomas’ cousin Archibald sees when he looks at Thomas, and what Hennessey sees, because the Thomas who has come back from that plantation is not the Thomas that went away and I think it’s important to acknowledge that. He’s angry, here – really, absolutely furious, and I wanted to show everyone what an angry Thomas Hamilton looks like now that we’ve also seen frightened Thomas and joyful Thomas and a host of other Thomases that are equally related to the trauma he’s suffered and his sudden, unexpected removal from that situation. 

As to Rogers and Silver and what’s going on with them emotionally – well, for starters, they hate each other. They were never going to do anything else, really – Silver’s a talker and Rogers is raving at ghost!Eleanor, and so I want everyone to imagine here that these two have been snarking at each other for days and driving everyone else, their guards included, absolutely mad. I’d imagine the guards are quite happy to let Thomas in – they’re hoping he can bring sanity or at least take a request to Madi for earplugs!

In all honesty, though, when Thomas reads him the riot act, I think Silver’s just seen the specter of what he was going to do to James and it’s really brought home to him that what he planned was horrifying. It is in no way a mercy – as Thomas tells him, there’s nothing about that plantation that is anything less than hard and soul-crushing and dangerous, and that’s the fate that Silver planned to hand James over to. That’s what Thomas has come through, and this is also Thomas saying to Silver and Rogers too, “I know what you’ve done to my husband. It stops now, if I have to fucking break you to pieces psychologically to make it stop.” Silver clings to denial but ultimately breaks at least a bit. Rogers, though – I think what Thomas says to Silver actually frightens Rogers quite significantly, because he sees in Thomas what he himself could become. This is Rogers’ moment of realizing what England does to men who try to change her even by legal means – what she does even to those with great privilege if they step out of line and it scares the shit out of him. He’s come from a place of thinking like a lot of rich men – that the pirates just made all the wrong choices in life to end up where they are, and Thomas is proof to the contrary. He’s proof that a man can do everything right – everything Rogers himself has done as far as working within the law – and still end up a slave, shoulders no longer straight, hands twitching for work to do, and towering anger that’s strong enough to topple empires included. I’m setting a deliberate contrast in this scene, between Silver who lies to himself regularly and so allows any guilt he feels at his actions to slide away and Rogers who has been screaming apologies to his dead wife and now sees in full just what it is that his enemies have been fighting against without any kind of filter between him and that horrifying realization that he’s been wrong.

fanfic wip guessing game: wife

you, lucky person, get a snippet from the beginning of the forthcoming sequel to Battle Raven, what little of it I’ve written:

“Remind me,” he says after a moment of silence that Jack is learning not to fill with too many words, “to tell you – later – about the worst dog bite I’ve ever gotten. Came from my wife’s favorite lap dog.” And then, to Jack’s surprise, the mountain of a man gives him just the barest flash of teeth – a smile, and claps him on the shoulder. “Let’s go get Charles.”

Fanfic WIP guessing game

‘miss’, ‘kisses’, ‘rose’

1. Miss – 

None of these count technically but I’m using the find function. 

Not bloody likely, Charles thinks, dismissing it. If Teach shot him in that side and still couldn’t kill him, then Charles had best bet that there’s no weakness to be exploited there.

He does not retreat – merely asks a question in the quiet, resolute tone James has missed so much and heard only the night that Thomas vowed to make Silver pay for landing James here.

The words stop Vane in his tracks – he stares, plainly surprised at the admission.

Unfortunately, Kisses and Rose don’t appear in my current WIP – maybe the next one!

Fanfic WIP Guessing Game

fic ask: 14, 15, 19, 23, 25

14 and 19 I’ve answered here.

15. something you learned this year

Hmm. I think I learned a lot this year as a writer, but the thing that pops to mind is “if I can see a scene in my head, then there should be enough detail on the page that my readers can see it too. If I’m imagining a candlelit room, people reading shouldn’t be imagining a sunny day.” I think I’ve gotten better at focusing on little things in order to bring people into the moment I’m describing.

23. fics you wanted to write but didn’t

Hmm. I keep wanting to write the Whitechapel crossover and I haven’t done yet. Similarly, the sequel to Battle Raven is burning a hole in my drafts. As far as fics I wanted to write and probably won’t now, though – hmm. I honestly can’t think of any. 

25. a fic you read this year that you would recommend everyone read

Revenant by Beth Winter. It’s a Flinthamilton reunion AU set post s2 and… look, that’s my revolutionary darlings, ok? It’s got Vane, Abigail, Thomas, and James, and they’re all in character, and Thomas gets to be angry about what’s been done to him and definitely changed by it in a way that’s very believable. 

Fanfic End of Year Ask

WIP Meme

I was tagged by @iwt-v – thanks!

1) How many works do you currently have in progress?

Um… *counts* Five? No – wait. Seven.

2) Do you/would you write fan fiction? 

That’s all I write at this point.

3) Do you prefer paper books or ebooks?

It depends on what the situation is. Generally speaking, I prefer paper books but if I’m at work, for example, it’s a lot easier to read an ebook at my desk than it is to read a paper book.

4) When did you start writing?

Oh shit. Like – seventeen years ago? I was 11 or 12, I think. 

5) Do you have someone you trust that you share your work with?

If we’re talking about who I trust to review my work before I post – two. They both know who they are!

6) Where is your favorite place to write?

In my room very, very late at night when the world’s gone quiet

7) Favorite childhood book?

Oh shit. Um – listen, friend. Here’s the scoop. Itty bitty me was a bookworm. Like – major, serious bookworm. Bitty me was learning to read hieroglyphs in third grade and tried out Cyrillic in fourth or fifth, and had all these books about all KINDS of things, and well – if I had to pick out books that I have multiple editions of, I guess I’d have to pick out The Sorceror’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter by Allan and Elizabeth Kronzek since it was bitty me’s intro to magic theory. Still – asking me to choose a favorite childhood book is like asking an alcoholic to choose their favorite liquor, ok?

8) Writing for fun or writing for publication?

For fun and maybe for publication if I can get one of my fics edited and fleshed out and set in its own universe and somehow accepted by a publisher.

9) Pen and paper or computer?

This is going to sound mad, but it depends on the character. Some of them I can write on the computer and others absolutely demand that I pick up a pen and do the thing properly.

10) Have you ever taken any writing classes?

Nope. 

11) What inspires you to write?

I once saw a quote where someone had compared fanfic writers to irritated oysters, and I’ve always felt that quote applied to me very well. I write fic when I feel that something could have been done better or a character deserved better from the writers or an angle just wasn’t explored that I wish had been.

I’m tagging @penflicks, @bean-about-townn, @comtessedebussy, @captainfuckingflint, @complaininginthedark, and anyone else that wants!