a couple more fests (you can still sign up if you move fast)

Here are 2 interesting fanwork games that I missed for some reason, but which some of you have posted about recently. Neither happens to have any of my personal best-beloved fandoms nominated, but perhaps they do yours:


littleblackdressex

"Little Black Dress is a ship-based multifandom exchange premised on creating fanworks for 'Little Black Dress' characters, which is to say, characters who 'go with anything.' In an exchange context, this means characters you ship with anyone. ... you request only characters, and it's up to your recipient to select which ship they would like to write from your requested canon."

Sign-ups close 24 May. Stories are due 7 July.

They do permit up to 3 Do Not Want matches per character requested (for example, if FK were nominated, I could request Nick and then DNW Lacroix, Schanke, and Tracy), and separately category DNWs that don't count against the 3 total (for example, I could use a category DNW to exclude Divia, Jenny, Lisa, etc.; and then another category DNW to exclude Fleur, Andre, etc.). This would leave my writer free to match Nick with any other recurring or one-shot character.


justmarriedexchange

"Just Married is a marriage-themed multifandom exchange for marriage tropes of all kinds: convenient, accidental, undercover, arranged, forced, and so on. ... Matching will be done on fandom, relationship, and marriage trope freeforms."

Sign-ups close 26 May. Stories are due 26 July.

Beyond the usual super-tropey tropes, some surprising available scenarios include: ( Read more... )

OUaT Mulan stories

lightbird reminded me how much I adored Once Upon a Time fanfiction in which Mulan had been in Storybrooke all along, and her implanted/parallel past was as a US Afghanistan or Iraq veteran. I especially loved reading stories set early in OUaT with those versions of Mulan, before the first curse broke, or shortly after, or from one era into the next, where her modern parallel life -- in our world -- was still powerfully with her.

A few of these stories may actually have been written before Mulan turned up in canon, free to imagine her only from the animated movie, myth, and history. More were written after, of course, and went strongly Mulan/Aurora from then on.

I can remember more of those stories than I can find again. I wish I'd bookmarked them. Or that the AO3 had different tagging categories for primary, secondary, and cameo characters, because Mulan is tagged as in thousands of OUaT fics, but she stars in so very few... You've likely heard me sigh over that before.

Anyway, if you happen to be a fellow Mulan OUaT fan, share recs? Self-recs are fine! :-D Thank you!

new HL fic rec (caution for covid-19 fic content)

If you don't want the current situation in your fanfic, this isn't for you!

If, on the other hand, you would like some fanfic in the current situation... I found this one comforting when I bumped into it tonight. Why not have our characters affected, coping, along with us? (I remember a 9/11 fic with Duncan volunteering at Ground Zero.)

HL: "Conversations from a Pandemic" by Raine_Wynd (~1K words, G, gen). Set now-ish in Seacouver. Anne, Richie (Clan Denial), Duncan, Joe, Amanda... (Anne's daughter Mary is away at college.)