I think AO3 might be overloaded due to LJ. It certainly loaded slow and stuttering for me the past few days.

Done! [link]

Carpetbaggers, 120,000 words of gen Narnia story, set right at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Eee! I've just finished the first chapter (trying to squeeze in a little reading at work, shame on me) and I wanted to say how much I liked it. Particularly Susan, she's always been the one I felt got the worst deal out of going to Narnia. It also made me sniffle a little in comparison to Lamp Post by thistlerose. Very short, 350 words, but it's oh so sad.

Oh, yes, I've read that one, Sail. It's lovely.

Really, dealing with Susan fairly was one of the big challenges of the story, because I want her to be entirely awesome, and yet I wanted also to be consistent with canon--if in a sympathetic way. It was tricky.

Has anyone here ever done a reversebang (art comes before the story) in any fandom? What makes a good pictorial prompt for you?

Can I answer that, even though my answer is no (in fandom, anyway)?

When we had the picture prompts in GWW, I loved looking for photos that had some kind of conflict in them. The family portrait where the mother was younger than the dad, and sour, and the kid looked confused -- that because a second marriage, etc.

I think static, *happy* pictures are harder, because every story needs conflict. (Although you can do it if you twist it -- this is the moment before it all went wrong, etc. I wrote one about a 60s girl at a bus station, very happy, waving goodbye, but from the POV of a killer who had spotted her, for instance.)

So if you're going to show two people, you want a sense of push-pull there, or you want them in a scene that looks incongruous given who they are. But other things might include someone reading a letter, or digging through a drawer, because then you want to know what the person is looking for.

Fandom has the advantage that you have an element of "why those people in that position?" even as it takes away your ability to decide for yourself who they are. But you can allude to a long history everyone shares with very little space. Symbolism takes on a whole new level.

My Big Bang story = done.

Apocrypha

117,000 words of John-centric gen that draws on stuff we learned all the way through S6. I've posted to AO3 as well as to JL.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go have a drink. I need one.

Heavens, Anne, that's a monster of a fic! Bookmarked.

Ooooh, 117K of John Winchester? I am SO all over that.

Bookmarked indeed.