Arctic Light

This weekend I decided to (experimentally) try writing in a new-to-me genre and wrote 8200 words today. I GUESS IT'S WORKING OUT THEN.

Not unrelatedly, you know that feeling when you exercise really hard and don't realize until you've stopped doing it that you've probably overdone it?

... my brain feels that way right now.

(For the record, I'm a binge writer, not a marathon writer. I cannot write every day. Bursts of frantic activity followed by mentally flatlining are my usual writing methodology. It's definitely not an improvement over slow and steady, but it's how my brain works and I've eventually figured out that things go best if I just roll with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

New multifandom comment fest currently running: Multifandom kissathon!

I wrote an extremely tiny snippet of Iron Fist fic for this comment thread in my last post.

I don't know if I'll get around to reposting it over here, or transcribing it into a more accessible format, but I had to take the Magicians books back to the library today, and before I did, I scanned a few of the passages that had particularly charmed me and posted them on Tumblr. I did not expect to find these books so utterly charming, but I did.

yhlee made me do it. :D

( Iron Fist cacti thisaway )

Yes, this was totally what I needed to spend this evening doing.

genfreeformexchange is having signups now! AO3 collection here. I am 1000% on the fence about this one - it is SO MUCH my thing, but I'm definitely doing HurtComfortEx, and I'm running SSRC in March, and I still haven't started my Id Pro Quo assignment, so ... yeah. Also, thus far I would be completely unmatchable. But the tagset looks so good, and it's being run by the lovely snickfic, and I am Indecisive. Signups are open 'til March 5, so I still have lots of time to decide.

The HurtComfortEx tag set continues to entertain and delight. Current favorite off-the-wall tag: Sunburn from Perineum Sunning. (ETA: Oh my god, this actually happened to Josh Brolin. I'm sorry, it's probably terrible, but I can't stop laughing.)

ANYWAY, the tagset is still open for nominations until Friday, and signups open next week!

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I am very entertained by this Iron Fist edition of the "tag yourself" Tumblr game.

For the non-Tumblr people, these are graphics done in an intentionally rough "made at 2 a.m. in MS Paint" collage style with descriptions of the characters that are meant to read like they were written by someone with only a vague osmotic knowledge of the canon, except they manage to hit all the points that you would want someone to pick up on because of course they're written by someone who knows it inside and out. It's hard to describe; it's a very Tumblr thing.

Anyway, "looks like he would kill you but actually can't" (regarding Ward) is going to make me giggle for ages.

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Speaking as a feral watercolorist, this tutorial on painting simple leaves in watercolor looks super useful and I'm linking to it so I can find it again later.

I'm looking up links on the 1964 Alaska earthquake tonight because I was thinking about using a picture from it to illustrate one of the mailing list stories. This story about a little girl who had to watch two of her brothers swallowed by cracks in the ground while she tried to rescue them - holy shit. (And the poor mom! Do not read if child harm is a triggery issue for you.) There are also some good pictures of the post-quake rubble here, including a 1960s newsreel with video footage I haven't seen before.

During the earthquake, several oceanfront subdivisions in Anchorage collapsed and slid into the sea, and were later made into a wilderness area called Earthquake Park. When I was a young child, which was only about 15-20 years after the earthquake, there was still a lot of debris in the park, random holes in the ground and big chunks of concrete and that sort of thing. These days, 55 years after the earthquake, all of that is gone and it's just woods networked with bike paths and hiking trails. I remember climbing on big pieces of concrete and boulders there when I was a little girl, and my mom explaining that it was because of the earthquake. I had no idea, at the time, that there were unrecoverable bodies buried under the park, which was one of the reasons they made it into a park.

The Rand Dossiers (25215 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 31/?
Fandom: Iron Fist (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ward Meachum & Danny Rand, Danny Rand/Colleen Wing
Characters: Danny Rand, Ward Meachum, Colleen Wing, Misty Knight
Additional Tags: Tumblr Prompt, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Comment Fic, misc other pairings in some prompts, also the Defenders show up occasionally
Summary: Short promptfic and commentfic from Tumblr and elsewhere, collected here to have them all in one place, about the Iron Fist and Defenders characters. Updated Jan. 17, 2020 with Ch. 13-31.

I got the Iron Fist ficlet collection updated tonight, with assorted prompt fills from Tumblr and various commentfic fests over the last year. It should be up to date with everything not posted as an individual story to AO3. New chapters since the last update begin on Chapter 13.

I have to say that my favorite of all of these, at least while reposting, was this one in which Danny accidentally turns himself invisible, which I now want to write an entire fic about.

For the December posting meme I asked dirty_diana to talk about Ward, and that post is up now with some delightful meta on Ward as the hot mess that he is.

Something that was touched on in that post and my comment to it, that I was talking about to sovay a little while back too, is Ward in the rooftop scene at the end of season one.

( Some spoilery nattering about that scene )

Hi, I had a terrible thought I felt compelled to share, which is this:

It's canonically plausible and even likely that video exists of Harold abusing Ward. We know Harold had cameras everywhere, and while I don't think there's a point in the show when camera views are actually shown of Harold's penthouse (other than the approach to it), as a Came-Back-Wrong paranoid control freak, it's not unreasonable that he would've wanted it as a security measure, as blackmail material against the Hand or just a backup recording of events in case things went sideways. Or, heck, Harold being Harold, recording it on purpose to maintain control of Ward isn't unreasonable either. (I mean, by his standards.)

Which means those recordings could easily exist, and therefore, there are two possibilities I can think of for what happened to them:

- Ward deleted them himself, which means he knows they exist and probably had to spot-check the contents, or:

- They still exist on some hidden backup server of Harold's somewhere, and could be stumbled onto at any time by anyone.

I posted an Iron Fist fill for fan_flashworks' current prompt, "Shower":

Shower Solutions, a 1100-word ficlet in which Ward discovers the horror of shared bathrooms. Also, there is sibling bonding via mud fights.

(Due to Fan-Flashworks' challenge rules, it's posted only there for the duration of the prompt period.)

... I think the thing about the road trip for both Ward and Danny is that it's an opportunity to indulge in little bits of a childhood that neither of them ever really, properly got to have.

This requires some backstory.

Last fall, the first long-ish story I wrote for Iron Fist was Cute But Prickly, a post-S2 story in which Ward accidentally gets turned into a cactus.

This turned into a running joke when rachelmanija and I were in Tucson in February, where there are CACTUS EVERYWHERE (including loads of little potted cactuses) and led to me coming home not just with cactus-themed everything, but with three miniature potted cactuses that Rachel helped me pick out. I was only going to get one (Rachel: "Which one of these cactuses looks like it's saying 'I have been turned into a cactus and I'm not happy about it?") but then I realized that I could also get a Danny cactus to keep my Ward cactus company, and you can't have a Danny cactus without a Colleen cactus and, uh, this is how I ended up with three potted cactuses.

The Ward cactus is the absolute prickliest cactus I could find (it pokes me every time I try to water it, I swear); the Colleen cactus is tiny and cute but also very prickly, although in a somewhat less in-your-face way than the Ward one; and the Danny cactus is a very serene-looking cactus with only the smallest of tokenistic prickles. (Rachel and I decided that Danny would probably be pretty okay with being a cactus; it's good for meditating.) If these cactus each had a philosophy of life, it would be, respectively: "I am a cactus and I hate it," "I am a cactus; plz don't touch me or I will poke you," and "I am a cactus; life is good. :)"

(I don't know how much of our conversation the nursery staff could hear, but they really must have wondered about us.)

Anyway, the reason why I'm making this post is because I just have to say that I really wish I'd owned a cactus before writing that story, because I would have had SO MANY MORE THINGS for Danny to panic about than just making sure Ward-cactus has proper humidity and doesn't get too much sun. Since becoming a cactus owner, I have:

- Dropped my cactus.
- Accidentally broken spines off my cactus.
- Poked myself on my cactus. A lot. (Particularly the Ward cactus, which is the prickliest cactus imaginable. The Colleen cactus pokes me occasionally. The Danny one never has.)
- Gotten one cactus stuck to another cactus, to my hand, to the plastic dish in which they live, etc.

But then there was today, when O. was looking at my cactuses in the window and said, "Did you know one of your cactuses has fungus on it?"

It was the Ward cactus. OF COURSE it was the Ward cactus. If ever there was a cactus this sort of thing WOULD happen to ... Though the Colleen one has a little of it too. The Danny one does not. (He's too serene.)

So I panicked about having over-watered them and put them outside in the sunshine for awhile, and then I decided it would maybe help to take a Q-tip and clean off the fungus. I was diligently working on this when I realized that the white fluffy stuff all over the cactus wasn't fungus or mold, it was the white fluff that aphids produce, and I know this because IT'S MOVING. D:

Brand new panic time! I know how to get rid of aphids on houseplants by spraying them thoroughly with soapy water, but can you do that to a cactus? What if getting wet kills them?! We Googled this and it turns out that the soapy water treatment is fine for this, so we did that and now the cactus are drying in the sun. I assume they're going to be okay. I hope. I didn't realize that getting aphids was a thing that could happen to cactuses, but apparently it is.

(Also, I'm pretty sure the Colleen cactus caught aphids from the Ward cactus, which does seem like something that would happen to her.)

So basically the point is, I missed an opportunity to write Danny panicking about Ward having aphids*, and I had to tell you all about it.

*Pretty sure there is no h/c bingo square for this.

One of the people on the Iron Fist discord went to a con with Finn Jones this weekend and apparently he talked about what season 3 of Iron Fist would’ve been, and I’m just DYING OF FANDOM DISTRESS now, because it sounds like it would have been literally everything I wanted. I'll just quote what they said in the chatroom:

( Cut for details and DISTRESSED FLAILING because it's spoilery for the ending of S2 )

Looking through the justmarriedexchange tags and prompts, especially the ones to do with things like "Marrying someone so they can't testify against you", gave me the absolute worst idea for an Iron Fist season one AU, and it is this:

Harold forces Ward to marry Danny to get hold of Danny's 51% of the company.

I love it because it is PRECISELY the kind of absolutely bonkers thing that Harold would do. It makes no sense, but neither do 90% of Harold's evil master plans anyway, and Ward would hate it and absolutely want nothing to do with it, but when has that ever mattered? All Harold has to do is tell him he has no choice and threaten to make Joy do it instead.

Getting Danny to go along with it is something I'm a little less sure about, but maybe if it was presented to him as basically a formality to reconcile the two families and legally unify control of the company ...?

And therefore, then, as of mid-S1 or so, Danny is actually living with Ward and therefore a lot more clued into what's going on with Ward at that point in the series (the abuse, the drug addiction, etc), whether he wants to be or not ...

Whether it actually ends up romantic is ... well ... the sibling thing makes them kind of a NOTP for me, though this was a lot less true in season one (I did actually read the pairing a bit in the S1 and immediate post-S1 time period). I could more easily get on board with viewing it romantically if it starts at square one and they never really get a chance to settle into thinking of each other as brothers, maybe a Colleen/Danny/Ward OT3 sort of thing. But I also kinda like the idea that it's only ever platonic and is mostly "forced cohabiting" more than "forced romance", with the two of them having to fake it for the media and being terrible at it and trying to figure out how long they have to put up with this before they can get a divorce without it being too much of a big deal.

But mainly I just like it because it is hilarious and bonkers and so completely a Harold thing to do (the one way in which he hasn't fucked over Ward is making him marry someone against his will!) and would also get Danny and Colleen way more involved in the Ward storyline in S1 rather than being off doing their own thing most of the time.