boogieshoes: (Default)
I was idly thinking about the Magnificent 7.5 AU i started long ago, and may even finish the first story of.  Some day.

When I was a young fan-girl, and The Sentinel was still fresh and awesome and so completely fandom's little black dress, a woman named Susan created a GDP AU of the Sentinel... and I ate it up.  And it was my not-so-secret fetish for a while. And then I started to pick apart the holes, because that's what I do when I'm really fascinated and in love with an idea.  Basically, if I start picking it apart, you know I really like it.  So the GDP AU was kind of awesome, and should have really showcased how bad a Guide's life could get in the universe set-up, but I noticed some things like... Blair was the only Guide who was ever abused, despite a governmental institution ripe for abuse that was very obviously corrupt and full of corruption.  Every other Guide's relationship with their Sentinel was nearly glowingly perfect.  Yet the exposition and GDP set-up made it a point that the Guides were in a very precarious position, kept imprisoned and chained to their Sentinels in law if not in physical iron.  It was weird to see a system where you *know* power-hungry assholes would get off on abuse of power, and in fact, the in-universe history pretty explicitly detailed cases of it, but it was never shown on-screen except for with the GDP Guards....

Now there's another show at this time called Renegade.... featuring the lovely Lorenzo Lamas.  And being the young fan-girl crushing on Lamas' magnificent chest (I sh*t you not, I think the first 3 episodes never showed the man in a shirt under his vest), I *of course* was thinking it'd be cool to show someone else's life being turned upside down due to the GDP rules - a Guide for Reno Raines (played by Lamas)! heh, and guess who would have an angsty Unrequited love crush but his female Guide!  Who would be a variation of me, of course.  Because fan-girl crushes.*

Fast forward a few years, and an older-but-hopefully-wiser fan-woman is binge-watching Renegade, grinning and giggling about how cute Lamas was back in the day.  And I got to thinking... in the Mag 7.5 AU, which I've been noodling about lately, I should totally make every new Guide I introduce girl-boy-girl-boy-etc... you know, keep the cast even.  Well, I've already got Chris's Guide pegged as a girl, and I had a random thought that Reno could actually be a damn good partner with an ex-military guy... which would be an interesting story in and of itself**....

But this means I have a really good excuse to drool over a younger Lorenzo Lamas again, and brush up on my Renegade... and I have ZERO problem with watching a cute man with a nice chest! :)

-boogieshoes, contentedly drooling over Lamas


*Incidentally, it's a really, really good thing I like to build in my head before this stuff ever makes it to paper.  talk about drawer-fic...
**It also means that the Guide on Ryan Kelly's team, if I'm allowed to borrow them, is going to wind up being another female***
***It also means this post has gone from light and funny to more serious than it was ever meant to be.  I swear, I can kill a laugh at the comedy show!
boogieshoes: (Default)
I've been experiencing a resurgence of interest in Sentinel-fanfic, not sure why.  My mother's father recently died*, so it's possible I'm feeling really nostalgic 'remember the good times' feelings as a way to deal, but anyway....

So, Sentinel fandom and Highlander were the first fandoms, at the same time, that I found myself involved in.  I know what attracted me to both shows, the 'what-if?' factor.  For Highlander, it was 'what if these long-lived people existed?  how do they view the world?  And I could do a bit of meta on that, but that's a separate post.  For Sentinel, it was 'what if these people existed, how would it change things? And not? And *wow*, there's a reasonable scientific basis for the senses occurring, even if the mystical stuff is, well mystical! (But I love the mystical part anyway, lol.)

And so I find myself re-reading fanfic as archived on AO3, and reading some of the fanlore wiki, and realizing that fandom really had a far-reaching affect on a lot of *other* fandoms.  I knew that, of course, because you see all those Sentinel AUs all over the place, even in fandoms like TeenWolf where it the main audience may never even have heard of the show the AU is referring to.  But Sentinel is, as someone once said, 'the little black dress of fandom'.  It really does go with everything - even with properties that don't actually need any more things to hit the supernatural/ mystical/ existential button (like, Dragonriders of Pern, Heralds of Valdemar, Supernatural...) you can see the Sentinels everywhere, and it's fun. 

And also, I find myself being inspired to write, although I know it won't happen right away.  I want to write, sort of as a gift to Sen-dom, a piece with the same style of Asimov's 'Commentaries on the Bible'.  Only, on the fictional book, Burton's 'Sentinels of Paraguay'.  And I find myself wondering how many 'quotes' people have made up from that book.  And also thinking I need to re-watch the series so I can find canon quotes.  And then I thought, it would be great if these commentaries were able to pull off something like Cesca's utterly incredible "Written by the Victors" (fanlore entry, AO3 story link), using historical sources describing the controversy over 'the Ellison case' (complete with quotes from TSbyBS, the published-unpublished book, entries from 'The Memoirs of Simon Banks' which has an edition out annotated by Daryl Banks...).  Something which leads the reader to assume that in that future time when the Commentaries are written, Sentinels and Guides (because I swing that way!) are common, or at least commonly known about, and part of the everyday fabric of society, much like the Bible and it's influences.

And I definitely want to finish my Mag 7.5 piece, which is a fusion between Magnificent 7 and Susan Foster's GDP universe. 

Speaking of which, I think I read one of my own comments on the fanlore page about the GDP**, at least it sounded like me.  But it was capitalized correctly, and even now, I'm only half-way into capitalization unless i'm writing an actual story.  (I got into the habit of not capping in posts during college, when we actually had to worry about how many bits and bytes the messages used...)  Anyway, the comment was to the effect of, "The GDP-verse is an incredible idea, with some great world-building, and some really lousy execution."  It's the 'great idea/ lousy execution' part of that that makes me wonder if it was my quote.  Certainly i'm not the only one who's said that, but that particular set of words is a common turn of phrase of mine.  And whether or not the fanlore page has my comment or someone else's, i stand by the evaluation - there's a lot of writing execution factors in many of the stories -strained wording, plot holes, flipping tenses, etc - and there's a lot of 'didn't think through the implications' factors in the stories, too, like making the US, Canada, and America one giant country with no explanation of how it got that way, and the impact on history.  Which it would have had, and how much and what would depend on when and 'where' the uniting had come from. 

Still, as ideas go... it has a ton of potential, and I really wish I could come up with ideas like that on my own.  Alas, I am, like the commercial, not the person who invents things, just the one who likes to make them *better*.  And yes, I'm well aware how egotistical it sounds to put it that way, and 'better' in the case of fanfic and other arts and crafts is a matter of opinion, for sure.  But the whole 'sussing out the puzzle pieces and putting it together to see the big picture' thing is an innate part of my personality - i *think* about things like this, ruminate over them.  cogitate.  If i were a cow, whole pastures would disappear beneath my hooves as i thought over the whys and wherefores and hows and the 'what does it really mean?' 's part of stories.  I don't think of this as particularly creative, as I associate creativity with originality... so I'd never take credit for idea origination.  But yeah, a large part of my interior motivation to write fic is 'gotta fix it'***.   I just hope i don't insult anyone in the process...

So here's to nostalgia, and the most delightful little black dress in the world, and inspiration to write! *chugs a glass of tullamore dew*
-boogieshoes

*Grandpa was 95+, and we all knew it was going to be this year, I think.  He died the best death possible, if such a thing *is* possible - in bed, surrounded by family, lucid until he went to sleep.

** The GDP universe is one where Sentinels and Guides are known.  Sentinels are up-held as unassailable heroes, and Guides are pretty much 2nd class citizens, with laws and customs in place that make it difficult to impossible to protect a Guide from an abusive Sentinel.  The Guide Development Project, charged with training and protecting Guides until they are matched with Sentinels, is sometimes the source of the worst offenses, but can rarely, if ever, be held accountable.

*** This is also a major reason I tend to be hesitant about writing a lot of things I think about.  I don't ever want to imply someone's idea is broken or not worth it.  I wouldn't spend time on it if I didn't think it had some merit.  But I sort of wish I could stick an explanatory note on a lot of my stuff - 'I'm putting beads on the cross-stitch pattern!'  Because like my stitching - I wouldn't do it if I didn't like the pattern, but I love putting beads on it to make it 'better'.

boogieshoes: (fresian)
my birthday is next week.  high on my "most wanted" list is a steamy Escorts AU fanfic.

Buck/ Chris anything.

Supernatural anything.

Kidfic with Buck or Chris the little ones (but not Buck and Chris both little in the same fic).

Sequal to "Loser Takes All" - what happens the next time someone gets in trouble? ;)

I have a special love for Vin is psychic/ gifted in some fashion stories.

I quite like the Yellowstone AU - gen or slash, more please?

Crack!fic... wing fic.... Crossover fic - i lover "Xander's real parents (Xander from BtVS)";  love the Highlander AU fics; how about some more Sentinel/ Mag7 fics, any time, any place, Sentinels known or not. :-)

All that, and if the Lord and Lady are truly pleased with me - a break in the weather.  I'm getting tired of 80% humidity and 95F weather....

-boogieshoes, humming
boogieshoes: (Default)
i've been having major drama with my computer lately, culminating with an emergency buy this weekend. follow along the story now:


so the guest room is being done in 'bad victoriana impression of ancient egyptian' (because an accurate rendering of ancient egyptian furniture, even for the pharoah, would make guests run, instead of be delighted...), and the stencil being used to put grout lines on the wall got, well, gummy, as repeat stencils tend to do. and i decided to clean it with acetone.

this was my first mistake, because i had the acetone sitting higher than my toshiba laptop, and i was tired, and knocked the bottle over, and it splashed on the toshiba. i let it dry, but the keyboard was fried. so i went and bought a cheapy plug-in mouse and keyboard. then i started having problems with weird input bugs, and i thought it might be the old keyboard reading stuff even though i was using the plug-in. i researched at work, dl'd instructions to take out the on-board keyboard, had second thoughts, and bought a wireless keyboard and mouse. the wireless combo worked for a while, especially after i updated the java script that runs things.

then the input bug came back. and i got frustrated friday night, and decided to finally take the inboard keyboard out... mistake #2.

i killed the toshiba. so Saturday morning i went to the local target, and bought new laptop. and an external hard-drive. then i went to the computer repair shop and asked if i could get a data transfer, and a downgrade to windows 7.

the data transfer was relatively successful. they didn't manage to get some of the programs across - like pidgin, the chat client, adobe reader, openoffice - but they got most of the files across, and did get mozilla firefox and thunderbird across. they got my old email file (yay!), but unfortunately, they didn't get my old bookmark file across. which sucks.

so monday (one of those short saturday/ closed sunday places), i picked up the laptop and brought it home and began to remove the crap windows insists on putting on their new boxes. i'd managed to put pidgin back on the new lappy, and gotten to the chatrooms - always the hardest part of a new machine for me - so i could have help if i needed it.

until i deleted the 'bluetooth thing'. yes, mistake number 3. see, i think bluetooth, and think the schizophrenic phone or smartphone type things. i don't think WLAN drivers... guess what this was? back to the computer store, sigh. and out more $$ to get them to undo my stupidity.

needless to say, i'm no longer going to be fixing my own computer. the local repair shop are nice people and don't make fun of me. at least while i'm in the store, hah.

anyway, i need to rebuild my bookmark file, so i'm taking favorite links in the comments for fanfic, writing tips, neat places to shop... etc.

-boogieshoes, the extremely frustrated
boogieshoes: (Default)

hey, i did it - made a reasonably major advance on one of my stories! thus my goal for nano is achieved - write *something* this month, despite this being the busy part of my year!

for those of you who liked Tanya Evans dropping in on FC, that's the story i worked a little bit more on.  i changed the title to 'One Night In Bangkok' for various reasons, and it's likely to stay that way.  without further ado, here's what i've got of Ch. 4 (and 5? i haven't decided if i should put in a chapter break there at the end yet, but it might be a logical place to do it.)


Title: One Night In Bangkok
Fandom: Mag7: OW
Word Count: 1,495
Pairing: None/Gen
Rating: PG-13 up to present
Warnings: WIP, Pt 5/? 

previous parts found:

In Time Relieved, Pt 1/?;
In Time Relieved, Pt 2/?;
In Time Relieved, Pt 3/?;
In Time Relieved, Pt 4/?;

Hey Look! A new Title! )-bs
boogieshoes: (Default)
more snippety from my mag7 story.  I hearby commence shamelessly begging for comments. -bs

boogieshoes: (Default)

did i mention i was supposed to be doing actual work today?  well, i sort of am - the CFD case is cranking, anyway.

-bs


boogieshoes: (Default)

story seems to be writing itself.  weird, that.  i don't know how long this will be, but to give some background, i envision this story as part of a duology.  this first part is supposed to be chris (Mag7) telling jim ellison (Sentinel) how he, vin, and buck got to the present (2006/7 or so).  so it's a very light corssover, obviously an AU to both universes.

at some point, i need to run this through a chris-voice beta, in addition to the regular beta-type stuff.  comments welcome, encouraged, and shamelessly begged for.

-bs

 

boogieshoes: (Default)
In Time Relieved
 
 
Prologue )
 
boogieshoes: (Default)
same scene as ch. 1, continued.

boogieshoes: (Default)
i think. i'm starting to lose coherency, but i finally hit on an idea for a reasonable sentinel AU setting.


Sentinel intro and AU set-up )

-boogieshoes, tired but happy

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