lobelia321 | bereft:need fic, need upgrade

First of all, I have to say how very frustrating LJ has become and how joyless. Not only does it take me 3 minutes on average to make a comment these days but tonight stupid Explorer wouldn't even allow me to post. The application actually kept crashing every time I hit the 'update journal' link. I've now crawled into LJ via an ancient Netscape browser with the images turned off. What sort of fun is that?

You must all be getting heartily bored with my techie lamentations. I certainly am.

Anyway, I am also bored with my fandom life. Now that the constant interactivity of LJ has been rendered painful, I want to read fic! But there isn't any good fic. Or not that I can discover. Perhaps the techie thicket is too tangled for me to hack through and I haven't been able to find the fic for the fuck. But people: rec me some good reads, please.

Today I was reduced to reading Nsync slash. And it was strangely satisfying. There's something about rps. And there's something about rps'ers. And there's especially something about popslashers. Often I really like an author's HP fic only to find that she is a former or closet popslasher, and that is always fun. I think popslash is a good inoculation against taking oneself seriously. From what I know of Nsyncers is that they adored their subjects even less than lotrippers adore theirs. They know that slashing pop idols is entirely ridiculous, and they do it with a kind of tongue-in-cheek passion that is devoid of the kind of absurd canon worship that I stumble across in HP. Lotrps was like that for me. Also there's a certain kind of plot that just goes really nicely with some dumb young men hanging about in hotel rooms.

So, the upshot: Basically I don't care what fandom you rec, as long as this is high-quality A1 stuff. The kind of writing I like (you probably know if you're on my Friends list but here goes anyway):

* no bubbling seminal fluids, please
* no lay/lie confusion
* immaculate prose
* Americanisms? I don't care; if the story's good, I'll cope with them.
* realism, or
* swoonery
* happy mooshy endings
* alternatively, really really well-thought-through bad endings where the badness arises from the characters and is tragic not externally inflicted
* I don't mind the occasional manly tear.
* Not too much action-plot at the expense of delicious dialogue and slow, slow build-up
* Hot, delirious sex
* Beautiful metaphors, or
* Terse, spare prose
* Bonus points: Unusual weird pairings done in a way that convinces me of their OTPishness

Somebody stop me before I describe the fic that never existethed... But no, it doeth! Because I have read fics that are like that (see my (woefully un-updated)recs-page!).

P.S. Don't be upset if I don't answer your tigs straight away. I tend to wait till I'm at work where I have a new, fast imac. But then again when I'm at work, I'm... at work. So you see the dilemma and appreciate the techie delays. :-)

ETA: I remember asking for fantastic fic-recs last year sometime so if you recced then, no need to rec the same fic again.

Also, if it's HP: At the moment, I feel like reading only something with Crabbe, Goyle, Dudley or Draco in it. Anything else will have to be super-mega-fantastic in which case I may already know it. God, I am demanding, aren't I?

Current Mood: desperate for reading matter

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cathexys.livejournal.com

reduced to popslash...oh my :-) i'm not sure i'd agree with you about the lack of adoration...i think it's *both*...tongue-in-cheek as well as total freaky fangirlishness...

if you haven't seen all of them, check out my recs, though some of them are weird pomo shit...the top 4 are just amazing and anything by sandy keene just totally touches all my this is great and makes me wanna curl up buttons.

if you just want general fic...any fandoms? i'm in this ww craze and read some gorgeous fic recently that might fit all your criteria (wearemany who has written the *perfect* popslash fic as far as i'm concerned has this amazing josh/sam that i'm trying to get everyone to read :-)...but i've been pimping some older sentinel stuff lately and just read cesperanza's latest ds fic and ...

anyway, i go by writers. i will read any fandom by certain people like ces and julad and res and torch...so when i'm starved for new stuff, i look around my favorite writers and see where else they've been [which means i'm about to read SN, b/c everyone passed through there and there is this wealrth of great fic and even though the premise really doesn't appeal to me i also never thought i'd be reading about teenagers singing and dancing :-)]

From:

cathexys.livejournal.com

ok, i went back to your previous entry and realized you wanted one and only one and seemed to not care about fandom. So, i'll defy you and go with three :-)

wearemany's Chance to Make It Real [WW]

julad's The Importance of Being Brian [QAF]

cesperanza's Kowalski is Bleeding [DS]

boy, this is hard...i wanna list 5 and 10 for every fandom...

From:

lobelia321.livejournal.com

I knew you wouldn't agree about the adoration! Given your recent post on matters rps, *g*. But I'm going to stick by that one for the moment although I felt odd about it even as I typed. I realise something's not quite right with the way I formulated it; there is adoration, and I'd be the last to discount the fangirly aspect of my life in lotrps but... There is less adoration of canon, perhaps that's what I mean. More willingness to concede that canon doesn't matter. Or that what matters is canon as fic fodder, raw material. Not this abject canon-love for its own sake that I find in HP fps and that was terribly rampant in Lotr fps last time I looked.

Thanks for all the reccypoos. God, there are a lot of fandoms out there. Who or what, eg., is "SN"? What is "ww"?

With the reading authors in any fandom: I've done that with some authors but it's a funny thing. In principle, this should work. In practice, it doesn't work for me. Sometimes authors actually seem to have a different style when they switch fandoms. Or perhaps I'm more hung up on the within-one-fandom thing than I like to admit to myself. But it's true: there are some authors I adore but whose oeuvres in their entireties I have not read. The Nsync I read came from having finished all that author's HP (

jane3) and needing more but although reading popslash was fun, there was a certain emptiness at the heart of my reading experience... Hm.

Thanks for your recs!

From:

cathexys.livejournal.com

nonono...i've spoken to several people now that were in both fandoms and pop rivals or exceeds lotrips canonicity. check out references and chronology. Plus we now have a central archive which tries to comprehensively offer non-commercially available appearances.

so, i think like in any fandom, it depends on where you look, but there is extreme faithfulness as well as extreme adoration...at times sadly without the irony (flamewars over hair, noses, or girlfriends are tin hat scary at times)

Sport Nights and West Wing...two Sorkin shows.

i tend to rec long fics for starters, b/c they let you get to know the characters while not needing to rely too much on canon. when i read wearemany's the long run, for example, i couldn't name more than ione nsync boy and had no idea what they looked like. it's that discussion of great fic and/or great fanfic...i think good first time recs must be both so that even newbies can get into it...

(and now i'm wondering how much of the shows you must know to appreciate the three i recced...oh well :-)

i've read jane's stuff, and i think it's harder to appreciate than some of the more novelistic stories...but that might just be me (and we do have similar taste b/c i wanted to rec exog so bad...but i obviously can't :-)

From:

lobelia321.livejournal.com

I'll have to believe you on this one. *g*. The only fandom I know inside out is lotrps and its offshoots, really, so my knowledge of popslash is heavily filtered. Heh, but let me cling to my little delusion... Maybe I've just got my antennae out for a particular sector of Nsync. The people I was thinking of were, e.g.,

ukcalico and

helenish who share a certain, how shall I put it, non-tinhattery sense-of-the-ridiculous attitude to canonnery. And both were popslashers and then veered into HP, so I'm reading this through their eyes. Sorry, got momentarily distracted by a very cute finch outside my window in the tree. Very pretty.

Where was I? Oh yes, there was that rps post you posted which referred to

fabularasa's post which I never read so am talking through my arse again but what's wrong with that?

Are you ever on AIM? And at what times? I'm lobelia321 on AIM. It would be fun to chat in real time!

Yes, we agreed on Exog, but can't remember if we ever exchanged top ten. Mine are listed at the bottom of my page, and that gives you an indication of what I like. Also the list I posted above. I think it's true what you say about fic/fanfic and that something combining both is good for a newbie or an outbie (or whatever you call a person who dips into a fandom for the sake of fic but with NO intention of hanging around in there... okay, I said that about HP and look what happened but in the case of everything else it's remained true).

Um, and what is a "Sorkin show"?

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