index // faves.
self-indulgence and 20/20 hindsight.
aren't lists fun? sabine is putting together this legacy project, the one fic you leave behind. i'm pretty sure that's the long run, but, you know. legacy! only one! i'm having some trouble narrowing it down, and when i went to check i realized there are some 75 stories or so here, some of which are quite long, and half of which i can never remember the title or pairing or POV without looking. if i had to rec my own favorite stories, it would look something like this, i think. here's 15, and i tried to keep it to one story/pairing. no co-writes, no sequels (unless it's the first story), multiple-story fandoms only (popslash and sorkinfic).
the top 15, in only something resembling order:
THE LONG RUN LANCE+CHRIS
i worked on this story every day for three months, and a year after posting it i'm still happy with almost every line. that's not true for anything else i've ever written. i think there's this level of insanity you acquire when you're working on something long and involved -- you get annoyingly self-referential, living in your own universe because it's the only thing that makes sense. a year later, i'm most proud that this is a story set 10 years in the future, taking place over some six or so months, with a good 16 or 17 years of backstory, and yet there's not a single flashback scene. it was also the absolute best feedback i've ever gotten -- quantity, but mostly quality. for all the love i put into this, i absolutely got at least as much back.
WAIT FOR IT LANCE+JOEY
this was a birthday present for jamie based mostly on her ideas and conversations we'd had about the unbearable hotness of jola -- and the almost painful and total incompatibility that logical extensions of their romantic aspirations/abilities would seem to project for them. i wrote the sex scene in one take while drugged and flying cross-country -- the handwriting starts to tilt off the page but i only changed a few words. it's the only time i think i've managed to integrate lube or condoms into a story in a way that i find to be both realisitic and hot.
STATIC LANCE
so i wanted to write a story about freddy that wasn't trying to be some authoritative story about freddy, mostly because i never felt like i knew enough about him to even construct accurate dialogue, let alone characterization. i'd also been saying for a while how much i wanted to write lance on a hiatus or break as just your average rich gay guy -- he gets up, goes to the gym, talks on the phone, has some sex. (i blame synchronik's antimatter, too.) and then there is the sprint guy, who is one of many random guys who i'll point to and say, "lance would think he was hot" or "he would look hot with lance." this wound up being a combination of all those ideas -- i have a perhaps unfortunate tendency to let a story simmer until it can hold a couple of different ideas i have bouncing around. this is the newest story i let on the list. i'm not sure how it will hold up. maybe i'll take it back off when i decide i don't like it so much in a few months.
MÄDCHEN CHRIS+LANCE
this is where i cheat a little to take two for one pairing, though this couldn't be that much more different from the long run, given it's baby/euro and an amalgamation of three stories i'd had on various back burners -- a victor/victoria homage/drag story, lance as southern belle, and something with the german footage we'd seen of lance alternately flirting with and looking terrified of this viva tv vj named mike. that's where i started, and i'm not sure i should have tried so much in one, but still i feel that this was my great attempt at genderqueering popslash -- a boy who looks like a girl dressed like a boy. and he's in love with another boy. it didn't all come together until i was putting together the kink archive's drag stories, actually, and then i couldn't stop thinking about how, no matter how hot lance is in a dress, he's too much of a dyke still in the early years for that to really count as drag, at least in my head. in my head, this is as close as i've ever gotten to making gender and sex and sexuality as fluid and overlapped as they are in my life.
THE ROYAL WE *NSYNC
i still feel ambivalent about having this up on my site, because it started off as a writing exercise and i'm frankly not sure it ever got polished enough to need to exist on its own. it's in first POV, for chrissakes. that said, it's one of my favorite things i've written and it became something of a blueprint for almost every story i ever wrote afterward. i wanted something that was about fundamental misunderstandings, and more about fantasy than reality (the old USTer in me coming out to play, i suppose). overall i think that the more fantastic the scenes are, the better they work. jc's meditation on chris fucking him against the car is among my favorite sex i've written, and joey and chris and the food run through my head every time i unpack groceries, still. the scene that's not all hard edges and reality and maybe changed everything i ever wrote from lance's POV after i got it down is him there at the end, "a fantasy is a plan you don't put enough hard work into."
A LITTLE RAIN LANCE+JC
i usually consider lance/jc AUs to be cheating, and i did keep trying with them till i felt i'd gotten it a little right in the real world, but still they're just intangible enough that i think it's easier to take them out of time and place. i maybe love this story irrespective of lance and jc and joey even being in it, because it's a genre/setting i love so deeply and had never felt i came even close to getting right before. more than anything else, this was my deep bow to amber and the magical worlds she creates again and again.
THE BALLAD OF RICHARD MARX AND BRYAN ADAMS JC+NICK
this was my story for the 2002 secret santa challenge, the pairing chosen by torch, along with the setting of "somewhere comfortable." i was a recent nick convert, had only written one story with him in it before, and was still IMing georgina every other sentence to make sure i hadn't fucked something up, even from JC's POV. the one thing that caught my eye about JC and nick was how both of them were unabashedly retro in their pop music love -- the '80s as something, somewhere comfortable. the fact that lyrics from "summer of '69" and "right here waiting" rhymed was just a bonus. i figured out a time they could both be in LA, stumbled across an '80s metal night at the Viper Room, and as torch had provided in her lj a handy list of her favorite fic-kinks, they wound up right in bed. fast-forward to late january 2003, when set-lists and bootlegs from nick's solo tour started to emerge. now. of course nicky is going to sing some bryan adams on tour. but there is no good reason for him to make a medley of "everything i do," his own adams-rip-off "do i have to cry for you" and "right here waiting." there just isn't.
STAY COOL, BOY JUSTIN+LANCE
i started in popslash by writing a lot of justin/lance, and while i like those earlier stories, i'm particularly fond of this one because i posted it before driven and yet felt after that aired that there was very little i'd have changed, even given all the new/early canon we got then. i didn't want another story about lance being shy, because i don't think he was, but there's outgoing and then there's queer, and i remember how no matter how much i belonged in high school, i couldn't wait to get the fuck out of dodge and be myself. this is also the only time i've really written much diane, and i like it enough that i think one day the story about the beatles records might be its own original thing.
GIVE CHRIS+JUSTIN
i am clearly insane. not only is the chronological structure of this story something like C B A F E D I H G, but it also alternates POVs. i don't know if it works. people seemed to get it, or at least profess to. i tried recently to explain this to someone who had never read popslash before and i started laughing at myself before she even could. in fic, i tend to think that most things that annoy me about someone, especially justin, can be solved with a good fucking, which is not at all how i think in real life but works nicely as plot. i suppose i could have made this a nice straight-forward narrative, and i don't even have a good story-related reason as to why it's not. my only excuse is that i do this for fun, and i wanted to try something new.
THERE'S NO RUSSIAN WORD FOR MOHAWK CHRIS+JC
i surprised myself by being so sure that this was my entry for this pairing. i love show me and so much for gravity, but i wanted to write some kirkchastrick that wasn't elliptical, that had a little more meat on its bones. i am not overly fond of the title, which was even more off the cuff than the rest of the story, but the interaction here is among my favorite things i've ever written. predictably, even when he's not in the pairing, lance is on the edges of things. and you can't tell me this isn't how chris got his hair cut. you just can't.
NOT SURPRISED CHRIS+JOEY
ah, the straight boys. straighter boys. the less gay ones. hell, they all wear sparkles. this is all because of "the making of 'pop'" on mtv, the subversive modelcam moment and joey's concern for the extras, and because once in a while it's nice to make grownups of them. lesa made me love this story because it was the first time i realized i let characters get away with whatever they want, that they know what they're doing (like, say, seducing chris) before either chris or i could figure it out. i love joey for that. chris told us what joey was going to do, and then he did it. i really didn't even need to be in the room.
YOU HAVE YOUR OWN BRITNEY+PINK
i'm always a little ashamed of the fact that i haven't written more femslash. i don't have any great excuse except perhaps i am a girl and so they've never been the same kind of mystery. and while i love my britney is mystified by girls story, just listen, i think this one is a lot stronger. plus it has pink! i think i actually wrote the sex for this the same weekend as when i got joey and lance to do it on the plane, except it was all done very calmly at a coffeeshop in the village. i wonder if i hadn't written this if i would have found a way to do something similar with christina, though there's something much more delicious about playing with the constructions of britney's innocence that doesn't really exist for the others. oh, and it's in second POV. look at that. i can't seem to write femslash in third without feeling skeevy.
three of these things are not like the others:
EVERY GREAT SUCCESS STORY CASEY+DAN
this was the first SN story i wrote by myself. i like the other things i wrote before and after, but if i only ever got to keep one, there's no question this one wins. it's a story about who wins when we don't expect it and casey is, as i said at the time, a big blockhead, but he's a big blockhead who loves dan and just has no idea how to fix him. ah, now i remember -- i wrote the sex scene for this story while sitting in the bar in which it's set, and i resolved quickly to put the sex at the top of the hour and have them work it out somewhere other than bed (see what popslash did to me?). i have never quite felt done with dan and casey -- maybe because the canon is closed, the show is over, they can't change on me now. but i'm also not ever sure i have anything better to say about them than what i did here.
NOWHERE SAM+JOSH
yes, i wrote a big epic in this fandom and, no, i don't have to think twice before not including it here. this is a tight, tiny little story about the first season death penalty ep that i started before 9/11 and finished after, in shock and full of grief and rage. this sam is a lot angrier at josh than i wrote anywhere else, angrier at the world and the way things work, and i guess i think it suits him. "this is my take on feeling useless," i said at the time. i think it's also the happiest i've been with integrating research and canon into a story -- i'd read some of the cases cited here before, but not all of them, and trying to construct sam's argument against the death penalty when we only hear it in bits and pieces in the episode was a challenge. the summer after s2 i watched all of s1 in order, ep by ep on hot nights with the AC blowing right on the couch, taking notes and trying to make sense of the politics and the men. this one just struck me as having missed some important scenes.
AMERICAN GIRL DONNA
i didn't even like donna when i started writing this story, though that'll get me every time. i can't do time in someone's head and not end up with at least a grudging respect for them. donna, it turned out, totally stole my heart. laura shapiro calls donna "the american public" -- she's the common-sense middle, the source of every average voter's questions about why and who is responsible for what. this story spurred the most confessional me too feedback i've ever gotten, which made me think i was on to something even if i'd started out wanting to mock the kind of girl donna represented to me. the american public, it turns out, is curious and never quite sure how to say so. go figure.