tangerine's dream

Hi! Thank you so much for writing something for me in Yuletide! I'm excited to see what you come up with! I've included some prompts below, but please feel free to ignore any of them and do your own thing. The range of what I like is broad and vast.

( Last Holiday (2006), Run with the Wind, Honeytrap, X-Factor )

Challenge #12

Commit an Act of Kindness (or two or three ♥).

I will consider this done and leave it at that. :)

Challenge #10

In your own space, talk About A Creator/Someone Who Inspired You.

I'm riding my own (self-created) nostalgia wave here. I have very clear (... more or less anyway...) memories of how and why I got into writing fanfic about the X-Men in the mid-to-late 90s and why I am still here, decades later, reading and writing about these same characters.

Step One:
Discover sevenall's It's All In Your Head, a Psylocke-centric story that had lots of Psylocke/Archangel, which I was extremely annoyed wasn't the sole focus of the books at the time. It took me a while to figure out what fanfic was, but once I did, I started writing my own Warren-centric Psylocke/Archangel fic and finally filled that void in my heart.

Step Two:
Read the Rictor/Shatterstar stories by devilc and viridian5 at a very formative time in my life. It had not even occurred to me that this was an option -- I was an extremely sheltered teenager at the time -- but I definitely dug it, and it made sense. Soon I would be spending hours scanning comics panels as proof of their love in my basement.

Step Three:
Befriend kerithwyn, who was not only writing amazing fic (then and now) but was also generous with encouragement (then and now) and shared a mutual admiration of Warren Worthingon III (then and now). I'm super lucky (then and now) that this friendship translated into real life and, despite the distance between us, get to see her a couple times a year.

Challenge #4

In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

Fannish goals:

1. Write at least 150k words. This is the goal I've set with getyourwordsout (where I picked the word count instead of the habit goal, since I am definitely not a write every day writer). Ideally, I hit 160k words, because I really want that 1 million wordcount on AO3.

2. Beta more.

3. Do Marvel Big Bang and Reverse Big Bang again, even if it means writing outside of comfort zone for the latter.

4. Finish a line for either trope_bingo or hc_bingo. Ideally both. My secret hearts desire goal is to complete a blackout, but I am probably too verbose for that.

5. Make a dent in my WIP list. There are 32 fully plotted out story ideas there, including several sequels. If I can get that list down to 16, that would be nice.

6. Talk more at fannish conventions. Maybe even pipe up during a panel. At least once.

Challenge #2

In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

X-Men: The Animated Series was basically my gateway into fandom. I was so into the show that I started collecting the comics at the age of 12 and then, a few years later when I got online in the mid-90s, X-Men was the first thing I searched for. Things I definitely remember finding:

- an X-Men bulletin board, where I would create the user name Tangerine
- Lori McDonald's X-Men fanfic archive, which had a handful of stories, including one Angel/Psylocke story, which was my absolute jam at the time
- explicit X-Men fanart, because of course

I eventually figured out where the fic was coming from (alt.comics.fan-fiction) and got on that newsgroup, then eventually ended up in yahoogroups, which I think hosted the comicslash mailing list. During all of this, I began writing my own fanfic in 1997, because the books didn't seem to think Angel/Psylocke was worth the level of attention I felt it deserved. Eventually, Rictor/Shatterstar caught my eye.

I started attending Dexcon, a convention for comics fanfic writers held in Toronto. The first year, I had to leave at 7 pm, because I wasn't of legal drinking age (19 in Ontario) and I wasn't legally allowed to stay in the pub. I don't think I said more than a handful of words.

I stayed in comics for a long time, writing enthusiastic but not always good fic, then a friend sidled up to me and was all, have you heard about popslash? I had not, but I was (and remain) incredibly susceptible to fannish suggestion. I was only active there (as Rhys) from 2001 to 2004, but I wrote almost 900k words (my word count as Tangerine, after 22 years, is only 860k).

What followed popslash was a period of burnout. I dabbled a bit in The Dead Zone (TV), fell back into Rictor/Shatterstar off and on, but I mostly just wrote Yuletide stories once a year. 2014 to the majority of 2017 was me crying to friends that my fannish love was dead and I would never feel it again. I still watched and read things, but the urge to create was gone.

And then I spent a week in Iceland, and suddenly, the spark came back, at the most inconvenient time. My friend I was traveling with got inundated with story ideas and fannish thoughts. I came home, finished a couple stories, filled a few bingo squares, signed up for Yuletide for the first time in three years. It hasn't really stopped since then. My primary fandom is still X-Men, though I dabble elsewhere occasionally for fic exchanges. But yeah, I love the X-Men.