The Band Gazebo

Pick up to three letters and I'll give you my answers:

A - Ships that you currently like a lot. (They don’t have to be OTPs because not everyone has OTPs.) Friendships, pairings, threesomes, etc. are allowed.
B - A pairing–platonic, romantic or sexual–that you initially didn’t consider, but someone changed your mind.
C - A ship you have never liked and probably never will.
D - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t.
E - Have you added anything cracky/hilarious to your fandom? If so, what?
F - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom?
G - Have you ever had an OTP? If so, do you remember your first one? Who was in it?
H - What is your favorite source text for fandom stuff (e.g., TV shows, movies, books, anime, Western animation, etc.)?
I - Has social media caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?
J - Name a fandom you didn’t think about until you saw it all over social media. (You don’t have to care about it or follow it; it just has to be something that social media made you aware of.)
K - What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?
L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves. (Characters you’re neutral about are fair game, as are characters you merely dislike. Characters that you absolutely loathe with the fire of ten thousand suns are exempt, as there is no point in giving yourself an aneurysm over a character that you hate.)
M - Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.
N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).
O - Choose a song at random. Which ship or character does it remind you of?
P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).
Q - A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.
R - Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?
S - Show us an example of your personal head canon (prompts optional but encouraged)
T - Do you have any hard and fast head canons that you will die defending?
U - Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.
V - Which character do you relate to most?
W - A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.
X - A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.
Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?
Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go! (Prompts optional but encouraged.)

Stolen from many! :

I currently have 672 works archived at Ao3. Pick a number from 1 (the most recent) to 672 (the first thing I posted there), and I'll tell you three things I currently like about it.


I don't know what scares me more, the number or that it is but a drop in the ocean of the number of fics that I have written that have disappeared off my old site and may never be updated on AO3!

Thanks leobrat for this!

Choose 5 OTP’s without looking at the questions in the Read More first, then tag.

 Frank Irving/Jenny Mills (Sleepy Hollow)
Leo McGarry/Ainsley Hayes (West Wing)
Debra Parker/Mike Weston ( The Following)
Reggie Higgins/Ian Ware (Fame)
Nate Getz/Kensi Blye (NCIS Los Angeles)

I tag - jenab, jaq_of_spades, lasairfhiona, medie, smiley_b


( the questions )

So in response to the ask me about my ships meme, shallowness asked-


Is there a type of ship that you've got more into over the past few years, or do your tastes remain more or less the same?

I had to think about this because over the last few years my tv watching has declined, my computer time has declined so I was trying to think of what I have actually shipped over the last few years! And in general, I have to say that I do have a type, and that my type has pretty well not changed over the last few years...it's been pretty constant.

I tend to ship the two people who generally fandom would not put together. They are usually more minor characters, or at the very least one character more marginal than the other. The ships that don't get a lot of love, they are usually mine.

Over the last few years, there's been Nate/Kensi from NCIS Los Angeles, Mike/Debra from The Following, Frank/Jenny from Sleepy Hollow is my new crack but while there seems to be shippers (including Orlando Jones himself if his twitter is anything to go by!) there isn't much in the way of fic.

Hawaii Five-0, there is Danny/Kono, 'nuff said, but also Steve/Catherine which actually goes to show that sometimes you are better off shipping the uncanon stuff , because let a show runner at your babies and they will totally eff it up. Example the second, Warehouse 13 where Pete and Myka did get together but in the literal dying minutes of the show in a hamfisted storyline that was horrifically shortened when SyFy, damn their eyes, made the final season not 20 episodes like the previous one, not 13 like the others, but 6 episodes long. I think the writers had ten episodes broken when that word came down so the rewrites came thick and fast and while I liked some aspects of it, yeah, just too rushed especially from Myka's point of view. (anyone who tells me Pete has not been in love with Myka for years, I can refute that, I can do it with evidence to back me up and I will never agree with you.)

For The Mentalist, I have written Cho/Van Pelt but in my head I have a whole AU twisty turning plotty thing that is Cho/Lisbon and I want someone who is not me to write it so it will be amazing.

Matt/Alesha from Law and Order UK is possibly the exception as a ship that does get a lot of love but it's in a small fandom, so it's still a small amount of love compared to some of the bigger ships.

Shallowness, did I even come close to answering your question?!

That meme that I was trying to do last week...

Comment here if you want to play, and I will give you three-six couples that I associate with you, and you make an entry in your journal talking about those couples and fics that you wish the universe would write for you.

Danny/Kono, Hawaii Five-0(
The ship of my heart on that show and I've just seen ep 1.03 on repeat on Sky this morning and this has inspired me to write about them! (And wow, the show was so much better written then. But anyway). I love those two together; certainly in season one Danny needs to chill out and relax on Hawaii and Kono is just the person to help him do it. Plus she won't take any of his crap! I want fic about the two of them after 1.03 where they're kissing undercover and he apologises if he went too far with the pawing of her and all (I have written this but I want someone else's take on it!) and she's like don't be such an idiot, it's fine and when he keeps apologising she grabs him and kisses him just to shut him up. I want fic set in the pilot where he held her hand a minute too long when he shook it and then Chin's all like, don't be getting any ideas with my cousin. Or fic about where he gave her his Saint's medal when she graduated and how much it means to her, or where her mentor was killed and he was there for her.... seriously, early season one was all over the Danny/Kono moments and I miss that! Also, anything to do with the Danny-can't-sext thing is always good!

Veronica Weevil, Veronica Mars
Oh how can people look at season one and not ship them? It makes no sense to me! I want fic about the two of them that tells us about what happened to them in the year between Lilly's murder and the pilot ep. Because Weevil trusts her, or at least knows her from the get go and there's no way he would trust an 09er princess, not even if she was Lilly's best friend. I want to know did they know one another before that, what circles they move in that would have intersected. I definitely want fic post movie where they're both trying to clean up Neptune and his wife has left him and taken the child and she's finding out that the new Logan is not the Logan that she knew and they don't work any more. (Not that, IMO, they ever did that well, but YMMV.) I want to see them falling for one another and resisting the hell out of it because she's gunshy and he still loves his wife.
The real wish I have? Universe altered/fix it fic where she knew about what he was doing and the news that he was married with a child was not news to her. (Yes, I know why they did it, but infodump is not a good reason to eff up such a good relationship!).

For Vegawriters...
Sara/Warrick, CSI
The whole enemies turning into friends/lovers trope is made for them. I fell for that the minute I saw them and the I-15 Murders just solidified it in my mind. I love that for two people who had all the reason in the world to distrust one another, they ended up being really good friends, to the point that you could see her pain when he died and he actually said to Grissom that since Sara left Vegas he felt lost and disconnected. He didn't take any crap from her, nor she from him and they always had one another's backs.
I want fic for these two first of all where he doesn't die! That's my number one preference!
I want to see them supporting one another, being there for one another, whether that's to do with Tina or Grissom or the child, I don't mind. I'd love to see something where Warrick is a single dad, trying to raise Eli and Sara doesn't want kids, has never wanted kids, but Eli starts to worm his way into her heart and she takes on the mothering role without even realising it. (And if Eli's older and starts to do a Parent Trap thing, I would love that!) Or something from the first few seasons, before she got together with Grissom but she and Warrick had some sort of fling... maybe post season four where she's dealing with the drinking and he knows what it's like to have an addiction... or he's angry at her for driving under the influence because a drunk driver killed his mother and he doesn't want to believe she'd be that person.

A West Wing pairing of my choosing
I cannot choose just one, there are too many! If I had to pick, I would probably pick Will/Kate, which I know I'm in the minority about but I liked as a pairing back in season seven. (WW fandom back in the day was so much fun, great writers, a multishipper's heaven, where you could find practically anything you wanted for any pairing, and if you couldn't, you floated an idea on a mailing list and someone would do the necessary!) I liked their awkwardness and the idea that they were trying to make this thing work, trying to fly under the radar and just were so bad at it! I'd like fic for them where Kate does go to Oregon with Will, or at least follows him there. I have an idea in my head that she takes a job at some defence company and she hates it and after one bad day she can't take it any more and surprises him at his campaign headquarters/home and basically never leaves. He does his campaigning and she writes her book and she dedicates it to him (because he taught her love is not a four letter word) and they live happily and awkwardly ever after. Or I want to see them talking at the library dedication where he wonders what happened to them and why they could never make it work and she doesn't know either and they decide to go out to dinner and make it work all over again... there is so much potential for these two!

shallowness asked for Veronica Mars --

* How I feel about this character
I unashamedly love Veronica. I think she's gutsy, resilient, clever, loyal... I basically want to be her when I grow up! She's also not without her faults - she's a tad myopic when it comes to getting what she wants, by which I mean she can ignore how what she wants her friends to do to her can affect her friends (Wallace tried to tell her that getting a file could get in him in trouble in the movie, she basically blew him off) but we all have our flaws and I like that she does too.

* All the people I ship romantically with this character
While the movie may have made me like Logan, that version of Logan at any rate, my list starts and ends with one name... Weevil, Weevil, Weevil.

* My non-romantic OTP for this character
Wallace!

* My unpopular opinion about this character
Again...while the movie may have made me like them a little, she and Logan are never going to work out long term. Not even now, when he seems to be a JAG lawyer (is that what we're getting from the movie?) and she's back rolling in the dirt in Neptune... it looks to me like now he's the one that's escaped while she's getting back into it again.

* One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon
Honestly, I wish something had happened with her and Weevil. Or at the very least that when she met him at the reunion, she didn't express total surprise at the idea of him being married with a three year old. Because that tells me that she hasn't been in touch with him at all for at least four years, if not five and that makes me sad.

* Something about them I consider true, though it's just head canon/fanon
Not so much about her as how other people feel about her... I truly believe that Weevil was in love with Veronica in high school (and Francis Capra has said as much too, so I have grounds!) I also believe that Wallace may have had a crush on her back in the day, but he got over it quickly.

Seen on tumblr, snagged off my friends list and ignoring the rather loose definition of OTP...

Give me a fandom and I will (attempt to) tell you...

* My otp(s):
* My anti-otp:
* My unusual otp(s):
* My crossover otp(s):
* My friendship otp(s):

So I'm thinking of signing up for au_bigbang. I've kinda sorta got a half a notion, if such a thing includes a bare bones outline of 12 sentences that can be twelve scenes which should easily get me to the 15,000 word deadline... I dunno.

In other items, snagged from all over,


I was thinking you should tell me about stories you think I should write. I mean, if you could sit me down for a day or whatever and say, "helsinkibaby, I want you to write this story for me," what would that story be?

I'm not actually promising to *write* any of these, mind you, but it's fun anyway. And who knows if I'll be inspired!


tpeej in the last meme I did requested the oddest mix I've ever seen (and this is me, dudes!) so I'm trying to do something with that, but in the meantime, I can do both... I think...

Is it just me, or is Kim Clijster's daughter the cutest thing ever?

In other random thoughts, Kanye West is an idiot and I have never felt as sorry for anyone as I have done for Taylor Swift. Beyonce, on the other hand, is a class act.

And, while I am working on the drabbles from last week's request post (still taking requests by the way!), this is taken from featherjean

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.