I'm trying to cure myself of leaving half-finished WIPs on my harddrive this year, and I found this one, which I think came out of a conversation with bexless several years ago about how Pete Wentz would make the worst sub ever. On the one hand, it's short enough that it's more of a sneeze (or a joke?) than a story, but on the other, it's never going to get any longer! So here it is.

Giving Orders in Bed for Dummies @AO3
Patrick/Pete established, inexplicit, 411 words, humor/kink

Eventually it was clear that his options were (1) give in, (2) listen to Pete whining about it for the rest of forever, or (3) kill him, and Patrick wasn't entirely confident in his ability to commit the perfect murder yet.

Original post on Dreamwidth at http://cimorene.dreamwidth.org/2839927.html. Comment there or read comments.

I've owed aeslis this next installment of the Just Like Verse since, like, last October, I think. Oops! I started writing a part of the epic saga that I didn't realize until too late had not been fully fleshed-out in my mental plans for it, yet.

Scenes from a Decreasingly Professional Relationship is a series of vignettes, Aiba/Jun established relationship, explicit, 2506 words. Falls after Like Flying but before Just One of the Boys.

Original post on Dreamwidth at http://cimorene.dreamwidth.org/2799053.html. Comment there or read comments.

Well, for Yuletide I wrote Clean Linen for RosieR. This is 22,000 words of sequel to Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax with a crossover cameo from April Lady's Felix Hethersett (Claud/Felix).

The Unknown Ajax is one of my favorite Heyer novels and I passionately ship Richmond/Vincent, but since I love everything about it I signed up for "any". My recipient had requested Claud slash without specifying whom she wanted him slashed with. I kind of thought she was just trying to be nice, and asked (through proper Yuletide channels) for a clarification of her preference, but it turned out that she really honestly didn't have one, except not slashing him with Richmond (I'm not sure why she felt that way, but it accorded with my shipper's soul, since I only want Richmond to be paired with Vincent); and she gave the okay to OMCs, which was how I decided to borrow a sidekick from another Heyer book. (Well, actually, I combed through about 20 different Heyers from my shelf before I settled on Felix, but the story there is lengthy.)

Besides the scandal, shenanigans, and madcap coincidence plot which I thought was necessary to make a good Heyer story (fervent thanks go to fairestcat for helping me to hammer that out!), the main thing I wanted to do was put homosexuality into Claud's life. Claud is one of Heyer's many secondary characters who read as coded-homosexual to me, and I wanted to add the homosexual lifestyle - subculture, that is - to the story. In the clueless stage I asked my spouse, and she provided the Period Equivalent of a Gay Club prompt. Also invaluable to me in writing this was this book I got for my birthday:

Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb. The author is an award-winning biographer who carried out a great deal of research around Europe using primary sources, and the book has lots of fascinating information on how people lived, hooked up, found each other, and talked about what they were doing throughout the 19th century. There's also a section devoted to homosexual representation that addresses Evil or Dead Queers (not by that name), including EM Forster's comment that Maurice wouldn't be big because his protagonists survived it without punishment. (Ouch.) Also, did you know that Tchaikovsky and Hans Christian Andersen were gay? That Walt Whitman lived with a little laborer dude happily, but once denied the homosexual implications in Leaves of Grass in writing? That throughout the history of Christianity many have read the Bible as Jesus/John the Baptist (est rel), and that one of the books removed from the Bible in the middle ages by the Church intimated as much very much more directly? That Arthur Conan Doyle's life was changed when he met Oscar Wilde at a dinner party, that he still talked about it years later, and that he declared his intention of making a study of homosexuality, which he considered not a hanging offence but a medical matter? (Robb theorizes that Holmes is based on Wilde. That whole section is awesome and, ahem, pretty wild.) In short: BUY THIS BOOK.

To return to "Clean Linen" for the moment, nobody commented that I was too obvious with the Richmond/Vincent in the background, so perhaps my decision to remove the part where Richmond tells Vincent that he's not in the petticoat-line was effective after all. I still worried that I was being a bit too obvious with my actual shipping preferences, so feel free to tell me if you thought so. I'm currently weighing whether to write a Richmond/Vincent sequel to it, actually, for my own satisfaction if nothing else. I originally envisioned all of that being entirely off-screen, but nonetheless resolved in the course of the story; but when I reached the end I realized that I don't think they are ready to hook up yet, after all.

Original post on Dreamwidth at http://cimorene.dreamwidth.org/2798056.html. Comment there or read comments.