Title: Boundaries
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~6,200
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Characters: Cal Lightman, Emily Lightman, Zoe Landau
Genre: Angst, character study
Summary: Proof is always better than trust. Or is it?
Notes: Written for topaz_eyes in the course of the 2010 Yuletide challenge. Beta'ed by earlwyn and Licia, who are both amazing. Thank you so much! This fic can be read at the AO3 as well.

( Boundaries )

I just spent a very relaxing, quiet Christmas Day with Jasper's family. It was nice. I got a lot of presents, which I totally did not expect. Nice presents, too--a shirt and a scarf and two hats and a book and money. Jasper's family is extremely generous. I do like them a lot.

I gave Jasper's mother a resurrection plant, which I think she appreciated. I'm glad. I don't often find gifts that are "right" for people--I'm not good at picking gifts. But I think that one worked well.

I had loads of food, which was delicious, I played with the dogs, which was fun, I started knitting a scarf, which was surprising--I don't usually knit, or enjoy knitting, but Jasper and I ended up in a crafts store, and I was like . . . I shall randomly buy needles and yarn. So now I have 1.5 feet of scarf. I'll see how that'll turn out. Anyway. Very quiet, very pleasant day.

Yuletide went live, too, but I haven't had a chance yet to read my fic. It is Bibleslash! Bibleslash makes me happy. I'll read it either tonight or tomorrow.

And now I will post this, because it's sort of a tradition on my journal by now.



And happy holidays/happy weekend to anyone who doesn't celebrate Christmas.

Oh, and I haven't seen the Doctor Who special yet. I'll watch it . . . later? Or tomorrow. I'll see.

Yuletide finished, beta'ed, edited and posted. My first Yuletide experience: could have been a lot worse. I am sort of curious to see what my Yuletide writer came up with. They haven't defaulted; I guess that's a good sign.

Writing that fic made me miss writing. I love RPing, but writing is just an entirely different kettle of fish. Roleplaying is good because it keeps you writing--someone tags you, you sort of have to tag back eventually, no matter if you feel like it or not. But it's also bad because it's so self-indulgent. You never have to streamline anything, you never have to structure a plot, and if you get bored with a thread, you can drop it and start a new one. You can create stories, in RP, but a lot of the time, you're just kind of . . . sharing your thoughts on yaoi your character. In tag-form. You do get to know your character very well, but in order to tell a story, you need more than just a character.

That sounds very snotty and condescending and makes it sound like I think writing is "better" than RPing. I don't. I just think there's a bigger difference between the two than people realize. I do know that I love RPing, and that I still feel that I should turn Jasper's and my epic Doctor/Master AU into fic. Because I love that AU, and I love its story, and I want to be able to share it.

My thoughts on RP, let me show you them. Maybe I'll start writing fic again when I have a new fandom I can get excited about. The new Torchwood needs to start airing already. By the way--how is that fandom going to work? Are they going to run it on the old torch_wood comm? Because . . . I can't see that ending well. Not with that comm being mostly about the Jack/Ianto and SIJ crowd.

Dear Yuletide Author,

thank you for doing this. I know of the horrors of Yuletide deadlines, even if this is the first year I'm participating in the challenge--the great number of people on my reading list despairing over Yuletide was what stopped me in the past from signing up. But! This year I caved. I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I'm sitting with my laptop in my lap on December 20, chewing my nails and trying to come up with something for my Yuletide fic, I will feel bad for putting you through this, and hope you know that you have my undying gratitude for signing up at all, let alone being willing to attempt to write a fic that caters to my specific requests.

Which are as follows. (Hur hur, wasting no time here.) Generally, I'm a dramedy fan. Meaning I really like stories that feel painfully, cuttingly real. To give you a general idea of what I mean--I'm a big fan of RTD's writing (Second Coming, Torchwood: Children of Earth, Doctor Who: Midnight, to give a couple of examples), and have read my way through most of Stephen King's published works. (My favorite books of his include Needful Things and It.) I like character-focused stuff, and I like stuff that combines comedy and tragedy to equal amounts.

As for fandom genres, I like angst, deathfic, angst/humor, PWP, angst/humor/romance. I'm not a big fan of schmoop--at least not if there isn't something to balance the schmoop. I like bittersweet endings, and am not at all averse to the idea of slash and kink, both explicit and non-explicit.

Things that I'd be grateful if you could avoid include of course the basics like improper spelling and grammar; then: imprecise personal pronoun referencing (I'd rather have the names used a large amount of times than everything just being "he"), POV changes within a scene, characterization being compromised to serve the plot, character bashing of any kind, sexism or misogyny of any sort, generally characters displaying any sort of privilege without that being addressed critically. (If you want to address it critically, however, characters being privileged asses and getting called out on it would make me very happy.) Oh, and I'm not a fan of genderswitch.

Now that I've probably thoroughly scared you off, here are some more details about my requests.

( Details. )

That was a lot of talking there. If you already have an idea for a fic that you want to write, please do ignore my rambling entirely and write whatever you feel like writing. I'm sure I'll love whatever you come up with. If you feel like you want to pick someone's brain about my likes and dislikes, hit up mind_the_tardis. She should be able to help you out.

Thank you for writing for me! And good luck. <3