Eildon Rhymer

06:34 pm: Fic index
If anyone's come here looking for my fic, the best place to find it is on my website here. That's the only place that houses all my fanfic. The design is rudimentary, I'm afraid, but the stories are all there, and that's what matters. I did consider putting together an index here on LJ, but there doesn't seem to be much point, when one already exists on the website.

Website last updated June 5th 2009

Most recent updates
June 5th:
The Flowers of the Field (c. 5,000 words) - an outsider viewpoint Sheppard h/c story in which a young girl comes across a badly injured stranger caught in a trap
A Walk on the Dark Side (c. 2,400 words) - Even in an evil mirror universe, things don't always go according to plan. Humour.

May 28th:
On the Wings of an Eagle (c. 50,000 words) - illustrated historical AU written for the bonus round of the gen ficathon, for the prompt "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines."
Where the White Lilies Grow (c. 46,000 words) - AU written for the gen ficathon, involving a Sheppard from one AU and a Rodney from another AU who meet up an a post-apocolyptic world where legends and superstitions are rife.
The World to Come (c. 6000 words) - Team fic written as a pinch hit for the gen ficathon. "The world ended when John was sleeping…"
Friends and Old Wine (c. 2700) - Ronon-centric character study covering his years in Atlantis, written for the alcohol flashfic challenge.

( Previous updates )

11:34 am: Checking in, and meme
Oh dear. I've not updated this journal in over two months. I said last time that I was hoping to return to fanfic writing soon, but I'm having to admit now that this is unlikely to happen. I did consider signing up for the Sheppard HC Secret Santa fic exchange, to kickstart the writing process, but quickly decided that this was a bad idea; my muse always responds awfully to a sense of obligation.

I'm still deeply embroiled in reading. For the last five weeks, I've been immersed in Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series. It's an 8 book series - 8 rather thick books, too, and slow reads all of them, in which you can't let your attention slip for a second. I'm half way through book 5 at the moment, but when I finish, I'll probably reread the 6 books of her Lymond series, since there are lots of links between the two (though I've not uncovered most of these links yet.) Her characters are not ones I would ever dare write fanfic about, but they've taken root in my imagination, and will be there for a good few months yet.

Now, I've seen this meme everywhere, in which you list 20 things you've been fannish about, and ask people to guess your favourite characters. I won't do the guessing part, since I post so seldom on this journal that I haven't given anyone any clues to base guesswork on, but I found it a fun exercise in nostalgia to think about the question, and ramble on a bit about fandoms past.

( Favourite characters. Warning: far too wordy and ridiculously rambling )

04:42 pm: Still here
I think it's a very good thing I decided to take a break from writing this summer. The summer is always busy, since I'm in two different Morris dance sides, and summer is dancing season, but this summer has been busier than ever. One of my dancing groups went super-keen, and booked four folk festivals on the mainland, as well as the usual round of weekend engagements on the island. What with dancing, visitors, LAN parties, role-playing weekends, more visitors, work, I've got only two free weekends between early May and mid October. Had I been trying to write through all this, I'd have been seriously stressed by the lack of writing time. Plus, I always come back from folk festivals seriously sleep deprived, and I stumble through the next week like a zombie, and I've never been able to write when tired.

( Ramblings about possible future fanfic plans )

Anyway... back to the super-busy summer: I'm now off to catch a boat to a sandbank in the middle of the sea, to watch a horde of Morris dancers dance in the tiny window of time they get before the tide surges in and drowns them.

EDIT: It didn't drown them, but I heard a random person describe the whole thing as the most eccentric thing they had ever seen. Photographic evidence is here.

05:29 pm: Checking in, and books
The last time I posted here, I said I was taking a break from fanfic writing in order to read. This is still the case. I've been really enjoying reading lately, and feel quite excited - almost liberated, as if I've been let out into a wonderful world full of possibilities. I've also had some very busy weekends lately, with many more to come - folk festivals, visitors, role-playing, concerts etc. - so in that respect, it's quite a good thing that I've not got a story on the go, since I'd end up resenting all these rather enjoyable things for taking me away from it.

I really need to work on multi-tasking my imagination. I can only write one story at a time, I can only write in one fandom at a time, and, as I'm realising only too sharply at the moment, when writing fanfic in one fandom, I can barely read (or watch) other fictional works that aren't in that fandom. I definitely want to write fanfic again, but not at this cost. I need to find some way to write alongside wide-ranging reading.

But, anyway, while talking about books, I'll link to the post I've just made on my other LJ, asking for book recs to suit a specific need, since the more people read it, the more lovely books I'll get to read. I will pay for it with a recommendation of my own, by way of a ridiculously overlong but spoiler-free review of the Inda series by Sherwood Smith.

01:48 pm: Time off
I think I am going to take a few weeks, or even a few months, off writing fanfic. I was on holiday last week, and while I was away, I did quite a bit of reading. Reading a new (to me) Sherwood Smith novel prompted me to reread her Inda series (to date; the final book is coming out in August), and even though it's a reread, I'm finding myself so gripped that I don't want to do anything else but read at the moment. Yesterday I didn't even switch my computer on until three hours after I'd come home from work, which is unheard of.

( Ramblings )

08:30 am: Fic update
I've been slightly distracted lately by playing Portal and Left 4 Dead, but here are the two short stories I've done in the last few days. I did hope to do one more slightly longer one before going on holiday on Saturday, but I'm not sure if that will work out now. The lure of the advanced levels in Portal might be too great.

Anyway... First we have some humour, and then some outsider viewpoint h/c.

Title: A Walk on the Dark Side
Word Count: 2400
Rating: PG
Summary: Even in an evil mirror universe, things don't quite go according to plan.
(Written for the bonus round of the gen ficathon, in the genre of "humour", for the prompt "Dark side of the moon")

Title: The Flowers of the Field
Words: 4995
Rating: PG-13 for some non-graphic ickiness involving the presence of a corpse.
Summary: On the first day of spring, a young girl finds a badly injured man, chained to a dead man and caught in a trap.
(Written for the first flashfic challenge on the Sheppard h/c community, for the prompt "traps/trapped.")

08:26 pm: SGA fic: On the Wings of an Eagle - part 5 of 5
On the Wings of an Eagle - part 5 of 5

The story starts here

( Part five )

08:24 pm: SGA fic: On the Wings of the Eagle - part 4 of 5
On the Wings of an Eagle - part 4 of 5

The story starts here

( Part four )

08:23 pm: SGA fic: On the Wings of an Eagle - part 3 of 5
On the Wings of an Eagle - part 3 of 5

The story starts here

( Part three )

08:20 pm: SGA fic: On the Wings of an Eagle - part 2 of 5
On the Wings of an Eagle - part 2 of 5

The story starts here

( Part two )

08:18 pm: SGA fic: On the Wings of an Eagle - part 1 of 5
Title: On the Wings of an Eagle - part 1 of 5
Author: Eildon Rhymer (rhymer23)
Words: c. 50,000, plus 6 pictures
Rating: PG
Genre: AU (also adventure, some angst, some humour, some h/c, and some illustrations)
Spoilers: None
Summary: It started with a man crashing into a herb garden. Soon a misfit band of four exiles are caught up in a wild ride of sword fights, sewing, rescue missions, shopping trips, high treason, lute-playing, changing the face of scientific knowledge forever, the imminent risk of hideous death, and comfits.

Note: Written for the bonus round of the sga_genficathon, in the genre of AU, and the prompt "Those magnificent men in their flying machines". Something about gen ficathon bonus rounds seems to bring out the illustrated historical AU in me. Last year I did The Pirate's Prisoner, and this year I've gone back nearly 200 years to the year 1555. For a prompt about flying machines. Er, yes, well. I suspect that normal people wouldn't see a prompt about flying machines and immediately think "We'll have Tudors! With planes!" but I blame Leonardo Da Vinci. He famously designed flying machines on paper, but didn't get them to work, but he was merely Leonardo; he wasn't Doctor Rodney McKay.

I've tried to explain the historical background as and when it becomes relevant, but a very quick outline can be seen here



( Part one )

05:12 pm: Stories
Taking a quick break from dealing with the zombie apocalypse…

Firstly, I did finish the story in the end. I wrote like a mad thing, and finished after midnight on Thursday night. It needs a tonne of work, and the pictures aren't finished, but I'm very pleased to have got to the end before the weekend, since I'll be too busy blowing my friends' heads off, taking over the world and eating junk food to think about story issues until Tuesday. When I got up last Monday, I thought I had two chapters to go, but the content I had actually took four chapters to write, so I'm particularly amazed that I managed to get it done, given that I was working throughout, had to go out on Wednesday evening, and was away for 13 hours on Thursday in London.

Secondly, some of my favourite literary heroes are masters of disguise, who cunningly save people's lives through their stealth and cunning. I, plainly, am not one of them, since my identity was so totally guessed in the gen ficathon. Admittedly, I wasn't really trying to disguise myself, and was heard to say that I'd eat my hat if at least some people didn't guess my story almost from the start, but, still…

So, anyway, here are links to my stories:

Where the White Lilies Grow
46,000 word AU (or, rather, two AUs for the price of one) written for the prompt "Clarke's Law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Sheppard and McKay are very much the main characters here, though others appear in the final third.
Summary: People tell stories about the wonders of the Time Before. They tell stories, too, about magical creatures with long, fair hair, who emerge from the hill and can turn you to dust in an instant. But John Sheppard has never been one to believe in stories...

And my pinch hit:

The World to Come
c. 6000 word team fic, written for the prompt "I found the end of the world, of course; And it's not the end of the world, of course (Gordon Downie, "Vancouver Divorce")"
Summary: The world ended while John was sleeping...

06:48 pm: Pesky muse
Gah! I wish my muse didn't have such decided opinions about how it wants to work. It absolutely refuses point blank to multi-task, forcing me to be a strictly "one story at a time" person; it refuses to contemplate me writing even a single line out of linear order; and it detests me taking a break even of two or three days in the middle of writing a story. Just two or three days can be enough for it to get all sulky, and say, "You're the one who decided to ignore me. Don't want to play now." This means that I have to think hard before starting a story, to make sure that I'm likely to be able to finish it before any forthcoming weekends away.

This week, it's all gone horribly wrong. I've got a bunch of friends coming round on Friday for a long weekend of computer games, with the last of them not leaving until Tuesday. For four days, my brain will be full of nothing but games, cider, junk food and chat, and I'll have a wonderful time, but it will be enough to totally drive my muse into "Shan't!" mode if I go into the weekend with an unfinished story and try to pick up the threads next week.

The trouble is, the story I started two weeks ago, confident that I'd finish it in time if I worked hard, has grown somewhat, and now looks like being nine chapters, rather than the six I'd vaguely expected back in my original "haven't really bothered to plan it out yet, but we'll see" stage. I had to work on Saturday, got up at 5 to walk a stupid distance in a howling gale yesterday, failed to get much sleep last night due to painful legs, and thus am rather too tired tonight to get much done. (My muse also refuses to play when I'm tired.) I've got to go out for all of Wednesday evening, and go to London all day Thursday. I've got about 25 pages to go, and while I probably can finish it (first draft, at least, which is what matters for now) if I work like a mad thing and don't stop for anything else, I'm really not sure if I want to. I'm tired, there's stuff to do to prepare for the weekend, I want to carry on with the drawing part of my story, and there's lots of other stuff I'm keen to do, too.

Wah!

08:49 pm: Writing, reading...
I've managed all of one day of the gen ficathon so far, as far as reading is concerned. The trouble is, no sooner had it started posting, than I started writing my latest historical AUs. Historical AUs eat my brain like nothing else, because they attack on all flanks. When I'm in a mood for writing, I write them. When I'm not in a mood for writing, I draw the pictures. When I'm in a mood for reading, I read history books or historical novels set in the period. There's just no room for fanfic reading at the moment, and it's the worst possible time for it, since there are so many wonderful-looking stories out there. But I suppose they're not going away, and I can always catch them in a few weeks.

It's proving a lot more challenging than my pirate AUs. I thought it would be easier. The early eighteenth century is one of the few periods that I never studied at school or university, although I've read plenty of historical novels set in the mid to late eighteenth century, so the general mood was easy enough to write. In contrast, 1555 ought to be so much easier. I spent a month living in the year 1553 at a residential historical re-enactment. The doctorate I almost did (I changed my mind before finalising my plans) was going to be something about the cultural history of the period 1547 to 1558. I ought to know this period so well.

However, nothing's been invented yet! McKay wants to go into long diatribes about the state of scientific knowledge, but almost everything interesting hasn't been invented or discovered yet. (Thank goodness for Copernicus, at least.) Virtually ever bit of technology or weaponry I would love to use hasn't quite got invented yet. The world's so much smaller, too. It doesn't provide that rich seam of reference that I had in 1720, when my characters had travelled the world and gone to plays and salons, and read novels and newspapers, and had ready access to books. Gah!

But I'm getting there - definitely over half way through the writing, and about a third of the way through the pictures. And speaking of which... Off to draw.

09:06 am: Historical AUs
I'm writing historical AUs again. All is well with the world. :-D Six lines in, and I've already done four urgent Googles to find out certain things that come up in passing (e.g. ink-pot design, the history of blotting paper, and the history of herb gardens.) Writing my pirate AU was the happiest experience I've ever had in writing, so I hope this new one gives me as much joy.

(I reserve the right to post again tomorrow saying, "Oh no! It doesn't work at all!", so don't take it as read that the story will see the light of day. The basic premise is one of those mad, crazy ideas that cause most of your brain to say, "oh no, I can't!" but a wild, loud, pushy part to say, "Oh, go on! It's fun" and then, when it thinks it might be thwarted, to say, "I refuse to let you write anything else until you at least try.")

06:49 pm: SGA fic: A Sure Anchor - part 4 of 4
Title: A Sure Anchor - part four of four
Author: Eildon Rhymer (rhymer23)
Summary: While visiting a place from Ronon's past, Sheppard and Ronon are attacked by snipers, but there's something there that's more dangerous and deadly than any human enemy.

The story starts here

( A Sure Anchor - chapter four )

05:30 pm: SGA fic: A Sure Anchor - part 3 of 4
Title: A Sure Anchor - part three of four
Author: Eildon Rhymer (rhymer23)
Summary: While visiting a place from Ronon's past, Sheppard and Ronon are attacked by snipers, but there's something there that's more dangerous and deadly than any human enemy.

The story starts here

( A Sure Anchor - chapter three )

08:04 am: St George and the Sheppard
Well, it's St George's Day, so the hearts of all true English people are drawn to… er… doing silly things with SGA action figures.

( St George and the Sheppard: a story for St George's Day )

05:59 pm: SGA fic: A Sure Anchor - part 2 of 4
Title: A Sure Anchor - part two of four
Author: Eildon Rhymer (rhymer23)
Summary: While visiting a place from Ronon's past, Sheppard and Ronon are attacked by snipers, but there's something there that's more dangerous and deadly than any human enemy.

The story starts here

( A Sure Anchor - chapter two )

07:36 pm: SGA fic: A Sure Anchor - part 1 of 4
Title: A Sure Anchor - part one of four
Author: Eildon Rhymer (rhymer23)
Words: c. 16,000 in total
Rating: PG (violence, injury and angst, but nothing that graphic or extreme.)
Characters: Sheppard and Ronon
Spoilers: References to quite a lot of episodes. Fifth season episodes referred to are Search and Rescue, Broken Ties and The Shrine.
Summary: While visiting a place from Ronon's past, Sheppard and Ronon are attacked by snipers, but there's something there that's more dangerous and deadly than any human enemy.

Note: This is complete - c. 16,000 words - but I'm posting it in parts while I edit. Be warned: thar be cliffhangers ahead. I intend to post daily, though.

Thanks to kristen999 for giving me a couple of prompts which were the jumping-off point for this story, even though I doubt I did justice to them.

( A Sure Anchor - chapter one )