A while ago, Dusk Petersen noted to me that a problem with my website was that none of my stories had blurbs: I acknowledged that I write lousy blurbs and prefer "none" to "lousy".

One of the questions in SurveyFail (Q54) was "If you write m/m slash, how do you study male anatomy and physiology in order to write more convincing stories?"

and as both the question and all of the multiple-choice answers contained too many false assumptions to be answerable, in comments to a post discussing that and other poorly-worded questions, I listed the topics I researched for Sins & Virtues.

Six people in the next six days asked me for a link to the story. To give perspective, I think the total number of people who ever read Sins & Virtues prior to 1st September this year is something like 15. (I sent out a dozen hard copies: not all of those got read...)

Okay. I really do need to write blurbs. Even crappy blurbs which consist entirely of a list of research topics.

...but I was reading metafandom, and a neat post about the reading (and writing) of fanfic entitled but i just wanted a hamburger..., and that post links to Ellen Fremedon's Id Vortex post which in turn links to Mirrormash... on my long-suspended livejournal.

I asked Ellen twice to update the post with working links: once when she didn't I was asking her to link to GJ, and the second time when she didn't (after GJ had gone) I was asking her to link to JF and IJ. But she seems to prefer (or can't be arsed) to leave her ID Vortex post with non-working links to a suspended journal... and this bugs me whenever I see someone link to it, because unless it occurs to them to click on the odd mess of comments just below the story (a suspended comment from me, a reply from Ellen, two anonymous comments) it looks as if MirrorMash has just disappeared off the Internets.

I need to go to sleep and forget about it. I have more important things to stress about...

I was just working out that in 1982, the year of the first season of Cagney and Lacey, Mulcahy will be 64 - so, presumably, Hawkeye will be 61 (I think I worked out three years difference at one point, though I can't off the top of my head figure out my exact logic).

Both of them not far off retirement, but not yet retired. They'd probably be an insanely cute couple, officially Not Out but in practice everyone officially/unofficially knows, with the possible/probable exception of Mulcahy's employers - if he's still working as a public school teacher.

(1982 was also the year the US CDC formally defined and named AIDS, and the first gay men's health organisations were being set up to react to it.)

Obviously neither one would have committed a crime. But witnesses to one? Or one of them a possible suspect? Actually I can see either one of them getting arrested for non-cooperation, or at least taken to the precinct. Hm. Basically I think I'm seeing them as decoration on a C&L story, which means I need to work out a C&L story. I guess.

Over at the Six Apart place, vescoiya writes:

All of the current discussion of race in fanfiction and the whole issue of pay attention to what you write has made me think about another minority. The disabled minority. ..... Now oddly enough it is not that disability doesn't come up in fanfiction. It does. It is the way that it does most frequently. Normally what happens is that it is used as a plot device. X is horribly injured so now Y can help him and he realises his true feelings. Or it is used as an excuse for rather a lot of angst. In a lot of ways temporary disability or even permanent disability is the corner stone of h/c fiction.
.....
Now fanfiction doesn't exactly do this with most of the other minorities. You do get homophobia in slash, but only in a small percentage of it. I've yet to see explicit racism portrayed if one ignores for the minute the general lack of ethnicities portrayed in fanfic. Yet, give someone a disability, and it is suddenly a plot point. Possibly because you are adding in something that was not there to begin with. You do get dsylexia casually referenced but that is about it.
.....
I guess i'm asking where are the what if X was always blind fic? How about what if W was deaf? I mean we do get mental disabilities but only due to the extreme angst involved. I guess I'm asking why it isn't more commonly just a part of characterisation as opposed to if it is there then it ellipses everything else.

( Cut for Goodbye, Farewell, Amen spoilers )

BBC Comedy Guide to M*A*S*H

Includes full cast / production credits.