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 )

In M*A*S*H 6th season, “What’s Up, Doc”, Houlihan is afraid she's pregnant. If she is, she'll be jobless and back in the US in short order, with a failing marriage.

Unless, of course, she can persuade Hawkeye, BJ, Charles, or Colonel Potter to perform a D&X.

Which one would do it?

Hawkeye, because he's her friend? (But what would Father Mulcahy think?)
BJ? No, probably not. I think BJ would be more likely to offer her a room at his place until she found another job.
Charles? He'd probably do it - I can't imagine he'd have any ethical qualms - but his issue would have been about being found out and getting into legal trouble.
Colonel Potter? I can see him deciding pragmatically and responsibly that he'd rather Margaret got an abortion and got to stay in the army than that she got dumped out of the army with a baby coming and a breaking marriage. Unfortunately I can also see him having decided views against abortion and decided views against allowing military doctors to perform an abortion.

Or would Margaret just head off to Tokyo on a 96 and get an abortion there? She'd need Potter's cooperation, at least, for that - but I think she'd get that.

In other news, my laptop is still not working right. Gah.

Update: I may write it as a full-length story someday, but here's the drabble.

The yuletide site is open again after another year's frantic rush to the last minute. This was my first year participating on GJ instead of LJ, and I completely missed that M*A*S*H was listed (but that's OK: I got something even better, hee hee).

Because of the Yuletide rules I don't yet know who wrote half of these, but to compensate for that here's a story published on Mash_slash on LJ on Christmas Day: a nameless but excellent short story about Hawkeye and Trapper and how sex changes friendship. Yes.

(And the story written for me two years ago: Perfectly Normal, absolutely brilliant, by Malograntum Vitiorum: you can guess the pairing, since it's me. And the story written for somebody else three years ago, In Truth No Beauty, by Epigone: Charles/Max, splendid: Epigone wrote another M*A*S*H story for the New Year Resolutions 2004, The Third Incurable Affliction, which is not quite slash but getting there.)

Anyway, Yuletide 2006, you should read:

A Day Like Any Other: "Incoming!" but the incoming are the wrong side. Radar. Hawkeye. Yes.

Bauching: Hawkeye/Trapper, yes, talking and wrangling and bauching. "I'm - no, we're going to debauch until our bauch is thoroughly de'd, and then maybe we'll bauch some more. You can never have enough bauching. Even though I'm feeling quite thoroughly bauched at the moment." Yeah.

And - though the first two are good, the next is really excellent, I'm-coming-back-to-check-who-wrote-it-and-can-I-blackmail-her-excellent, the hours between dawn and nothing, BJ, after Korea, back in Mill Valley, trying to cope with Korea. You should definitely read this.

And finally, last but not least, the story that fills me with utter envy and makes me wish I were more of a Hawkeye/Trapper fan: Strange Bedfellows. Better Than Canon.

Update, from January: Powdered Milk Kisses by whatho who did not post it on GJ. Bad show, what ho. Bad show.

Am I the only person who didn't know?

Ken Levine on Goodbye Radar, the last episode he and his partner David Isaacs wrote together.

I got there via Lance Mannion writing about the difference between Radar and Hawkeye - both of them grew up, kinda, but Radar grew all of the way up and Hawkeye only got halfway there.

I just heard: scarlatti is dead. Her partner, lover, and friend wrote here that she had died - yesterday afternoon, her time, just past six pm, my time.

I have so many friends I met through fandom that I never met, or rarely met, who are important to me. Susan, Iolanthe, scarlatti - I never met her: I read her stories: I talked with her on livejournal and elsewhere: I liked her very much.

I'll miss her, though I never met her. Best wishes to dougs.

BBC Comedy Guide to M*A*S*H

Includes full cast / production credits.

Perfectly Normal, by malograntum (Malograntum Vitiorum).

*sigh*

It's lovely and beautiful and Christmassy, even, and I love it very much.

I updated the website again!

A Blake's 7 Alpha-Bet is just pure silliness.

I added a M*A*S*H slash category to the story list, in the hope that I'll be needing it. At the moment it just links to all my drabbles on mash100th. They had a free week of which I took full advantage with Crossover #1, Crossover #2, and Crossover #3: of them all, I'm most pleased with C#2. For Challenge #54, I wrote People Like That, for Challenge #55, I wrote False Ballot (yes, it was the day of the American presidential elections), and for Challenge #56, I wrote A Game of Consequences.

I also updated the recs page - Due South and M*A*S*H.

Why, yes, I have been a little focussed on M*A*S*H recently, why do you ask?

bravecows asked: "Leave me a drabble of backstory. It can be about anyone -- one of your characters, one of mine, someone else's, no-one's. Anyone. Then I'll write one for you."

So I wrote.

(cmshaw's Good Omens/Due South crossover was also excellent.)


"Oh, Crowley, really," Aziraphale said, both horrified and annoyed. "Tempting a priest? That's so... fourteenth century."

Crowley hissed with annoyance. Father Mulcahy moaned in his sleep: the next morning he was to wonder why, in his rather embarrassingly explicit dream, Hawkeye Pierce had turned into a snake halfway through.

"Oh, go away, angel," Crowley said. "Go thwart their drinking or something."

Aziraphale looked across the muddy compound at the tent labelled The Swamp. He spread his wings in an angelic shrug. Inside the tent, the glass vessel of their homemade still cracked into a thousand pieces. It would surprise both Hawkeye and Trapper that somehow it had broken without damaging anything else or even waking them up.

"A bit crude," said Crowley.

Aziraphale looked at what Mulcahy was urging the dream-Hawkeye to do in his sleep. "I could say the same about you," he retorted.