Hey everyone.

This is a quick PSA to say that I've recently taken over the running of this comm. I'd like to thank fairestcat for having seen the need for a comm like this and gotten it up and running - the Bujold presence on LJ has grown a lot in the last couple of years and I think a lot of it is because of this comm. So, thank you, fairestcat!

Truthfully, not much is going to change - you all are wonderful and don't require much modding. One thing I would like to do, though, in order to make fic easier to find is to take advantage of the tagging system. I've had a couple people already volunteer to help me out with it, but the more people who pitch in, the less work it is per person. So if you think you might be able to take six months or so and tag them, please let me know! We're not a very high volume comm, so it shouldn't be too terrible.

Other than that, is there anything you guys would like to see here? We have the Fest in the summer, of course, and firefly_124 runs lmb_challenge the rest of the year, but perhaps someone else has some ideas about things we could do to light a fire under the fandom.

Speaking of the Fest, this post is going to double as this week's reminder that the list of prompts is available here.

I hope everyone is having a lovely lazy Sunday afternoon.

Hello, everyone!

This is just a reminder that posting for the 2008 Bujold Fest begins on August 10th, and that the post where you can view all 135 prompts and comment to claim one or more of them is here.

So far only two people have claimed prompts, aside from myself. I assume this means that you all are thinking very, very hard about what you want to write. Right?

A little time yet

Warnings: Angst. Neo-feudal – well, ism. Language.
Characters: Gregor/Miles, ensemble. {VOR SAGA)
Summary: Gregor thinks no one see him, they only see Him, but it's not the case.
Spoiler warning: Possible spoilers for all canon, mainly mild. Takes place between immediately after the events of The Vor Game.
Word count: 4.8K (author's notes excluded)
A/N 1: For Sweet Charity winner qbic1. Your generosity, support, and patience are appreciated.
A/N 2: And with gratitude to Riverbella for her help and beta, despite her lack of familiarity with the 'verse. By turns Riverbella offered constructive advice and gentle support – without her, this piece would still be a half-finished abomination living only in my mind and hard drive. All mistakes are mine.
A/N 3: NC-17 ("Explicit adult content")
Disclaimer: Copywrites the properties of respective owners. Any cease and desists received will be complied with, and shown off at parties.
*** *** ***

You have a little time yet. You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.

Title: No Concept of Elephants
Authors: Therese N., A. Wahlbom
Fandom: Doctor Who, the Vorkosigan books
Characters: Simon Illyan, Miles Vorkosigan, a Dalek
Rating: All audiences
Summary: A crackfic AU version of the fishing scene in Memory.
Word count: 200

Because some things are just crazy enough to demand to be written.

We had one fic posted this week:

Title: Untrammelled Judgement
Author: philomytha
Word count: 900
Rating: suitable for all
Characters: Illyan, Gregor
Prompt: argument
Summary: A little missing scene from Mirror Dance

Pop on over for a look if you haven't already.

And lmb_challenge is going to take the next several weeks off for the duration of the ficathon, so people can focus their energies on the amazing and growing array of prompts for that. We'll be back with weekly prompts on August 24.

Happy creating!

This is a reminder that tomorrow, Sunday the 29th, is the last day to submit prompts to the Bujold Fest. I won't organize them until Monday, so if it's Sunday where you are, you can still submit them. After that, I'll throw them up (with a schedule for the Fest) and people can start claiming.

Remember: You can submit as many prompts as you like, and you can submit even if you aren't going to write. We have tons of good stuff over there, but we can always use more!

A bit of fan-art.

Inspired by the idea from The Bujold Nexus I have created some fun designs for t-shirts. (All slogans are written in Russian but translated to English below).


Money, power, sex... and elephants

Others t-shirts see under the cut.

( Read more... )

We have some tasty, tasty prompts over at last week's post, but we could always have more! We especially need TSK prompts, it seems, so head on over if you haven't already and prompt away!

On a related note, I was wondering if someone on the mailing list could pimp the fest there? I'm not on it because it's way too high volume for me, but we should probably get the word out. Thank you!

Title: Population Adjustments
Author: Branch
Genre: Humor, Smut
Rating: soft R
Pairing/Characters: Ivan/By

Summary: Ivan is caught in a Cunning Plan, ten times worse because By is there with him. Written for Porn Battle, with the prompt: Ivan/By, undercover.

Population Adjustments

"Ivan," By murmured in his ear, intimately. "If you don't do this, it's quite possible we'll both die. There's motivation for you, yes?"

"Have you considered I might prefer dying?" Ivan gritted through a toothy smile, trying to find room to back up.

The music video on LMB fandom

Title: "The Last Gift"
Authors: eide_maiden & jetta_e_rus
Music: Emperor Ezar's song from the rock opera "Legend of the Prince" concerning to the pre-Escobar events.
Language: Russian
Duration: 3:29 min

You can upload it from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSIF0BP5ag (low size and quality)
or
http://barrayar.slashfiction.ru/media/lastgift.avi (full size of 13.7mB).

The word for word translation of the poetry to English see below

( translation ) 

I've been a really kind of terrible absentee mod here of late (and by "of late" I mean the last several years. *facepalms*) I made this community because there was a clear need for it, and mostly it has run itself quite nicely. Bujold fandom on lj in general and Vorkosigan fic fandom in particular has grown a lot since then though, and think at this point it's in the best interests of this community to have a moderator who is an active part of that fandom.

I'm looking for one or more people active in the fic side of Bujold fandom who are interested in taking on ownership of this community. If you're interested, please leave a comment here or email me at fairestcat at techemail dot com.

Yes, my dearies, it's that time of year again! Summer has finally rolled around, which means it's time for another Bujold Fest. This year I will be the one driving this bus. I ask that you keep your hands and feet inside at all times, though should you feel the need to stick your head out the sun roof, please feel free.

No bus you've ever been on has ever had a sunroof, you say? Only because you've never been on one designed by me. In my world everything has a sun roof. ;-)

So, as I said in my original post, the fest is going to work a bit differently this year. Between now and Sunday the 29th of June (so two weeks), we're going to be collecting prompts. These can be Sharing Knife, Chalion, Vorkosiverse - whatever you want. Suggest as many of them as you wish, even if you don't think you'll be able to participate. They should answer at least one of who? when? how? So, for example:

Cordelia and Aral following Mirror Dance
Caz/Palli during the events of Chalion
Kareen and Mark on Beta (any point in the timeline)

On the 29th (or shortly thereafter), I will make a post listing all of the different prompts, broken up into categories. At that point you can claim prompts - as many as you want, even if someone else has claimed it already, though I advise against claiming more than you can reasonably write (don't get people's hopes up for nothing). You can claim at any point between the 29th of June and when posting starts, so if you finish one, feel more than free to come back and grab something else.

Posting will be the week of August 10th through the 17th. I'll assign categories to each day of that week (so hopefully we'll have Chalion 'verse day, a TSK day, maybe a crossover day, etc.). You post your story (or fanart, as the case may be) on the appropriate day - but should you miss your day, do not fear! The final day of the Fest, Sunday, August 17th, will be Free-for-All day in which you can post any and everything you might have based on a prompt from the Fest.

SO! Here is a rough and dirty run down of the details:

The 2008 Bujold Fanfiction and Fanart Fest!

Organizer: sahiya (sahiya @ gmail . com)
Prompt claiming: Now until Sunday, June 29th
Story posting: Sunday, August 10th - Sunday, August 17th
Minimum length: 500 words

Happy prompting!

Title: Mead
Author: elsane
Characters: Aral
Notes: written for otw_onlinecon's Hodgepodge Challenge, to the prompt "Aral and/or Cordelia, alcohol".

Edited to link to the version at my journal; the original is here.

Given that it's Memorial Day weekend here in the States, this week's prompt over on lmb_challenge is "remembering the fallen."

Past prompts are always open too. Come play if you're so inclined!

P.S. stormchaser67ne, I've answered your question over in my LJ.

This week's prompt over on lmb_challenge is to take a canonical scene and look at it through another character's eyes, whether a character who's also in the scene or another character who's possibly spying or hearing about it later.

Past prompts are always open too. Come play if you're so inclined!

[I've written the subject line with a dash rather than a colon, to avoid raising expectations of another book. Of course, if Lois were to feel so inclined, she should feel fully free to use that as a title *at any time*. Iow, W, L, W!]

While it is a truth universally acknowledged that I've been a vehement, vociferous, rabid [see the ears?] Bujold fan for lo, these twelve-plus years and more, it is rarely known that in all that time I haven't actually read the books that many times. I've read all the Vorkosigan books maybe 3-4 times, _Chalion_ twice, and _Paladin_ and _Hunt_ once each. It hasn't really been necessary to read them more than that. They made such vivid, visceral impressions, it's as is I'm still having an ongoing conversation with them, like yeast bubbling and working away, in the back of my mind.

Yet, here's a thing. I've read the Sharing Knife books as much as the others in 12+ years. This year alone, I've read book 3 at least three or four times. I've been trying to figure out why, and I think Lois writes truer than even she knows sometimes; it all comes down to *affinities*.

These books are sheer comfort to slip into, like slithering around on satin sheets, snuggling into bed under warm coverings on a cold night, savoring chocolate, or getting intoxicated breathing wisteria.

That they're set in my own country certainly gives a geographical affinity, but that in itself is insufficient. There are admittedly affinities of topography and climate. [Of course, my own state, Georgia, is more diverse than most. From friendly foothills {aka, "mountains"} in the north, to piedmont, flatlands, swamplands, and beaches, we have a wide variety of climates right handy, so to say.] I've driven extensively through Ohio and Pennsylvania, en route to some of the best times of my life [OVFF and Confluence], which adds a certain luster to the scenery. These last few years, we've begun to take walks several times a week at the nearby nature preserve. I'd be able to see what Lois is writing about, often the same day as reading it: cardinals, bluejays, robins, lizards, turtles in the sun, various ducks, thuggish geese, cattails, dogwoods, redbuds, blue herons. Still no water lilies [although the fire lilies were exquisite last year], but that's enough to be going on with, surely. I've shared delightful snippets of physical description with ze spouse. Lois turns a phrase the way Chihuly blows glass: liquid, creative fire.

We southerners like folks from the midwest, because they almost talk right, close enough to be real comfortable. It does make it hard for me to appreciate all Lois' linguistic efforts properly, however; familiarity blurs details so.

Culturally, I can identify with both Farmers and Lake-Walkers [minor pet peeve: if reviewers, et. al. are going to capitalize one culture, they should capitalize the other]. My great-grandparents were sharecroppers, & I had a great-uncle and -aunt who didn't get indoor plumbing until I was seven. They made their own butter [I still have a butter mold]. My grandma plowed her own garden up until the year she came to town for cataract surgery and stayed for a stroke [they took her off her blood-thinners]. I've gotten up at dawn to pick field peas and shelled butterbeans until all fingernails were green. I've also been far too tightly owned by some things and completely baffled at the things some other folks are owned by [none of them written by Lois]. It could almost be said I travel Lake-Walker-lightly through the world [except for all the books and music--more like, I Marley merrily. ;)].

The romance tropes are comfortably familiar, too; I've always said I owed that high verbal score on the SAT to having started reading Harlequins in the 5th grade, back when they were written with big words, plot, and character development. Given how many of the best authors [hello, Jane and Georgette!] have heroines between 17 and 20, and heroes of 35-40 and higher, the age difference never bothered me.

Having never procreated, I never joined the adult conspiracy. Inside my head, I'm still somewhere between 18 and 23, so coming-of-age stories still resonate, even when one is coming-of-age at 56 [hi, Dag!].

These books have everything, the very stuff of life itself: wit, wisdom, bafflement, betrayal, puzzlement, poignancy, goodwill, malice [both kinds!], with hearty guffaws and primo snark. I want my life written this intelligently by an author this insightful.

Colossal kudzu kudos, Lois; brava!

Also, Write, Lois, Write!

This week's prompt on lmb_challenge is mothers. (Yes, I took the easy way out. Have pity on me - it's finals week. :)

Past prompts are always open for inspiration as well. Come play if you're so inclined!

I wrote this the other day thinking mostly of Dag and Caz, but it occurs to me that it applies to an awful lot of Bujold's romantic-lead-type characters -- see what you think?