... having been breathed out

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

Well, this is fun!

As it's loosely defined as 'pets of fandom' I won't go into raptures about my first dog, strictly my family's first dog, but she was wonderful. She was half Rhodesian Ridgeback and half Red Setter, which may ring a faint bell for assiduous readers of my stories.

My first pet, strictly speaking, was my daughter's pet, but Bun was only nine when we got kitten Socks, and Socks ended up more my cat because, well, there I was, and unlike my Beast, I was happy to have her on my lap. Incidentally, Socks took the leading role in my podfic of Let The Cat Out Of The Bag, written by lizibabes and produced for the Pod_Together Challenge in 2013.

Socks lived to the grand age of 19, and then for a while we were petless, but after moving to a new city and having copious building work done, we adopted Princess Fluffykins and Sable, sisters, the former of whom was a very beautiful beige tabby, the latter a void. Sadly, we lost the Princess, who was too confident for her own good and used to cross the road to maraud in the park, and, well. Sable remains with us, a plush, soft little cat, barrel-shaped but mostly fur, with her own quirks. She is a knee cat, rather than a lap cat, and will nestle between Beast and me when we watch telly, or between my knees when I am on the sofa alone.

It was hard to decide which pet icon to use, as I have several, but the eventual choice is Socks.

*

My early days in fandom occasionally also featured a cat, as I was brought into fic fandom by Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Data has one. There were at least three cats which starred as Spot. I attempted to explain their differing appearances in this story, Qualicative Assessment. And much later, I wrote An Odd State of Flux, set shortly after Data was kidnapped from the Enterprise by Kivas Fajo in The Most Toys. Spot helps him to recover. Rather fond of this one.

When I moved on to my beloved Popslash, however, it was generally about dogs. My sparkly dancing boys (Nsync, and a bit Backstreet Boys), canonically owned dogs. I'm grateful to them!

But there were others, and as I went through my index I found rather more unusual pets than I had initially remembered. Ferrets and dragons, for example. Oh, and this one, somewhere between a pet and a, hmm, baby: Justin Junior. In this story, there is a magical slash fairy godpiglet. (It's popslash, okay? Slash fairy godpiglets are entirely normal. I'm surprised there weren't more of them.) And a dog, too, eventually.

So, anyway, dogs.

In Cat Chris has an Entirely Canonical Dog (although this is an AU), and AJ seems to have acquired a cat.
My first Lance Bass/Adam Lambert story includes Lance's two Entirely Canonical Dogs. Bouquet.
In The Pussycat and Porcupine, JC acquires a cat, and Lance, two dogs. I'm sorry to have to report that nobody acquires an actual porcupine.
In The First Step Lance is walking his ECDs when he meets an unusual stranger, who knows them.
I wrote two versions of Wanna Tell Me About It? , but it is the revised (and much longer) version in which Lance and Adam get non-canonical dogs (eventually).
The dogs in Dragon Country are canon-based, but this is an AU. There is a scene of rape and violence in this story, so if you decide to read it, be warned.
And I think my final effort is Jamie, written for the final Make The Yuletide Gay challenge and featuring the adoption of a very cute little dog who was tenuously based in canon but not entirely. Pet adoption is a heartwarming thing to put in a Christmas gift story, yes? Happily for me, My Adored Lance spent quite a while advertising dogs on behalf of a pet shelter.

I did just squeak in before the reveal with yesterday's recs, happily. Not that it matters, because there are so many authors around for Yuletide, and I maybe recognise a handful of names—I doubt I'd go looking for Writer X's Stuff. Anyway, I hope you all had a chance to read through whatever may have caught your eye.

My story was With What Intense Desire, a Mansfield Park fic which changes the end of the story so that Fanny goes home earlier from Portsmouth, and gets to listen to Edmund whingeing about Mary in person instead of reading his letters.

My recipient wanted Fanny to be happy, and my conclusion from re-reading was that Fanny's truest source of happiness is being at Mansfield, at Home, in fact, so that is what I gave her. I may not have been quite heavy-handed enough, as nobody in the comments said they were glad to see her becoming the mistress of Mansfield Park, but there it is. It was fun to do, mostly because I was able to adjust Fanny a wee bit so that she gets more impatient with Edmund, which I do myself.

The title is from a quote in Chapter 45, "With what intense desire she wants her home," from Cowper.


So, that's Yuletide done for another year!

*

Snowflake Challenge 2026, challenge no. 1: The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

I seem to have introduced myself many, many times, as I've been doing an online journal since I joined LiveJournal in 2005, and have (I think) done at least some of the Snowflake Challenge every year since it began.

So rather than reiterate how I came to be a fanfic-fandom person, I'm going to send anyone who's interested to the Snowflake 2022 post I made, in which I introduce myself via some posts. A selection of my posts, rather than a(nother) post About Me. The first is a love letter to fandom; the second mourns the death of a creative idol of mine (Stephen Sondheim) and also mourns the country I wish I lived in. The third is about death, though possibly a bit less miserable than that sounds. And there's a bonus fourth, to cheer you up a bit—a really unhelpful phonetic alphabet. As a collection, I think they give quite a good idea of Me, though I'm not usually quite so death-focused.

What do I want from Snowflake this year? I'm not sure. Some entertainment, maybe the discovery of a couple of new people to interact with? As much as anything, I have the feeling that this is a little burgeoning of posts, and I would like to be part of that.

What do I want from DreamWidth this year? Hmm. I'd like to put in a bit of the energy that I've been frivolling away on Reddit lately—although on Reddit I am somewhat more astringent and wit-focused, I think, than I am in this my own space. I hope there will be more discussion of Stuff I'm Interested In, whether that may be barbershop or fandom in general and the changes it has undergone of late, or the pleasure-pain of writing, or what to wear to dance at my daughter's wedding, and more. We shall see.