2005 continued the trend of longer but fewer challenge responses at the fabulous LJ community Sentinel Thursday, but I was hardly alone because the word limit was raised to 2000 words. :-) A combination of RL pressures and a need not to continually repeat myself has plagued the first half of the year... we'll see how the second half goes... Here's what we've got so far, in the order they were written, oldest on top, with the sentinel_thurs challenges they are in response to indicated where applicable. In case you got here by way of somewhere other than my main TS page, be aware that while the slash might not be evident in each piece, to me, just about everything in TS can be read as slash waiting to happen, or happening offscreen, or whatever. If male/male relationships aren't your thing, please go elsewhere. The rest of the fine print:
DISCLAIMER: The characters belong to Pet Fly, etc. - no copyright infringement is intended and no money is being made.
NOTE: Please heed the ratings and do not access stories that you are not legal to view in your jurisdiction.
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Challenge: Holiday. Just a wee look at Blair contemplating New Years. I wrote this very quickly in an effort to get back into the swing of writing again; hopefully it doesn't show too much!
Challenge: Holiday. A Christmas Eve story that stops just shy of my sap threshold. :-)
Challenge: New. Jim is a wee bit obsessive, but Blair can usually find the way to manage him. Just a fun bit of fluff, probably not what you were expecting from that description...
This one is actually two, two, two challenges in one -- a languishing response to a challenge to use a line from the first song you hear on the radio, finished during the "unfinished snippets" challenge. Not for those who think Blair is well-spoken even with no sleep or coffee, or those who need the smut at the end of the build-up. ;-)
The challenge said, in part, "you have to write a story beginning with either Give me a break, Sandburg or I didn't touch it, honest! And if you want to use both lines, well it's okay, as long as one of them starts the story." I used both... or perhaps it's more accurate to say Jim & Blair used both, since I'm really just channeling their argument here. :-)
Challenge: "It's/He's/She's Dead, Jim." Light-hearted, dialog-only response, set well past TSbyBS.
Challenge: Episode title. A dialog-only slice of a larger encounter, featuring clued-in!Jim and oblivious!Sandburg. :-)
Challenge: Secret. Blair contemplates his partner. First ficlet in the Bunny!verse.
Challenge: Mistake. A sequel to Unseen Truths; should Blair have left Naomi & Jim alone in the loft for even a few minutes? :-) Second ficlet in the Bunny!verse.
This piece is not only a sentinel_thurs response but a sentinelsecrets response as well -- I began writing it for the sentinel_thurs challenge to base a ficlet on a Steve Walker artwork, and finished writing it for the sentinelsecrets challenge of writing a ficlet where Jim & Blair are away from Cascade. The picture that inspired this vacation story is Water, Water Everywhere.
Challenge: Lies. Follows Bunny but is really a direct sequel to Unseen Truths. Third ficlet in the Bunny!verse.
Challenge: Resolution. This piece really baffled me for a while -- Jim had a lot he wanted to say, but when given free rein, he had a lot he didn't intend to share, leaving us with a piece that's first-person but yet rather restrained at the same time... but I like it. :-)
For kennedy_bowman. My longest TS fic to date, and the product of two separate challenges, neither for sentinel_thurs. I challenged myself to write a ficlet based on a random word I pointed to in the dictionary; that word was "sinecure." I also offered kennedy_bowman a story as a sort of consolation prize for the first round of Sentinel Secrets; she requested protective!Jim. These two ideas met up with another bunny I had lying around and after many months, I'm finally finished. :-) Set after "Dead Drop" in homage to the very first episode I saw.
My Sentinel Secrets Round 3 entry. The challenge was to use the song titles of an album in the story, with the challenge to the readers to guess not only the author but the album. An alternate title to the fic is "Walking Wounded," the title of the album.
Challenge: to use Blair's "one week, man" quote from "The Debt." Is it really a songfic if the person is actually listening to the song but bitching about it? ;-) Jim hears the Barenaked Ladies' song One Week one time too many and his repressed guilty conscience lets loose. :-) Set after SenTooP2, which I am calling summer of 1998 for reasons which will become obvious. All rights to the song (which I still love and never actually got sick of, personally ;-) ), the show, etc., belong to their rightful owners.
My entry in the ts_ficathons Getting a Sense of Clichés challenge. My prompt was to use the cliché of "overheard conversation" and the sense of taste. My original idea flopped the week of the deadline, so this was a last-minute replacement written during a week of intense personal stress, just to be up-front about it...
