Fierce Rawthorne

Hello, and welcome to this sticky post! I'm Lake, and I have formerly gone by the pseuds Amatia (pre-2008) and Amitee (just for SG:A fandom). I have been Very Online since the 90s and have been in and out of various fandoms since the X-Files tried to do that whole stupid thing with the bees. You might also know me as that person who was very into Matt Damon/Ben Affleck for, um, forever.

My current stuff is all here. About 15% of it is still hockey RPF since I was in that fandom for several years, and then there's another good chunk of Generation Kill stuff, as that is my forever fandom. And then somehow Top Gun and Venom, two fandoms which could not be more different! After those it starts to get really miscellaneous in there.

If you're here for Yuletide exchange reasons and are looking for letters from previous years, I use a different pseud for that (long story!) and a bunch of them are now imported to this Dreamwidth so that I can stop using LiveJournal for anything. If you want to see what I've written in the past for Yuletide, ( here's a list behind this cut )

If you're here for Fandom5K reasons, previous letters are in the tag.


Questions/comments/etc, please feel free to reply to this post!

I'm on VACATION, which feels like a good motive to post. I have been at my job for twenty years full-time so I get a whole lot of vacation hours (the only perk left, besides the pension) and last year we were so short-handed that I barely touched them so: it's May and I'm using last year's vacation time!!

I have gotten very into The Pitt. I waited to watch it until it was completely over and I have now written three fics and I want everyone to kiss in various configurations. Doctor Robby is so hot and so sad and so suffering a mental health crisis, and Doctor Langdon is so Needs Rehab and such an asshole and also so hot. SHAWN HATOSY from The Faculty, oh my fucking God I nearly cried laughing when I realized Doctor Hotness With One Foot was STAN. Amazing. And I love Samira and Dana and Mel and Collins and - well, everyone. Everyone!!!!!!!!!!! Now kiss.

Tomorrow is Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning!!!!!!!

For weeks I have been looking forward to going to B&N after work today to grab The Brutalist, since if I'm going to pay to watch it then I want a goddamned physical copy, and my B&N has in the past normally gotten most award-winner new releases when they come out. I checked the website to be sure it was in stock before I stopped and: nope. No B&N closer than an hour away has it in stock. And no other store in town even sells physical media anymore - the last other store that carried new releases closed a few months ago (RIP FYE, I miss you).

Skeletor shaking fists emoji, etc. - I wasn't even going to watch it right away tonight but I don't want to order it. I want to pick it up from a shelf and take it to a human being at a register!! Ugh.

Well. Yep. Last week was certainly... a week. Then I had to send my elderly cat to join her brother in pet heaven on Saturday (she was fifteen, and had clearly been declining over the previous few days), so that made for a completely shit weekend.

The one bright spot was the new episode of Doctor Odyssey - my new obsession - which Did The Thing, amazingly, somehow, wildly. ( This show is so ridiculous and I love it so much. )

I am so not used to writing fanfic for a currently-airing television show - I know no one would care if I posted something that immediately got jossed (we need a new word for that) in the next episode, but it sure does add an extra level of "I need to write as fast as I can" to things. Or at least a level of "I need to come up with ideas" faster, because I can write fairly quickly if I have to.

In other news: I finished and turned in my Yuletide assignment already! I would like to do something else as well for my recipient but given the on and off writer's block lately, I just went with the flow when this particular inspiration struck.

A note, first: I feel much better about the Stucky now, a week after I started writing this entry! But the fact remains... I don't think I have ever been so crabby about posting something in my entire fanfic career. I was so mad at it for several days straight that all I could do was laugh at myself for how stupid I felt. (Part of feeling like shit about it is definitely all the hours I've been working since July plus training the new people leaving me no mental space to think very hard about writing. Bah.)

I didn't want to post all in one go because I didn't want the longest fic I've ever finished and one I'd spent an entire year working on - more than a year, really, since I started outlining it in May 2023 - just immediately disappearing in a busy ship tag. This has happened to me nearly every time I write a popular ship and is thus one of the reasons I usually don't bother with big fandoms. I wind up disappointed every single time. This is a me problem and I understand that but sometimes you just have to let yourself be annoyed about stuff.

Anyway, I planned out posting four chapters a week for a month working up to my WIP Big Bang full reveal date that's now next weekend - thinking cool, that gives me time to do some final editing before posting on Fridays and Saturday, and hopefully collect some subscribers. Except after a week I would just look at the binder and think, "I don't even want to open this." (Plus, every time I'm in the mood to edit at home, the old lady kitty wants to sit on my lap - and she is old so I am not going to deny her cuddles.)

So now I am still several chapters behind in my posting BUT once I got to the chapter where Steve and Bucky actually start to have feelings, it picked up a lot more subscribers, which eased some of my annoyance. Also we're finally done training people at work for a while, so even though I'm still on twelve-hour shifts for the next week or two (the second shift person is out on a medical leave), I'm not trying to talk for several hours straight or figure out training projects.

Enough of all that: For the last couple months I have been writing - like half a sentence at a time - a Matt/Ben based on those pictures of them as teens with the matching pukka shell necklaces, and yesterday my writer's block lifted like a black cloud being blown away, so I finished this!! The first Matt/Ben thing I have written in probably twenty years.

( Work, yet again. )

Bennifer breakup yet again!! Sadness!! 900 million Matt/Ben references suddenly everywhere: rather delightful. Although I have no idea what that ask I got on tumblr was really supposed to mean.

I have zero brain for writing lately and I know it's a combo of all the working plus finishing the Stucky epic (currently in editing, when I feel like editing) - I plan to start posting it on the 20th a couple chapters a week so that I finish posting on October 20th, my WIP Big Bang posting date.

I also haven't kept up with my usual Yuletide possibilities spreadsheet since February and I feel very meh about it right now, but that doesn't mean I will still feel meh about it come signups, so I guess I should at least attempt some nominations. I rewatched The Martian twice in a row a few weeks ago so that's still floating around in my brain.

Lately my after-work shows have been House (only an episode at a time or I have weird medical dreams), re-watching season one of 9-1-1, and The Larry Sanders Show from the 90s. I see the House/Wilson but I'm also not sure I could actually write House in the right fashion. And 9-1-1 fandom just looks too insane to want to wade into any of that!

I keep thinking, oh, I should post - but honestly there's not much to report besides a rundown of the television I've been watching.

Finally finished Northern Exposure - for all that I'd seen the early episodes several times, I'd never watched all the way through to the end. I know I mentioned in a previous entry how much the Joel/Maggie hate-flirt annoyed me, and it continued to annoy me all the way up until they actually get together. And then I didn't mind that it was canon, and after they broke up I wanted them to bang some more - it's just the stupid flirting via insults that I can't stand. (I also hate the "the boy pulling a girl's ponytail on the playground means he likes her" thing, and this is the grown up version of that!!) But Maggie's characterization mellowed as the seasons went by, which I appreciated, and I liked her much more by the end. ANYWAY, overall thoughts: I'm glad I powered through the whole series after all these years. I don't know if I'll write any more fic besides the little Joel/Ed thing I did, but never say never. I do have a gdocs file of vague ideas.

After that, I watched the rest of 30 Rock, which was fun! I'd seen the first two? three? seasons years ago but also never finished. But I needed a new nighttime show after finishing NX, and while I was enjoying The Mentalist it wasn't as comedic as I prefer for before bed. (I should go back to The Mentalist.)

Figured out the last remaining scenes for the Stucky and somehow I'm still mostly on track with my writing schedule for it - I just have to power through the rough draft stage for the last few scenes, and then I can tweak them more into shape. Currently I'm a little stuck but I know it's because I have two scenes that are sort of the same right in a row (that, or I just need to start the second one differently) so maybe I'll swap things around a little.

I was on staycation for a few days over my birthday; I went out to lunch with my dad, hung out with my sister, got my eyebrows waxed and took myself out to lunch one of the days so I could get some Stucky work done, and then mostly watched a lot of TV and tinkered with writing projects. I watched season one of 9-1-1, which ended up being less stressful and more so over the top with the ridiculous calls that I basically laughed in disbelief the whole time and was only sad about Peter Krause's character. (And I only cried at the old hoarder brothers episode.) I may or may not write an entire entry about it later on, but that depends on if I keep watching.

It's been slower at work since it's summer, so I'm using the downtime there to watch stuff on Hulu since the adblocker skips the commercials. I finished season one of The Bear yesterday - I'll probably keep going with it. I didn't find it as stressful as others have mentioned, just sad. (Aside from always being worried someone's going to cut themselves during the on-screen vegetable chopping.) It's definitely not a comedy!

Life has returned to normal after the Covid (it wasn't much worse than the random upper respiratory virus I used to catch occasionally, but I haven't taken that many sick days in a row since my brain surgery!) - we remain short-staffed at work since two of the students resigned within a few days of each other, so I am currently starting this entry from the Sunday overtime shift I'm on. We have two in training but it's still going to be weeks before they're ready to fly solo.

February seems to be the "don't feel much like writing" month, which tends to happen to me every winter so I shouldn't be surprised - I think I was hoping since it skipped me last year, I'd get lucky this year as well, especially since the weather has been so mild. But it's happened before and it'll happen again and eventually I'll feel like writing for real again. In the mean time, I've been reading an assortment of things and also watching a bunch of TV shows from my childhood, mostly Night Court but also some Designing Women and Northern Exposure.

( True Detective: Night Country )