I don’t know where you find the time or talent to moderate such a mammoth project as the MOMEs but we are indebted and forever grateful that you do. You expose writers to readers they might never have reached, and reader to fics they might never have discovered. It is a true labor of love.

Here’s some more love:
Click for larger...


Special thanks to kittylass whose spirit is as generous as it is thoughtful and to stormatdusk who can pick a picture and make it sing.

I've got five minutes to pop my popcorn. Viggo is on David Letterman tonight. Gotta run.

My Hallowe'en treat from alliwantisanelf arrived last night -- not because I soaped her windows or did anything malicious, but just because she is a dear Hallowe'en friend and gifter. Put down your drinks and check out what happens when liquor and paint and zaniness attack a hobbit, an elf and a man.

Birds do it...

Title: The Wooing
Pairing: EW/OB (EW/DM implied)
Rating: N17
Setting: AU, in The Beguilement universe. This story is a sequel to The Opening, which in turn follows earlier episodes in The Beguilement, Beguilement: Interlude and The Digression. It is recommended that these stories be read in sequence in order to fully understand what follows.

( Orlando has just climbed out of the Underground at Sloane Square... )

Wishing you the happiest of days, dear friend. I hope you know exactly WHY I would want to celebrate your day with this picture. May the coming year treat you gently and specially.

♥

fragment
This detail is from a pic that has been making the fandom rounds of late. Every so often, the camera catches the light in such a way that the transluscent beauty of Elijah's eyes just makes one sigh, "Good God, he is beautiful." I sometimes think that the world might never have seen any of it had fate worked differently, had he grown up, let's say, to be an anonymous store manager with an afterhours DJing gig in Cedar Rapids. Which then makes me wonder about all the other anonymous beauties of the world we are deprived of seeing.

It's enough to make a gal weep.

So to beautiful men everywhere -- and this one in particular -- a toast.

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, several days after its counterpart in Britain, the same day as Veteran's Day in the United States and other days of reflection in other nations. It is, for me, the most moving day of the calendar year, one in which somewhere along the way, tears will be shed as letters from soldiers long dead are read out on the radio, or a song by Vera Lynn is played, or an old man sits in his wheel chair in the cold at the nation's cenotaph in my fair city, surrounded by those dwindling members of his brothers and sisters who, in the bloom of their youth, left their homes and loved ones to take up a battle they didn't start but were determined to see won. Each year, the sense of loss and passing is very acute. And I think that it is because it causes me to remember not only those nameless souls, just brave and scared kids for the most part, but also a generation lost to us now, my parents' and grandparents' generation in which the Great War and the Second World War marked their youth. They are nearly all gone now. So each time I hear, "I'll Be Seeing You," this day becomes one of remembering all who have been loved and lost, whether old or young, whether to war or in peace, those who came of age during those times, and I am connected to history in a very real and present way.

The Other: Part Three
(Read Parts One and Two first.)


( Part Three )

The Other: Part Two
(Read Part One first.)

( Part Two )

Title: The Other (3 parts, complete)
Rating: R
Warning: Non-con, language. See Author's Comment.
Film source: The Entity
Author's Comment: It's Hallowe'en and we're all here to have fun. But this is based on a scary movie, which was based on true story, and what happened in real life was not fun and it altered someone's life. But remember, it is Hallowe'en, little goblins, and being scared sometimes happens.
On a serious note, however, heed the warning. What follows has instances of non-con because in the real life story upon which the movie and this fic are based, that too actually happened. Read no further if you would rather not go there.
Beta: The ghoulishly fabulous tweedle_

( The Other )

Title: The Opening
Pairings: EW/OB, IM/DM, (EW/DM/IM implied)
Rating: R
Setting: AU, in The Beguilement universe. Nearly two years have passed since Orlando first met Elijah, a high-priced escort, on a business trip to Amsterdam, where they spent one memorable night together. They have not seen each other since.
Cross-posted: fellow_shippers, bloomwood_


( The catering staff are at full-bore... )

Title: Potty Mouth
Pairing: EW/VM
Rating: R, mostly for language
Length: 301 words
Disclaimer: Fiction. No disrespect intended to those depicted.
Cross-posted: fellow_shippers
Dedicated to tweedle_ for floating the notion that maybe I might try writing Viggo.

( Whenever Elijah speaks in public )

From the September 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, in an article "The Shape of Thighs to Come", writer Amy Fine Collins posits that, according to history, how we style our bodies results from the fashion vogue of the moment:

While fashion models, notoriously, are mutating into ever more attenuated, long-necked, sharp-contoured, and small-headed creatures...stacked Russ Meyer-type fetish bimbos are overrunning the mass media. The flip side of anorexic chic is not, in my opinion, morbid obesity, but inflatable-sex-doll-style self-mortification, via knives, needles, treadmills, hair extensions, fake tans, fake teeth, fake nails and full Brazilians. It's a cyber-age variation on Munchausen syndrome that makes old-fashioned tight-lacing and garden-variety female masochism seem wholesome by comparison.

"I find it imcomprehensible that, after the feminism of Kate Millett and Betty Friedan, women would turn themselves into an army of stepford porno chicks with shop-bought hooters," says Simon Doonan [creative director of Barney's New York]. Observes psychoanalyst Dr. Jamice S. Lieberman, a specialist in narcissistic body-awareness disorders, "Instead of working at a job, these women work on their bodies, almost as a moral imperative. It's a backlash against feminism, a symptom of accelerated upward mobility, a consequence of inadequate nurturing, and a way of having control in otherwise scary times...."

...Today's standard-issue synthetic breasts have the subtlety of bowling balls, and underpinnings are devised to squeeze them together, not "lift and separate" them as the old Paytex TV ads used to promise. "You lie on your back, and they look like water wings," Dr. [Gerald] Imber [New York plastic surgeon] explains.

I don't know, doctor. I don't have silicone but I am decidedly in my middle years, and that water-wing comment is hitting a little close to home.

It's a great little 2-page read, and it also cites Aristotle for explaining why all those strapping male statues of ancient Greece had what is referred to as "the dainty penis."

Title: Amazing Grace (Afterword)
Pairing: EW/OB
Rating: PG for complete story
Length: 16,700 words, in five parts.
Setting: AU, Depression-era Southeastern U.S.
Warning: Actual and implied abuse.
Disclaimer: A work of fiction. Any implications to persons living or deceased are unintended.
Crossposted: fellow_shippers, bloomwood_
Previous Parts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

( Afterword )

Title: Amazing Grace (5/5)
Pairing: EW/OB
Rating: PG for complete story
Length: 16,700 words, in five parts.
Setting: AU, Depression-era Southeastern U.S.
Warning: Actual and implied abuse.
Recommendation: While not necessary, a clearer understanding of certain references would result from (re)reading The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.
Disclaimer: A work of fiction. Any implications to persons living or deceased are unintended.
Crossposted: fellow_shippers, bloomwood_
Previous Parts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

( Part Five )

Title: Amazing Grace (4/5)
Pairing: EW/OB
Rating: PG for complete story
Length: 16,700 words, in five parts.
Setting: AU, Depression-era Southeastern U.S.
Warning: Actual and implied abuse.
Recommendation: While not necessary, a clearer understanding of certain references would result from (re)reading The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.
Disclaimer: A work of fiction. Any implications to persons living or deceased are unintended.
Crossposted: fellow_shippers, bloomwood_
Previous Parts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

( Part Four )

Title: Amazing Grace (3/5)
Pairing: EW/OB
Rating: PG for complete story
Length: 16,700 words, in five parts.
Setting: AU, Depression-era Southeastern U.S.
Warning: Actual and implied abuse.
Recommendation: While not necessary, a clearer understanding of certain references would result from (re)reading The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.
Disclaimer: A work of fiction. Any implications to persons living or deceased are unintended.
Crossposted: fellow_shippers, bloomwood_
Previous Parts: Part One, Part Two.



( Part Three )

Title: Amazing Grace (2/5)
Pairing: EW/OB
Rating: PG for complete story
Length: 16,700 words, in five parts. Part One here.
Setting: AU, Depression-era Southeastern U.S.
Warning: Actual and implied abuse.
Recommendation: While not necessary, a clearer understanding of certain references would result from (re)reading The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.
Disclaimer: A work of fiction. Any implications to persons living or deceased are unintended.
Crossposted: fellow_shippers, bloomwood_



( Part Two )

Title: Amazing Grace (1/5)
Pairing: EW/OB
Rating: PG for complete story
Length: 16,700 words, in five parts.
Setting: AU, Depression-era Southeastern U.S.
Warning: Actual and implied abuse.
Author's Comment: A year and a half ago, this tale began to take shape, and then it sat. In part, I think it was because it wanted to be more a story than a slash story. Eventually, a compromise was reached, but be warned: this is a quiet account that moves by its own time, and what follows is less about sexual adventure than about two young men who once met and how their lives changed as a result.
Recommendation: While not necessary, a clearer understanding of certain references would result from (re)reading The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.
Disclaimer: A work of fiction. Any implications to persons living or deceased are unintended.
Crossposted: fellow_shippers, bloomwood_



( Part One )