Comment if you have anything to add.( Read more... )

Okay, chickfight is this annual cage match poll thing for female characters. This year the theme is Young Adult Heroines. Let's see that historical young adult is represented by nominating these great girls:
Felicity, A Great and Terrible Beauty
Deryn, Leviathan
Catherine, Called Birdy
Maura, Beyond the Western Sea
Jacky, Bloody Jack
Amy, Bloody Jack
Clarissa, Bloody Jack
Megan Kelly, Orphan Train Adventures
Goewin, The Winter Prince
Sally Lockhart
Vesper Holly
Liesl, The Book Thief
Karana, Island of the Blue Dolphins
Cecelia, Sorcery and Cecelia
Kate, Sorcery and Cecelia
Kit, The Witch of Blackbird Pond

Also, March 22 is this community's second anniversary. There will be a commentfic fest. I already have the banners made.

Here are the opening sentences of thirty books for you to guess. I took out all the character names but left in any other proper nouns.

( I know some people who say they can read any kind of book except an I book, and sometimes I agree with them )

I think I got all the relevant fandoms. Let me know if I missed any.

And one for The Silver Branch because I didn't actually know when Yuletide Madness closed!

One story in Bloody Jack - L. A. Meyer (this is my gift, and it is awesome femslash)

Four stories in Frontier Wolf - Rosemary Sutcliff

Two stories in Mairelon the Magician - Patrica Wrede and three treats

One in Gemma Doyle - Libba Bray

One in Sword at Sunset - Rosemary Sutcliff

Five in Leviathan - Scott Westerfeld and one treat

One in Sally Lockhart - Philip Pullman

One in The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Elizabeth George Speare

One in A Northern Light - Jennifer Donnelly

yalit100 yalit100 yalit100 yalit100 yalit100

Love YA lit? Love writing fic?  Love writing fic for YA lit and wondering why there doesn’t seem to be very much for most books?

Join the YAlit100 challenge!

• You MAY claim more than one table at a time.
• You MAY do crossovers, fusions, and AU fic! If you intend to write crossovers and/or fusions, claim the table for the MAIN WORK (so, for example, if you want to write 100 godly-parent-fusion fics, your claim would be “Percy Jackson,” unless all 100 fics would star characters from Anna and the French Kiss or something. SOME ASPECT of all 100 fics must be constant for the book/table you choose!)
• Fics can be ANY LENGTH. You may write 3-sentence fics, drabbles, one-shots, six-word-ficfests, whatever. The whole point is just to encourage more YA lit fic! :)

So far, there are just the first few tables up, but I will be adding my usual amount of ALL THE YA BOOKS.  :P  Join and/or Watch the
comm on LJ for updates, and make sure to suggest any book(s) that you may think I’ll miss or that you want to see sooner!

Just a note to say that I started up an LJ comm for Joan Aiken. I found that there didn't seem to be one, which was obviously a wrong that needed righting! So, for all things relating to her and her works there is now: midnight_place.

She's most famous - as I'm sure people here will know - for her Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence of AU historical YA fiction, although she also wrote adult suspense & historical stories, Jane Austen prequels & sequels, fairy tales & retellings, the Felix Trilogy, Arabel & Mortimer and more.

I also made a bunch of Midnight Is A Place icons to start things off - a mix of icons from the 1970s TV serial, and quotes from the book itself:

Teaser:


More here @ midnight_place.

Last updated April 23.
Goodreads version
Other links of interest: http://www.goodlesbianbooks.com, http://www.gayya.org, http://speakitsname.com
( thirty and more! )

Like the Tide
by templemarker

Notes: First begun as a reponse to a prompt in riventhorn's Happy Gay Farmers post last month, "a storm's coming." With grateful thanks to samjohnsson for uber beta skills.

It was as if Esca knew Marcus was looking at him, as if he bent and flexed with purpose to distract Marcus from his work and draw Marcus' focus to the slope of Esca's back, the spray of freckles across his shoulder. Marcus knew every part of him, from the frantic exploration atop a horse blanket in the hills of the North to the slow, fire-drenched coupling of their first days in their bothy, on their land, their home.

Available on livejournal, dreamwidth, and my archive.

Total Icon Count: 25
Teasers:

( Icons Here! )

Poll #1766200 Bloody Jack
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

Where does the series begin to decline?

I finally read Under the Jolly Roger. I say finally because I've read 4-7. In this one Jacky is a midshipman and then captain of a privateer . . . pirate ship . . . well, it's a fine line. Jacky's manservant Higgins appears for the first time, and so do Mairead Delaney and sailors Robin Raeburn and Joseph Jared (one of my favorites). UtJR is just as good as the first two, though, as always, Needs More Amy.

Do you think Jaimy and Jacky are ever going to stay together or get married? My bet is that if they do get married, it won't be until the end of the last book, whenever that may be.

Also, next week I plan on posting a commentfic fest.

Since it's such a large part of fandom, what does everyone ship?

For Bloody Jack, I'm kind of indifferent to Jaimy. I like Jacky/Amy and Jacky/Clarissa.

For A Great and Terrible Beauty, Gemma/Felicity, Sarah/Mary, Felicity/Pippa, a little Tom/Simon and Gemma/Kartik. Though I would love it if there was more fic with other femslash (Ann/Gemma, Ann/Pippa, Ann/Felicity, Gemma/Pippa).

Maura and Nathaniel in Beyond the Western Sea are utterly adorable. And I ship Lord and Lady Kirkle too.

With Sally Lockhart, I like Sally/Fred and Sally/Daniel. I think most people don't like Daniel, right? Also Jim/Adelaide and Adelaide/Becky and Jim/Becky/Adelaide. Then there are all the femslash possibilities between Sally, Rosa, Cicely, Margaret, and Sarah-Jane in the third book

For The Eagle of the Ninth, Marcus/Esca and Marcua/Cottia/Esca.

John/Sary in The Traitors' Gate - it's only implied in the book but it's totally my headcanon.

And Sarah and Abel's romance in The Gift of Sarah Barker is beautiful.

Do I need to explain what yuletide is? It's a fanfic challenge that happens every December for rare fandoms that have few fics, or sometimes none at all. You get matched with a person, and you write a story, and on December 25 the website opens and you can read the fics. Here's a link to the 2010 collection.

What I've done is copied from the list here all the requests I found for historical ya. The ones with an asterisk have been fulfilled once, but there's no rule about getting filled twice. If you want to fill one of the requests, you'll need an account at the Archive of Our Own - I have an invite.

( E. Wein - Aksuma (The Winter Prince) )

( American Girls: Felicity, Kit, Samantha )

( M. T. Anderson - The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing )

( Avi - Beyond the Western Sea )

( L. A. Meyer - Bloody Jack )

Meta! There should be more meta about YA, if you ask me. ( I think I read it four times before the repeated scene hit me )

But not about what a terrible mod I am for never updating. :D

Read anything good or bad lately?

The last community related book I was The Traitor's Gate by Avi, which was pretty good. My main reaction was that I ship John/Sary like crazy. He says, "I will not deny I was smitten." And they slept back to back! Unfortunately, they have massive Victorian class issues in their way, as well as geographic differences.

Any upcoming releases?

I'm looking forward to E. Wein's Code Name Verity, about a girl spy in WWII. And Libba Bray's next series, The Diviners, which is set in 1920s New York. Neither has a page on Amazon, but I think they both come out in 2012.

It looks like the ninth Bloody Jack book, The Mark of the Dragon Tattoo, comes out this October, so I have something else to look forward (except I still need to read the eighth and third).

The 1920s

Are rather in vogue now, aren't they? There's Bray, and then Anna Godberson's new series, and I know a third 1920s YA at a bookstore.

I also saw reprints of some of the Dear America books - they have different covers. And two of them were brand new. One was about the internment camps for Japanese-Americans in WWII, and one was set in Maine in 1918.

The community

It's almost March, and that means another round of f_march_madness. We could do the same thing but with our characters, or books or authors or ships. Anyone interested? f_march_madness inspired the Home Team matches which inspired chickfight, and chickfight was what made me cave in and create historicalya. Funny how that works.

At some point we should have a comment fic deal, and maybe once we get enough members we can have a fic exchange.

Yuletide 2010 has produced some fanfic!

One American Girl Kit/Ruthie fic - read this, it's awesome.

Two American GIrl Felicity stories

One Joan Aiken story about Dido Twite

Two fics for the Sorcery and Cecelia series

Let me know if there are any fandoms I missed.

I really like this set of covers. Unfortunately it looks like only the first six mysteries were published in America. Feel free to use as bases.
( 7 icons under the cut )

I was reading book blogs and I stumbled upon this book, which I now desperately want to read. All the reviews I read are really positive but I'm pretty broke right now. Have you heard of it?

The Agency 1: The Spy in the House by Y.S. Lee (she's got a website). Here's the summary: Mary Quinn, a scrappy 12-year-old orphan and accomplished thief in Victorian London, is saved from the gallows by a stranger and taken to Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls, an institution dedicated to turning out strong, independent, educated young women. Though reluctant at first, she accepts the challenge and eventually becomes a teacher herself. At 17, she is recruited by the mistresses of the school to join a covert group of female spies known as The Agency. Her first assignment involves posing as a lady's companion to the daughter of a man suspected of fraud and smuggling. She carries out her investigation at night and during stolen moments, but soon finds that she is not the only one on the case.


There's a sequel that just came out too (the cover is as gorgeous as the first). Have you heard of it? I just stumbled upon it by accident but it sounds really good!