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How were you imagining that number being said, hS?

I was a bit thrown by that since I would've written "N+1st", that is "N plus first", as in "first, second, third ... Nth, N plus first, N plus second, ..."

- Tomash

I have always seen shipping, as it relates to writing, as a construct of fandom. Outside of the realm of fandom, I see it as not really existing. In an original work, it is more or less just romance or plot development, or what have you.

So to answer your question, I do not think that qualifies as shipping, because as far as I can tell it is an original work. As far as PWP, if it is tied to an existing work, i.e., fanfiction or a response to someone else's work, I think under the most generous (and common) definition it would be shipping. If it is not tied to an exiting fandom, then I do not think it counts as shipping.

________________________________________________________

Alternatively, shipping refers to the transportation of goods, usually via sea-faring vessel.

Michaelis walked into a bar and sat down on a stool. Slumped over, he looked like the weight of the world was on his shoulders.

Or so Isabel thought, at any rate. "You okay there?" she asked.

"Not really," Michaelis said, his voice muffled by his arms. "But you wouldn't care about that."

Isabel blinked. "Of course I would," she protested. "That's why I asked!"

"Sure." Michaelis snorted. "That's why you're here, in the Raggedy Hound, drinking alone."

"Waiting alone," Isabel clarified. She tapped her glass, setting it ringing. "First one of the night."

"Waiting." Michaelis frowned at her. "For what?"

"You, obviously." With a smooth motion, Isabel downed the rest of her drink and waved the barman over. "So - how about a glass or two, and then back to mine?"

Michaelis blinked at her, then shrugged. "It's a bad idea, probably, but... sure."

---

Michaelis, Isabel, and the Raggedy Hound are entirely new. I've probably used those names before, but not for these people. There's clearly some kind of relationship there (y'know, she just propositioned him), but is that 'shipping?

What about if we'd opened on them an hour and a half later, and it had just been pure PWP? Would that be 'shipping?

I don't have an answer, but if there's a semantic argument to be had, I'm all up for jumping in feet first. ^_^

hS

The last one was in March, so that's only seven months! I think that's a new record! It looks like I didn't actually write anything for the last round, so hopefully I can do better this time.

The rules of the Monthlyish PPC Writing Challenge are simple:

-I will give you a prompt.
-You write a PPC-related story based on it. You do not need Permission to do this. Length is not important: we've had 100-word drabbles, vignettes, and longer pieces.
-You post your story in this thread. The emphasis here is on speed rather than perfection - get it beta'd if you want, but it's not essential, because:
-If you post a story, you should also provide constructive criticism for another story in the thread. Your concrit should not focus on SPaG errors (though you can point at them, too), but on issues of character, plot, realism, setting, and the like. And it should be constructive! Suggest improvements, don't just point out what's bad. A good rule of thumb is to include something you liked, something you thought needed improvement, and guidance for how to improve it.
-If (when!) you receive concrit, you should rework your story based on it. This isn't essential, but is highly recommended.

Got that? Good! Feel free to ask if anything's unclear, but, uh, 'write a story and get it concritted' isn't all that complicated. ;) Now for your prompt:

It's Friday 13th today, which to the superstitious among you means all sorts of trouble (assuming you're of Western European descent). It's also October, scientifically proven* to be the spookiest month. So the prompt, naturally enough, is:

Friday 13th October.

Interpret that however you please. ^_^ Let's get writing!

hS

*Not actually scientifically proven.

Hope you enjoy. The author's name is apparently Edmund de Waal; Google says he's a British ceramicist, which is a nice coincidence considering I was just looking at a Facebook post about potters...

~Z

"Ship" simply stems from "relationship," though, so I don't see why it can't apply to all sorts. "[Canon character]/OC" is definitely a pairing you see on fanfiction sites. And if somebody else ships characters you wrote, that's a ship, so why wouldn't it be if you do it yourself?

Has anyone come across any definitions or traditions that don't support shipping for OCs?

~Neshomeh

There's a lot of potential relationships going around in the current Magic story. Some of them are more likely than others. Sometimes by a lot. Let's take a look. (This is going to be a long one, folks.)

Chandra/Liliana: The card that was brought up to support this ship is Diabolic Tutor from the set "Kaladesh":



That's some great art right there, and it definitely says something. I could see that being fuel for a ship. If you read the story, you actually find that Liliana is like Chandra's cool older cousin or maybe her shoulder!Devil; pushing her to play by her own rules and be the most free version of herself. That picture is followed immediately by them going out dancing, drinking, and punching city guards in the face. It was a good time.

However, their good times were short lived. By the time "Aether Revolt" rolled around (three months later) they were barely interacting at all. "Amonkhet", again, saw little to no interaction between these two. I'm really not sure what story you are talking about, but I think you might have mistaken Liliana for Nissa, who does interact with Chandra quite a bit.

Phobos's Rating: Fun but unlikely

Chandra/Nissa: During the events of "Oath Of The Gatewatch" Chandra and Nissa became close. Not in any traditional shipping sense, though. Their minds touched while they poured all of their magic into killing what amounted to two Elder Gods. For one brief moment, Chandra felt the calm of Nissa's mind. This was new and different for Chandra who, being the exemplar of Red magic, is basically ADHD-made-flesh. It had a profound effect on her.

Fast forward to the beginning of "Kaladesh"; Chandra is screwing up everything. She can't seem to do anything right because she is so hasty. What is she supposed to do? Then she thinks back on that moment and it occurs to her that Nissa could help her find that inner calm, again. So she seeks her out in the garden (Nissa is the Green mage, so that is where she basically lives). There is a brief conversation that...well...it goes poorly. See, Chandra is stuck in her own head thinking about how she must be screwing this up, too. At the same time, Nissa doesn't understand how to people. She's a hermit who talks to plants, animals, and anthropomorphic personifications of whole planets. So, Chandra starts trying to explain what she wants in a wild, meandering way that ends with her running out and Nissa, who hasn't really said a word at this point, wondering what she did wrong.

When Chandra eventually runs off to Kaladesh with Liliana (for the aforementioned drinking and guard punching) Nissa volunteers to go after them and bring them back. It is her hope that she can atone for whatever mistake she made in that earlier conversation. When she does catch up to them, she joins Chandra in a quest to find her mom, while Liliana goes off on her own.

Through the end of "Kaladesh" and "Aether Revolt", Nissa is the one who has Chandra's back when things get bad. When Chandra's power is running out of control and she is on the fast track to going supernova, it is Nissa that steps in to help her focus and regain control. And in the end, there is this scene:

Nissa swallowed past the desert in her throat. "I don't speak often. I lived alone for...decades. Zendikar was my companion. We understood each other at a level deeper than words. I...I don't know how to talk to you. I'm trying to learn."

Chandra looked up, eyes wide and startled. "You don't know how to talk to me?"

"I will make mistakes," Nissa said. "Pick the wrong words. Misunderstand yours. I'll act strange and won't know that I am. But if you can be patient with me, I would like to be..." Waves of sky-song memory welled upward, symphonies of color and warmth, resonant movement and shared breath. She stilled them, reduced them, and forced out angular words shaped in a pallid shadow of acceptable truth. "...your friend."

Which is followed shortly by this:

Carefully, Nissa lifted Chandra's radiant featherweight, and maneuvered so she could rest her head across her lap. Chandra stirred in her sleep, turning on to her side and curling up, pulling her knees to her chest and her hands to her face. Then her lips parted, and industrial snores pealed across the platform.

[...]

Nissa guarded Chandra's sleep.

It felt right.

Their relationship continues to deepen during "Amonkhet" with this exchange:

"Thank you for accompanying me this morning, Chandra."

"Nowhere else I'd rather be." Chandra fiddled with the straps on her vambrace, her eyes darting in Nissa's direction. An involuntary smile flitted across her face—a blush, an inescapable dash of sentiment.

Nissa scoffed. "I can think of at least twenty places I would rather be than Amonkhet."

Chandra's smile turned plain and she looked down.

The two sat in semi-silence, comfortable for one and fraught with unspoken words for the other. Nissa took a breath, allowing the churn of the fountain and the cool shade above to her soothe her nerves. Chandra kept her eyes focused on her buckle.

"I've never spent so long in cities before," Nissa said. "Between Kaladesh and here, I've had more than my share of people."

"You seem to be getting along fine," Chandra replied.

Nissa shook her head. "I have gotten better at hiding my discomfort. Being around others so often is draining."

"But not with us, right?"

The question caught Nissa's attention. She watched Chandra intently unbuckle and rebuckle the same strap of her vambrace.

Nissa frowned. Thought over her words. "Yes and no."

Fiddling hands paused, while a meandering mind searched for the words to lend shape to unfamiliar feelings.

"Friendship with all of the Gatewatch is still quite new. I'm still trying to understand what it means to have friends in the first place," Nissa said.

Chandra made a small noise and looked out on the plaza, her posture heavy and leaden, her fingers suddenly quite still.

Nissa continued. "On Zendikar, I was without the company of people for most of my life. The plane was the closest thing to a friend I had. Learning to trust has been . . . slow—and there is still much for me to learn. Understanding and sustaining friendships is daunting when one has never really done it before."

Chandra shifted awkwardly. "So . . . friendship?"

Chandra seems disappointed in how that exchange went, doesn't she? But that's the thing, isn't it? Nissa would have no idea that Chandra is disappointed, and Chandra is too nervous to just come out and say anything about it. There's an awkward "will they; won't they" kind of dynamic. Chandra is definitely crushing, but I don't think Nissa understands enough to acknowledge it, let alone reciprocate.

Phobos's Rating: I ship it.


Now, I could go on, believe me. There's at least three other relationships to cover beyond these ones. However, I've already spent two days researching and getting my references together and I should have been working on a blog post instead. If anyone is interested in my analysis of the rest, I can get back to it after this weekend.

-Phobos

Is it shipping if you're doing it entirely with OCs, or even entirely in an original universe? Because it seemed to me that shipping was about characters you didn't actually write. Was I wrong?

Seriously, it would be really nice to know, so that I can finally that sorted out.

Rather than following one family, it follows several intertwining ones through WWI, WWII, and the Cold War/Civil Rights era. All European and American, but with some good attention paid to women, gay people, and black people. No heirlooms, unless a family tradition of being politically active counts as an heirloom.

~Neshomeh

Mostly I'm content to accept the canon ships or lack thereof. There are some that I've cheered on more than others (Roslin/Adama springs to mind), and some I haven't cared for (the whole love triangle in The Hunger Games, Buffy/pretty much any of her LIs), but it's not something I get really worked up about. Probably because it's not something I've ever been really worked up about in real life, either. Throughout middle school, high school, and college, I had a total of three boyfriends and was only really interested in kissing (let alone doing anything else with) the last one, whom I went on to marry. So yeah. I'm hanging out somewhere on the lower lefthand side of that bell curve. {= )

I've never had strong enough feelings about a canon/canon ship that I wanted to write about it myself. I used to have some negative feelings about shipping in other people's fanfic, mostly to the tune of either "ew, they wouldn't do that!" or "ugh, can we please focus on something more interesting?", but nowadays I'll read other people's ships with characters I like, and as long as it's well-written and has a reasonable basis on the characters' personalities, I can get into it. Canon/canon, canon/OC, straight, gay, whatever.

As for shipping my own characters, I've typically had a bit of an aversion to it unless in an RP scenario, with someone else playing the other character in the relationship. Firstly I wasn't interested, secondly it felt like cheating, and thirdly it's just really satisfying to get someone else to like your character enough to imagine that their character would want to be with them. I still prefer hooking up my characters with other people's characters, but if you've been watching my writing lately, you may have noticed I'm sometimes willing to ship my characters with each other, too. {= ) Also, I'm writing an OC in a relationship with a canon character in my Skyrim fic, which I think works for me because it's something you can do as part of the game, so it feels legitimized in sort of the same way an RP ship does in that it came about organically during gameplay, not just because I up and decided it. Everything is better with consent!

~Neshomeh

[Checks]

Yep, in the second NTV broadcast schedule, I put up the listing for Stars War: Utumno Strikes Back:

Following Lukwё’s destruction of the Starkiller, the Great March is finally underway. But can even the mighty Vala Oromё defend the Eldar against the horde of abominable Orcs Melkor has now unleashed?

Rather than 'Star Wars written by Tolkien', it's 'Tolkien written as Star Wars'. And as it happens, the unpublished/incomplete third schedule lists another film in the series:

Stars War: The North Awakens

Thousands of years have passed since Lukwё saved the Great March from Melkor's machinations, but all is not well in the Blessed Realm. Melkor walks free, a dark-haired elf is filled with rage, Lukwё is nowhere to be found... for young Rehtië and Fanë, the adventure is just beginning.

I feel like it would be fun to fill out the rest of the list. The most recent film out would be Stars War: Road One, the tale of Hyinyë, Casa, and their quest to find the hidden road north from Cuivienen to the dreaded Starkiller. Only if they succeed in rescuing Hyinyë's father and revealing the secret route can Lukwё's later journey succeed and the Great March begin...

hS

Or failing that, ships where the subtext is heavy enough you can't help but consider them as canon, even when no confirmation is given by WoG or anything (Subaru and Teana in Nanoha, Sayaka and Kyoko in Madoka, Sunset Shimmer and Sci-Twi in Equestria Girls, Lyra and Bon Bon in Friendship is Magic... You get the idea).

In fanfic, I don't mind shipping making sense relatively to the characters' personnality and development and their orientation when it's stated by the canon authors (no suddenly gay/straight/bi character when we already know their orientation).

And to be fair, I feel the same way about Tolkien a lot of the time. :-)

Yeah, makes sense. As does your distaste for Asimov: it's not for everyone, especially not Foundation, which is an interesting series, but has quite a few problems as a story - well, the trilogy does, because that's what I read.

But as for historical fiction... well, the only thing I can think of is Stephenson, with Baroque/Cryptonomicon, but 1) that has a massive timeskip, and 2) it includes one character who is actually immortal. So... yeah.

OSC isn't the greatest writer in the world, but I agree with hS here - he may be a bad person, but he's not a bad writer. Well, he's not an awful writer, anyways. Ender's Game is the only novel of his that I'd really recommend with no provisions. And I've read quite a bit of him.

OTOH, Sanderson's work is absolutely fantastic, and I'd recommend just about anything I've read by him with no reservations.

...I don't actively ship anything usually, with the exception of canon ships. I'll read basically any ship in fics and stuff (with the exceptions of incest/pedophilia/abuse/etc) but I don't think I've ever written any shippy stuff apart from for friends and things like that.

Gondorian monumental architecture grew directly out of Numenorean funerary architecture. The early Numenoreans were at peace with the fact that they were going to die (Elros Tar-Minyatur laid down his life willingly, rather than dying of natural causes, though whether that's suicide or an act of will is unmentioned); their descendents were not, and they began to build grand tombs - Houses of the Dead, in later Gondorian parlance - to pretend that the dead were coming back.

And of course, if the dead deserve fancy houses, so do the living, right...? Annuminas in Arnor was probably built in the same grand style, so it's not just Gondor.

The other drivers in (above-ground) city-building in Middle-earth are 1) fortresses (Minas Ithil to an extent, Ost-in-Edhil, Barad Eithel), and 2) the very specific 'looks like Tirion-on-Tuna' (Gondolin, and honestly most of what you think of when you imagine an Elven city). Other than that, people were happy to live in smaller communities and/or underground.

None of which you can get by reading A Scholarly Guide to Gondorian Architecture, because it doesn't exist. You have to pick it up by reading the books, and unless you read them in detail you can't know for sure that you've got everything. It's not like being a chemist, where you can plug 'organometallic silver' into a journal and get only what's related to your field; you have to study everything, or you might miss what matters.

I suppose if you intended to make a career our of elf-sex criticism stories, then you could focus what you reread... but who does that? Most people write a broad range of stories, and for that, you need to know as much as you can.

~

As to your struck-out sidenote: there is an inherent bias to storytelling in Mormonism, simply because the Book of Mormon has a far more coherent narrative and better worldbuilding than the Bible (^~). But I think it's more of an observer effect: you don't flag up how many SF/F writers are Catholic, or Baptist, or Pentecostal, because it doesn't come up in discussion of them. The cultural perception of the LDS Church is closer to how people think about Islam, or the Amish - a distinctly other religion. So they stand out.

Glancing through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDSfiction">LDS fiction, which is apparently a real Wikipedia article, the only names that pop out of the Notable section for me are Steph, Orson, Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn), Chris Heimerdinger (Mormon YA books), and Glenn Beck (who... is a fiction author apparently?). I've read the first three, and while Brother Orson has recently(?) shown himself to be a pretty bad person, the only one whose work I would describe as unambiguously bad is Stephanie Meyer. Which is essentially because she's trying to write romance novels but without the titillation.

(I always feel bad for calling Steph's writing bad, because she clearly cares so much. But she's also one of those people who drives her characters through to her predetermined ending regardless of whether they would actually act that way - and she has frankly dangerous ideas of what's romantic.)

hS, words words words

Also, sidenote: why are so many garbage SF&F writers Mormons? OSC, SMeyer, the list, it goeth on...

However, I also think that there's such a thing as going too deep in ways that are unproductive. To use your own example, a fic concerning and questioning the idea of IF elfbang GOTO elfnuptials absolutely needs a secure understanding of the various elfish cultures in Arda... but it might not need, say, a prolonged look at the architectural vagaries of Gondorian city-builders. It's a question of staying on topic and not getting bogged down in ever-more obscure detail, which can just descend into he-said-she-said. =]

Although, I reckon there's probably a story in just why Gondorians build such grand cities when nobody else does, exploring the social and political pressures inherent in the commissioning and construction of monumental architecture (see Follett, K., The Pillars Of The Earth). =]

... the better you can think about the material.

To use your own example: you can write an Ender/Alai slashfic ("salaam"), but unless you read the Shadow books and realise that Alai will end up as Caliph [/spoiler for 15-year-old book], you can't use that story as proper criticism - which it would be ideal for, since the moral assumptions in the Ender books come from OSC's Mormonism. You get to use a religious character to cast light on the implicit assumptions of a religious author - or you just read the first book and use Alai because he comes across as the most "feminine" of the Battle School boys.

I'm writing one story as a direct response to Tolkien's 'sex=marriage among the elves' idea. If I don't have a secure understanding of that idea, the whole concept is completely useless.

hS

... is that I've learned most of what I know about it from alternate history stories. Certainly I can't think of any other reason I would have had the Natural Geographic civil war poster hanging around for so long.

hS