I would love to rec a delightful fic I've been reading today. Voices at the Door by rhymer23. It's a beautiful series of vignettes about the friendship between Bilbo and Aragorn, how they met and how their friendship developed over the years that Bilbo dwelt in Rivendell.

The author is fairly new to writing LotR fanfic, but her story is filled with rich and vivid descriptions and the characterizations of both Bilbo and Aragorn are spot on. You can see why they are drawn together, the hobbit in exile from his own people and the lonely king in exile whose wanderings are given a new purpose when he can describe them to another kindred soul. It's not a long story--only 14 short chapters!

Please do read this story if you are at all fond of Aragorn and/or Bilbo, and let the author know if you enjoy it half as much as I have been!

A few weeks ago I got a PM from a person who was publishing a scholarly work on Tolkien for permission to mention some of my stories in the essay. I gave permission, and had some nice e-mail correspondence with him.

The essay is now published as a Kindle e-book: Tolkien's Triumph: The Strange History of 'The Lord of the Rings' by John Lennard. It includes an entire section devoted to secondary works and fanfiction.

He has some very flattering things to say about my stories "A New Reckoning", "The Road to Edoras" and "In the Court of the High King". I am not the only fanfiction writer he mentions. He also includes pandemonium_213 (my co-author for "The Prisoner and the Hobbit") blslarner (analyzing "The King's Commission" and "Murder Most Foul") and jodancingtree (concerning her three stories "Following the Other Wizard", "The Queen's Orc", "The Grey at the End of the World").

The author has an LJ: bracketyjack and a blog, Reading Matters.

I think he did a wonderful job!

The October Challenge stories are up!

Some of you might have spotted mine briefly the other evening, when I accidentally posted it here (I was working on the formatting and meant to post privately) so if you wondered where it vanished to, here it is!

I took that political quiz a lot of my friends have been taking, but my results don't look quite like everyone else's.

Here are my winning entries in the MPTT 2013 Tree and Flower Awards! Thank you so much to all who nominated my work, and to all who voted for it; I am quite pleased with my results. I'm even more pleased that several of the stories of other people that I nominated (or wanted to nominate until someone else did) placed! And look at the lovely banners our hard-working banner-makers made! ( Read more... )

Stolen from several friends, but seen first at lindahoyland's journal:

Ask me a question about one of my stories. It can be absolutely anything (Including current WIP's) I will answer honestly.

You can also ask about my writing as a whole, if you like.

I've FINALLY figured out how to post these pics!

( Here's some veggie pics: )

TORN is having a contest for writing Tolkien in the style of another writer:
http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2013/09/04/78302-calling-all-writers-submissions-for-our-rewrite-tolkien-contest-are-now-open/