Pen's Nest

A fic with great dialogue.

Trouble is, great dialogue crops up in so many popslash stories, and I cannot for the life of me remember all the fabulous conversations that have made me laugh aloud, or smile and nod and say yes, or even rage at the characters.

However. I'm sticking with yesterday's author, Jae, because The Earl of Rothinghamtonfordshire has some of the best dialogue *ever*. Those Backstreet group meetings in which everyone gets sidetracked into discussing Nick's book, Kevin's eyebrows and the fact that "they're not real monkeys"... Much of the story happens in dialogue, and it is brilliant. (When I recorded the story I kept having to stop the recording, announce to the cat that this was the best story *ever*, and sober myself before I could get on with it.)



Nothing I've written is on a level with TEoR, which is no surprise. And really, deciding that I've written "great dialogue" is a bit, well, I dunno, it isn't really my call. However, I'm nominating The White Room, because I remember wanting to keep things fairly stark when I was writing it, and cutting back on frills and such as best I could. I'm a frilly writer. But I'm particularly fond of the scene where Chris is bandaged and the five of them are eating together.

( In other news, my back garden yesterday morning looked like this: )

The challenge is to find something that doesn't need more than 500 words to be perfect. Quite a difficult challenge, as it's very much harder to keep track of really short fics than long ones... and under 500 words turns out to be very short indeed.

However, I've found a couple of rather excellent contenders from the sky_pie Just for Fun challenge to write breakup drabbles. There were a lot of entries worth reading.

This one by Ephemera, and
this one by Terri.


As for my own, I was surprised to find most of my shortest stories still managed to come in at more than 500, so how about Fourteen lines extolling the pure and perfect love between man and lava lamp.



In other news, surely Adam Lambert's new video will inspire a *lot* of fanfic. Or was it inspired *by* fanfic?

Ah, so many wonderful stories.

This is one that always comes to mind: Be Your Own Best Friend by Betty Plotnick. Long and emotional and tense and splendid. Mercy by the same author is also a great read.

And, because I can never eat just one (or two), serious by no pseud attached, which was written for me, *happy sigh*, and oh my god is it really *five years* since Lance came out? Five and a half!?!? Bloody hell.

Oh, wait—did I mention, my favourite pairing is Trickyfish?



I've written more of this pairing than any other. I'm going to nominate Prone as my favourite.

"There was something about the smell of a tattoo parlor, hot metal and steam from the autoclave and a waft of cigarette smoke from the waiting room, antiseptic mixed with the scent of rebellion, it brought back memories." also with Prologue and Epilogue.