Author Archives: Sam

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I don’t think watching “Mack and D’s excellent adventure” after WandaVision was the best idea. This was Agents of Shield’s experimental season and this episode is weird as hell.

Mack’s fake beard was terrible. The gore from the robot saw was crazy. But the show still came at me with the feels. Honestly Mack nearly made me cry. Part of me wishes that Yo-Yo could have been there for him but the rest of me remembers post-framework. Mack lashed out in his pain and grief and it hurt them both.

I’m confused as to how Nathaniel survived. Also confused as to how Jemma had worked out how long the jump will be and made some kind of watch? As I thought the time jumps were instant so it was 20 months for Mack and Deke and no time at all for them. But perhaps next episode will explain it.

Deke never really has got the whole operational security thing. He invited his people to the base in the future and remodelled a lab for them to work out of without Mack knowing. His heart is definitely in the right place though. He wants to do the right thing. That scene in the bar with the song though went on way too long though I nearly fast forwarded.

OK I had to watch another to find out.

OMG Jemma managed to work out the pattern in 20 minutes? I love her! Seriously I am so predictable with my faves. I love scientists.

Oh that scene with Elena just grabbing the diviner and then going “oh it’s a prosthetic” was great. May having to be Elena’s emotional guide was great. I love May and her reaction was just brilliant. Friends and comrades. Sparring, fighting to a breakthrough is just so them.

Jemma making Fitz a video broke my heart. Oh Yo-Yo is like Quicksilver now, that’s cool and helpful. I love that Jemma got Sousa a new prosthetic leg. He’s properly one of the team now. I feel bad for Coulson he’s having a self crisis over what he is. I hope he watches some Star Trek and hears Picard saying to Data about how we’re all machines just in different forms.

I am a bit worried over how much the timeline has changed. Surely that’s created a new reality by this point? Or several like what happened in Endgame with the avengers time adventure. How will they get back home to Fitz?

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I don’t know what to make of WandaVision which I suspect is the point.

I think my confusion is different though. There’s a lot of canned laughter tracks but I didn’t laugh once. Was I supposed to laugh? Was it funny?

To be honest I’m hoping it picks up a bit. The trailer showed a lot of promise but the first two episodes were long on confusion, almost all in black and white which got old fast, and there was not much tension. Like I know there’s a plot and the weirdness is part of it, but I don’t feel like they are teasing it very well.

I feel like if there is a mystery I should have more questions and be intruiged. Instead I’m just perplexed. So far I’m feeling very meh about it.

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Making AU gifsets is bloody difficult. Like I want it to at least look plausible that they could be having the made up conversation. So their emotions need to be right and also I don’t want them to change location/outfits during the conversation (at least not too noticeably, I might have to bend a little).

Anyway I have 1/3rd of it down. The other parts are missing pieces. I did a dive for footage the other day but what I have doesn’t work for everything. So I’m going to need to look again. Good job I have another month to finish this is all I’m saying.

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@thisgirlshouldbestudying thanks for the tag 🙂

Rules: Tag 9 people you’d like to get to know better/catch up with.

Last song: Brighter than the Sun, Poets of the Fall

Last movie: The A Team I think, watched that Christmas eve. I love it when a plan comes together haha.

Currently watching: Oh too many things. Ignoring what I watch with family (as that would add another 9), so just shows I watch on my own: Star Trek Discovery, Agents of Shield, Sanctuary, Black Lightning, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek TNG, Star Trek DS9 and Supergirl. I may pick up Alex Rider and The Letter for the King again, and I’m also thinking of watching Bridgerton. Oh! and when Batwoman and Blood and Treasure come back I’ll probably watch that too. And I suppose candour forces me to admit that these are just current shows that have unseen episodes. I also love rewatching old favourites. I watched a couple of episodes of The Librarians for instance the other day. Merlin help me when Disney+ kicks off it’s new slate of shows.

Currently reading: I haven’t started it yet but I randomly selected from my kindle a book called Agent of Time. Thanks to bookbub deals I have about 80+ books on my kindle to read. I’m terrible about making time to sit down and read and I’m determined to actually meet my reading goal this year.

Currently craving: nothing really? erm maybe my breakfast which I’m about to eat. I’m hungry.

Tagging: anyone who wants to do it! (aka I’m a coward who is scared of tagging people).

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There’s a vampire faction/zone/raid in Shadowlands. I made a joke about how “Nikola Tesla is the only valid vamp” in tonight’s raid. My day was totally made as someone got the reference! 🙂

But it made me think Warcraft + Sanctuary, and then of course I remembered Leverage because Hardison “the burning crusade was good but the new one? girl I stayed up all night” and friends with elves and stuff (I can’t remember the exact quotes).

Anyway now I want to write a ficlet about Hardison and Henry on the same raid team/in the same guild because I don’t know, I just want it.

After all Henry is a hacker/tech too and come on the Leverage team have all seen some stuff. Black market red list goods, Eliot’s definitely fought some abnormals, Parker (I boosted cars, I was a getaway driver etc.) definitely moved in the same circles as Kate at one point (and probably has similar regret now she’s developed), I’m just saying.

The world is weird and Team Leverage knows it. They ignore it but occasionally Hardison will tip Henry to something. It’s a fun thought.

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You know how I said Normandy wrecked my headcanon for James and Helen’s relationship? I’d put in Our Darkest Hour that they’d split, as Helen couldn’t live with James’ pain and her own. They’d obviously stayed best friends but that was why they weren’t living together in present day – they weren’t together together.

But Normandy put a spanner in that because James and Helen were definitely together romantically then. So why weren’t they together together? If they loved each other it made zero sense to me why Helen lived in Old City, James was head of house in London and they saw each other maybe once a year and barely talked otherwise.

However, this morning I woke up and it just came to me.

I still have 2 episodes of season 3 to watch but I’m not completely spoiler free I know season 4 has time travel. Helen goes back to the past and has to live a century over again. Well James knows about future!Helen (I know that much) and Helen doesn’t want to disrupt the timeline so she can’t do much, has to hide a lot of the time. Her past!self is living her life, so everyone she knows and cares about is off-limits pretty much – apart from James who knows.

Now James can’t have a relationship with current/past!Helen and future!Helen at the same time. He can’t tell current/past!Helen the truth, so her logical conclusion at his secrecy would be an affair. However, he can’t leave future!Helen to face the century totally alone. She doesn’t have anyone else.

Therefore that’s the reason for the distance between them. James probably made some excuse about politics, needing to stay in London etc. when Helen moved to Old City. I’m sure he would try and leave her in no doubt as to his feelings (and they certainly seemed to be on good terms in Revelations) but they don’t live together, as he needs to be there for future!Helen. If he was living with Helen, and sneaking off to see future!Helen, as I said the current/past!Helen would surely conclude an affair.

New headcanon! 🙂

I like this one. Current/past!Helen might be a bit confused, and never have totally understood why they aren’t together together. Then she has her time travel trip and suddenly it all makes sense.

Now I just need to concoct some way that James could theoretically have survived in Revelations (while appearing to die) so post-time travel shenanigans he can come back to life and be with Helen completely (as she’d merged with herself so to speak). Also it did just occur to me that I heard (but I’ve not seen so I don’t know if it’s true) that John disappears post-time travel event. I know there’s some kind of scheming going on so Helen doesn’t admit to her time travel adventure for ages, so that could be why James couldn’t come back to life, but then after Helen went back to her life he would be the one left alone unless John went to keep him company.

I’m going to have to write this aren’t I? This has got to be a thing.

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I haven’t rambled about writing since mid-December apparently.

You know how I did a NaNo report every day in November? Well I’m thinking of making that an every day/all year thing. NaNo was so good for me this year I want to try and continue whatever magic that had. Don’t worry, I’ll probably post it on my private writing sideblog instead of spamming here. Depends on what I’m writing maybe, I can’t decide.

Anyway, it might be 2021 now but fanfic is still happening – for Sanctuary that is. I honestly can’t remember if I have said the current status of things or not so in summary:
– Our Darkest Hour is being posted every Tuesday and Friday at the moment.
– I posted the ridiculously fluffy oneshot Happy Ending
– I have written but not yet posted the oneshot James Watson and the Curious Case of the Jarnul. I want to do an illustration (that will be my January drawing) so it’ll be later this month.
– I am currently writing another long multi-chapter fic Choosing Fate where basically I play with the arranged marriage trope.

I’m aiming to finish writing Choosing Fate by the end of the month (it’s on my writing goals list) but I’m also writing an original novella this month so it’ll depend on how words go. Currently today = not well. Focus = non-existent, which is probably why I’m rambling.

Anyway, that’s where things stand.

WriYe: Goals and Plans

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January and a blog circle topic!

What’s your WriYe Word Count goal for 2021? Why did you chose it?
Technically it’s 75k at the moment. However, I put on my progress thread “starting small, dreaming higher” and that’s precisely what I’m doing. I picked 75k because it’s the length of a full novel draft. At minimum I want one completed drafted full length original novel. So those two goals are compatible BUT I’m going to be writing other things. I’m continuing with the fanfic and my first original project in 2021 is a novella.

Basically I hope very much that I will far exceed 75k. I have secret dreams about smashing past 75k in February if I’m honest. However, given how last year went I thought picking a low goal wouldn’t be intimidating, and then when I smashed it (thinking positively here) I could increase it and then feel good about that.

What are your writing/editing plans for the year?
As I said above I’d like at least one full length novel written. I’m starting with this novella and there’s fanfic. To be honest I haven’t thought further than those goals quite deliberately. I don’t want to scare myself off. I’m focusing on January and what I’m working on now. When I finish my current projects I’ll focus on February, and what I’m going to write then, and not look too far into the future.

I’m feeling like if I take it a month at a time, a project at a time, then that might work like NaNo which went really well last year. I had my project, I worked on it all month, and I wrote ‘The End’ on the 30th and it felt great. So I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. I have a lot of different possibilities about what I can work on but I’ll pick when I get there. For now I’m focusing on the novella (Fall of Camelot) and my current fanfic (Choosing Fate).

What are you most looking forward to in 2021?
Smashing my goals? Haha oh I don’t know. I’m trying to be positive here. Seriously, what I want the most from 2021 is to make progress, to move forward, to finally get somewhere. There is nothing I want more than to get to the end of December in 2021 and type up a yearly review, and to list all the things I accomplished.

I want that glow of satisfaction, of being able to feel like yes I did something good. Not that I’m saying the writing will be good (although I’m trying not to make myself panic about being good enough right now!). What I mean by good is, I don’t want to get through another year and feel like I wasted the time again. Like I said I really want to feel like I made progress.

So yes, that is the only answer I can give really. In 2021 I’m most looking forward to (hopefully) feeling accomplished, to being productive and getting words written.

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OMG Agents of Shield season 7 is an absolute delight.

They did almost an entire episode in black and white. Complete with voiceover narration. Very film noir.

Now they just did an old school credits sequence and it’s so 70’s.

I love Sousa so much. I mean I always did in Agent Carter but his reaction to the clothes was priceless #SoRelatable. He’s having trouble adjusting, wavering between committing to this time thing and wishing he was back in his time. A little bitter that he couldn’t stop Hydra but then aren’t they all. It must burn to have to let it happen.

I am so sad for poor Enoch though that they left him behind AGAIN. Like they really should have picked him up in 55 I’m just saying. If he’s seriously pissed then I will totally understand. All he did though was mention that it had been forty years twice. I know he’s an immortal robot and had the time to spare but still poor guy.

Oh my god Project Insight I did not see that one coming! Though with the chronicom staying behind that makes sense. They would be able to leap the technology forward. All these changes in the timeline is worrying though because what kind of future will they be returning to?

I can’t believe Mack “king of robot movies” as prophecy had to have Elena tell him about James Bond as a warning sign. Poor Mack. Having to make a split second decision about the lives of his parents I can’t blame him for trying to do both – destroy insight and save them.

Not being able to control their time jumps is a serious liability! Sousa asking the real questions here. I love how he is so willing to always do the right thing. He’s reeling, he’s confused but he is still throwing himself into the fight. It’s hitting him every now and then all he’s lost, and how he’s a stranger in this new world, and he wants to get off this ride. Really so relatable.

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I just watched Normandy.

Way to wreck my headcanons haha.

Oh and James looked super weird without any kind of facial hair. He had the goatee in Revelations and of course the full beard in the flashback in For King and Country. I didn’t like it, he didn’t look like himself, but then the actor did play that villain in Stargate and he was clean-shaven like that so maybe that’s part of the problem.

Ok the backstory I set up in Our Darkest Hour isn’t potentially canon anymore but never mind. So new facts! James and Helen were never involved pre-Whitechapel based on John’s comments. If they’d all been together back then (how I wrote it) then John wouldn’t have said this:

You’re with her now. Aren’t you? I know you, old friend. Your passion… your passion for her, it just comes off you like a bad smell.

Unless … I mean there could be more than one way of reading it. The inference I got from watching was a bit of jealousy on John’s part, and it just felt like James and Helen’s relationship must be a new thing. I think I get that from the “bad smell” part and also the “with her NOW” as in ‘not then’. BUT John might well be jealous not because he didn’t know about James and Helen but because he’s no longer part of it – he lost them both. So it’s more bitterness and the ‘now’ could be a bit like ‘still, even though I’m not’.

Yeeeeah I know I’m twisting it but it’s not impossible.

Hang on I’m rambling too much (cut for length)

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