- 23-June-2020 - Hmmmmmm, hiding out at home tele-working while a virus attacks the world does not make much time for fanfic-writing because there are those five dozen other things to catch on. And the house-building is just beginning the planning stages.

- 27-Dec-2019 - If you want to have lots of time to write fanfics, don't join a committee. And especially, don't join two. Or build a house.

- 19-Oct-2018 - I was not planning on a hurricane last week. But Michael had other ideas. So, after evacuating with a couple of suitcases of stuff, including a full hard drive backup and a spare laptop, huddling in a boarded up house through the storm and then returning to blessedly little damage, one should contemplate it. If you know anyone who gets wiped out in Michael or any similar storm, be generous. And then plan for the next. The planet is on fire, and just because climate change is a low burn doesn't mean it's not there. Plan to live in places that don't require driving and are away water. And watch your carbon footprint. It's bigger than you think.

- 29-Jul-2018 - So many things to do and so little time to write (fanfic at least). I've still got things to write, but a ridiculously crowded schedule.

- 05-Dec-2017 - I really am writing. Just really slowly. And I have commitments to write other things that aren't fanfic. And costume-making really, really takes a lot of time away from writing (I did well in the Worldcon masquerade and it weighed less than 4.5 kg for international luggage). And there's this movie coming up next week. !!!!!!!!!! Oh, please lets have lots of Jedi stuff. Of course, it doesn't matter what happens in the movie; it has Luke Skywalker in it and that automatically makes it something I must see. Rogue One had things in it that I didn't even know I wanted to see. And TFA was good, but kind of the 'Luke-Surprise' SW movie ('Where's the Luke?'). But this one ... oh, I'm looking forward to not having to avert my eyes and plug my ears against the merest hint of a spoiler.

- 28-Jun-2017 - I yet again, highly recommend completing a story before posting any of it, even if it's a long one with many parts. I tried posting-as-you-go years ago and it just was not that fun because the clock was ticking once the first chapter was posted. I do have lots of unfinished stories -- they're just on my hard drive in the low-stress zone. And if any of those unfinished stories don't work out, I can always cannibalize parts of them for other stories. But the biggest reason for waiting is that the #1 reason why I might get stuck on a story is because it just is not working anymore; something is wrong and the only way to fix it is to go back and change some things that happen earlier in the story. And that is just a lot harder to do if the earlier bits are just hanging out there in the open on the internet. I suppose one could parcel out the chapters of the finished story over time and get more responses from readers who want you to finish, but when I'm done with a story, I just want to get it out of my hair and be complete online so I can go on to the next one.

Oh and now we know that TFA is good, except that it did not have enough Jedi stuff in it (Luke? Where the Luke?). But Leia and Han were magnificent and the movie just felt right. So, on to 'The Last Jedi'...

- 22-Aug-2016 - They had discussion panels about fanfiction at the World Science Fiction Conventions in Kansas City MO last week. Yay! The internet is changing everything.

- 24-Jul-2016 - Costume-making really cuts into writing time. So many things to make -- closest full of costume, but I don't have a thing to wear. So many things to write.

- 18-Oct-2015 - We are in the 'Glowing Good Times'. Right now, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is the greatest, most stupendous movie ever. Or at least since "A New Hope" came out, which I saw (many times) when it was first released in 1977. Of course it is great. We haven't seen it yet. But I have three cold buckets of reality for that. TEMPLE. OF. DOOM. The second Indy movie should have been good. Same cast. Same director. Same production company. And there were good parts in it. But the whole ... not so great. Good thing 'Last Crusade' made up for it. And I enjoyed 'Crystal Skull' though it wasn't as good as #1 and #3. So, I will enjoy these next two months, when TFA is so, so, so wonderful, for all they're worth. And those words to that very old Weird Al song, "Yoda", have finally come to pass.

"... I'll be playing this part 'til I'm old and gray."

And I am writing. I'm just getting more sewing done right now -- and it feels soooooooo gooooood to cross some of those things off my list that have gone un-touched for literally years.

- 28-May-2015 - Hmmmmmm, when you write on 3 things at the same time, they don't get written very fast. And it's costume season and I've been going after those projects that have been half finished for ages. And if you look on youtube and search for the 2015 Star Wars Celebration Cosplay Contest, the winner for the best Jedi costume -- and first place in the whole contest -- might just have a familiar name -- heh, heh. :)

- 4-Sep-2014 - 'WRITER BEWARE'. Go google that and 'SFWA' (Science Fiction Writer's of America) and you will find a wonderful blog about what every writer should know about the scams and money-making schemes that 'say' that they're going to help you be a writer, become rich and famous, yadda, yadda, yadda. They're all horrible, greedy bottom-feeders and never give them anything. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Ann C. Crispin helped found the WRITERS BEWARE blog on the SFWA web site and I went to a memorial for her at DragonCon. It was very nice and along with being a wonderful writer herself, she did all aspiring writers a great service by helping to found that blog.

- 13-Jul-2014 - Still writing, but I've got too many unfinished things on my hard drive. Need to finish those. But aside from that... I used to get e-mail notices whenever someone would review a story. But that stopped awhile ago, and I never looked into why. Unfortunately, that means that if you put in some typo corrections -- yes, please, point them out when you see them -- then I won't get any notification about it and there's no telling when I'll find it. So, PM is best for pointing out for typos. I do still get e-mail whenever someone sends me a PM here.

- 24-Mar-2014 - Typos are like cockroaches ... there is rarely just one. My latest typo gave Master Yoda a sex change (thanks to the reader who caught that one). I suppose there might be story in that typo, but I'm having trouble picturing at the moment. Just let me know when the turn up. I'm still writing slowly. Getting more sewing done, but writing, too.

- 29-Oct-2013 - Whew, got all those covers done. Reeeeeeaaally basic graphics; not much art with the faces of the characters we love emoting and all that good stuff. Maybe sometime in the future I can do that, but for now I at least have basic templates for covers for anything new I post.

- 19-Oct-2013 - I posted a new SW story and in a fit of vanity, I got tired of looking at all those default images for my fics and have started uploading covers for them. They will just be the basic graphics with titles and author name, but some will be pretty. Also, I reviewed the stories and found some did not have characters listed. The web page software has advanced a bit since some were posted, so I've added characters to the story descriptions, since now you can have up to four. Busy-work, busy-work.

- 02-Oct-2013 - Ugh, I fixed more typos that I'd like to admit and re-uploaded 'Sith Lords Are Our Speciality' again. I'll do that periodically and randomly as I find them, but otherwise I have new stuff to write, and costumes to make. I've been getting a bit of sewing done.

- 04-Aug-2013 - I finally finished that 34-part Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan mission story. I am proofing it as I post it serially on another web site - - and I dread the typos that will get through - - but I still won't be done with that until the end of this month.

I can't resist expounding on the virtues of waiting until the first draft of a story is complete. For this long one I just finished, I've had to go back multiple times to re-write things to keep the story going to the end. It never would have gotten done because re-writing earlier bits is ridiculously hard for a story that is partially online. I have lots of unfinished stories on my hard drive where they don't haunt me. They can be either finished or not or cannibalized for other stories. Hmmmmmm, I should go finish some of them.

- 19-Apr-2013 - Thanks to the kind reviewer who pointed out that one of the chapters in 'Dinner At Ten Forward' was posted twice. The story is all there, it just had the same post twice. I deleted the repeated chapter, but ff.n now annoyingly has the story with a Chapter 8 and Chapter 10, but no Chapter 9. I was hoping that would automatically re-number when I deleted the repeated chapter, but no such luck. Again, the story is all there, but without the repeat.

- 20-Jan-2013 - And BTW, I guess I should say -- since I noticed some advertisements on this page that I strongly disagree with -- that I have nothing whatsoever to do with any ads that appear on this website, at all. They are here only because fanfiction.net put them there. Whatever pays the bills, I guess. Which ads you might wonder? Well, check the date and my country of origin. I think that today is a wonderful, historic, bright-blue-sky, over-the-moon-HAPPY, absolutely 110% fanTABulous day. Yippee! :-) :-) :-D ... I did not go to the Big Event ... this time ... but I did get the t-shirt. So, you figure it out.

- 20-Jan-2013 - Hmmm, my 200th story. Wow. This one also marks a switch from OpenOffice to Word. The last update of OO would not read my old WordPerfect files and that was a real deal-breaker for me. And a single home license of Microsoft Office is very reasonably priced.

- 2-Aug-2012 - I might have to take back what I said about doing only one Sherlock. I might be able to manage a few little ones sometime. Have to ponder that.

- 29-Jul-2012 - It's costume season again. That always seriously cuts into my writing time. But it's fun. Still working on fics -- 75 pages into a SW one that is taking forever -- but they all seem to be long ones at the moment; tough to get done between bouts of rampant sewing. I tried a Sherlock -- a wonderfully fun series created and written by self-proclaimed Sherlock Holmes fanboys -- but I can't sustain it for more than one famfic from an American client POV. Doctor Who is British (and the Sherlock writers worked on that) but technically he's not from Earth and it's not a big deal if the alien menaces have American accents. But Sherlock really does require a better knowledge of Britishism than I have for it to come out right. At least for it to come out the way I'd want it to. Interesting challenge for fanfic writing.

- 16-Jun-2012 - I have finally posted the last of my older print-fanzine fanfics here. * * Whew! * * Now they can spin around cyberspace with all the other fanfic electrons. :)

- 3-Jun-2012 - They're taking images here now?? I have to do cover art, too? That's a mixed blessing. I started out in fanzines doing art; I love art. But I'm so backed up on writing stories, I don't know where I can squeeze in the art, too. A very few stories already have some cover art done for another website and then there's the original print fanzine art, but the others might have to wait awhile.

- 29-May-2012 (update) - Finally, I got those three Man from U.N.C.L.E. stories from the old print fanzine days edited and ready for posting. Because they are co-written, they are on a different account here, ardavenport-tlneill . All three of them are posted at this URL

-- http://www.fanfiction.ws/u/3990538/ardavenport_tlneill

(I can't seem to get an active link, even when I copy source code into the profile edit - ah well) .

- 08-Apr-2012 - Still writing. Slowly. Everything I write gets three times longer than I intended. Finally got the OCR going, so I have to clean up those ancient stories for posting. And found a Picard/Crusher hurt/comfort story that got missed because the file name was different from the title of the story. Got to clean that one up, too. And there are so many things to do. But my living room has never looked better.

And I knew I was old on Feb 29, 2012, Leap Day, when Davy Jones died of a heart attack at age 66. And if you're old enough to know what that means, you're old too.

- 11-Jan-2012 - Aaaaaah, finally won the battle of the OCR and retrieved the text from one of my oldest stories. I'll go now to get the Who and UNCLE stuff that didn't make the transition from KPM to DOS (ancient computers here, before MicroSoft took over the world), but it will take awhile. And I've still got new stories to write, costumes to make, etc.

- 12-Oct-2011 - Still writing. Veeeeeeerrrrryyyy slowly. And I still have that OCR issue. But some of the mounds of backed-up costume projects are much smaller now. Mama wants a new Jedi robe. :)

- 16-Sept-2011 - Finished posting the print zine stories that I have files for, but I still have to tackle the OCR problem. And so many of my stories are long things that I've been meaning to finish for quite awhile, so I probably won't post too often for a bit.

- 14-June-2011 - I think this looks better with the most recent changes on top. Alas, I have not mastered writing faster than I do, and now I have costumes to make this summer. But I am writing; it's just taking awhile. And I have been posting some of my print fics. I am almost done with those that I had in files on my computer, some of them quite old (Wordstar, anyone?). There are others that were written on an ancient Kaypro and didn't make the transition when Microsoft's DOS took over the world, so I have to get my OCR software working (minor battle between the software and the printer/scanner that still hasn't been resolved).

- 7-Mar-2011 - I got a new computer last fall. And aside from the hassle of converting things from WordPerfect to OpenOffice, I decided to do something with those files deep down in the 'Archive' folder that I have dragged from computer to computer. So, I have begun posting online fanfictions I wrote for print fanzines. They are not new, but they are new to the net.- Sep 2009 - Hmmmmmmmmmm, I just looked at this and see that I had some dates seriously wrong, which are fixed ... I hope.

- 9-Mar-2010 - That bold face looks a little severe; I'll get rid of it. And add a few details.

- 15-Feb-2010 - Time to reorganize a little more.

- - - o - - - o - - - o - - -

- I see typos. Typos, typos, typos. I sometimes go back an look at stories I post and there they are. Missing words. Extra ones. Repeat words in the same sentence. Words that are one letter off of what they should be, but are other words, so the spell-check didn't catch them, transposed letters; 'was' instead of 'saw', 'form' instead of 'from', 'angle' instead of ankle'. To get them here I have to go back to the chapter in the word processor, find them, fix them, upload the file and then replace the chapter. At the moment, other activities, including writing new fics has higher priority than going after those pesky typos, but I'd like to get them someday.

- I have a phobia about having unfinished fics online, so I pretty much post them complete here. I do have unfinished fics kicking around -- but they stay on my hard drive where they won't haunt me.

- Thanks for reading any of my fics, should you choose to. And thanks for any comments you might leave. If you have any specific questions, just send a private message. There's no obvious way to answer a question in a review without it being another review which might look odd.

- If I find that I've got all original characters (or seriously extrapolated versions of source characters) and original settings, then I should just cut the cord and write original fiction.

- When it comes to writing fanfic, for me, it usually comes down to:

/////-- 'Me see movie/TV show/whatever characters that I like.'

/////-- 'Me want more.'

/////-- 'Me write more.'

Generally that means that I try to stick to the original characters as much as possible. There are always background details that need to be filled in and there might the odd 'what if' fic where I try an alternate reality version of characters, but I try to keep them as close to as you see them in the source.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I've been a fan-fic writer since back in the days of print zines and snail mail. And I still have most of them, too, including those very earliest zines after Star Wars: A New Hope came out before we knew Luke and Leia were related (oops). In the early 80's I did mostly Star Wars art and cartoons, very little writing.

I co-wrote U.N.C.L.E. fics with a friend in the mid-80's and started writing Dr. Who around then, plus a smattering of other things. I specifically got my first computer (1984 Kaypro - a green-screen monster that didn't even have a hard drive) and a dot matrix printer so I could write fics with them. There were a few of zines produced with it, too.

I did not start writing a lot of fanfics until the late 1980's when Star Trek: The Next Generation came out -- strange and terrible things happened to Captain Jean-Luc Picard in those. ;)

And now I am digging around deep down into my sub-folders for the files of my old print fanzine days, so some of that Picard/Crusher and Janeway stuff is ending up here along with my newer fanfiction, though I am highly unlikely to write anything new there; they just look new because they haven't been on the internet. Or maybe they don't look new ...

My new fan-fic muse has been in Star Wars (mostly prequels) for online writing/posting (2005-2009), but since DragonCon 2009 I have branched out to Emergency! fanfic -- I attribute this addition to:

-- someone mentioning that Emergency! fics existed (you know who you are)

-- I watched the whole series, start to finish, when it originally aired on NBC in the 1970's, but never saw it in syndication (now I get it online -- how cool is that?)

-- me turning 50 (must be a mid-life crisis)

-- looking for an avenue to try a few writer's workshop tricks I picked up at DragonCon

-- Johnny Gage is still really cute (right up there with Mr. Spock, Luke Skywalker, the 4th Doctor, Illya Kuriakin and young Obi-Wan).

I have more Star Wars fics to do, but they've been slowed down by the Emergency! diversion (along with the costuming and sundry other fannish activities).

I have also written and/or done artwork for (print zines - early 1980's through mid 1990's):

Star Trek (original series)

Doctor Who (4th Doctor and a tiny bit of 5th Doctor)

Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: Voyager

and a smattering of other fandoms like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, MacGyver, Sapphire and Steel, Blake's Seven, Spiderman, Beauty and the Beast, Blake's Seven.