Sign Ups Are OPEN For This Year's 'Finish That Fic, Merlin! (2024/2025)

I redrew some Merlin characters to be more historically and culturally accurate! The text is their original names in a later Latin script, yoinked from a display in the Corinium Museum, Cirencester. (Sneaky edit to add: Y'all are incredibly welcome to use this in any way you want, I would love to see more of my home's culture being represented more accurately in media!!)

Unlabelled version under the cut!!

Art by Rolf Mellstrom, 1916

Amazing art for one of my microfics, thank you so much @merthurotica 🥺!

i watched Excalibur

Once i thought about Merlin's stupid metal hat and I couldn't stop thinking about it, and now you're cursed too with the image of Merlin in metal hat

What Art We Sticker by GrandpasSwamp

For Aithusa doodles, may I suggest Aithusa with her head stuck in a doughnut, or tangled up in a curtain she was hiding behind, or maybe trying to drag Excalibur off even though it's much bigger than her?

She’s so so helpful!!! (x)

I also love how audio fiction has always been a highly experimental medium, and likely always will be.

Financially, it has a low barrier for entry, a low point of diminishing returns, and a relatively small potential market. It's basically impervious to being taken over by giant studios - even the "big" networks like RQ would be considered indie in the film or game dev industries. With the exception of the BBC, they tend to dip their toes into audio fiction, figure out quickly that, although it's beloved by its fans, there isn't that kind of money in it, and proceed to leave us alone forever.

Then there's the fact that it propagates largely by word of mouth. Audio dramas owe everything to obsessive nerds forcing nearly everyone they know to listen to that podcast they just discovered.

So it's more about the thing being actually good, plus a decent amount of luck and persistence.

There's no optimally marketable success formula being relentlessly enforced by gatekeeping jellybean-counters because they don't exist here. So people make whatever they want. So it draws people to it who are looking for something different. And the cycle feeds itself, and the medium gets weirder (in a good way).

It may very well ALWAYS remain the wild west of storytelling.

So listeners tell your friends about that podcast!

And creators, make the weird thing! There are no rules! It can be an hour long or Breaker Whiskey short, or Re:Dracula all over the place length. It can be another tape recorder framing or another voicemail framing or basically just an audiobook. It can be any genre or blend of genres. This creative space gives us the opportunity to be our own target audience in a way rarely found elsewhere.

If you enjoy the thing you're making, odds are somone else out there will enjoy it too. I've already found this to be true, and my time as an audio fiction creator is still just beginning.

Peace and love on every planet, y'all!

been doing a LOT of analog note-taking / journaling / planning lately (new years' resolution fulfilled! yes!), and I've slowly but surely started writing mostly in cursive again.

that said, I'm old (almost 35, ew) so I have questions.

if you want to RB this and put you age / locale / whatever else you think is relevant in the tags, that'd be very cool

I was today years old when I realised that Kanen, the main villain in Moment of Truth whose terrorising Merlin’s hometown Ealdor is Alexander Sidding aka Dr. Julian Bashir from Star Trek Deep Space 9.

Now I wonder if there are fanfics of Dr. Bashir and Chief O’Brien in a simulation of King Arthur and Wizard Merlin that’s basically the Episode of the Moment of Truth.

Or one of these Time Travel episodes where they accidentally end up in the past and change something they have to fix so Bashir has to pose as Kanen and at the end they are like ???THAT was Prince ARTHUR??? AND MERLIN WAS A HOT YOUNG REAL WIZARD???