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Fic: A Timely Interruption [T; Jurassic Park OT; Alan/Ian]

T; Jurassic Park OT; Alan Grant/Ian Malcolm, 5800 words. Canon divergence post-The Lost World.

"All right, all right," Ian said dryly, dropping heavily into the chair across the desk from Alan. "Go ahead and say it. Get it out of your system."

A Timely Interruption

(For

Ormspryde in

fandom5k)

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Dear FIAB Creator

Thank you so much for making something for me! I'm really looking forward to opening my box in a couple of months and seeing what's inside. <3

( Likes and Dislikes )

( Oasis RPF )

( Re-Animator )

( Kyle Murchison Booth stories )

Only 24 days until our trip to Greece.

We started planning a year ago, so the time seemed like it was going slow, but suddenly it's less than a month away, and Eeeeeeeeekkkkk. I'm not ready. We're so excited. I will post some pictures when I get back. We're seeing Athens, Volos, Kusadasi, Turkey, and Istanbul, Turkey, Santorini, Crete, Mykonos, and Rhodes. It's going to be great. Woot!!!!! I forgot to mention it's a 10 day cruise. So we get to see quite a few places. We can't wait.

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Give Me a Hand ... For Surgery

Chances are good that I'm about to disappear.

I'm having surgery on my hand, thanks to a non-dangerous affliction called Dupuytren's contracture. This was named after a scientist named Guillotine Dupuytren, and I hope he's happy. I'd give him the middle finger, but it won't bend that way.

Over time, a patient's fingers can bend toward his palm until he--that would be me--can't use them anymore. In my case it's the two middle fingers on the left hand, where tissue under the skin hardens and draws them in.

I know what you're thinking: "Mark, how did you get Kleenex under your skin?"

No, no, it's not facial tissue, I think. It's one of those medical terms, like when they call a person who draws blood a phlebotomist, instead of the obvious title of "blood sucker". A phlebotomist sounds like someone who collects spit. Thank goodness for knowing terminology, because the medical establishment classifies Dupuytren's contracture as a "tumor".

Think of it more like paper towels when they get squeezed together while wet, then dry into a hard mass you can't break with a hammer. My sewer once got blocked that way. Unrelated to my hand.

In the United Kingdom, where many of my ancestors come from, about 20% of men over 65 have, as the drug commercials would put it, D.C. I'm not that old yet, but you gotta start somewhere. My Grandmother had it, and her maiden name was Welch, which is Welsh. But you knew that.

It's often painless, although it's started to hurt me--and hurt way more after the ortho doctor poked and prodded at it for half an hour. There's also the time he tried to ease the pain by sticking a five foot long needle through my hand, but never mind.


Proof: the needle mark

The man ran an iron bar through my palm--to make the pain go away! It did eventually, but I broke my other hand while punching the wall.

It wasn't the pain that worried me: It was the fact that I keyboard for my fulltime job and for my part time job, and now that I'm no longer an active firefighter, I keyboard for the Fire Department. You older people, that means typing. Typing with one hand clenched into a fist would cause issues.

So the doctor's going to put me under, then use a fork and steak knife to dig the tumor/tissue out. Then I won't be able to use my left hand for about two weeks.

You see where I'm going with this.

I once had a boss who had one hand, and he could do just about anything a two-handed person could do, out of necessity. I'm not that kind of person. I've been practicing, and it's no go. I'll have to wear sweatpants and zippered hoodies I can't zip up. Cooking will be even more dangerous than before.

Okay, usually Emily cooks, but as for doing the dishes, we'll have to stock up on paper and plastic. Mowing the lawn will be up to my grandkids. (I actually like mowing, when it's not so humid you have to shoo fish out of the way.) I have to take two weeks off work, which is fine, but everything I do at home involves a keyboard, too.

"No, you type with your left hand--oh, let's just watch Expedition Unknown."

Which brings me to the internet.

Some would say I spend too much time on the internet, and they'd be right. I submit that some of that time is necessary, both to keep up with friends and family and to promote my writing. I also submit that I can't type well one handed. I'll try some speech to text writing, but based on experience with my phone, I'd have to type that much more to correct mistakes.

So I declare late August to be a vacation from the internet, and if you see a long piece of writing from me it was probably prescheduled. Once the pain and pain meds have subsided enough for me to think straight, I want to catch up on my reading.

But what I'll probably do is watch TV.

Just because I'm not around doesn't mean you can't find our books--including the newest, Haunted Noble County, Indiana:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: You only need one hand to turn the pages.

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Movies: Red Sonja and Weapons

Red Sonja (2025). Sword and sorcery fantasy about a young woman who is captured and made a gladiator by the emperor threatening to invade her beloved forest.

This was an absolute joy. I cannot say whether it was good, but I had so much fun, and I'm so glad I got to see it on the big screen on the one (1) day it was in theaters. This movie has all the classic sword and sorcery cheese melted on top of a big ol' overpowered hero(ine)'s journey. Matilda Lutz stars as Sonja, and she is very hot and has great big eyes full of feelings. The other place I know her from is the lead in Coralie Fargeat's movie Revenge, so it kinda seems like she got cast here for her ability to run around being badass in her underwear, but she's great at it, so!

I need to stress that Sonja is hilariously overpowered, and it's fucking delightful. Sometimes you just want a woman beating the shit out of bad guys who are hurting animals. (I love that her first important character note is having a soft heart for the funky CGI fantasy rhinos.)

There are also some other characters! Emperor Dragan has a surprisingly complicated backstory about being a slave child who invents a bunch of new technologies, is probably gay, and is maybe fucking his giant mandrill-guy captain. Annisia is Dragan's star gladiator-turned-concubine except they don't sleep together, and she is haunted to the point of incapacitation by... ghosts? mental illness? who can say. She gets a surprising amount of focus and has a lot of very pointed chemistry with Sonja, and I will say my only disappointment is that the movie didn't really take that to any kind of logical conclusion. And also there's Osin, hot fellow gladiator and Sonja's nominal love interest, who's honestly very charming, not least because he takes no more attention from Sonja than he ought to.

The CGI is dodgy, but the scenery is lovely, and some of the casual worldbuilding is a lot of fun. (What's the deal with the mandrill people, anyway?) There are a lot of horses running everywhere when they should be walking. There's a whole thing where Sonja sings one of the songs of her people, and according to the credits it's a traditional Irish folk song.

There's also a bunch of plot, which you can discover for yourself once the movie's on streaming at the end of the month, which you should absolutely do. Again, I do not promise that this movie is good, but if any of what I've said sounds like fun, run do not walk.

--

Weapons (2025). One night, a bunch of children ran out of their houses and didn't come home again.

This is Zach Cregger's sophomore outing after Barbarian, which came out three years ago and which I liked quite a lot, partly for tackling a lot of chewy thematic material and partly for its absolutely fearless disregard for conventional Hollywood narrative structure. I would not say Barbarian was entirely successful at what it was trying to do or that it even knew precisely what that was, but boy it was trying a lot of things in a lot of directions, and it gave me a lot to think about.

Weapons, by contrast, feels more conventional and generally more successful in its aims, but those aims are so much less interesting to me than Barbarian's. It doesn't appear to have any themes it's trying to tackle at all. It feels like Cregger decided he just wanted to make a fun horror movie about [spoiler]. And I'm not opposed to that! I think overall Weapons is a lot of fun and definitely has its good points. However, I wish it'd shown some more ambition.

I also wish it had any sense of character development in it. The gimmick is that this movie is being told from successive overlapping perspectives of more or less the same time frame. This is absolutely my shit; I love stuff like this. (In this Cregger reminds me a bit of early Christopher Nolan, who also loved weird structural stuff in his movies.) Unfortunately, I didn't feel like these multiple perspectives really built to anything other than eventually revealing the mystery. We get to reevaluate certain characters as we go, but there's only one character who feels like they get any kind of arc to speak of, and we don't get to dig into that character until halfway through the movie. There's no one like Tess from Barbarian who acts as an emotional throughline for the audience.

( spoilers )

Overall: less messy than Barbarian, less ambitious, not quite as pee-your-pants scary (there's nothing on par with the multiple tunnel scenes in Barbarian), but a fun time and still enough creativity and interesting angles on things to keep me looking forward to more movies from Cregger. And from the box office numbers, it looks like we will definitely be getting more from him. Yay.

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Battleship: things I wrote!

I wrote six things in six days for Battleship (and made a tiny art) and promptly burned out, which was okay, because I then left on my trip and didn't get back until after works reveals.

First, I wrote a bunch of Oasis fic!

adastreia kindly threw in some prompts for me so I had at least one person to write for who I knew would like some Gallaghercest, and then a teammate kindly adopted one as well. This was so lovely and much nicer than combing through the Creator's Choice of Fandom requests for someone who looked like they might enjoy an RPF incest ship.

You Know That I Would Give You My Hand, 1.7k, Liam/Noel, fisting PWP. Set ???. One of the things about Battleship is a lot of the details I'd normally worry about, like era, just kind of get glossed over. However, I am incredibly proud of the title (which comes from their deep cut Sad Song).

“Oh fuck,” Liam said. He squirmed, and Noel could feel his every tremble and shiver of breath, because he was up to his wrist in Liam.

one in the oven, 2.1k, Liam/Noel, semi-public omegaverse pregnant sex PWP. Silly and porny and kind of schmoopy.

If anyone had asked Liam beforehand, he’d have guessed Noel would only get more squirrely once Liam had a very public baby on the way that was also very secretly Noel’s. Instead it was like the weird soup of hormones simmering in Liam was so strong that Noel was getting high off the fumes.

maybe tomorrow, 600 words, Liam/Noel. This ficlet is pure vibes, inspired by the "liminal spaces" tag. It might be my favorite thing I made for Battleship. Contains one of my favorite lines I've written this year:

A brother and a tune and a beer, which will never run out so long as he doesn’t drink any more of it.

And some other fandoms!
the land of gold seemed to hold him, Re-Animator, 1.6k, Herbert/Dan, wilderness survival and h/c. Another one that's mostly vibes, but this time the vibes are "the world has ended and all we have is each other." This is fact the THIRD fic of around this length that I have written for this ship on this theme, all with slightly different apocalypses.

A part of Dan wanted to be angry that they’d come up to here to begin with. So the world had ended, more or less; that didn’t mean they needed to run away from what little world there was left. They didn’t need to break camp this morning when the weather looked foul, and they didn’t need to take the shortcut Herbert insisted was indicated on the map, and—

But looking at Herbert’s face, pale and pinched with discomfort, all Dan wanted was to get him somewhere warm. “It can’t be that much farther, right?”

putting the ick in ichor, Buffyverse, 600 words, Buffy/Faith sex pollen. My forever fandom. <3 My most popular fic during the anon period (before I redated all the Oasis fics). I'm very pleased with this title, too.

“Crap. Didn’t Giles say the blood was poisonous?”

“I think the phrase was ‘mildly toxic,’” Faith said. She was still smirking, which meant Buffy… probably wasn’t going to die a miserable painful death? “Pretty sure I’m already feeling it. Aren’t you?”

steak, rare, Stardew Valley, 2k, Abigail gen horror with animal transformation and cannibalism. Out of all the stuff I wrote, this is the one I feel least sure about. I'm not sure it really works tonally, although there are some individual lines I liked, and writing the Abigail-Sam-Sebastian trio was fun.

“It just makes me so angry,” Abigail said. “We were here first, and Dad’s prices are cheaper than Joja Mart’s. He has a booth at all the community events—” Not that Abigail’s mom was always thrilled about that, but the rest of the town seemed to appreciate it. “—and our store even sponsors the egg hunt every year. And we don’t sell Joja Cola, which I’m pretty sure is what turned Shane’s teeth blue last month, so that seems like a point in our favor.”

“Hmm,” said the wizard.

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Fic: the admission of promise (is a recognition of something already there) [T; The Gorge]

T; The Gorge (2025); Drasa/Levi Kane, 2000 words. Slight canon divergence AU.

They were now each other's place to stand; together, maybe they could do the impossible and move the world.

the admission of promise (is a recognition of something already there)

(For

Teaotter in

bitesizedfandomsex)

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Fic: send not to know for whom the bell tolls [T; The Amateur]

T; The Amateur (2025); Charles Heller & Inquiline. 200w, for

bethefirst.

Charlie's figured it out, what she'd been doing.

( send not to know for whom the bell tolls )

(x-posted @ AO3)

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Battleship!!

I signed up for Battleship this year, my second time, knowing that I would leave for vacation nine days in. That seemed fine, since I figured eight days of Battleship would probably be enough for me, and then I burned out in six days. 😅 Still, I received some things and I wrote a bunch of things, and as always the team atmosphere was very fun. I'll put the stuff I wrote in a different post.

Things I received:
no alarms and no surprises by

ElasticElla, Suspiria 2019, Susie/Madame Blanc, 800 words. A trippy little post-canon piece, and the one gift I received for one of my requests.

Dirty Water by

darkrosaleen, Jaws/The Witch crossover, Martin Brody/Thomasin, 900 words. I got offered this in DMs (as someonetimes happens in Battleship), and the combo was so wild I couldn't resist.

Wrist Day by

Nary, Letterkenny, Jonesy/Katy/Reilly, 1.5k. A very silly PWP with the humor and voices of the show, which I adopted when it was offered up on discord (as also sometimes happens in Battleship).

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: various doctor offices

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It's Release Day! Sort Of.

Yes, today is the release date for Haunted Noble County, Indiana. It's hit the bookseller websites (although not as an ebook yet), and I just received a box of what may or may not be copies of the book, although I've been too busy to actually open it. In my defense I was going to take a video of me opening it, and Emily and I haven't been in one place long enough to do it.

I don't know, maybe it's something else.

Things started going right immediately, starting with a flood of people wanting a signed copy straight from us. That was also something that went wrong because--despite me constantly talking about it online--the date sneaked up on us. As of when I write this, I haven't made arrangements for a local author appearance where I can distribute copies before late September, and there are way more people wanting them than I have time to deliver to.

Which is good, if you think about it. I always worry about whether anyone will want our newest book. This is the twelfth published, and I still have imposter syndrome.

On a related note, I should have gotten another book out earlier, so the book about ghosts and hauntings would be our 13th.

I even went around taking spooky photos to promote the book with. The irony is that the Old Jail Museum--arguably the spookiest looking structure in Albion--has no ghost stories associated with it.

So, what went wrong? There were some personal and family related things that I can't talk about here. I can talk about the prep for my upcoming hand surgery, which will happen on August 18th, and I just realized the joke: I really can't hand deliver the copies.

It's minor surgery, but starting last week I had to stop taking any form of certain pain medicines. Due to the wording on the pre-op papers I was led to believe that meant all pain medicines, including acetomenoph ... aceta ... ac ... Tylenol. Specifically the paper said I couldn't take paracetamol, which is another word for, yes, acetaminophen.

As all fourteen of my regular readers now, I have chronic pain issues. I stopped all meds on the 8th, and the following weekend was really, really rough. On Monday I called the ortho doctor, because all our internet overlords said taking Tylenol was just fine. He said, "taking Tylenol is just fine!"

So I took six, then crushed a bottle full and spread them over my body, then emptied a case full into the bathtub and soaked in it for six hours.

Where were we? Oh, yeah, the book.

Long before all this started, Emily set about updating our https://www.markrhunter.com/ website, so the new book would be there along with links to buy it. You people who want it mailed to you, that's where you can go to make the order and give me your mailing address.

Except Emily realized the entire website had to be completely redone. At exactly the same time her seasonal job is at its busiest. After working on it every spare hour, she punched the domain name transfer request with one day to spare.

Except the domain name transfer doesn't happen in one day. It may, in fact, take several days, and there's no way to rush it. So I don't know when you'll be able to order it, I don't know where I'll be passing copies out, and I have to work this weekend ahead of the surgery.

And there you have it. Both an apology and a sob story, and an epic fail. Whoever knows where I live is welcome to stop by, of course, if you don't mind the clutter, and I'll update things as we go along. But in the end I can only blame myself and my hand, and my back, and sometimes my head.

I WILL keep you updated!

If you can't find it on one of these sites now, you will soon:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Ghosts can’t read, so you may have to read for them.

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OASIS CONCERT

On July 26 I saw Liam and Noel and the rest at their second night of five at Wembley Stadium in London, which has a capacity of around 90k and was completely sold out.

( So much more. So much. )

So yeah. Great concert, absolutely mind-blowing tour, my ship has gone from "will they ever speak to each again" to NIGHTLY HUGS AND HANDHOLDING. Everything about this reunion has exceeded my wildest dreams.

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birthdays

Happy Birthday SpikedLuv

I hope you're having a kick butt birthday. Eat lots and lots of cake.

Hugs, Patt

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fandom: mcu

MCU Stuff I Have Seen

Meme yoinked from

muccamukk and

sholio, because I can never resist a list.

( big list )

( musings )

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more new horror movies

I have been to the theater a bunch since I got back, and am going again tonight to see Weapons, so before I build up even more of a backlog, here are my latest watches.

28 Years Later (2025). 28 years after the original rage virus that turns people into mindless flesh-eating monsters, a twelve year old boy named Spike leaves his safely quarantined island community and ventures to the mainland in hopes of finding medical help for his mother.

I have heard very mixed reviews of this movie, things like "interesting but messy." I honestly find this a little confusing, because on the whole I found this movie beautifully executed (it's Danny Boyle, after), emotionally coherent, very well-acted, and with only as many unlikely bits as one gets in any zombie/post-apocalypse movie. It's very earnest; I saw someone call it "sentimental, in a good way," which feels about right. I liked the island community, I liked the complicated relationship between Spike, his mom, and his dad. The moments the movie wanted me to find beautiful and moving generally worked for me.

I didn't love it the way some of my friends did; I think it just didn't have enough of my own personal id-bait in it. I thought it was a perfectly competent post-apocalyptic coming of age story, though.

The one fly in the ointment is the ending/cliffhanger, which feels like a visit from the schlockiest era of Mad Max. It's easy enough to just ignore that scene, though, at least until the second movie in the trilogy comes out. IMO this movie works fine without it.

Together (2025). Real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie star as a longtime couple whose stagnated relationship gets more strained when they move to the countryside, and then things get really weird after they go hiking and fall into a weird hole in the ground.

I feel like this movie knows exactly what tone and mixture of horror, humor, metaphor, and relationship drama it wants and mostly succeeds. Unfortunately that tone didn't really work for me, and I found the main couple annoying, especially Franco's character. Meanwhile the movie is NOT interested in the mechanics or backstory of its horror, fair enough, but those are the parts that I would have been most interested in.

The deal with the third significant character is pretty fun, and I appreciate the foreshadowing. I also appreciate that this is yet another horror movie this year with a casual, unmarked queer relationship in it.

Overall, this felt like a perfectly fine movie that was just not for me.

Strange Harvest (2025). A true crime mockumentary about one man's series of ritualistic killings.

If "Lovecraftian serial killer mockumentary" sends tingles down your spine, then this movie is for you. I would not say it does a lot over and above that description, but the slow unspooling of events and the eventual reveals (which mean more to us horror aficionados than to the people being interviewed) are all very solidly written. It also manages to be quite gory, which I feel is impressive given it's literally all shown via photographs and video taken after the fact. There's one particularly grisly kill that is not like anything I've seen before. Plus, you have to be charmed by a movie so indie that the guy playing the serial killer is also the production designer.

Watching this, I wondered why there aren't more horror mockumentaries. They feel like probably just one step up from found footage in terms of budget and complexity (okay, maybe two steps), and they allow for a lot of the same kind of storytelling. I would absolutely watch more of this kind of thing. (Any recommendations? I've seen Lake Mungo, and that's about it.)

Anyway, this movie is a solid example of the kind of thing it is, which happens to be a thing I like. If you watch it, be sure to stick around through the end credits for the little stinger.

Its almost time again. I can't wait.

This community is so fun. You won't be sorry if you join in. Signups will start on September 1st.