Team Angst

Hola, angsters! Some of you may be aware that the talented j_s_cavalcante gave those cheese-eating, wine-swilling, French-speaking team Romancers some suggestive artistic inspiration last week. She presented our competition with the Embrace (note: NSFW, male/male nudity and eroticism) and I may have made one or two suggestions that the portrait was actually angsty and not sugary-sweet in nature. Not wanting to play favourites, JS took up the gauntlet to show us how angsty a drawing she could make.

So here it is, folks: Back Against the Wall. The link goes to JS's journal, and from there you can click on the thumbnail to go to the larger portrait. Again, M/M nudity, NSFW (even though I'm posting this at work. Shhhhh) and be prepared for fabulous Fraser!belly, which makes me a very happy Nos.

Go Team Angst! Now we have uncertainty and tension in colour! Remember to thank JS for the angsty artwork, and let her know what you think of the drawing. She worked very hard on this piece.

Well folks, the polls have closed and the Blood-Smeared Polar Bear narrowly edged out the Unnamed Box Turtle to win the dubious distinction of becoming our Angst team mascot. It was a very close race (8-7) and I wanted to thank you for voting and doing your bit for the democratic system.

I'm going to put out a request to you talented visual artists out there: could one of you brilliant folks come up with an icon or a banner of our angsty polar bear? We'd like to use it when we want to intimidate the opposition, so images of Knut are out. We want something that says, "Life is painful and then you get eaten by a polar bear." A lot of the team members suggested using screencaps from sisabet's fantastic IceBound Stream vid (and look! She's got a blood-smeared bear icon of her own!), so you've already got something to work with.

Artists, I would love you forever if you'd do this! Err, scratch that. I will angst you forever! And I'm sure the team would appreciate it very much, too. Only they'd be all sad and reserved about it.

Hi all!

Just checking in to take care of some spamCaptainy duties and remind those of you who haven't yet filled out yesterday's questionnaire to do so. It's important stuff! It's your chance to introduce yourself to the team, talk about your angst reading habits, and weigh in on your choice for our team mascot. It also occurred to me that you might like to have a list of all our team members without all that sign-up junk (like, uh, email addresses) getting in the way.

( the following contains your daily recommended dose of angst )

I'd like to start up with a few prewriting exercises later today or tomorrow just to make sure we're in sync and cooking with angst and not, say, romance with angst-shaped tears sprinkled on top. (Yeah, I know. My gift lies not in metaphor. Or grammar). For now I'll just reiterate that I love, love, LOVE our team (but not in that gooey romantic way) and don't forget to introduce yourself and answer the questions!

Hullo everyone, and welcome aboard the Team Angst Train! I'm your evil overlordfriendly neighbourhood captain nos4a2no9, and I'm here to provide leadership, encouragement and gentle mocking of Team Romance.

china_shop and sageness will assign prompts soon since this is a fast-and-dirty challenge: we'll have four weeks once the dialogue prompts are handed out to write the angstiest fic we can possibly generate. Then our stories will be posted anonymously and matched up against a Romance competitor’s fic, folks will vote on which one they like better, and our team will take our well-earned victory lap and hand those Romance suckers our spare hankies. Easy as Ray Kowalski!

What I'd like to do before we get started on the stories is to spend some time discussing what "angst" actually means and how we can write those heartbreaking gems that are sure to garner us the votes we need to put Team Angst in the winner's circle. Most of you are old pros at the angst game (I think katallison may have written something with angst content once, for example) but there are a few new faces on our team list and I thought it might be helpful to provide a few definitions and examples of angsty goodness.

( Woe, angst, woe )

Finding a good balance between romantic resolution and desperate longing might be a bit tricky, particularly for those of you who haven't written a great deal of dS fanfiction, but I'm going to run a few prewriting exercise that will get us warmed up and thinking angsty thoughts. I'd like to give everyone a chance to introduce themselves, too, and mention that while we'll keep the introductions and writing exercises public we'll hold beta and strategy sessions behind f-locked posts. We don't want the ds_team_romance agents to steal any of our secrets! So make sure you lock your posts to this community once we move into the writing stage of the matchup challenge.

Once we get rolling I'd love to host brainstorming sessions and invite workshopping within the comm: we're a team and part of the fun of this challenge is offering one another support, help and encouragement. Remember, the better the individual stories are the better our chance of winning the competition! Whinging about how tough this subject matter is to tackle is welcome, and don't be shy about posting your rough ideas to the comm or putting up requests for a beta. We like our fic dark and our characters slightly bitter but we're a friendly group at the end of the day, and I hope this place will come to feel like a community as the weeks pass by.

*Whew* Okay, I think that covers most of the basic information you need to know as newly inaugurated members of ds_team_angst. I thought it might be fun to hold a "getting to know you" session over the weekend, so drop by at your leisure and comment to this post with answers to the following questions:

1. What made you decide to sign up for ds_team_angst?

2. What are your top five favorite angsty due South stories?

3. Who's a bigger woobie: Fraser, RayK or RayV?

4. True or false: Ray's unnamed box turtle is a much better choice for our team's Mascot than a blood-smeared polar bear.

5. Team Romance is going to go down. In flames. Right?