Down on the Ranch by foggynite (Harlequin Challenge)

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Squeaking in under the deadline here. Linked to my site since the file was too large for LJ. oops.

Title: Down on the Ranch
Author: foggynite
Rating: meh. PG-13 at the highest.
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Disclaimer: If I owned them (which I don't) there would be more boy snogging. Not that I don't love Peter DeLuise...
Notes: I was attacked by rabid plot bunnies and ended up with this. It's my first SGA fic, and unbetaed at that, so any concrit is welcome. Horse knowledge and support came from my pet Virtasquee and her ubercoolness, and thanks goes to moonblade85 for the encouragement. Any errors are my own, of course.

Word count: 17,990. This is the crackfic that ate my brain.

Astrophysicist Rodney McKay inherited part of the Circle A horse ranch from his uncle Marshall. No one expected him to want to keep it, especially the general manager, John Sheppard. Now, as the Rathe Land Development Corporation tries to buy up as much of Pegasus County as possible, John must convince Rodney to help him expose the corrupt conglomerate and bring his uncle's murderers to justice.

*NOTE: Temaris was kind enough to share a re-coded version! I hope this works for those of you who had difficulties before.

Comments

[cydah.livejournal.com]

ummm, something's weird with the coding. Looks like there's spaces in between the letters... going to be real hard to read. Can you reupload it? thanks.

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Sorry about that-- I hand code everything for IE, and I'm not familiar with other browsers. I'll look into it, though. Thanks for letting me know ^.^

[slashygood.livejournal.com]

You might want to put a note that Firefox browsers can't read it. I can read it fine in IE though, and am looking forward to reading it. Ranch!fic makes me happy. :D

[cydah.livejournal.com]

huh, odd. Thanks for letting me know, now going to read it. ^_^

[marag.livejournal.com]

It doesn't work with Netscape either.

::goes off to figure out where IE might be on this machine::

Firefox users

[jayel-fox.livejournal.com]

Another 'fox user here, also having problems reading on site, but it looks fine reading from a downloaded copy. The coding seems to fix its self...*shrug*

File -> Save Page As

then open from your hard drive. That'll probably work for netscape as well. Maybe. ;-)

Re: Firefox users

[scap3goat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the advice, I'm gonna try!

[jayel-fox.livejournal.com]

Very cute and sweet!

“I don’t know. Apparently you smell weird, you’re ill-tempered, and you’re high maintenance…”</>

LOL

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it ^.^

[casspeach.livejournal.com]

Yay, Cowboy!John and Harlequin Intrigue (I did a lot of research for this challenge, lol). Brilliant story, loved the casting, well-paced and characterised and the build up to the kiss was tantalisingly good. As was the end.

Thanks for sharing this

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Heh. I wasn't even really thinking along the lines of Intrigue (I used to only read Back to the Ranch) but apparently that's what Rodney wanted it to become. I'm glad the pacing worked for you-- I'm afraid the ending was rushed.

Thanks for the FB!

[cydah.livejournal.com]

great story. I especially loved Zelenka hanging up on Rodney. Excellent how you incorprated the Atlantis characters.

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I just used them because I was too lazy to make up any needed extras (except Allina's brother, because he was tossed in as an after-thought).

Zelenka is love ^.^

[mcalex22.livejournal.com]

Cowboy stories are always fun! Rodney and horse manure. John the cowboy - that I can definitely see! Love your story and glad you gave it a happy ending.

Thanks for sharing this with us.

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Considering that Harlequin is like crack because you're guaranteed a happy ending no matter how much angst they put you through, I couldn't not make them stay together ^.^

I'm glad you liked it

[daraq.livejournal.com]

That was great! A romance, mystery and western all in one. ;-) Thank you!

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reading-- I'm glad you liked it ^.^

[astolat]

Yeah, you've got smartquotes and other Microsoft-only characters in this, so it's saving in Microsoft proprietary encoding style. It's not going to display right outside of IE on PCs. You need to turn off the auto-formatting features, then do global search and replace to change all the curly quotes to straight quotes (both the single and double quotes), replace the m-dashes with -- or with &mdash;, all the ellipsis characters with three periods. Then you can save the file as plain text and put in your hand coding of the HTML.

Here's a description of how to do it for smart quotes and how to turn off all the annoying ms word features:
http://wordprocessing.about.com/cs/quicktips/qt/smartquotes.htm

Or you can try copying and pasting the text into LJ posts to get the plain text; I'm fairly sure LJ will automatically correct the stupid Microsoft characters, though I could be wrong.

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info. I'm kinda tired of fiddling with it at this point, but I'll definitely go in and fix it when I've had more sleep :) Smartquotes are apparently the bane of my existence...

[merelyn.livejournal.com]

Have I told you lately that I love you? moonblade85 told me about this, and I'm so happy you posted it! The sharing a brain cell line! The experimental hair! The detail! The banter! Yay! *glomps you*

Oh, and sorry about the formatting issues, hun. I hate when that happens.

[merelyn.livejournal.com]

Okay, so the lj user is obviously Meg. I can't type.

[micehell]

Yay, quite entertaining. A little angst, some intrigue, romance that's sweet without devolving into treacle. It's all good... well, in that Harlequin-ish sort of way, but with way better writing than a lot of series romance. ;)

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it ^.^

BTW, I love your icon!

[bibliokat.livejournal.com]

Just reading the summary, I think this is exactly what I wanted someone to write! I'll be back with feedback after I've read it;)

[bibliokat.livejournal.com]

Back! Wow, that was your first SGA fic? Great job! It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but I'm very happy anyway. There's just something about John and horses, and Rodney and John.

So to start with I did find a couple typos, but remarkably few for an unbeta'd fic.

Then a lot of our staff started getting job offers from other ranches at salaries they’dve been fools to refuse.” they'd've

“Actually, I had planned to buy Jeannie’s share from her. Not as much as Rathe was offering her, but a fair price with a portion of my profits going to her each year. She wants it for the boys’ and I figured, I would have given it to them anyway…”
.......

Weekends normally meant that Rodney could go into the office and work on his personal projects without being interrupted by annoying subordinates, relishing the thought of having the coffee machine all to himself.

So Rodney!

“I prefer a room with windows facing west, I don’t consider any time before noon a civilized hour, and my cat will be joining me if the accommodations prove suitable enough for her.”

Beautiful!

I hope you write more SGA because I loved this!

[tonicollins.livejournal.com]

I really hate to say this but it's coming up as unreadble in Netscape; for example, it's showing the break marks, paragraph marks and the text is all different fonts with pretty strange spacing.

[sanitylapse.livejournal.com]

I'm having a server problem.

yaoihaven.net cannot be found.

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

That, I don't know how to help with since it's still showing up at home and from school. It could be the time of day you tried to access it.

[celli]

I am a huge dork, because my favorite moment was Rodney threatening Kolya with the IRS. *grins*

But this was fun! You took a cliche I've always been kind of iffy on in "regular" romance novels and made it something I cared a lot about by adding the characters I love to it. :)

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Death and taxes, man. ^.^

I used to only read the ranch stories, so how could I *not* for this? But I'm glad you were swayed. It was a lot of fun to write.

[pionie.livejournal.com]

Really enjoyed this lovely piece of crack. The location was very real and John makes a perfect cowboy :)

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It was fun crack to write. And John is a perfect cowboy...

[writerlibrarian]

Quite a lovely story. I do have a soft spot for Cowboy!John.

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thanks! ^.^

[oxoniensis.livejournal.com]

Ah, that was wonderful. I love the way you wove so many characters convincingly into such an AU situation, and kept them all so very recognisable and in character.

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I was just too lazy to come up with original characters. Besides, I always prefer when people use as much canon info as possible in AUs-- Then it kinda turns into a Where's Waldo. Hee.

[(Anonymous)]

I have IE and It was still weird. Lots of Question marks in funny places. Very good story though.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bettina_/]

Just read the story and really nice, I enjoyed it a lot :-).

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thank you ^.^ It ate my brain, so I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[wickedwords.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed this. I liked the murder mystery plot that you set up. Thanks!

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Thanks-- I totally meant to do a plain ranch story, then the whole murder thing crept in and it exploded. Like my head ^.^

[torakowalski.livejournal.com]

*squeels* Totally wonderful! I love the banter and the "gravity defying hair" and the kiss scene in the tool shed and... ZELENKA! And, yes... lovely :)

Rodney's self-loathing is the most adorable character quirk EVER

[fashes.livejournal.com]

I loved Rodney's self-hate. SO MUCH. That never got old. EVER. And I loved Rodney's vicious lawyer removal speech. You do Rodney dialog really really well. Have you written more since this?

Re: Rodney's self-loathing is the most adorable character quirk EVER

[fashes.livejournal.com]

Right! And John cornering Rodney against the tractor was really really really the most wonderful expression of John lust. I love John lust like I love Rodney snark. SO MUCH. Possibly more.

[cabayuki.livejournal.com]

Hello. I was wondering if it would still be possible to read your story. The link is unfortunately broken.

It looked like a fic I would enjoy, so it'll be fantastic if it were possible.
Thanks.

[foggynite.livejournal.com]

Hey there-- Sorry about that! I'd forgotten this was linked to yaoihaven. Unfortunately, my host's server is kaplooey now, but I'm transferring my fic to LJ for easier archiving. You can find it posted in my regular LJ here: http://foggynite.livejournal.com/123615.html

Thanks for your interest, and I hope you do enjoy it!