(no subject)
I only have one scene left to do on this year's Yuletide, which I guess means it's my turn to procrastinate by doing that Meme of Yuletides Past!
2007
No Good Deed - Chronicles of Chrestomanci
My first Yuletide . . . and my YULETIDE OF TERROR. The request was "Mordecai/Flavian. Smut. Preferably not long after Mordecai arrives and he’s at his darkest, most arrogant elevenes self. Something dark and rough. Otherwise, anything about their friendship would still be awesome." I spent a lot of that fall making @_____@ faces at the screen, and finally desperately churned out 1000 words of pre-slash-if-you-squint-I-suppose with some mild creepiness in a parentheses. This is why no one should ever ask me to write dark, rough, or explicit fic. (BUT ESPECIALLY NOT FOR DIANA WYNNE JONES.)
Personal Mythology - Fionavar Tapestry
In retrospect, I am sort of embarrassed by this ficlet, because it's all about the kind of Significant Naming of Children After Dead Buddies that I tend to seriously roll my eyes at these days. I mean, I fully believe that Paul Schafer would pretentiously and angstily name his children after dead friends, but that doesn't mean I have to give it pagetime. Nonetheless, I include it for the purposes of completionism.
2008
The Prisoner's Dilemma - Dalemark Quartet
I am actually pretty proud of this one! You can tell because it's the only one of my Yuletides from the old site that has thus far made it over to the AO3. Also notable as my first Yuletide with a coherent plot. This was an attempt to backtrack from the super-competent, politically savvy Navis that we see in Crown of Dalemark and figure out what he was doing all that time that he spent moping in Holand, and what role he played in Konian and Kialan's trial. But mostly I remember arguing with all my betas about the title, since they kept pointed out that technically it was not a prisoner's dilemma as laid out in game theory, to which I maturely responded I DON'T CARE I DO WHAT I WANT.
An Epistle from a Gentlewoman of Quality to her Famed Brother Robert Walton - Frankenstein
. . . I totally forgot that I wrote this! SO APPARENTLY I was so annoyed by Frankenstein that I felt the need to relieve my feelings by writing a long-winded and unsubtle Yuletide fic in which Ernest Frankenstein and Robert Walton's sister hang out and commiserate about how their brothers are whiny jerks. It was probably not necessary to take two thousand words to make that point, but oh well!
2009
While Recognizing the Importance of Luck in Certain Situations, Eve Genoard Continues to Disapprove of Gambling - Baccano!
To judge from AO3 hit counts, this is the most-read story of any I have ever written! This is probably because it's the most fun I've ever had writing a fic, and I think it comes through: explosions! gambling! kidnapping! arson! severed fingers! punny chapter titles! people shooting their love interests! (This is also notable as the year in which I finally learned how to write UST.) I spent pretty much all of the time period leading up to that year's Yuletide sending my betas excited emails about how I FIGURED OUT HOW TO SOLVE THIS PLOT HOLE BY BLOWING UP SOME FACTORIES, and by the way, could someone explain to me what exactly the rules of billiards were?
Armiger - Song of the Lioness Quartet
I also deeply enjoyed writing this fic. The Alanna books are pretty fast-paced, and don't take a ton of introspection time to explore the changing friendships and dynamics between Alanna and her buddies as they grow up. So that's what I tried to do! The nice thing about imitating Tamora Pierce's style is that you don't need any fancy prose tricks to do it.
Jamie Hamilton's Rotten Luck - Homeward Bounders/Harry Potter
I had the idea for this treat in the shower and wrote it in thirty minutes before running out to go perform the traditional Christmas Eating of the Chinese Food and Watching of Mel Brooks, which is really all that needs to be said about its quality. Jamie Hamilton Attends Hogwarts, Is Annoyed By Everything, End Of Joke! That being said I still firmly believe that there need to be short crossover ficlets about Jamie Hamilton visiting every canon ever, or else what is a bumptious world-hopping eleven-year-old for?
2010
Etude: Composition - Princess Tutu
Well, I guess every Princess Tutu fan has to take their one obligatory stab at the "Fakir Writes Duck Back Into Being A Girl" fix-it fic, and this was mine. The goal was to play around with the tropes of different genres the same way that the story plays around with fairy tales. I don't know how effective it was, but it did give me the opportunity to make fun of Hemingway, as well as the dubious distinction of having written the only Princess Tutu fic in existence that features the trope "aliens made them do it."
Entr'acte - Princess Tutu
Oh, right, this was also the year that I had no letter and no details except "Ahiru/Fakir" and was panicking a little bit about what to write! So I wrote this extra fic of pure fluff, just in case epic meta genre-play was not what my recipient had in mind for her Christmas gift. (I have no idea if she ever read either, as it turns out, but I had fun writing both anyway.)
The Barkosigan Saga: Mirror Dog - The Vorkisigan Saga/Wishbone
You know how sometimes you see a pinch-hit with a concept so amazing that you absolutely cannot resist it? Yeah, this was that year for me. WISHBONE DOES VORKOSIGAN SAGA GO. Believe it or not, I actually performed extensive research for this fic - the casting of nineties B-list actors to play Vorkosigans on Wishbone required careful attention to detail! But mostly I'm just proud of having successfully transformed Mirror Dance - you know, the one with all the torture porn - into a G-rated story. Hell yeah, extensive Bowdlerization!
Catherine's Fairy-Tail - Northanger Abbey
This was a treat for another great prompt that sadly I did not have time to do actual justice to. Northanger Abbey is my favorite Austen novel and I really wanted to write a whole novella-length Austen pastiche about Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney encountering various fantastical adventures, but since all I had was twenty-four hours I jotted down a thousand-word prologue and then bowed out. Someday maybe I will come back to this!
2011
Nice Holystone Remains Unafraid to Write Herself Into Explosive Situations - Baccano!
When I first received this prompt, I was like, "oh, another Baccano! Yuletide fic, I already did that! I'm so unexcited for this!" Little did I know that as soon as I started attempting to plot this out it would devour my brain and mutate into the longest fic I've ever written. So apparently I have always wanted to write the Nice/Jacuzzi Epic With Bonus Al Capone and also the Nice And Eve Become Friends epic and just had never known it before? And then I posted it and immediately got called out as the writer in the very first comment. Secrecy: I am the best at it.
And Every Homestead Holds a Ghost - Downton Abbey
Pinch-hit written for
newredshoes, because I love her, and also because "a ghost haunts Downton Abbey!" is an amazing prompt. I am still filled with schadenfreude about this one, because I spent one whole scene thoroughly discrediting the notion that Dead Lavinia has nothing better to do with her afterlife than hang around Downton Abbey, and then the Christmas Special aired, like, THE NEXT DAY and was all "Hey guess what! Dead Lavinia has been hanging around Downton Abbey!" Oh, show, that is why you sucked and I rocked. Bonus points to me for a stealth To Say Nothing of the Dog crossover. (Yes, I am allowed to award myself bonus points.)
Barriers - Hexwood
And here we come full circle, because the story I really want to exist - about Mordion's PTSD and host of triggers and guilt complexes, and how that affects his attitude towards sex and relationship with Vierran postcanon - really needs someone who is much more capable of writing something dark and complicated and explicit than I am. But I wrote a thousand words trying to get a bit at that anyway, which basically boils down to a thousand words of Mordion And Vierran Not Making Out.
And that brings us to this year! Status: not bears, exactly. Maybe teddy bears? I'M SO CLOSE (and yet so far.)
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/310585.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.
2007
No Good Deed - Chronicles of Chrestomanci
My first Yuletide . . . and my YULETIDE OF TERROR. The request was "Mordecai/Flavian. Smut. Preferably not long after Mordecai arrives and he’s at his darkest, most arrogant elevenes self. Something dark and rough. Otherwise, anything about their friendship would still be awesome." I spent a lot of that fall making @_____@ faces at the screen, and finally desperately churned out 1000 words of pre-slash-if-you-squint-I-suppose with some mild creepiness in a parentheses. This is why no one should ever ask me to write dark, rough, or explicit fic. (BUT ESPECIALLY NOT FOR DIANA WYNNE JONES.)
Personal Mythology - Fionavar Tapestry
In retrospect, I am sort of embarrassed by this ficlet, because it's all about the kind of Significant Naming of Children After Dead Buddies that I tend to seriously roll my eyes at these days. I mean, I fully believe that Paul Schafer would pretentiously and angstily name his children after dead friends, but that doesn't mean I have to give it pagetime. Nonetheless, I include it for the purposes of completionism.
2008
The Prisoner's Dilemma - Dalemark Quartet
I am actually pretty proud of this one! You can tell because it's the only one of my Yuletides from the old site that has thus far made it over to the AO3. Also notable as my first Yuletide with a coherent plot. This was an attempt to backtrack from the super-competent, politically savvy Navis that we see in Crown of Dalemark and figure out what he was doing all that time that he spent moping in Holand, and what role he played in Konian and Kialan's trial. But mostly I remember arguing with all my betas about the title, since they kept pointed out that technically it was not a prisoner's dilemma as laid out in game theory, to which I maturely responded I DON'T CARE I DO WHAT I WANT.
An Epistle from a Gentlewoman of Quality to her Famed Brother Robert Walton - Frankenstein
. . . I totally forgot that I wrote this! SO APPARENTLY I was so annoyed by Frankenstein that I felt the need to relieve my feelings by writing a long-winded and unsubtle Yuletide fic in which Ernest Frankenstein and Robert Walton's sister hang out and commiserate about how their brothers are whiny jerks. It was probably not necessary to take two thousand words to make that point, but oh well!
2009
While Recognizing the Importance of Luck in Certain Situations, Eve Genoard Continues to Disapprove of Gambling - Baccano!
To judge from AO3 hit counts, this is the most-read story of any I have ever written! This is probably because it's the most fun I've ever had writing a fic, and I think it comes through: explosions! gambling! kidnapping! arson! severed fingers! punny chapter titles! people shooting their love interests! (This is also notable as the year in which I finally learned how to write UST.) I spent pretty much all of the time period leading up to that year's Yuletide sending my betas excited emails about how I FIGURED OUT HOW TO SOLVE THIS PLOT HOLE BY BLOWING UP SOME FACTORIES, and by the way, could someone explain to me what exactly the rules of billiards were?
Armiger - Song of the Lioness Quartet
I also deeply enjoyed writing this fic. The Alanna books are pretty fast-paced, and don't take a ton of introspection time to explore the changing friendships and dynamics between Alanna and her buddies as they grow up. So that's what I tried to do! The nice thing about imitating Tamora Pierce's style is that you don't need any fancy prose tricks to do it.
Jamie Hamilton's Rotten Luck - Homeward Bounders/Harry Potter
I had the idea for this treat in the shower and wrote it in thirty minutes before running out to go perform the traditional Christmas Eating of the Chinese Food and Watching of Mel Brooks, which is really all that needs to be said about its quality. Jamie Hamilton Attends Hogwarts, Is Annoyed By Everything, End Of Joke! That being said I still firmly believe that there need to be short crossover ficlets about Jamie Hamilton visiting every canon ever, or else what is a bumptious world-hopping eleven-year-old for?
2010
Etude: Composition - Princess Tutu
Well, I guess every Princess Tutu fan has to take their one obligatory stab at the "Fakir Writes Duck Back Into Being A Girl" fix-it fic, and this was mine. The goal was to play around with the tropes of different genres the same way that the story plays around with fairy tales. I don't know how effective it was, but it did give me the opportunity to make fun of Hemingway, as well as the dubious distinction of having written the only Princess Tutu fic in existence that features the trope "aliens made them do it."
Entr'acte - Princess Tutu
Oh, right, this was also the year that I had no letter and no details except "Ahiru/Fakir" and was panicking a little bit about what to write! So I wrote this extra fic of pure fluff, just in case epic meta genre-play was not what my recipient had in mind for her Christmas gift. (I have no idea if she ever read either, as it turns out, but I had fun writing both anyway.)
The Barkosigan Saga: Mirror Dog - The Vorkisigan Saga/Wishbone
You know how sometimes you see a pinch-hit with a concept so amazing that you absolutely cannot resist it? Yeah, this was that year for me. WISHBONE DOES VORKOSIGAN SAGA GO. Believe it or not, I actually performed extensive research for this fic - the casting of nineties B-list actors to play Vorkosigans on Wishbone required careful attention to detail! But mostly I'm just proud of having successfully transformed Mirror Dance - you know, the one with all the torture porn - into a G-rated story. Hell yeah, extensive Bowdlerization!
Catherine's Fairy-Tail - Northanger Abbey
This was a treat for another great prompt that sadly I did not have time to do actual justice to. Northanger Abbey is my favorite Austen novel and I really wanted to write a whole novella-length Austen pastiche about Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney encountering various fantastical adventures, but since all I had was twenty-four hours I jotted down a thousand-word prologue and then bowed out. Someday maybe I will come back to this!
2011
Nice Holystone Remains Unafraid to Write Herself Into Explosive Situations - Baccano!
When I first received this prompt, I was like, "oh, another Baccano! Yuletide fic, I already did that! I'm so unexcited for this!" Little did I know that as soon as I started attempting to plot this out it would devour my brain and mutate into the longest fic I've ever written. So apparently I have always wanted to write the Nice/Jacuzzi Epic With Bonus Al Capone and also the Nice And Eve Become Friends epic and just had never known it before? And then I posted it and immediately got called out as the writer in the very first comment. Secrecy: I am the best at it.
And Every Homestead Holds a Ghost - Downton Abbey
Pinch-hit written for
newredshoes, because I love her, and also because "a ghost haunts Downton Abbey!" is an amazing prompt. I am still filled with schadenfreude about this one, because I spent one whole scene thoroughly discrediting the notion that Dead Lavinia has nothing better to do with her afterlife than hang around Downton Abbey, and then the Christmas Special aired, like, THE NEXT DAY and was all "Hey guess what! Dead Lavinia has been hanging around Downton Abbey!" Oh, show, that is why you sucked and I rocked. Bonus points to me for a stealth To Say Nothing of the Dog crossover. (Yes, I am allowed to award myself bonus points.)
Barriers - Hexwood
And here we come full circle, because the story I really want to exist - about Mordion's PTSD and host of triggers and guilt complexes, and how that affects his attitude towards sex and relationship with Vierran postcanon - really needs someone who is much more capable of writing something dark and complicated and explicit than I am. But I wrote a thousand words trying to get a bit at that anyway, which basically boils down to a thousand words of Mordion And Vierran Not Making Out.
And that brings us to this year! Status: not bears, exactly. Maybe teddy bears? I'M SO CLOSE (and yet so far.)
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/310585.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.