Running a little late on the ol' Yuletide reveal
This would have been posted a couple days ago, if not for some crazy weather that knocked out most of the power in the towns I tend to spend time in, and which kept the internet out for another day even after the lights came back on. Never leave me again, internet! I promise I'll make more sacrifices to any weather gods I can think of. Like... Thor? Baal? Who's gonna be my best bet here?
Back on topic: My lovely Yuletide gift was from shanola22, and my treat was from swtalmnd. Thank you both for making my first Yuletide a great experience!
It turns out I also wrote a story: Playing Nice (Night at the Museum, Jedediah/Octavius).
I didn't include author's notes because I, er, ran out of time (snuck in posting time on December 19th while I was supposed to be co-hosting a holiday dinner, haha.) So I'll take care of my thank yous here: Thanks to redsouffle for forcing me to write the other half of the story when I was trying to be lazy, and for brainstorming on insults. Thanks to Miss Kimma, for real-life grammar wrangling and humor consultation. Thanks to my roommate for not complaining (much) even after many, many viewings of the film. And finally, big thanks to very_improbable for talking me into participating in Yuletide for the first time. Maybe next year I'll finish a draft in a timely enough manner for you to beta!
And now I'm going to babble a little about the whole writing-a-fandom-from-scratch experience:
So, I got tricked talked into signing up for Yuletide this year at nearly the last minute (the phrase "suicide pact" may have been uttered.) I tried to offer only fandoms where I either owned a copy of the source material or would be willing to purchase it (Night at the Museum fell into the latter category.) At one point, a couple days before assignments were sent out, I made a little list in my head of the fandoms I most wanted to write. Eureka, Dinosaur Comics, and Night at the Museum were the front runners, so it was definitely exciting to get NatM as my assignment. (I actually didn't know any of the other fandoms my recipient requested, so there was no leeway on which prompt I chose. But this got me to actually write a story I'd been meaning to write since I saw the damn movie in the theater, so it worked out quite well.)
[An aside: at one point when I needed to check on some detail in my assignment, I searched for "yuletide" in my gmail and came across a comment notification for something I posted in kageygirl's LJ on May 9th about how much Jed & Octavius needed to be an option for Yuletide. So perhaps it was fated.]
Anyway, assignment in hand, I obtained a copy of the movie and proceeded to watch it repeatedly. Eventually to save time I just noted down the timing on all the J/O scenes and had done with it. Then I spent a month or so thinking about cowboys and Romans while washing dishes, riding buses, or eating lunch (standard pondering activities, really), and sending myself random story notes from my work email. Then, about a week and a half before the deadline, I got a little panicked about how I'd never actually been to the Museum of Natural History (or New York, for that matter), so I googled for a complete floor map which I printed out and scribbled all over. I also watched the movie again with a lot of freeze-framing and taking notes and a little bit of freaking out. Being pretty terrible about deadlines, I actually took the afternoon off work on Tuesday the 18th to go hide out in the library and type up the bulk of the story.
Writing this was pretty odd; I kind of took everything I remember from my Roman history classes and everything I ever tried to write in Firefly fandom and threw it all in a blender. I'm a little worried that Jedediah ended up sounding like John Sheppard, but then I've been convinced from day one of Atlantis that Flanigan is just doing a creepily good Owen Wilson impression, so maybe it works.
(This bit contains minor spoilers for the film)
It occurred to me only a couple days ago that I utterly failed to work any Latin into the story at all, but it's probably for the best since that starts to get into "why does Octavius speak English when the Huns and Incans still speak their native tongues?" territory. I ran into a couple of problems when I accidentally started applying logic to the movie, which is, incidentally, why there's no hanky-panky in the fic.
You'll notice the sports car from the end of the film gets destroyed and the guys get a car with a larger backseat, and then nothing comes of it. See, my brain pointed out that if Teddy Roosevelt survives getting run over by the stagecoach because he's still made of wax even while he's "alive," it unfortunately stands to reason that Octavius and Jedediah are still made of plastic even while they're walking around causing trouble, and if they don't have little anatomically correct plastic bits (which I very much doubt they do) then there's not going to be a whole lot of opportunity for them to make use of a backseat. I did have a little conversation about this very topic though with someone who commented on the fic, who helped me start to justify a way around this reasoning in case I'm ever possessed by the urge to write more about the guys.
I'm sure I had other silly thoughts about this, but I can't recall any of them at the moment and if I don't post now I probably won't manage to til next weekend. The basic message here is, as ever, hooray for fandom!
Back on topic: My lovely Yuletide gift was from shanola22, and my treat was from swtalmnd. Thank you both for making my first Yuletide a great experience!
It turns out I also wrote a story: Playing Nice (Night at the Museum, Jedediah/Octavius).
I didn't include author's notes because I, er, ran out of time (snuck in posting time on December 19th while I was supposed to be co-hosting a holiday dinner, haha.) So I'll take care of my thank yous here: Thanks to redsouffle for forcing me to write the other half of the story when I was trying to be lazy, and for brainstorming on insults. Thanks to Miss Kimma, for real-life grammar wrangling and humor consultation. Thanks to my roommate for not complaining (much) even after many, many viewings of the film. And finally, big thanks to very_improbable for talking me into participating in Yuletide for the first time. Maybe next year I'll finish a draft in a timely enough manner for you to beta!
And now I'm going to babble a little about the whole writing-a-fandom-from-scratch experience:
So, I got tricked talked into signing up for Yuletide this year at nearly the last minute (the phrase "suicide pact" may have been uttered.) I tried to offer only fandoms where I either owned a copy of the source material or would be willing to purchase it (Night at the Museum fell into the latter category.) At one point, a couple days before assignments were sent out, I made a little list in my head of the fandoms I most wanted to write. Eureka, Dinosaur Comics, and Night at the Museum were the front runners, so it was definitely exciting to get NatM as my assignment. (I actually didn't know any of the other fandoms my recipient requested, so there was no leeway on which prompt I chose. But this got me to actually write a story I'd been meaning to write since I saw the damn movie in the theater, so it worked out quite well.)
[An aside: at one point when I needed to check on some detail in my assignment, I searched for "yuletide" in my gmail and came across a comment notification for something I posted in kageygirl's LJ on May 9th about how much Jed & Octavius needed to be an option for Yuletide. So perhaps it was fated.]
Anyway, assignment in hand, I obtained a copy of the movie and proceeded to watch it repeatedly. Eventually to save time I just noted down the timing on all the J/O scenes and had done with it. Then I spent a month or so thinking about cowboys and Romans while washing dishes, riding buses, or eating lunch (standard pondering activities, really), and sending myself random story notes from my work email. Then, about a week and a half before the deadline, I got a little panicked about how I'd never actually been to the Museum of Natural History (or New York, for that matter), so I googled for a complete floor map which I printed out and scribbled all over. I also watched the movie again with a lot of freeze-framing and taking notes and a little bit of freaking out. Being pretty terrible about deadlines, I actually took the afternoon off work on Tuesday the 18th to go hide out in the library and type up the bulk of the story.
Writing this was pretty odd; I kind of took everything I remember from my Roman history classes and everything I ever tried to write in Firefly fandom and threw it all in a blender. I'm a little worried that Jedediah ended up sounding like John Sheppard, but then I've been convinced from day one of Atlantis that Flanigan is just doing a creepily good Owen Wilson impression, so maybe it works.
(This bit contains minor spoilers for the film)
It occurred to me only a couple days ago that I utterly failed to work any Latin into the story at all, but it's probably for the best since that starts to get into "why does Octavius speak English when the Huns and Incans still speak their native tongues?" territory. I ran into a couple of problems when I accidentally started applying logic to the movie, which is, incidentally, why there's no hanky-panky in the fic.
You'll notice the sports car from the end of the film gets destroyed and the guys get a car with a larger backseat, and then nothing comes of it. See, my brain pointed out that if Teddy Roosevelt survives getting run over by the stagecoach because he's still made of wax even while he's "alive," it unfortunately stands to reason that Octavius and Jedediah are still made of plastic even while they're walking around causing trouble, and if they don't have little anatomically correct plastic bits (which I very much doubt they do) then there's not going to be a whole lot of opportunity for them to make use of a backseat. I did have a little conversation about this very topic though with someone who commented on the fic, who helped me start to justify a way around this reasoning in case I'm ever possessed by the urge to write more about the guys.
I'm sure I had other silly thoughts about this, but I can't recall any of them at the moment and if I don't post now I probably won't manage to til next weekend. The basic message here is, as ever, hooray for fandom!