Yuletide reveal!
I once guessed one person's Yuletide story correctly, and it made me cocky. It turns out that I was correct in that the author of Circuit Court was an author I'd read and admired before -- but I have to admit that I was not expecting it to be Parhelion, author of 2006's fantastically demented Jane Narf (the Jane Eyre & Pinky and the Brain crossover).
(On the plus side for me, I idly wondered whether 21st Century Girls might have been written by springgreen, and that turned out to be right, but I can hardly count that as a guess since I didn't wonder that to anyone but myself.)
My story was Two of Swords, a Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser story written for Measured_Words. This was a story that I asked for last year, and she wrote a Yuletide Madness treat for me in that fandom last year, so it was nice to return the favor!
Rereading the series, I fell in love with it all over again. Granted, it is sexist as all heck -- but it's an old-fashioned "Ah, the ladies, god bless 'em" type sexism, not nasty defensive misogyny, so I can work with that. And the racism strikes me as being of a somewhat similar caliber, but I am probably not the best judge of that.
But the writing is just so good! I don't have the books at hand to quote, but Leiber damn sure knew his way around a sentence. Ornate and vivid prose that never quite goes over the top, dialog that marries high diction and low to generally charming effect, and oh, I just love the guys and their friendship. I want this to become one of those perennial Yuletide fandoms that has five or eight or ten stories every year. In my dreams, I would write the ultimate F&GM story, one that would suck in people who didn't even know the source, one that would garner a whole list of recs going "Aw, it's snarky, fun sword-and-sorcery slash! Why have I never heard of it before?"
What I wrote was not my dream story. I had dreams of extravagant, plotty adventure! And smut! But under time pressure, I revert to my well-worn pattern: figure out the crucial emotional beats of the story, and string them together with the absolute minimum of Stuff Actually Happening, then fade to black after a kiss and a witticism. ::sigh:: But my recipient was very pleased, and I had fun, so we will count it a Yuletide win, and hopefully next year someone will write the ultimate F&GM story that creates a fandom out of thin air.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/414206.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.
(On the plus side for me, I idly wondered whether 21st Century Girls might have been written by springgreen, and that turned out to be right, but I can hardly count that as a guess since I didn't wonder that to anyone but myself.)
My story was Two of Swords, a Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser story written for Measured_Words. This was a story that I asked for last year, and she wrote a Yuletide Madness treat for me in that fandom last year, so it was nice to return the favor!
Rereading the series, I fell in love with it all over again. Granted, it is sexist as all heck -- but it's an old-fashioned "Ah, the ladies, god bless 'em" type sexism, not nasty defensive misogyny, so I can work with that. And the racism strikes me as being of a somewhat similar caliber, but I am probably not the best judge of that.
But the writing is just so good! I don't have the books at hand to quote, but Leiber damn sure knew his way around a sentence. Ornate and vivid prose that never quite goes over the top, dialog that marries high diction and low to generally charming effect, and oh, I just love the guys and their friendship. I want this to become one of those perennial Yuletide fandoms that has five or eight or ten stories every year. In my dreams, I would write the ultimate F&GM story, one that would suck in people who didn't even know the source, one that would garner a whole list of recs going "Aw, it's snarky, fun sword-and-sorcery slash! Why have I never heard of it before?"
What I wrote was not my dream story. I had dreams of extravagant, plotty adventure! And smut! But under time pressure, I revert to my well-worn pattern: figure out the crucial emotional beats of the story, and string them together with the absolute minimum of Stuff Actually Happening, then fade to black after a kiss and a witticism. ::sigh:: But my recipient was very pleased, and I had fun, so we will count it a Yuletide win, and hopefully next year someone will write the ultimate F&GM story that creates a fandom out of thin air.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/414206.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.