It's a magical world

I don't even know anymore.

Dear Yuletide writer,

First, thank you so much for participating in Yuletide this year! Second, thank you for agreeing to write a story in a fandom we both love, or at least remember fondly. I'm genuinely interested to see what caught other fans' interests about all of these sources, so please don't feel that my prompts are too binding. I'd rather have an inspired story than slavish devotion to my requests. If you're looking for more of a sense of me and my tastes, skimming through the last twenty entries on my DW will probably give you a good idea; most of the entries in general are unlocked.

I hesitate to say what I do or don't like in fic--I don't have any major squicks, and no firm principles as to what I will or won't read. That said, it's my general sentiment that Yuletide is not the place to go looking for PWP, at least for me; which isn't to say that I wouldn't want sexytimes, as it were, in any story you write, but which is to say that I generally like my sexytimes to go along with plot and characterization. And as you may have guessed from these requests, I do really like women being awesome. In some ways, really, my own fics demonstrate both these preferences very well.

( Magic School Bus, Jazz Kings, Darkwing Duck, Mary Poppins )

Taken all together, these seem sort of random, and I guess they are; for me the fun of Yuletide is just as much in the giving as in the receiving. I hope the same goes for you, and that you can find something in here to tickle your fancy.

♥,
Me

First things first, recognition and further applause for my wonderful writers!

In Threadless T-Shirts, hectorrashbaum wrote You're Ready And You're Willin'. In Disney Princess Superheroes, beatrice_otter wrote A League Of Their Own; ankaret wrote Just Another Day In The Secret Base; nextian wrote you're gonna leave them all behind; pervyficgirl wrote The Trial of Snow White, lovelyzelda wrote The League of Extraordinary Princesses: B for Beauty, and last in terms of word count, but certainly not least in terms of awesome, wickedtrue wrote Disney Princesses, ASSEMBLE!. They are all so awesome, you should go read them all right now, yes, even you. I can't pick between them, all of them are wonderful. Thank you, writers! I am amazed and humbled to have received such a bounty of great fic. ♥

---

So I wrote two stories of Heian Period RPF for Yuletide, Bangai (Apocrypha) for elegantpi and Brush Talk for daegaer; I also wrote the Clover fic Sanctuary for toxictattoo. Let me thank again my wonderful beta reader lnhammer, without whom "Bangai (Apocrypha)" would have been much weaker. Really, I have to say that I thought these three stories, and particularly the first two, were screamingly characteristic of my writing and interests. XD

( Bangai (Apocrypha) )

( Brush Talk )

( Sanctuary )

All that being said, it's time for (drumroll, please!):

The End of Year Fanworks Meme!

Fic I Wrote:
1 of the Good Guys, The Archandroid/Fake News RPF feat. R2-D2
Symbolic Logic, Inception
Gravedust, The Old Kingdom Chronicles, for New Year's Resolutions 2010
Infernal Machines, Sherlock Holmes 2009
Recompense, Sherlock Holmes 2009
Second Face, Sherlock Holmes 2009
The Flying Empire, Sherlock Holmes 2009 steampunk AU for holmes_bigbang
Known Associates, Sherlock Holmes 2009 steampunk AU
Bangai (Apocrypha), Heian period RPF for Yuletide Treasure 2010
Brush Talk, Heian period RPF for Yuletide Treasure 2010
Sanctuary, Clover, for Yuletide Treasure 2010

Total word count: About 65,000 words. Throwing in original fiction, unfinished fic, and papers, I'm at nearly 105,000 words for the year. I think my original goal was 150,000; I'm sure that if I threw in all the translations I've done, it'd get within shouting distance of that. In any event, I'm satisfied.

AMV I Made:
Quantum of Darkness - Darker Than BLACK: Ryuusei no Gemini

( 2010 in fanworks )

I have three windows of Yuletide stories open at the moment, so I'm going to keep these recs on the quick and dirty side. I'm also trying to rec things that I haven't seen get much traction on the comms as yet. These are just the shorter stories; hopefully I'll have time to plow through the longer ones before the reveal. 

Also, guessing game! As a reminder, I wrote three fics in two fandoms, both chromatic, both I've never written in before; as of this writing, none of my stories have been rec'd to the comms (which doesn't surprise me, really; I made a deliberate effort to offer the more obscure fandoms I could). And, you know, at least two of them seem really obvious to me, but that is because I'm the one living on the inside of my head. ^^

( A Night in the Lonesome October, Arcadia, Arts & Sciences RPF, Calvin & Hobbes, Circle of Magic, Disney Princess Superheroes, The Effluent Engine, Eugene Onegin, Hark, a Vagrant!, Heian Period RPF, Hogfather/The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Hunger Games, Gabriel Knight, K-20, Princess Tutu, The Prisoner, Qing Hua Ci, Sociology RPF, Their Majesties' Bucketeers, Threadless T-Shirts )

And finally, in the brilliant tradition of writing about Yuletide, With All Apologies to William Carlos Williams by Lanna Michaels. I'm still laughing.

I wound up writing two three stories, one request and one two Treats in two fandoms, this Yuletide; if anyone wants to take a guess at which (Chromatic Yuletide) fandoms before reveal, and guesses correctly, I will happily write a story to your prompt. Total word count this Yuletide is about 4600 5600, though I have my eye on at least a few more prompts for Madness. 

I went with my dad and sister to the movies today, and then we continued our relatively new Christmas Eve tradition of cheese fondue for dinner. Mm, fondue. I have made five kinds of cookies in the last week; tonight I made cranberry sauce, and tomorrow I will make two kinds of stuffing, two kinds of potatoes, and two kinds of gravy, as well as shadow my dad on cooking the turkey. We had to put the second leaf in the dining room table for the first time in forever, which warms my heart. I am also making egg nog from scratch for the first time, and I am EXCITE. 

Merry Christmas to all those who are celebrating, and to all, a very good night. 

My Yuletide assignment is right up my alley. I can so totally rock it, you guys, you have no idea. (Which is good, because just like last year, I only matched with one fandom, and I don't think I have time to acquire the others.)

Mwahaha, this is going to be sweet. 

ETA: I even know exactly who I'm going to ask to beta! Hah!

Dear Yuletide writer,

First, thank you so much for participating in Yuletide this year! Second, thank you for agreeing to write a story in a fandom we both love, or at least remember fondly. I'm genuinely interested to see what caught other fans' interests about all of these sources, so please don't feel that my prompts are too binding. I'd rather have an inspired story than slavish devotion to my requests. If you're looking for more of a sense of me and my tastes, skimming through the last twenty entries on my DW will probably give you a good idea; most of the entries in general are unlocked.

I hesitate to say what I do or don't like in fic--I don't have any major squicks, and no firm principles as to what I will or won't read. That said, it's my general sentiment that Yuletide is not the place to go looking for PWP, at least for me; which isn't to say that I wouldn't want sexytimes, as it were, in any story you write, but which is to say that I generally like my sexytimes to go along with plot and characterization. And as you may have guessed from these requests, I do really like women being awesome. In some ways, really, my own fics demonstrate both these preferences very well.


( Requests )

Taken all together, these seem sort of random, and I guess they are; for me the fun of Yuletide is just as much in the giving as in the receiving. I hope the same goes for you, and that you can find something in here to tickle your fancy.

♥,
Me

For those of you who don't know it, I wholeheartedly recommend the Chromatic Yuletide 2010 challenge hosted by dark_agenda in honor of the late skywardprodigal, who is already much missed.

So I nominated:

Disney Princess Superheroes - chromatic characters are Jasmine, Mulan, and Tinker Bell  Tiana

Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore (white creator) - chromatic character is Nimira (pimp post/review here)

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi - chromatic creator, chromatic characters are Ore and Sade (pimp post/review here)

the Clockwork Century by Cherie Priest (white creator) - multiple chromatic characters including Croggon Hainey

and NPR RPF and Paradise Kiss, which were already nominated.

Yuletide having been revealed, it turns out that jadelioness (who I think is jadelioness) wrote me No One Loves You Like I Do, and watersword wrote me Incense and Sunglasses on Orchard Street. Thanks so much again to you both; you made my first Yuletide pretty damn awesome.

I wrote four Yuletide stories. In order, they are:

The Momiji File (Gouhou Drug) -- I never expected that this would be the fandom on which I would match my recipient, but thankfully the prompt was pretty open-ended: essentially, what happened next? I wound up setting the story immediately after the end of volume 3 and stealing a recent plot point from xxxHOLiC to form the request the boys took on, partly because I think there would have been a lot more HOLiC crossovers had Legal Drug continued. It was an interesting challenge to write a story that could be read as either slashy gen or pre-slash, depending on the reader, since that seems to be a key feature of the manga reading experience. I also tried, as much as possible, to load up the fic with actual details from my time in Japan (this included scrutinizing the photos I took in Rikugi-en for the settings--you could actually go sit on the shamisen player's bench, not to mention walk across the bridge Kazahaya nearly falls off), and to make the dialogue echo the characters' diction in Japanese. Writing the story also made me realize how much of the slashiness in canon depends on visual humor and innuendo. Oh the power of images! And thanks again to nokiirat, whose insightful beta comments helped me get Kazahaya's characterization better. I think, though, that maybe my favorite thing about the story is the Suki Dakara Suki crossover. I justified it on the basis that Hina (and Doumeki, too) went to Waseda for college, and now in my world they totally do.

A Midwinter's Tale (The Drowning City - Downum) -- I'd offered to write Downum originally, and the requestor is a fellow tag-wrangler, so when I saw it on the unfulfilled prompts list I jumped at it. Oddly enough, it took me almost a day and a half to write, because I couldn't think of a concrete scene on which to anchor the first part of the fic. But I got to throw some Latin into my writing, and draw on my classics background, and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Empty-Handed (Old Kingdom series - Nix) -- Another story about (maimed and/or missing) hands. I wrote this on my plane to Detroit on Christmas Eve morning, having paged through Abhorsen the night before, and I'm very happy with it. It's probably going to become the first in a little series of fics in this fandom based on YT prompts for New Year's Resolutions.

The World Ends With You (the Michelle West novels - West) -- This one I churned out on my forty-minute flight from Detroit to Milwaukee on Christmas Eve afternoon, because I share the fandom with inkstone, the requestor, who totally knew it was me because there's about five of us in this fandom, total. XD I've read the other story written for this same prompt ("Indelible" by moontyger; it's good! you should read it!), and I think it's interesting how the two of us did completely different things with the exact same request. Ideally I would have reread the beginning of Hunter's Death before writing it, but c'est la vie. I did at least manage to echo some of West's diction from key scenes in other books. And I'm totally way too fond of the title.

( 2009: The year in fanworks )

I think it's time to make rugelach now.

Yuletide brings all the great writing to the yard.

( Sherlock Holmes, Web 2.0, fairy tales, song and album fic, The Big O, Matilda, composer RPF, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Hamlet, My Fair Lady )

Or, hooray for Yuletide! I received two full-length fics.

The first is No One Loves You Like I Do. It is the anime Blood+, David/Julia at a Red Shield holiday party, and it is hot like burning.

The second, a Treat, is Incense and Sunglasses on Orchard Street. It is Diane Duane's Young Wizards: Tom and Carl take a vacation in New Orleans, and it's great to see them get to enjoy themselves (and each other!) for once. I don't know whether the Treat writer mentioned Lud-in-the-Mist because he or she knew that I read it this year and liked it a lot, or because the Treat writer is awesome and likes good books, but either way, that shout-out was great.

I am not very good at leaving articulate comments, but both stories are awesome, and I sincerely enjoyed them. Thank you, writers!

---

Christmas Eve also saw the release of a very special holiday episode of Shadow Unit. I enjoy this strange hyperfiction experiment quite a lot on account of the characters, who are awesome and flawed and tragic and utterly human. The third season starts in February; I'd recommend the holiday episode, "On Faith", as one possible entry point to the show, and there is also a recommended reading order, which starts from the beginning.

And on that note, I should probably go get dressed.

---

ETA: My recipient and someone else left me very complimentary feedback on one of my stories! It is snowing again! So, all things considered, I think this Christmas has turned out as well as can be expected.