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.