It's a magical world

I opened my miscellaneous fanfic document for the first time since March 2020, and what did I find but a reasonably complete series of vignettes for Good Omens S1. So anyway, here's Wonderwall.


Things We're All Too Young to Know (7294 words) by starlady
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Good Omens (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Anathema Device/Newton Pulsifer
Characters: Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens), Anathema Device
Additional Tags: Written Before Good Omens Season 2
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley stumble towards happiness.

We're all out here reading and writing wingfic like it's 1994, it's extremely charming. There are no wings in this fic, though. Maybe next time.


Thanks to Olivia, who read it, liked it, and reminded me that Alanis Morissette played God in Dogma, which makes the whole thing even better.

via dira and many other people: When you see this, share 3 random lines from 3 WIPs.

1. Charles imagines this is what skydiving feels like, or BASE jumping, or any stupid endeavor where you fling yourself out into empty space and trust in something outside yourself to save you from the fatal embrace of gravity. For Charles, that’s Erik. Here and now, he’s making his choice.
2. “Erik, you pratt,” Charles breathed. “Why did you think I stripped naked and paraded myself around for you at the swimming hole the other day?”
   “Er,” said Erik.
3. Of course no monarch ruled alone; he or she was only as good as their armies, their commanders, their agents, their advisors, and Georgiana was under no illusions on that score, either. She had a half-blood mage, a flighty prince, an embittered marchioness and a handful of Naval officers, plus whomever she could scrape up in the various barrels of Europe, to confront the ruthless and experienced realms of that continent. The Caribbean was wealthy, and its commerce the envy of Christendom, but money was an unintelligent beast; it wanted direction. So too did Georgiana, and she would have to provide it herself.

My Yuletide authors were snow (Paper Dreams, Escapist) and jadelennox (Wishing you a peaceful future from the earthlings). Thank you both so much!

For Yuletide this year I wrote something that I think was actually somewhat predictable:

The Lost Revolution (4258 words) by starlady
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Gullstruck Island | The Lost Conspiracy - Frances Hardinge
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Hathin, Minchard Prox, Tomki (Gullstruck Island)
Additional Tags: Revolution
Summary: The Lost Revolution, and how it came to pass.

A huge, huge thank-you goes out to ellen_fremedon, who beta-read my draft at very nearly the eleventh hour and told me what I had suspected but hadn't wanted to hear, that it needed to be much longer and that I actually needed to show, you know, the actual revolution in question. The story is much stronger for her comments, seriously.


Yuletide having been revealed, it's time for the End of Year Fanworks meme! 2013 was another fallow year in most respects, but here it goes anyway.

X-Men: First Class
[WIP] Sweeter Than Honey, Your Eyes - There are many ancient Rome AUs; this one is mine. Okay, by "many" I mean about five, and most of them including mine don't meet the request in this particular kinkmeme comment, which I will admit made me laugh. I actually have most of this story plotted out, and I do intend to finish it; but it's also me looking head-on at some of my own tastes in XMFC fic, and in my own way trying to make a little restitution. It's also been a very enjoyable excuse to read up on Roman sexuality and other aspects of Roman society. My ancient urban Rome seminar got a lot more interesting after I started writing this fic, that's for sure.

Five-Minute Studies - Hello, my past and current lives! Chapter one is a grad student AU and chapter two is a string quartet AU. I at one point had most of a Philadelphia Orchestra AU worked out in my head, and while I'm not sure I'll ever write it, it was fun writing the string quartet one in particular. I love playing music.

The Most Sincere Patch - I like to think I'm getting better at writing short fic, but really I have no way of knowing. This one was inspired by tumblr (as was the Roman AU) and it makes me smile. Charles and Erik meet cute at a Halloween party. 'Nuff said.

Frances Hardinge
The Fractured Realms
Paragon's Tale - I love Frances Hardinge's books, and in particular I love the Fractured Realms books. This fic, a tag for Paragon after the end of Twilight Robbery, is something of a love letter to the books--I did my best to try to capture some of the same rhythms of Hardinge's language, and I also did my fallback Yuletide trick of setting my fic at solsticetide. It makes me happy.

Gullstruck Island
The Lost Revolution - In previous years I have sometimes made it my practice to offer as a Yuletide fandom a source I have not previously consumed. My Pillow Book Yuletide story of 2010, Bangai (Apocrypha), was one such effort; I hadn't previously read The Pillow Book before I got assigned the request for the exchange. In this year's case, I had Gullstruck Island sitting unread on my shelf, and I signed up late enough in the exchange that to be quite honest, some careful scrutiny of the sign-ups list allowed me to game the system to some extent--I offered the book with a strong feeling that I might get matched on it, and in the event, that is how it turned out. I was able to read the book with my recipient's letter in the back of my mind, which isn't a bad way to read; the rest of it was just a matter of finding time to write, and then of nearly doubling the word count of the story when Ellen gave me her comments. I'm very pleased with the final result, and very grateful to Ellen for telling me what I needed to hear.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
[vid] 雙女｜Double Woman - This is probably the thing I did this year that I am proudest of, an auction vid for oyceter, who asked for a vid about Shangguang Jing'er and Wu Zetian being awesome. I learned Premiere Pro and learned to do more with After Effects to make this vid, and I think that work shows very well in the vid.


( Questions and answers )

Next year: Keep calm and keep making fanworks!

Paragon's Tale (2143 words) by starlady
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Fly By Night Series - Frances Hardinge
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Clam Blythe/Miss Kitely
Characters: Paragon Collymoddle, Clam Blythe, Miss Kitely
Summary: What did Paragon do after Toll, you ask? Well now, thereby hangs a tale…

A New Year's Resolution for incantatem, because I loved the prompt.

True confession: it ends the way it does because I did not want to write the epic love story of Paragon and Mr. Pertellis that came into my head as I was writing it, because I don't know anywhere near enough about molly houses. But, in my head, that is where it goes, once Paragon is seventeen.

I continue to corner the market in Japanese History RPF for exchanges.

Worthy Opponents (1230 words) by starlady
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sengoku Jidai | Sengoku Period RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Mogami Yoshihime, Date Masamune

This was a gift for maat_seshat, who probably knows more of the relevant sources than I do, and given that I don't have anywhere as firm a grasp on aristocratic Sengoku material culture as I do on that of earlier or later periods, I was forced to shift into the epistolary mode, as well as do some reading in Japanese. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it! 

One of the panels I enjoyed most at FOGcon was "Mutations, Their Gifts and Betrayals: Embodiment in the World(s) of the X-Men" (not even because one of my friends proposed it)--it was actually really interesting. Being me, I made more than a few comments during the discussion (though I virtuously did not bring up mpreg as Charles Xavier's secondary mutation, I'm quite virtuous), and afterward, when we were walking back to the BART, troisroyaumes and epershand were both like, "Dude, I didn't realize you'd read so many X-Men comics!" and I was forced to explain that no, I haven't read hardly any of the comics (except for Marvel 1602, which copperbadge rightfully and hilariously savaged in this recent post), just the Wikipedia articles, at a scary and obsessive depth.

"Well, you sounded like you knew what you were talking about!"

That is my stock in trade. (Though I did watch almost all of the X-Men: Evolution cartoon, which was actually pretty good.)

I found this highly amusing at the time, and still do; the point of telling this story now is to put up the links to my two current XMFC/X-Men WIPs:

Transmutation (3433 words) by starlady
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: X-Men: First Class (2011)
Rating: Mature
Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Characters: Erik Lehnsherr, Charles Xavier, Emma Frost, Alex Summers
Summary: Various additional scenes from the Synthesis timeline, or, the alchemical process of creating something new out of disunified fragments.

Reunion (2282 words) by starlady
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: X-Men: First Class (2011), The Avengers (2012), X-Men (Movies)
Rating: Mature
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Irene Adler/Raven Darkholme, Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Characters: Raven Darkholme, Irene Adler (X-Men), Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr
Summary: Five years after the end of X-3: The Last Stand, the X-Men and the Avengers are thrown onto a collision course when some very old allies (and enemies) return.

Both of these are mostly written; I just have to write some last few bits and then wrangle some betas. Which is to say, they are WIPs now but they will be finished soon, and I will post the links again, and update the master post, when they are completed.

Yuletide first, and first up, writers! threeguesses wrote As I Always Say, and Carmarthen wrote Tribute. Contrary to many people, I never really have strong ideas about what I want out of Yuletide; thank you, writers, for fulfilling my request in such wonderful spades! I'm really glad that the fics have gotten relatively wider notice, since they assuredly deserve it. ♥

As for what I wrote…well, I only had time to write one story this year, and it was so screamingly obvious, I'm quite sure everyone who knows me and read the fic put two and two together immediately. All of which is to say, I appear to be cornering the market on Heian Period RPF for Yuletide: I wrote Songs by Ono no Komachi for lnhammer.

Larry actually requested the Kokinshû, and this is not a very Kokinshû fic, partly because I am not a scholar of Japanese literature and have never actually read it, except for the translations Larry's posted to his journal and the poems we read and translated for it in my classical Japanese program the previous summer. I like to write seasonal fic for Yuletide (yes, this is a major tell of mine), and I didn't have time to work my way through all of the Winter scrolls--I didn't have much time to do anything, actually, because I was so damned busy this December, so I fell back on an easier idea I'd had, namely, the life of Ono no Komachi, who is darned awesome. Ki no Tsurayuki sort of muscled his way in very early on, which is very much a him thing.

This fic, like I said, is very strongly influenced by Tom Lamarre's book on classical Japan, right from the title and the persistent confusion in the fic between songs and poems--they truly were interchangeable, particularly at the beginning of the Heian period, which is when the fic takes place. I'm not as strong on the details of daily life in the 9thC as I am in the 10th, however, so most of the details are consequently vague. I hope people like it; I do, though as usual I wasn't sure where it was going until I finished it. Many thanks to wintercreek, who puts up with me asking her to beta things in fandoms she's never read and who always has great comments, which I strive to put into action. ♥

Finally, I wrote a New Year's Resolution.
The Wallmaker's Carol (4150 words) by starlady for lionpyh
Fandom: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Nicholas Sayre, Prince Sameth, Lirael (Old Kingdom), Sabriel (Old Kingdom)
Summary: Just after "The Creature in the Case," Lirael and Nick spend Miwinter in Belisaere with Lirael and Sam's family.

I really love the Old Kingdom Chronicles, and I really like writing seasonal (thus for me, wintry) stories for Yuletide. I was listening to my college's Christmasfest recording of my favorite carol, "I Saw Three Ships," early in December and the idea for this story fell out of my brain.

---

So, it's time for
The End of Year Fanworks Meme!

Fic I Wrote:
From the Collected Works of Solwing: 'England', The Chronicles of Narnia by way of bedlamsbard
Synthesis (Scenes from an AU), XM:FC
Turning and Turning, Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, for Parallels 2011
Last Will, and Testament, The Chronicles of Narnia/The Dark Is Rising Sequence
from The Classic of the Three Realms, Half World, for Kaleidoscope 2011
Songs by Ono no Komachi, Kokinshû/Heian Period RPF, for Yuletide 2011
Honi soit qui mal y pense, Sherlock Holmes 2009 steampunk AU

Total word count: Roughly 36,000 words. Throwing in papers and translations, I'd put it at about 75,000 words for the year (though I'm not counting my WIPs, some of which are very wordy). I'm satisfied, though this has been something of an off year, in terms of quantity--though not, I think, quality.

Vid I Made:
Too Big to Fail - Occupy Wall Street

( Questions and comments )

Happy (Gregorian) New Year, all. ♥

The creators for the Kaleidoscope challenge have been revealed, which means that I can admit that I wrote

from The Classic of the Three Realms (4754 words) by starlady for lionpyh
Fandom: Half World - Hiromi Goto
Summary: Gao Zhen Xi and Jade Rat, from their first meeting to their final parting.

I had a lot of fun writing this one--it went differently than I was planning it, and I like the voice that I used here.

And I received the wonderful
These Dreams Are Forever (1392 words) by such_heights
Fandom: Janelle Monae - Works
Summary: She'd heard stories before of people for whom music and magic were one and the same, people who could create songs of enchantment and dances to raise the dead. Nothing like that could really happen, of course.


Kaleidoscope Treats has reopened for submissions, too! (More info and thanks at this post in dark_agenda.) I haven't had a ton of time to read in the collections, sadly, but there are a lot of awesome fanworks in there that could use some love--if you have a few spare minutes, please do check them out, and leave kudos or comments as you fancy.

If getting 4.5 hours of sleep secondary to consuming all of a WIP XMFC fratboy AU of awesomeness is wrong, I don't want to be right.

This post is brief and rather self-indulgent, because it is Wednesday afternoon and I am both starving and brain-fried. And if I need fandom and laughter to get through this semester, that is a-okay.

A while ago I wrote an Inception fic, Symbolic Logic, which on one level is an Ariadne-centric POV take on how slash goggles work. (Sidenote: I often find that my female characters are channeling fannishness under another name; Jean Grey's POV section in Synthesis does some of the same.) So I was highly tickled to see this recent post, by way of bookshop, on the interior design of Arthur's dreams, because it is the perfect distillation of what I was talking about and riffing on in the story. Oh fandom, please never and immediately change.