[Fic] "A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love)" -- Star Trek: AOS

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love) and In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You) for melayneseahawk, and Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here) for sour_idealist.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love): 3,200 words, April 2011. Love doesn't have to be difficult: all you need to do is reach out to your friends. A story in three parts and many knitting projects. Contains background Amanda/Sarek, Kirk/Gaila, and Spock/Uhura.

Remixed from Spock's Sweater, a drabble by MelayneSeahawk.

This is the one I call my unexpected remix.

I offered to write Star Trek: AOS mostly on a whim, and was not at all expecting to get assigned to anyone in that fandom. I assumed I'd get Harry Potter, Naruto, or Narnia, since those are the fandoms I actually qualified in, and Naruto and Narnia are also notably smaller fandoms (in Remix terms, at least -- Naruto utterly crushes Star Trek: AOS if you go by number of stories on ff.net, but Remix tends to skew away from anime and manga fandoms). Anyway, once I recovered from my surprise, I read through MelayneSeahawk's archive and was promptly attacked by a vicious, tenacious, novel-length plotbunny for the story of Gaila's life from birth through old age.

( Unfortunately, that required absurd amounts of world-building, and wasn't... )

I am sorry for turning a drabble that was (as I later learned) intended as slash into a story with so much background het, but I am not in the least sorry for focusing on the power of family and platonic friendship, because the world always needs more gen fic and friendship is awesome, amen, the end.

[Fic] "In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You)" -- Star Trek: AOS

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love) and In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You) for melayneseahawk, and Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here) for sour_idealist.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You): 1,600 words, April 2011. Nyota offered herself as Gaila's sister when they first met -- she greeted Gaila with her name in all openness, the traditional overture to the creation of an in-net -- and Gaila has never regretted accepting that gift. Gaila/Uhura, dubious consent, mildly explicit sex.

Remixed from Talented Tongue, a ficlet by MelayneSeahawk.

The key word here is bonobos. My version of the Orion species is very much based on the hypersexuality, female dominance, and female inter-group mobility of bonobo troops, as reported by Frans B. M. de Waal. And yes, I can make that play perfectly nicely with widespread slavery.

( Here's the thought experiment: when female Orions reach sexual maturity, they leave their birth groups and... )

(This is the remix I am least satisfied with, both as a story on its own and as a remix -- it feels a little flat to me, and I don't think I was able to make Gaila's worldview and narrative voice come to life enough to really give a different perspective on the events of MelayneSeahawk's ficlet. *sigh*)

[Fic] "Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here)" - Inception

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love) and In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You) for melayneseahawk, and Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here) for sour_idealist.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here): 5,300 words, May 2011. In the months after the inception job, Ariadne slips from one life to another.

Remixed from With Thanks to Apollo, a fic by Sour_Idealist.

At some point in mid-to-late March, I fell into Inception fandom. Then I bought and watched a copy of the movie. (Yes, I do these things backwards. Don't argue with me about it. You will get nowhere.) And I read even more fic.

On... hang on, let me go find the date on my review... March 27th, I read sour_idealist's wonderful story With Thanks to Apollo. When Remix Madness was announced, I signed up even though I was visiting family for the weekend (because hey, why not?), and noticed that sour_idealist had also signed up. And I remembered that I'd loved her fic and her take on Ariadne's family, and I thought, "Why not?"

( This is the sum total of my background work for the story, scribbled on a piece of notepaper at work Sunday evening... )

For something written in about six hours, I think it works pretty well. :-)