[Fic] Yuletide 2011 reveal post

[edenfalling]

Happy New Year! Also, it is Yuletide reveal day! I wrote six fics in six different fandoms, for a total of ~10,000 words. I have listed them in the order I wrote them.

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1) A Woman with Silver Eyes: Kate Welker, the Rolling Stone Interview -- The Girl with the Silver Eyes - Willo Davis Roberts, 3,750 words. Twenty-five years after the Institute of Psychic Phenomena went public, Rolling Stone interviews Kate Welker, one of the Curtis Pharmaceuticals quartet and a long-time activist for both animal rights and the acceptance of the psychically gifted. Background Katie/OFC. (Written for Macadamanaity.)

Thoughts: This is not the fandom I was matched on. That was the Suburban Gods duology by Brenda W. Clough, but when I tried to reread those books I hit a brick wall of screaming annoyance with Rob Lewis, the main character. I just could not write something nice about Rob and Edwin and the weird power dynamics of their friendship. Instead, I wanted to write an AU in which Julianne doesn't wait for Rob when he runs off and gives her amnesia in the first book (okay, he had reasons, but still!), and instead divorces his ass and gets on with her life, and maybe when Rob finds that his key doesn't fit in the lock, he goes and lives on Edwin's couch until Edwin is like, "I love you, man, but if anyone moves in with me it's going to be Carina, not you," and politely kicks him out, and Rob takes back the pearl of immortality and goes off to be a sulky hermit and maybe have physically fantastic but emotionally empty sex with women he meets in bars or something, for the rest of eternity.

Which is... um... not what macadamanaity asked for. Neither is a post-canon story in which Edwin is like, "Hey, you're not getting any younger and here I am publicly immortal, so maybe you should figure out how to pass on the psychic stuff like Gilgamesh did so it won't go poof when you die and strand me forever. How about giving half to your daughter?" and then Rob goes all cave man "No! Never!" and Julianne and Carina are like, "Oh, shut up," and make him do it, though that is at least less completely off the track.

Anyway! I found a copy of The Girl with the Silver Eyes at the library and read it in hopes of not having to default. When I started thinking about what might happen to the four silver-eyed children as young adults, I got attacked by the idea of doing a Rolling Stone interview set 'now' and thus covering a whole swathe of adulthood instead of just one moment. I am still not sure where that idea came from, but it had a powerful grip. *wry*

Stuff about the story: so, if you know me, it is pretty obvious that I pulled contextual details from my own life. I think this is because I was unfamiliar with the canon and so leaned more heavily on "write what you know" than I otherwise would have. But Cornell does have a veterinary school and Ithaca is a nice place to live if you want to balance rural countryside with the amenities of a tiny city (~30,000 people). Katie grew up in farm country until the summer of the book, and an animal rehabilitation center does demand a certain amount of land area, so. *shrug*

The politics, the activism, deciding Eric was gay, and the tiny Murphy Brown shout-out were aimed at Macadamanaity, based on a few glances at her journal. (Katie being bisexual just happened, though. It's a wonderfully serendipitous coincidence! But seriously, not planned.) The faux-science handwaves are there because I have a Thing about psychic powers -- I cannot just take them at face value and must either force them to sound less like things I groan at in the Skeptical Inquirer or just give up and call them magic. Since The Girl with the Silver Eyes makes nods to science, I had to go the first route. Once there, it seemed reasonable to try for a slightly more realistic take on mutations and go from "all four kids wear horn-rimmed glasses" (tangentially, what is it with horn-rimmed glasses in particular? is there something wrong with plain plastic or metal?) to "Ty-Pan-Oromine causes congenital degenerative myopia! News at eleven!"

You have no idea how many Rolling Stone interviews I read to get the format to sound right, and I am not going to enlighten you either. Let's just say it was a lot. *grin*

Katie's wife, Agata 'Root' Wolitsky, takes her first name from a former coworker of mine, her last name from one of my little sister's high school classmates, and her nickname from A&W root beer. I could not find a good way to work the explanation into the interview, so her name just sits there as a random thing that only makes sense to me. Alas.

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2) Loopholes -- The Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones, 2,650 words. There's no rule saying you can't have more than one anchor. (Written for anait.)

Thoughts: anait asked for a way to make Jamie happy, which, if you know The Homeward Bounders, is the next best thing to impossible. As one of my commenters said, you can tell it's Homeward Bounders fic because even the fix-it story is STILL SAD. But I think I did find a loophole in the rules.

It is very important not to break the rules. That would destroy the whole point of the book. But it's okay to game them a little. They do the same thing, after all.

I am kind of torn about this fic, because on the one hand, Jamie is in such a horrible bind at the end of The Homeward Bounders -- I want so badly for something to make it better, and I found a way to do that! On the other hand, that ending is what defines the book and makes it one of the passionate literary loves of my childhood (and adulthood, really), and so I am weirdly ambivalent about diluting the effect.

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3) Self Made -- Lucifer, 250 words. How Mazikeen chose her face. (Written for nextian, aka cosmogyral.)

Thoughts: When the list of all prompts went up, I looked at the pinch hitters' requests first in case any of them had asked for something I could produce off the top of my head. Mazikeen/Lucifer smut would have required a lot more time -- porn is about as far from my forte as humanly imaginable -- but writing a little character study showcasing Mazikeen's strength? That's easy. That's more than easy. That's a pleasure.

So I did. *grin*

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4) Healing -- Black Jewels - Anne Bishop, 1,400 words. Wilhelmina Benedict visits her sister after Queen of the Darkness. Background Daemon/Jaenelle. (Written for random_chick.)

Thoughts: This is another pinch hitter request! I have a lot of feelings about the Black Jewels series. I also really like Wilhelmina, and I once toyed with the idea of writing Karla/Wilhelmina femslash before I realized I had no plot and also canon caught up to me and Bishop went in a different direction for Karla. Also also, sisters are AWESOME and should get ALL THE LOVE just like brothers do, so this story was an easy and obvious response to the prompt.

I am very pleased that people seem to like it.

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5) Dum vivimus, vivamus -- Seaward - Susan Cooper, 800 words. Caught between grief for her parents and longing for Westerly, Cally dreams of Snake. Mild Cally/Snake. (Written for pikkugen.)

Thoughts: I wrote a Seaward fic for lesserstorm two years ago. When pikku_gen commented on it earlier this year, I said in response that if she requested the book for Yuletide, I promised to sign up to write for it. Which I did, but obviously we did not get matched. Still, I tracked down her Dear Writer letter and resolved to write her a Yuletide treat if at all possible.

This is the book involved in my epic library quest of Friday the 23rd, because I'd already done a Cally-and-Westerly-reunion fic and didn't want to repeat myself. That meant writing about either Snake or Peth, and I didn't remember them well enough off the top of my head. Upon rereading, I cannot believe Cooper got away with the Snake scene, because is that a description of an orgasm or is that a description of an orgasm? In a YA book written back when YA books were just kids' books, no less!

I kind of took Cooper's example and ran with it. *wry*

(You also have to realize that I am the kind of person who, in an experiment to test my own boundary between erotica and squick, once wrote Parseltongue, a Harry Potter fic in which two unnamed characters -- one a Parselmouth, one not -- had sex using live snakes as aids to their foreplay. So the overall concept is not completely out there for me.)

The title is a Latin quote I first encountered as the inscription on Oscar's sword in Heinlein's Glory Road, where it's translated as follows: "While we live, let us live!" Mere existence is not enough. I think Lugan and Taranis would agree.

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6) As You Wish -- The Dark Is Rising - Susan Cooper, 1,125 words. Will was the one who kept them all together. Bran was the one who thought to ask why he bothered. Mild Will/Bran. (Written for Aishuu.)

Thoughts: I was scrolling down the alphabetized-by-fandom list of prompts, saw the request, and said to myself, "Hey, I've written this fandom before and I still owe aishuu a fic from a couple years ago (in a completely different fandom, but whatever)." So this is basically an interest payment on a very delayed gift. (Which I will finish in 2012, I promise!)

The Will/Bran aspect of this story is so mild it almost might as well not exist. That is not for lack of trying on my part. But it is not exactly news that I write the world's most unromantic romances, no matter what pairing I am dealing with. *sigh*

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Yuletide statistics

This is the fourth year I have participated in Yuletide. The first year (on the old archive) I wrote one story at 4,200 words. The second year I wrote six stories for a total of 7,400 words; the longest was 2,800 words and the shortest 150. The third year I only wrote two stories (on account of being in Seville), one at 7,200 words and the other at 1,600, for a total of 8,800. This year I was back up to six stories, for a combined total of 10,000 words; the longest was 3,750 words and the shortest 250.

So my total word count has gone up each year, though the number of fics is all over the place.

I seem to write a lot of Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper stories for Yuletide -- two for The Homeward Bounders, two for Hexwood, two for Seaward, and two for The Dark Is Rising. That is 8 of 15 stories, or half my total output. The other stories are a scattershot mix: one for American Gods, one for the Book of Ruth, one for Meredith Pierce's The Darkangel trilogy, one Enchanted Forest Chronicles/Hikaru no Go crossover fusion, one for The Girl with the Silver Eyes, one for Lucifer, and one for the Black Jewels series.

The thing to note about these is that they are all text-based canons rather than audiovisual, and the majority of them are YA fantasy novels. Clearly I have a Yuletide type -- or, more accurately, these are the fandoms I know well enough to write something pretty much off the top of my head, or am just so ridiculously in love with that I carry the books to my parents' house with plans to write treats.

Comments

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

I literally ran my head into my keyboard because while I suspected I knew the person who wrote it, I didn't ping it as you. Which is a me-being-an-idiot thing since I think you're the only one who gets my fascination with Peter as Archetype, and the translation to Will is something I will never be able to unsee. Welcome new headcanon.

<3

[edenfalling]

Archetypes are cool. :-) Mostly I was thinking about Will and Bran, and how so often they get written into very sad stories, with Will withdrawing or Bran not caring without his memories, and I wanted to write about the whole group of them staying friends. It seemed to me that Will was the logical one to hold them together, and the rest just flowed from there.

I'm glad it clicked for you!