[Meme] Self-rec: Five Favorite Fics

[edenfalling]

thatgirlnevershutsup asked: Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers (◠‿◠✿). Do multiple fandoms if you want!

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Five favorite fics that I myself wrote? Okay. The first three are easy:

1. The Way of the Apartment Manager (Naruto): Ayakawa Yukiko retired from being a ninja, and she's come to terms with that. Then the Third Hokage summons her for an assignment that will change her life. AU story, set six years pre-manga.

2. Knives (Harry Potter): Beware, you who fight evil, lest you fall into darkness. Beware, you who invite the abyss into your heart. Ginny. Lucius. Harry. Guard your soul.

3. Out of Season (Chronicles of Narnia): In the fourteenth year of Rishti Tisroc's reign, a demon in the shape of a beaver is captured and brought to Tashbaan. Shezan Tolkheera, high priestess of the goddess Achadith, is given the responsibility of guarding the demon until its sacrifice at the Spring Festival. Complications ensue.

The next two I am essentially picking out of a hat. I mean, the number of stories in the hat is a lot smaller than the total number of stories I've ever written! But once you pass my big three, what you get depends entirely on my mood and what comes to mind first on any given day. Today, those stories are:

4. Untimely Ripped (Homestuck): Most spellbooks are bullshit. Everyone knows this. But they're made of words and you need words to fill the hole in the center of your mind, so you flick through this one at the same mechanical pace you read a cheesy romance yesterday and plan to read a stupidly anachronistic spy thriller tomorrow. The clock on the living room wall ticks rhythmically above your head. Outside, light November rain mists down on the fallen leaves and dormant grass. Damara's cat watches you disdainfully from the mantel. You turn another page.

And then a spell title jumps out at you: 'For the Restoration of Life After Untimely Death'.

5. The Vastness of the Sky (Chronicles of Narnia): Digory Kirke invites Polly Plummer to watch the 1912 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race with him, hoping to catch up with his oldest friend. But lives once touched by magic never return altogether to normal, and when both crews sink in adverse weather, Digory and Polly stumble into a strange new world in search of a missing rower.

Ask me again tomorrow and you will probably get a different answer. :)

Comments

[heliopausa]

I well recall The Way of the apartment Manager. :) I enjoyed it very much - though I didn't know the fandom at all beforehand.
and this weekend is surely set to be the weekend when I learn just what did happen when a fearsome creature in the shape of a beaver arrived in Tashbaan!

[edenfalling]

One side-effect of writing a lot about original characters and/or times and places not much focused on in canon is that the resulting stories occupy a liminal space between fanfic and original fiction. That is, they are absolutely fanfic and still work best when read in conversation with their canon, but they have to do a lot more of the things original fiction does -- introduce and explain new settings and characters -- and are therefore less, hmm, reliant on jargon/in-jokes/shared references, which can make them more accessible to people unfamiliar with the canon in question.

Crossovers can have a similar effect, because writers can't safely assume readers will be equally familiar with both canons in the mix, and also have to explain/introduce settings, plot elements, and characters from each canon to their counterparts from the other. So they act a little bit as a primer for new readers, though obviously a rather skewed one.

Marigold Beaver is not fearsome in the slightest, though she's young enough that before her capture, she might have been flattered and amused by that description. :)

[marmota_b]

"Out of Season" is the one that brought you to my attention, by the way. So you should be proud of it. :-)

Ans yes to both the things you say above about fandom-entry stories. I think I've actually found some fandoms through crossovers...

[edenfalling]

The funny thing about my 'big three' favorite stories is that they were all at least half-accidental. "Apartment Manager" was meant to be a short and slightly downbeat oneshot; it turned into a novel and is one of the most consistently upbeat things I've ever written. (It is structure entirely around Crowning Moments of Heartwarming with occasional Crowning Moments of Awesome for flavor.) "Knives" was quite literally based on a dream that collided with a longstanding vague idea that it might be interesting to write a torture scene from the POV of the torturer, and proceeded to eat my brain for a couple months. And "Out of Season" was, of course, a fic exchange story that got wildly out of hand in about seven directions at once. I think the takeaway is that I do my best work balancing halfway between 'I have a plan and I know exactly where I'm going' and 'when did I board this runaway train and how do I get off without killing myself???' *wry*

I have found a LOT of fandoms through crossovers -- they're a really effective transmission vector. :)