the deep moans round with many voices

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... )

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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 is the next best thing to impossible... )

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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... )

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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... )

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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 pikkugen commented on it earlier this year... )

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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: ( This is basically an interest payment for taking so long to finish 'Friends and Neighbors'... )

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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.

I wrote one more Yuletide treat last night, for a total of six stories: three in the regular collection and three in the Madness collection. I have heard from four of my recipients, who seem to like the stories, so that is a bit of a relief. *bites nails over the remaining two*

Yesterday I got up shortly after 9am, but breakfast didn't happen until after 10, due to technical difficulties with the blueberry pancakes. *grin* After breakfast we opened presents, which involves periodically 'helping' the dog open a gift so she will wander off to abuse a new toy or chew on a dried pig's ear and not be constantly underfoot in the wrapping paper.

Around 1pm I took the dog out for a walk, after which my family collectively failed to get our act together and choose a holiday movie to go see, so we ended up sitting around at home reading random books and magazines instead. (Mom and Vicky also took the dog out for another walk, searching for a couple ponds in the wilds of the Drew University campus forest.) Then we had snacks and burra-peg champagne cocktails around 5pm, while playing 8 rounds of hearts and two rounds of rummy -- we had wanted to play Clue, but unfortunately all the family boardgames are currently down in Vicky's apartment in D.C., since she'd been using them as part of her assisstant teaching volunteer internship thingy. But card games are fun too!

Dinner was tasty, dessert was also tasty, and generally it was a good day. :-)

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi, and thank you in advance for writing a story for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a story that's only a long sex scene, I'll be thrilled just to get a fic in one of the fandoms I asked for. *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

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( General Information )

Okay. On to specific fandoms.

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( The Lions of Al-Rassan )

( Lucifer )

( The Dispossessed )

( Mysterious Skin - TRIGGER WARNING )

And that is that.

1. I made a few mostly cosmetic edits on my Yuletide story and uploaded the beta draft to AO3. This is because I will be in a minivan heading to New Jersey tomorrow evening when the deadline arrives, and it is better to have a slightly untidy story than no story. :-) (In all honesty, the story will work as is. I just want it to work better.)

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2. This new interface thingy LJ just rolled out, I do not like it. Not at all. The default pages are ugly and the margins are awful. I want more white space at the edge of my pages, thank you. I also want the light blue shading at the top of the comments section to go die in a fire. It is vaguely painful to look at for too long -- not enough color contrast, I think.

Plus all comment subject lines have been summarily made to disappear and turn into bold headings in the comments themselves, which is just... I don't know who thought that was a good idea, or why, but it is a BAD IDEA. It destroys functionality for no reason. Why was this not TESTED or run past the user base?

...

I am beginning to think about redirecting all comments to Dreamwidth and seeing if I can recreate even more of my LJ reading list over here. Also I may have to embark on the long and unspeakably tedious task of switching all the links in my master fic lists to point to DW entries, and all the internal links (forward to next chapter, back to previous chapter, jump to main index page, that sort of thing) to point to DW as well. That will take forever and a day, but I suspect it may be worth the headache in the long run.

The ONLY good thing I have noticed in the new LJ code is that on the mobile version, when I hit the back button from an entry to my f-list, I no longer get jumped up to the top of the page; instead, I only get jumped up one or two entries, which is still not ideal but is at least vaguely more functional. And that is not worth all the new idiocy in the slightest.

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3. PM has been massively overstaffing the smoke shop this week, in anticipation of last minute holiday shoppers. Today was actually quite slow, but I'm pretty sure that's because it rained all day. Tomorrow should be busier.

Anyway, I left about two hours before the scheduled end of my shift, because there was no point in me just standing around with nothing to do. I am of two minds about leaving early. On the one hand, I don't earn money if I'm not on the clock. On the other hand, if I go home, that means less work-related stress and more chances to take a nap. I am a big fan of naps. :-)

1. My Yuletide story is easily over 1000 words. My Yuletide story is also not remotely near done. *headdesk*

Oh well, at least the writing is going smoothly now. I finally found the right opening and from there onward it's pretty stream-of-consciousness until I find something that feels like a good note on which to wind down and exit.

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2. I may have kinda-sorta outlined a story that acts as a sequel to Little Sister and a prequel to Grass and Silence, the snippet I wrote for animus_wyrmis. It is the tale of how Innenya the serpent (otherwise known as the Lady of the Green Kirtle) went about inciting rebellion in Narnia and destroying the Tree that kept Jadis out for nearly nine hundred years. Which is all well and good and fascinating, except it is not any of the various things I am supposed to be writing now and stole over an hour of potentially useful time. Argh!

...

*tucks outline away for future reference*

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3. There is no point three.