Yuletide reveal hurrah!
Jan. 1st, 2009 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthros1) A Host of Sparrows, Emma Bull's Bone Dance. Please don't read this if you haven't read the book -- I love the book times a billion, and this story spoils the best part of the book. ( Bone Dance is like B5, in a way: you can't use the best part to convince people to read it, because it's a million times better if you don't see it coming.)
Seriously, I love this book so much that it was massively intimidating to think about writing in this universe -- Sparrow changes so much over the course of the book, the world-building is so awesome, the character voices are so interesting. I think I read (parts of it) six times, at least, trying to get a handle on Sparrow's internal monologue. And also, of course, there's a stylistic problem -- the whole book is done in the first-person past, which is a really unfamiliar voice for me, since most of my fandoms haven't done that since the mid-90s. I considered bailing;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adina_atl's other requests were things I could've written, too. But she clearly wanted this, and I love the book so much that I wanted to be able to write it for her, even if that meant wrestling with dialogue and first-person and post-book worldbuilding.
I can't really talk about the story, either, without spoiling the book. But I tried to write Sparrow, after, and I think I did okay -- I failed in a couple of places, but overall I'm pretty proud of it.
And also, you should go read the book. I have a spare copy and I will loan it to anybody, because I love it so and want to share it with everybody -- it's been out of print for years, though I hear a new edition is coming out in mid-2009. ETA: see what I wrote here for a discussion of why not to buy this book.
2) Paradise Lost, which is, uh, NC-17 LOLcats fic with voyeurism.
Here is how this happened: I was tellingthingswithwings that I'd actually thought for a long time before I decided to offer LOLcats for yuletide, because I thought it would be difficult to do 1000+ words of LOLcat. So I'd decided, I told her, that the way to go was to do really different genres for internal narrative and then use LOLcat for dialogue. And once you're in a Milton or Thackerey pastiche, I told her, the relationship between Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat is clearly the way to go. But I didn't get assigned LOLcats, I said, so oh well.
Then I woke up yuletide madness morning to an email from her -- ". . . there is TOTALLY A lolcats (any) prompt available for you in yuletide madness. DO EEEET"
And I did. And let me just say? If you guys thought you were reading through your fingers? Boy, was I writing that way. It felt like there had to be the NC-17 part in there, and I even had a copy of Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance, a book about homosexual practices in the animal kingdom, so obviously for ARTISTIC REASONS I had to write it. But, well. LOLcat sex.
I hear tell that I have scarred a number of people for life. Um. Yay?
3) Poolside, Cary Grant/Marlon Brando.
This is also the result of chatting with people on yt madness day. I saw a request for Cary Grant/anybody RPF, and I had a conversation withthingswithwings about the rumors about Cary Grant, and his House of Bachelors, and I was seriously trying to talk her into writing some Cary Grant/Randolph Scott -- I even youtubed Randolph Scott's performances. This obsession lasted about fifteen minutes, as fandoms now do for me (seriously, making that vid turned everything into a short-lived one-night-fandom). Then, just before I clicked away from the wikipedia page, I saw the Marlon Brando rumor. WELL. How could anyone not love two such perfect icons of two different kinds of gay male performance? And I was explaining to thingswithwings why this would be awesome -- the effete and the butch, Cary Grant in a towel and Marlon Brando in leather -- and she finally was like, stop telling me and tell yuletide instead.
***
Now, to go figure out who wrote everything I liked, and institute tracking measures.
ETA: Now that I can load the yuletide pages without seeing a screaming snowman, I can report thatladygray99 wrote my main story and mjules wrote my treat. Thanks to you both!
Seriously, I love this book so much that it was massively intimidating to think about writing in this universe -- Sparrow changes so much over the course of the book, the world-building is so awesome, the character voices are so interesting. I think I read (parts of it) six times, at least, trying to get a handle on Sparrow's internal monologue. And also, of course, there's a stylistic problem -- the whole book is done in the first-person past, which is a really unfamiliar voice for me, since most of my fandoms haven't done that since the mid-90s. I considered bailing;
adina_atl's other requests were things I could've written, too. But she clearly wanted this, and I love the book so much that I wanted to be able to write it for her, even if that meant wrestling with dialogue and first-person and post-book worldbuilding. I can't really talk about the story, either, without spoiling the book. But I tried to write Sparrow, after, and I think I did okay -- I failed in a couple of places, but overall I'm pretty proud of it.
And also, you should go read the book. I have a spare copy and I will loan it to anybody, because I love it so and want to share it with everybody -- it's been out of print for years, though I hear a new edition is coming out in mid-2009. ETA: see what I wrote here for a discussion of why not to buy this book.
2) Paradise Lost, which is, uh, NC-17 LOLcats fic with voyeurism.
Here is how this happened: I was telling
thingswithwings that I'd actually thought for a long time before I decided to offer LOLcats for yuletide, because I thought it would be difficult to do 1000+ words of LOLcat. So I'd decided, I told her, that the way to go was to do really different genres for internal narrative and then use LOLcat for dialogue. And once you're in a Milton or Thackerey pastiche, I told her, the relationship between Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat is clearly the way to go. But I didn't get assigned LOLcats, I said, so oh well.Then I woke up yuletide madness morning to an email from her -- ". . . there is TOTALLY A lolcats (any) prompt available for you in yuletide madness. DO EEEET"
And I did. And let me just say? If you guys thought you were reading through your fingers? Boy, was I writing that way. It felt like there had to be the NC-17 part in there, and I even had a copy of Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance, a book about homosexual practices in the animal kingdom, so obviously for ARTISTIC REASONS I had to write it. But, well. LOLcat sex.
I hear tell that I have scarred a number of people for life. Um. Yay?
3) Poolside, Cary Grant/Marlon Brando.
This is also the result of chatting with people on yt madness day. I saw a request for Cary Grant/anybody RPF, and I had a conversation with
thingswithwings about the rumors about Cary Grant, and his House of Bachelors, and I was seriously trying to talk her into writing some Cary Grant/Randolph Scott -- I even youtubed Randolph Scott's performances. This obsession lasted about fifteen minutes, as fandoms now do for me (seriously, making that vid turned everything into a short-lived one-night-fandom). Then, just before I clicked away from the wikipedia page, I saw the Marlon Brando rumor. WELL. How could anyone not love two such perfect icons of two different kinds of gay male performance? And I was explaining to thingswithwings why this would be awesome -- the effete and the butch, Cary Grant in a towel and Marlon Brando in leather -- and she finally was like, stop telling me and tell yuletide instead.***
Now, to go figure out who wrote everything I liked, and institute tracking measures.
ETA: Now that I can load the yuletide pages without seeing a screaming snowman, I can report that
ladygray99 wrote my main story and mjules wrote my treat. Thanks to you both!
no subject
Date: 2009-01-01 07:01 pm (UTC)So, you know. If your name has to be on it for eternity for having written something so fantastically scarring, I guess it's just as bad that I get to be blamed for asking for it in the first place. :D
no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 07:51 pm (UTC)Ceiling Cat alwayz watches U