eruthros

So, now I can figure out who wrote my stories!

On This Shore of the World was by sophinisba, and The Outskirter's Quest was by xylaria (possibly xylaria?). Thank you both!

I wrote four stories for yuletide this year. Here's how it went:

Dreams, Tranquility, Solitude (Moon 2009 movie). aitakute basically asked for dystopia and identity, and I thought: well. I can do that with the film, it's all there already.

In a way, this is a perfect fandom for me -- I love worldbuilding. In another way, well, I spent a really long time watching the movie and trying to figure out, like, the economics of helium three mining, and why three years, and the physics of lunar bases, and when the baby was supposed to be born. Then basically none of that went into the story, but it made me feel better.

La Adelita (Como agua para chocolate | Like Water for Chocolate). This was my first treat; I read the author letter again on Monday night or Tuesday morning, and really wanted to read a story for the prompt. Then I ended up writing a lot of this while I was on the plane on Tuesday. I hadn't read the book or seen the movie since like 1993, but I got it from the library early Wednesday morning and sped through the relevant parts to make appropriate changes (including my facepalm when I realized that Gertrudis canonically joined Villa's army -- I'd totally thought she was a Zapatista) and see how I'd done with tone.

This story is kind of like, things eruthros loves: magical realism, bodies, recipes, women's knowledge. Check. Also I really am going to nominate Around the Day in Eighty Worlds or Hopscotch or something next year.

Rough (anthropomofic web 2.0). Um. Well. I got home from doing all my Christmas shopping in basically two days and I was tired and cranky and I wanted to write some yuletide treats but I just couldn't face looking at source. So I wrote a story about the pages in yuletide archive instead, based on a prompt that I'd seen go by on the pinch hit list that had a line like "or anything really." I was careful to keep it under a thousand words, though, because elynross said somewhere that people could go wild for treats, and use just the fandom if we thought the recipient would like it, but that folks couldn't do that for full-length stories.

The Abbreviated History of the Flashlight (The Lost Room + four other crossovery fandoms). I wrote this in about half an hour, an hour before the end of yuletide uploads. I really liked the idea, but I think it came out very much rushed -- I'll have to try again when it's not, like, "aaaah do I post it or not?"

I also acquired source for two other treats I wanted to write, but I just couldn't face watching anything. Perhaps I will do them as NYR stories.

I haven't read a whole bunch, but I have read a lot that I liked!

First, ( my two great yuletide stories )

And then some Misc Other Stories, too! Usually I try to read methodically from a random letter, but this year it all went wrong and I've got a bunch of fandoms from all over the place. So this is recs, part one of, like, a bazillion. ( Indiana Jones, Leverage, Mad Men, Moon, Inuit Mythology, PSAs, Mythbusters, RPF NPR, Nero Wolfe, and Some Like it Hot recs below the cut )

I'm kind of sad about the loss of the most-frequent-commenter stat from the old archive. Not that I could ever be in the top ten by any stretch of the imagination, but because I always enjoyed boggling at how many more stories other people had already read!

I have uploaded my yuletide story! The last two thousand words or so were written in hundred word segments in alternation with heavy applications of ice, but it's DONE.

Now: more ice packs. And BEER.

Later: possibly reviewing source for treats. *facepalm*

thingswithwings and I decided to treat yuletide like a study group. So we had livrelibre over for a yuletide-writing-party! To make it more like a study group, we ate thingswithwings's chocolate chip cookies, we ordered pizza and drank beer, and we took occasional tangents into legal procedure ("no, like, who sits in front of the bar thing in the court?") and academic field names ("why can't I google backwards?") and html coding questions ("does the AO3 allow that code?") and the premise of Jeremiah ("see, all the adults die...").

And now I have some words! I don't promise that they're good, but I have some scenes and stuff. Success! I just need to pretend I'm a college student. A college student who writes papers before 11 pm on the day they're due. A college student who, in fact, is not at all the kind of college student I was. Um.

So, okay, I've been reading many of the yuletide letters linked in the main post, because they are full of fannish joy. I read them in fandoms I don't know, in fandoms I love, in fandoms I've barely heard of, and I rejoice in the glee and the fannishness and the yuletideyness of yuletide. And so, because I thought some of y'all might enjoy this, too, I've pulled out some cool requests I've seen recently. Presume that there are spoilers for all the fandoms behind the cuts, because sometimes I have no idea what the source even is and can't warn more carefully. (To my shame, I have never read Mercedes Lackey.)

( Eddie Izzard - Stand Up Routines )
( Indiana Jones universe )
( Total Eclipse of the Heart (music video) )
( Mercedes Lackey - Valdemar series )
( Aristophanes - Lysistrata )
( Enid Blyton - St Clare's )
( RPF Misc Actors (George Lazenby) )
( My Little Pony )

Also, the entirety of kiki-eng's Canadian Politics request, which is too large and picspammy for me to reproduce here.