estirose

So, Yuletide 2010 in quick review (and last Yuletide post until November, I hope):

As I put in my recs post on the main Yuletide comm, this year I did pretty much everything: I wrote fic, wrote more fic, hippoed, beta’d, pinch hit, and recommended. I wrote a lot of fic, too, 11 pieces in the end – not counting two that, for one reason or another, didn’t get posted to Yuletide (one I just decided was not what I wanted to bonus-gift my recipient with, and the other posted non-Yuletide by accident). A lot of my Yuletide fics this year are not showing a lot of hits right now, but I suspect they’ll be up there if/when we get the hit counts from the static pages added in.

I was fortunate to get three recs: one for “Lay Your Body Down”, two for “Versal and Marginalia”. I was also very happy with the people who pitched in when three of my stories weren’t getting any reviews, and for Jadelennox, who probably is responsible for “Lay Your Body Down” getting one heck of a hit rate for a fic based on an obscure YA book! I still have one missing recipient (hasn’t updated their journal since the week before Yuletide opened, and I’m getting kind of worried about them), but the other nine sent me nice comments. And I have to say that I never thought quiet little “Versal and Marginalia” would out-hitcount everything else I wrote this year, even before getting recs, especially since I didn’t meet the source material (Mulan) until mid-December!

My fic for this year was “Ordinary” which is all that I asked for, and the amazing alianora wrote it for me. I kind of guessed the writer was big on Rihito/Mei, but I hadn’t guessed it was her!

And, as I did last year, some notes under the cut:

“Lay Your Body Down (And Don’t Let Go)” was for my assigned recipient, for the book “Bleeding Violet” by Dia Reeves. It wasn’t the fandom we matched in (that was Starman (tv)), but I’d read what she’d mentioned about the book before, and the bit about Hanna being bipolar interested me. Plus, I thought it would be too obvious if I wrote in Starman (tv) fandom, given that this would be the second time with her as my recipient, and given that she knew I was going to offer the fandom this year. I bought it through Amazon in ebook format, devoured it (it was an extremely good book), and was caught by the mention of Hanna’s time in the hospital/institution. Some research later, I feverishly wrote 900 words of the fic. It took me another week to write the other 200 or so, a few days to get feedback from betas, and I still managed to get it in as the 70th fic for Yuletide 2010 (and then edited it a few more times!)

That being said, it was a bit nervewracking once I got done and read it over, because I never know how well I portray someone with mental illness and worry that I come through as ableist – even though I have my own set of disorders. It’s very, very hard to write how it feels to be depressed, or anxious, or anything not normal, and even harder to explain that even though it’s an illness, it’s still part of you, part of who you are.

Title source: An obscure song called “Jonestown: The Unanswered Question” by Ken Risling, about his friend Annie Moore. I thought that particular part of the chorus fit Hanna so darn well, even if the rest of the chorus really doesn’t.

“Beyond Growing, Beyond Dividing” was written while I was waiting for my assignment. I’ve played Alpha Centauri (the original) so many times that I have the thing pretty much memorized. And I had to admit that the idea of writing Planet appealed to me. So I jotted down a fic about how it must feel, and tried not to slip up on what stage was what because I didn’t quite have my disc handy.

Title Source: The title for this one came from the fact that Planet starts out by endless dividing and growing, and goes beyond that.

“Doomed, the Minion”, my first Girl Genius fic, is of course centered around poor Moloch. The prompt mentioned a bunch of things, but when I saw it, I was thinking of the page where Snaug tells him that some people are natural minions. Of course, Moloch does not want to be in any way, shape or form a natural minion (poor guy). I have to admit, I do ship Gil/Agatha, but the “will they or won’t they?” kind of gets wearing after a while, and Moloch’s own love issues (loves Saana, is loved by Violetta, is loved by Snaug) interest me.

Title Source: Poor Moloch is doomed! Doomed, I say! And I don’t mean in the physical sense….

“Rain, Rain, Go Away” was actually my second attempt at a Yuletide Starman fic this year, just because, well, I still like writing Starman. I wanted to write a Wylie fic, but Fox kind of took over, and so we ended up with Fox and Wylie in yet another airport, Fox getting annoyed at everything, and of course, Wylie being helpful. I used Midway because it was a nice airport, and I figure that Paul and Scott were somewhere in Central California, thus requiring going to strange and wonderful airports.

Title source: From the nursery rhyme, fitting as Fox is being rain-delayed.

“Roads that Run” is a Power Rangers Zeo fic, with the request of Adam/Tanya. I have to admit, I love the couple and I have written my share of them; to write them again was pure joy, even though I was a bit nervous that Tanya would be tutoring that student forever and I wouldn’t actually get any Adam/Tanya interaction like requested. I had to hit Wikipedia up for the spelling of Shawn’s name, and I’m pretty sure that Penny was the martial artist that Rocky dated, but I don’t have my Zeo eps anymore.

Title Source: From the Final Fantasy XI song “Distant Worlds”. The lyrics that inspired the title are “I may know the answers, / though one question I still hear. / What twist in fate has brought us / to roads that run so near?”

“No Longer Be Bound” is a Hana Kimi (TV) fic that is really short, and deals with Nakatsu’s realization on who he loves, and it’s really not Komari. I have to admit, I have a soft spot for Nakatsu, and I do ship Nakatsu/Mizuki over Mizuki/Sano. I had a terrible time finding my recipient until I looked at several posted fics, tracked the person’s name down in the all prompts list, and uploaded it.

Title Source: From the Final Fantasy XI song “Memoro de la Ŝtono”. The original is in Esperanto; the line is a translation from a site.

“Better to ask Forgiveness” is a Hana Yori Dango (tv) fic, kind of AU futurefic-ish story set in a universe where Rui turned Tsukasa down and kept going after Tsukushi, and won her over. I tried to keep some elements in (Tsukasa’s amnesia), even though they probably didn’t happen like they’d happened in canon. The requster wanted Rui/Tsukushi, which I’ve always wanted to write, and they wanted serious, which I think describes this somewhat melancholy fic well. Rui gets the girl, but is he entirely happy? I don’t think so, even as a Rui/Tsukushi fan. I was planning to do this as a NYR, but something happened, and it ended up being a Yuletide treat.

Title source: From the saying “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission”.

“Hikari Saseba” is my first “Chaotic Butterfly” fic, grabbed as a pinch hit. I saw the requester come up and the fandoms, and hit reply, wanting to get it but thinking I never would. But I did! Then I had panic set in, because I didn’t know if I could get the feel of the characters in time. Since the requester requested gen about one/all of the members of 5*STAR, I went back and looked at the characters I liked best, and decided it would be cool to write a fic about Tsukioka and his worldview. It felt natural to set it at the end of “Unseen Wings” when they go to Korea to have the concert with Pantheon (I love Pantheon, especially Daewoong), because that pretty much was towards the end of the novels so far and it was easiest to reflect about everything that way.

Title Source: From the Kamen Rider Kiva song “Roots of the King” and means, basically “If the light shines” if I’ve translated it correctly. (It’s kind of an injoke, because this particular recipient wrote me my wonderful Taiga/Wataru fic in 2009′s Yuletide, and there is a version of “Roots” that features Wataru’s and Taiga’s actors in a duet.)

“Songuisendus Anuncemise” was one of two fics I wrote for Disney’s Mulan. There were several prompts in the DYW letter, and the one about Shang and Mulan having kids and what to do about going to war caught my eye. So, I ended up with a fic about Shang, pondering orders that require both himself and his wife to go to battle. I was intending Mulan make an appearance, but apparently this was Shang’s fic, and Shang’s fic alone.

Title Source: The title is actually completely nonsensical, as far as I can tell! (I used a generator of nonsense words, chose two words, and altered each word by a letter – Songuisendus because the word it originally gave me contained the name of a Chinese city (or at least, Marco Polo’s name for a Chinese city), and Anuncemise to make it sound more like the word announcement.)

“Versal and Marginalia”, intended to be my final fic, was also for Mulan. The person requested what happened after the movie, and would be happy if the author incorporated Chinese culture/tradition and the original Mulan legend(s) into the fic. This fic, I think, managed to do both. It’s a slightly melancholy piece, highlights Shang’s inability to really talk to Mulan about anything other than military matters, and fuses in the requested culture/tradition/myth. For example, Mulan could have been killed for impersonating a man and being in the army (civil service was also forbidden to women). Women were considered pretty worthless at that time (the legend was first recorded in the 6th century and Mulan was supposed to have lived somewhere in the previous three centuries). Shang wouldn’t have asked for Mulan’s hand in marriage directly; apparently in that time and place, the first thing that was done was for the potential groom’s family was to send a representative/intermediary to the potential bride’s family, or vice versa. (In fact, in one version of the Mulan story, Mulan requests a fast horse so that “he” can go home because somebody thinks that “he” would make a good husband for their daughter. Shang discovers that she’s a woman when he arrives at her home with gifts as an intermediary.)

Title source: A versal is related to a drop cap; it’s a large letter on the margin on handwritten manuscripts. Marginalia are items printed in the margins of a page. Not only do these words look kind of exotic, but I can easily imagine this fic with a versal, and I so wanted to be able to insert marginalia!

“Pierced Hearts, Idle Cups, and Flaming Towers” was written over the course of two hours, mostly because I looked up the cards first, wrote most of the fic, and then went back and filled in the card decriptions and the reading. Since I do not own a tarot deck, I used sites to give me pictures/descriptions of the cards in question from the Rider-Waite deck and did a past/present/future (aka 3-Card) spread. I deliberately overdid the descriptions so that tptigger would not recognize (hopefully) that I wrote it, especially since I finished it right after we talked on the phone about how obvious my writing style was. I’ve never had an actual tarot card reading myself, but I figure it’s something a bored teen would do, and I tried to do a bit of a hint of what happens to him during the series. Oh, Anton is very protective of his (foster) son. I wrote it to quiet the muses, and then posted it when I thought I’d never find the recipient for “No Longer Be Bound”.

Title source: The descriptions of the three cards.

There were two stories that were meant for Yuletide but didn’t join that event for one reason or another, so I thought I’d mention them here:

“Not a Hope” was my original try at a Starman treat for my recipient, but I thought it would make a better non-Yuletide fic than as a true Yuletide fic. It’s about how Scott envies people who have stable lives, and at the same time knows that they don’t know how things truly are. For it, I rearranged and renamed my high school, moved it down a few streets, created an OC (inevitable in Starman’s format), and tried to remember what things were like in the late 1980s (which, fortunately, I’d been reviewing for my novel-in-progress). Its title was a kind of a play on the name of its OC, Hope, a very shy, nerdy girl that Scott talks with. (I ended up writing “Rain, Rain, Go Away” for the same recipient.)

“A Little More Out of the Ordinary” was meant to be my one and only Kamen Rider series (in this case, KR W) fic for Yuletide, but AO3 didn’t catch that it was for Yuletide and I didn’t catch that AO3 didn’t catch that it was for Yuletide, so it posted as a gift and un-Anonymous. It was a brief, humourous story about Shoutarou transferring bodies with Mick, the British Shorthair that appears throughout the series, because I was inspired by a prompt. This one was fun to write, especially when I hit upon the idea of using the typewriter. The title comes from the fact that even at the detective agency, this is a little odder than usual.

Crossposted from Ramblings Yet Once More here.