Entry tags:
Some fanfic catch-up
So I wrote the Yuletide fic that was a massive multi-fandom urban fantasy crossover featuring the POV of a cat and elditch tentacle monsters trying to break through the barriers between worlds. Raise your hand if you're surprised! Raise your hand if you're surprised I have now written two of those!
...thought not.
Assistance to British Nationals Abroad (20372 words) by melannen for ambyr
Fandom: British Government Cats RPF, Slip Slidin' Away - Paul Simon (Song), Monstress (Comics), Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch, Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Palmerston (Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office), Larry (Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office), Tam Tam (First Record-Keeper of the Is'hami Temple), Cronus (Assistant to the Chief Whip), Siffha'h (Tower Bridge Gating Team), Toby (Rivers of London), Molly (Rivers of London), The Woman Who Became A Wife, The Man Who Wore His Passion For His Woman Like A Thorny Crown, The Father Who Had A Son
Additional Tags: Crossover, London, worldgates, Cats, Tentacle Monsters, Spiders, Dogs, Wizards
Summary: Three cats, three humans, a dog and a tarantula walk through a Gate -
Me! I was surprised! That's the longest story I've ever finished by about 4,000 words. I wasn't sure I was going to make it (and I won't confess how much of it got written after 12/11) but I did! I sort of painted myself into a corner - I matched on British Government Cats, which I only offered after seeing![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ambyr's letter and being fairly sure she was the only one requesting, because I really wanted an excuse to write an urban fantasy/YW crossover for them, because they are great, but I didn't want to be stuck having to actually engage with British politics or the ehhif who are currently occupying Whitehall. (I also didn't want to risk matching with an actually British person on it, because I knew I wouldn't have enough time to get it a proper britpick, so if anyone wants to London-beta it for me now, I'm up for it, although I've decided that since it's all translated out of Ailurin anyway I accept the inevitable Americanisms in the language.)
I had also almost offered Slip Slidin' Away, but realized the only thing I wanted to write for that was *also* something along the line ofambyr's fantasy/magical realism prompt, and if I got someone who wanted mundane litfic I would be stuck (especially if all their other fandoms were also mundane), so I backed out on that one.
Anyway, like a lot of Americans, I first met the Whitehall cats via Young Wizards, so that was an obvious framework for the urban fantasy, and given that, the Paul Simon characters were clearly involved in some sort of worldgate 'slide (YW canon even uses "slide" to refer to some of the stuff wordgates can do), but YW has WAYYY too much canon for me to review it well enough to set in that universe, so I needed a universe they could actually be traveling to, and also a way to get British officialdom connected to wizardry, and, well, RoL was right there in the request.
At that point I just mashed together all of ambyr's prompts for Whitehall Cats and SSA if they were set in YW and RoL, and well, there was the basic outline of my plot.
But I knew there was a chance things might get slightly dark, and also that I probably wouldn't quite manage to use all the requested SSA characters so it had to fit the Whitehall Cat prompt, so I needed to be able to use the "you can only write darkfic for Whitehall Cats fandom if it's a Monstress crossover" DNW loophole in her letter just in case, and also she dared her writers to do that crossover, and the first Monstress trade was RIGHT THERE on my "graphic novels you got as review copies and you need to read" pile. So I read the two trades (which are REALLY GOOD and REALLY PRETTY, btw) and there was the last missing bit of my plot + my Designated Exposition Cat. Whoo.
I thought about also trying her other requested canon too but I decided maaaybeee I had enough to juggle already, and also I'm really bad at working with audiovisual canons unless I've already read a ton of fiction for them.
Then all I needed was to actually write the thing, which was the hard part. I was thinking about 8,000 words, which is a length I've been writing at pretty successfully the last few years. HOOBOY WAS I WRONG.
And then the problem was, "plot out an intricate epic longfic that fills all the prompts but you have neither the time or skill for" is actually pretty standard for my yuletides, that's just how my brain works, but every year previous, I've been able to chicken out at the last minute and write something short(ish) instead.
The problem was this year, it's really hard for me to write a good urban fantasy AU with basically original characters and a roadtrip as a last-minute shortfic, and I was too attached to Palmerston who can sidle and walk through walls and is really committed to the ancient tradition of Whitehall cats to switch tracks there. And the Monstress prompts were all plotty enough that I didn't feel like I could write them with only having read the trades.
So it was either default or buckle down and WRITE THE THING. And I've never yet defaulted yuletide (quite), So I did.
But, yeah, if you were wondering about the higher-than-usual amount of bears this year, 20,000 VHAI'ING WORDs is why. Also I had a small mental break on the evening of the 17th and wrote 6,000 words of Clark Kent/Lois Lane fic. And another earlier mental break in which I wrote several thousand words of Steve/Bucky porn. So with the Star Wars reaction story, that's, like, 30,000 words in a month after not posting any fiction for the entire previous year.
But I finished it! With a whole 24 hours to spare after I did my "final" revision, even! (...we'll ignore the last-minute bonus chapter and all the spag errors I found later and the character name problem which I'm blaming on the AO3 tag being wrong.) And it seemed to go over really well with people other than my recip, which I was NOT expecting, so yay. Now I have a bunch of comments to reply to.
And 24 hours meant I had time to beta! For my recip, even! Both of the stories I beta'd this year were really good well before I looked at them, you should read them:
Antelope Dreams (3620 words) by ambyr, Fandom: Summer in Orcus - T. Kingfisher, Rating: Explicit<, Warnings: Underage<, Relationships: Summer/The Antelope Woman, Summer/Original Female Character, Characters: Summer (Summer in Orcus), The Antelope Woman (Summer in Orcus), The Weasel (Summer in Orcus), Additional Tags: High School, Dream Sex
Summary: When she was eleven, Summer thought she was very nearly an adult. At seventeen, she's starting to understand how much she has to learn.
And I Think My Spaceship Knows Which Way To Go. (3832 words) by Lanna Michaels, Fandom: The Martian - Andy Weir, Wonder Woman (2017), Rating: General Audiences, Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Relationships: Beth Johanssen/Chris Beck/Mark Watney, Characters: Beth Johanssen, Chris Beck, Mark Watney, Diana (Wonder Woman), Additional Tags: Yuletide 2017, Post-Canon, Canon Compliant, Crossover, Established Relationship, Summary: No one becomes an astronaut because they want to stay home all the time.
I have been very slowly reading through the collection and rec-bookmarking a lot of stories, too! So much good stuff (as usual.)
In non-yuletide news, sisi-rambles podficced one of my old Marvel fics that I honestly though had been completely forgotten! It is a really good podfic, I had forgotten how much FEELS I had packed into the dialogue of that story, and she does justice to all of them. (Also this may be the only one of my old Marvel fics that could still be more-or-less canon at this point, hmm.)
[Podfic] The One Where Bucky Barnes Was a Yankees Fan All Along (4:21) by sisi_rambles
Fandom: Captain America (Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes, Sam Wilson (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Baseball, New York Yankees, Brainwashing, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes
Summary: "I remembered somethin’," Bucky drawled, not looking away from Steve. "Somethin’ I guess I shouldn’t’ve remembered."
And just to top off an interesting week for me in fic, I just got my first AO3 comment on the very first fanfic I ever posted to the internet. (More than half my life ago, that was.....)
Anyway, I've just posted the Thor/Star Wars fic from last post (currently under the title The One With Rey's Mom after I chickened out about putting major movie spoilers in the title) to AO3, since nobody on here yelled at me about how it was wrong and I shouldn't've done it.
I've been seeing everybody's end-of-year wrap-ups going around talking about all the great stories they posted to AO3 this year and I DIDN'T REAlIZE, so either y'all need to get better about announcing fic on DW or I need to finally cave and start using AO3's subscription system, I guess.
....and that's all. I think. Next week should be back to the usual nice helpful SF novel polls and wretched excuses about why I haven't reviewed the previous ones yet. Hurrah!
...thought not.
Assistance to British Nationals Abroad (20372 words) by melannen for ambyr
Fandom: British Government Cats RPF, Slip Slidin' Away - Paul Simon (Song), Monstress (Comics), Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch, Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Palmerston (Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office), Larry (Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office), Tam Tam (First Record-Keeper of the Is'hami Temple), Cronus (Assistant to the Chief Whip), Siffha'h (Tower Bridge Gating Team), Toby (Rivers of London), Molly (Rivers of London), The Woman Who Became A Wife, The Man Who Wore His Passion For His Woman Like A Thorny Crown, The Father Who Had A Son
Additional Tags: Crossover, London, worldgates, Cats, Tentacle Monsters, Spiders, Dogs, Wizards
Summary: Three cats, three humans, a dog and a tarantula walk through a Gate -
Me! I was surprised! That's the longest story I've ever finished by about 4,000 words. I wasn't sure I was going to make it (and I won't confess how much of it got written after 12/11) but I did! I sort of painted myself into a corner - I matched on British Government Cats, which I only offered after seeing
ambyr's letter and being fairly sure she was the only one requesting, because I really wanted an excuse to write an urban fantasy/YW crossover for them, because they are great, but I didn't want to be stuck having to actually engage with British politics or the ehhif who are currently occupying Whitehall. (I also didn't want to risk matching with an actually British person on it, because I knew I wouldn't have enough time to get it a proper britpick, so if anyone wants to London-beta it for me now, I'm up for it, although I've decided that since it's all translated out of Ailurin anyway I accept the inevitable Americanisms in the language.)I had also almost offered Slip Slidin' Away, but realized the only thing I wanted to write for that was *also* something along the line of
ambyr's fantasy/magical realism prompt, and if I got someone who wanted mundane litfic I would be stuck (especially if all their other fandoms were also mundane), so I backed out on that one. Anyway, like a lot of Americans, I first met the Whitehall cats via Young Wizards, so that was an obvious framework for the urban fantasy, and given that, the Paul Simon characters were clearly involved in some sort of worldgate 'slide (YW canon even uses "slide" to refer to some of the stuff wordgates can do), but YW has WAYYY too much canon for me to review it well enough to set in that universe, so I needed a universe they could actually be traveling to, and also a way to get British officialdom connected to wizardry, and, well, RoL was right there in the request.
At that point I just mashed together all of ambyr's prompts for Whitehall Cats and SSA if they were set in YW and RoL, and well, there was the basic outline of my plot.
But I knew there was a chance things might get slightly dark, and also that I probably wouldn't quite manage to use all the requested SSA characters so it had to fit the Whitehall Cat prompt, so I needed to be able to use the "you can only write darkfic for Whitehall Cats fandom if it's a Monstress crossover" DNW loophole in her letter just in case, and also she dared her writers to do that crossover, and the first Monstress trade was RIGHT THERE on my "graphic novels you got as review copies and you need to read" pile. So I read the two trades (which are REALLY GOOD and REALLY PRETTY, btw) and there was the last missing bit of my plot + my Designated Exposition Cat. Whoo.
I thought about also trying her other requested canon too but I decided maaaybeee I had enough to juggle already, and also I'm really bad at working with audiovisual canons unless I've already read a ton of fiction for them.
Then all I needed was to actually write the thing, which was the hard part. I was thinking about 8,000 words, which is a length I've been writing at pretty successfully the last few years. HOOBOY WAS I WRONG.
And then the problem was, "plot out an intricate epic longfic that fills all the prompts but you have neither the time or skill for" is actually pretty standard for my yuletides, that's just how my brain works, but every year previous, I've been able to chicken out at the last minute and write something short(ish) instead.
The problem was this year, it's really hard for me to write a good urban fantasy AU with basically original characters and a roadtrip as a last-minute shortfic, and I was too attached to Palmerston who can sidle and walk through walls and is really committed to the ancient tradition of Whitehall cats to switch tracks there. And the Monstress prompts were all plotty enough that I didn't feel like I could write them with only having read the trades.
So it was either default or buckle down and WRITE THE THING. And I've never yet defaulted yuletide (quite), So I did.
But, yeah, if you were wondering about the higher-than-usual amount of bears this year, 20,000 VHAI'ING WORDs is why. Also I had a small mental break on the evening of the 17th and wrote 6,000 words of Clark Kent/Lois Lane fic. And another earlier mental break in which I wrote several thousand words of Steve/Bucky porn. So with the Star Wars reaction story, that's, like, 30,000 words in a month after not posting any fiction for the entire previous year.
But I finished it! With a whole 24 hours to spare after I did my "final" revision, even! (...we'll ignore the last-minute bonus chapter and all the spag errors I found later and the character name problem which I'm blaming on the AO3 tag being wrong.) And it seemed to go over really well with people other than my recip, which I was NOT expecting, so yay. Now I have a bunch of comments to reply to.
And 24 hours meant I had time to beta! For my recip, even! Both of the stories I beta'd this year were really good well before I looked at them, you should read them:
Antelope Dreams (3620 words) by ambyr, Fandom: Summer in Orcus - T. Kingfisher, Rating: Explicit<, Warnings: Underage<, Relationships: Summer/The Antelope Woman, Summer/Original Female Character, Characters: Summer (Summer in Orcus), The Antelope Woman (Summer in Orcus), The Weasel (Summer in Orcus), Additional Tags: High School, Dream Sex
Summary: When she was eleven, Summer thought she was very nearly an adult. At seventeen, she's starting to understand how much she has to learn.
And I Think My Spaceship Knows Which Way To Go. (3832 words) by Lanna Michaels, Fandom: The Martian - Andy Weir, Wonder Woman (2017), Rating: General Audiences, Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Relationships: Beth Johanssen/Chris Beck/Mark Watney, Characters: Beth Johanssen, Chris Beck, Mark Watney, Diana (Wonder Woman), Additional Tags: Yuletide 2017, Post-Canon, Canon Compliant, Crossover, Established Relationship, Summary: No one becomes an astronaut because they want to stay home all the time.
I have been very slowly reading through the collection and rec-bookmarking a lot of stories, too! So much good stuff (as usual.)
In non-yuletide news, sisi-rambles podficced one of my old Marvel fics that I honestly though had been completely forgotten! It is a really good podfic, I had forgotten how much FEELS I had packed into the dialogue of that story, and she does justice to all of them. (Also this may be the only one of my old Marvel fics that could still be more-or-less canon at this point, hmm.)
[Podfic] The One Where Bucky Barnes Was a Yankees Fan All Along (4:21) by sisi_rambles
Fandom: Captain America (Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes, Sam Wilson (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Baseball, New York Yankees, Brainwashing, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes
Summary: "I remembered somethin’," Bucky drawled, not looking away from Steve. "Somethin’ I guess I shouldn’t’ve remembered."
And just to top off an interesting week for me in fic, I just got my first AO3 comment on the very first fanfic I ever posted to the internet. (More than half my life ago, that was.....)
Anyway, I've just posted the Thor/Star Wars fic from last post (currently under the title The One With Rey's Mom after I chickened out about putting major movie spoilers in the title) to AO3, since nobody on here yelled at me about how it was wrong and I shouldn't've done it.
I've been seeing everybody's end-of-year wrap-ups going around talking about all the great stories they posted to AO3 this year and I DIDN'T REAlIZE, so either y'all need to get better about announcing fic on DW or I need to finally cave and start using AO3's subscription system, I guess.
....and that's all. I think. Next week should be back to the usual nice helpful SF novel polls and wretched excuses about why I haven't reviewed the previous ones yet. Hurrah!
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After seeing your word counts, I went back and added up my word count from last year - after not having written anything for almost a decade, in the second half of last year I wrote 56K words! Anyway, if you'd like to check out my fics, they're at http://archiveofourown.org/users/BritHistorian/works (old fics are Firefly, new fics are K-pop, with one fic ["To Catch a River"] crossing over the two).
Happy New Year!
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Happy New Year!
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In conclusion: thank you! Story was great! And now I am going to have to come up with an ALL NEW set of Yuletide prompts for next year, because you went and used up my whole stock. I am pleased other people are liking the story, too. Sometimes I feel bad for my authors, because it feels like writing for my weird prompts ends up being the kiss of death in terms of receiving feedback from anyone else at all. But not this year!
(And also, thank you for betaing!)
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And what is the fun of song fandoms if you can't take everything literally?? I kind of want an entire Paul Simon universe now with those three, and the woman with the diamonds on the soles of her shoes, and the Only Living Boy In New York, and so on. (I mean, I would probably have enjoyed reading the litfic version of Slip Slidin' Away fic, but I would not have been able to read it. The scene where Delores and her man were being heteronormative-monogamous-dysfunctional-relationship at each other was hands down the hardest scene in this to right, and I only got through it by knowing I could write the scene where the woman washed her wifehood right out of her hair next.)
You were a great recipient! And I would have been happy with just your comment and your recs, because it was so much fun to write your promts and live in those universes for a couple months.
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