I am back from my annual Winter Holiday away-from-internets-ness! I have not even started catching up on the DW posts I have missed, or the hundreds and hundreds of Yuletide recs, but I *did* get to my stories.

And as seems to be a trend, I have an embarrassment of riches again this year: three stories!

My assigned story is The End of the Enlightenment, based on A Night in the Lonesome October, and Awesome Author took up the challenge of writing about a Game other than the one in the book, and it is amazing! Alas, I am not knowledgeable enough about the place & time that author chose to recognize the characters immediately, but that is okay, because not really knowing just makes it creepier, plus! That means there is research to be done! Which is always a good thing!

I also got The Story of Elihu Yale, which fleshes out John Hodgman's account of the founding of Yale University, featuring Elihu Yale and his wise prostitute, and it is adorable!

And finally, there is Two Out of Three Ain't Bad, which is Myssmo/Law and Srafen/Hedgyt and comes in chapters, OMG. Author took up the challenge of writing queer lamnviin! And in a way that fills me with joy!

...also, while all the above stories are amazing on their own, two of the authors left notes to the effect that they plan to write more, which a) means more story for me someday YAY! and b) makes me feel slightly better about the fact that I did the same thing to my yuletide recipient. :/ Dear recipient: You seemed to like the story, and I hope you could not tell that I only wrote 1/4 of what I intended (and instead just assumed I'm not a very good writer) but I *do* still intend to write you the other 3/4. Hopefully by the time the archive opens again. Maybe?

Meanwhile, apropos of you-really-don't-want-to-know, here is a song I have written:
( I want a Necronomicon for Solstice (only a Necronomicon will do.) )

I signed up for kink_bingo this year! I love how accessible they're making it: low pressure, the minimum is one 500-word story in a year, and they've emphasized that you don't have to be able to write explicit sex or sexual characters in order to play, so I'm fairly sure I can do it. My card:
( My Card )
So everybody's going on and on about their kink_bingo cards, and how lucky they are, and I looked at mine and went "huh."

I don't think *any* of the kinks I was really excited about ended up on it, and the two stories-in-progess I'd been planning to use at cheats - each of which have so many kinks they could conceivably blackout a card on their own, with no overlap - are barely represented on the card at all.

I guess that serves me right! Anyway it'll be fun, even if I only end up managing one meta post or something.

I would like to note that as I was going through the kink_wiki yesterday, exploring my options, the questions I was coming up with were things like "Would a story about someone whose erogenous zones are primarily tactile negotiating a scene with someone whose erogenous zones are primarily aural (involving sonics that person A can't produce) work for the 'silence' square?" and "does crossdressing have to involve gender, or can it involve someone whose species doesn't wear clothing dressing up as a human?" and "is 'accidental soulbond with a mechanical life-form due to shoddy safety measures during repair work' suitable for the 'electricity' square?" and "Can I do 'wrist/ankle restraints' on somebody whose limbs don't exactly fit those categories?"

... which just goes to show what pairings I have been getting bunnies for lately. Actually, having gone down the entire kink list, there are only four kinks which require somebody to have a humanoid or vaguely humanoid body (five, if you count 'shaving', which requires a mammalian one at least) and I got three of them...

I also went out to work last night without actually remembering what was on my card, and I ended up plotting out in my head an amazing story - for a kink that's not on my card. But now I really, really want to write "How Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex Invented Strip Personality Chess, And What Happened Afterward." (Does kink_bingo give out prizes for "most stories written for the wrong card"?)

...I may at least have to write a Bran/Tru 'ship manifesto, since Mymy/Vyssu/Mav has been such a hit. :D ...and I'm so tempted to try for a bingo with all non-human or cross-species pairings.


Anyway I was going to try to make this short, but this *is* me, and it's an excuse to talk about kink and about ideas for stories I'll probably never write, so here's ( some brainstorming for every square )

Tell me that this ( picture ) which I photographed at the train station this morning, does not look exactly like the greater tree squid. It was even more obvious in real life; I could watch it tossing its limbs around in the wind.

But I thought arboreal cephalopods in the US were restricted to the Pacific Northwest. Are we getting invasives coming north with the longer hurricane seasons and global warming?