Yuletide Reveal

[alixtii]

So I've posted links to all my Yuletide stories, but here's a place for me to compile all those links into one place and chatter about them.

My main Yuletide assignment was Glories Stream, for reflectedeve. We were matched on Dar Williams' song "Alleluia," from the album The Honesty Room. It was weird being matched on a canon that was shorter than the fic I was supposed to write; at first, the temptation to simply write a novelization of the song, throwing details in until I expanded it out to a thousand words or more.

As I wrote, however, I found ways to make my work transformative, to make it fanfic rather than a mere novelization (which should not be construed as a prescriptive definition of what fanfic is and is not). There are pieces of the song which don't appear in my fic, and parts of my fic which critique the song. There are bits--little bits, but there--that require already knowing the song in order to understand. As far as I'm concerned, these are features rather than bugs; they're what serve to make the fic mine. I don't explain the surfing, for example, anymore than I would explain what vampires are when writing a Buffy fic.

What I did realize once I had read what I had written, however, was that my fic was a lot more explicitly Christian than Dar's song. This too was a feature; reflectedeve had specifically suggested I might examine the theology behind the song a little more deeper. So a number of Christian saints are mentioned in my fic (I couldn't resist pairing St. Francis and St. Clare), as well as references to Christian doctrines. It was fun to write, especially as it freed me to be irreverent and bring something a critical lens to traditional notions of heaven. The fact that I re-read Heinlein's novel Job: A Comedy of Justice in the course of writing the fic probably influenced me as well. And I know conversations with Ari and Elizabeth were in my head as I wrote the line "just two bodies created in the fucking divine image doing what they fucking were designed to do [i.e. lesbian sex]."

My other fic I wrote in a new fandom was If on a Yuletide morn a slasher, one of the several If on a winter's night a traveler fics that made their way into the Archive this year; indeed, norah's fic's title differs from mine by only one word (she used "reader" where I used "slasher").

It, too, was fun to write--I got to use my draft of an unfinished Platonic Dialogues genderswapped space opera AU which I had abandoned because I just couldn't find any point to it as the story-within-the-story, as well as communicate just a fraction of my love for fandom and for Yuletide. Because Calvino's characters would write fanfiction, would get mixed up (and lost!) in the levels of creation and transformative recreation. My story's not as polished as it could have been if I had had more than a couple of hours to write it in, but judging from the comments, that love and affection came through--which is the important thing.

For my other treats, I returned to known and loved fandoms in which I was comfortable. So I finished two Sarah Connor Chronicles fics I had been working on in my Psalm 23 'verse that filled two of the prompts, The Children's Crusade, which is Sarah training Savannah in the (pre-Judgment Day) future leading up to the final scene of "Born to Run," and Though I Walk Through the Shadow, which is the crucial meeting of John and Savannah in the post-Judgment Day "Born to Run" future. selenakwins a ficlet for the observation that I wrote a story with a pairing for whom I am the lone OTPer and which is consistent with my other fics in that 'verse.

I also wrote two Arcadia fics, both of them simple fixits of a sort--one of them, Skasis, a cracky crossover with Doctor Who where Thomasina becomes a companion, and the other, Dancing Lessons, a more serious fic which begins with Thomasina and Septimus' last dance in the play and goes on to get porny. Neither manage to negate the tragedy of the play, though, because in order to fit into canon both fics still end with Thomasina and Septimus separated and Septimus going mad. Oh, play, how you break my heart. ("Skasis" actually started out in my mind as an AU where Thomasina lives and she and Septimus get to be together, but I began to try and picture the magnitude of the changes that would exist in a world where chaos theory was discovered in the time of Lord Byron and then the Doctor showed up to set everything right again. Oh well, maybe next year I'll write the steampunk epic in which the Doctor doesn't appear.)

Last Day on Earth is an Ender's Game fic, another canon I know well, but the first fic I've written in which Val and Peter actually do part as in canon. In the fic I write them saying goodbye. Beleza and the B.E.A.S.T. is a fairy tales fic, a futuristic AU of "Beauty and the Beast" taking place on a space station.

For prettylightsfic, I wrote Deck of Cards, which focuses on Miracle Laurie. My main research for the fic was reading Miracle's twitter feed, and the thing that struck me the most was the way in which being a Jossverse actor was still new and shiny to her. So I thought about the ways in which that might be overwhelming, and how I could use her outsider perspective. I considered making it critical, but I never got the sense that Miracle's reaction to any of it was anything but genuine love and excitement, so I went light and fluffy instead, focusing on a geeky conversation about how best to adapt Alice in Wonderland. I wanted Felicia in it because, Felicia, so I set it in "Epitaph Two," which gave a nice thematic connection to Alice in that I could have Miracle's reflections on Dollhouse ending and how it paralleled Alice leaving Wonderland.

I have to say that "Deck of Cards" is the least anonymous anonfic I've written since I remixed "Incurable" for Ari (even with my SCC fics this year giving it a run for its money). Obviously the fic in which Joss, Summer, and Felicia all appear, and in which Joss wants to get into Summer's pants, was written by alixtii. I'm surprised no one guessed it.

For secret_slasha I wrote Life is Just This, which is Buffy/Willow. It was a fic where I sat in front of my laptop for quite a while not writing anything, then I walked away from the keyboard and put pen to paper and suddenly I had notebook pages full of fic.