fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2012-12-16 07:33 pm
some_stars) wrote2012-12-16 07:33 pm
(no subject)
There's a meme going around where you talk about your own fic? SIGN ME UP. Specifically, a Yuletide retrospective, via toft, which even though I no longer participate because anxiety, I did for seven years so let's do this thing.
2003
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
Stargate: SG-1
The first year of Yuletide! Full of non-rare fandoms! Of course it would be completely impossible to administrate a rare-pairings-in-popular-fandoms challenge for more than a couple hundred people, and now there are fandom-specific challenges and exchanges for that. But it was a great idea, even if it did lead to people nominating Harry Potter in every subsequent round.
Anyway, this is my Teal'c/Apophis fic, and being as it is from 2003 there's a LOT of stuff wrong with it, but I still stand behind the concept. I also stand behind the concept of more Teal'c porn in general, because seriously. Teal'c.
2004
And o'er his heart a shadow
The Road to El Dorado
I am not linking this one because I really don't like it. It was also cheating, because I took a commentfic I'd already written and expanded it, though not to very good effect. But it's RtED threesome fic, and as evinced by subsequent creative efforts on my part, this is also an idea I stand behind.
2005
Such deliberate disguises
Batman Begins
So my dirty Yuletide secret is that I actually kept writing rare pairings in popular fandoms for several years after the first round. I just wrote them about the movie versions, so nobody noticed. I'm just not suited for Yuletide, frankly. I can't write about books, or movies, or the kind of TV shows that don't attract fandoms. I mean, look at my list--Stargate, movies about DC comics, Dark Angel, The Vampire Diaries--that is really not in the spirit. Which is one reason I stopped participating.
However, I really like all those unspirited stories! Well, not always "really," but I still have all of them linked on my master list, which is not true of most of my writing before about three years ago. This particular one is about Jonathan Crane. Scarecrow was kind of a peculiar choice to inaugurate a new Batman franchise; I get the thematic idea re: fear (how could you not), but it's still...weird, and kind of unsatisfying. But Cillian Murphy's crazy eyes make it work, so I wrote a story about him. Also I wrote a story about this horrifying and deeply scarring story I read once about a scarecrow. Did anyone else read those "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" books? With the absolutely fucking demonic illustrations? And there was one about a scarecrow that came to life and killed some boys and skinned them. Who the fuck thought it was okay to market those books to children, that's what I want to know. Shit, I started reading Stephen King in fourth grade and his books never bothered me half as much.
Anyway, this fic is terribly self-indulgent and full of unnecessary sentence fragments, but I love it nonetheless. Oh for those sweet and vanished days when I didn't hate Batman and everything associated with him! Alas.
2006
On our finger the ring awakes
Superman Returns
And the award for most inappropriately sourced title in the history of the world ever goes to: me! Probably. It's a poem about the Holocaust (inasmuch as a Paul Celan poem can be 'about' anything), I don't know what the fuck I was thinking. Aside from "oh gosh I love this poem" and "this story is about marriage!" Which it is, even though Richard and Lois weren't married. Because of that, really. I found that fact so interesting, and the general nature of their relationship as portrayed--somehow it was both tenuous and deep, constantly threatened but always sure. So my fic is about how people become married without getting married (but in the dramatic metaphorical sense, not in the sense of common-law marriages).
So ultimately, I guess the poem isn't quite as inappropriate (although still...no), because the story is about the connection between Richard and Lois, the one they continually build and rebuild and affirm over and over, every day, by living their lives--raising their kid, choosing to stay together without being married, Richard choosing to support her even after Superman reenters the picture. And in my fic, Lois choosing--deliberately, consciously--to make Richard a central part of her life.
The story is also about how much I loved Richard. You guys, I really loved Richard. REALLY REALLY. And I loved Lois, despite the movie sometimes trying very hard indeed to prevent my love. At the time I described this fic to someone as a feminist treatise, which it isn't really--it's from Richard's POV and primarily about him, for one thing--but the way I wrote Lois here is my attempt to fix how the movie used her.
2007
Big Love
Probabilities in View
Dark Angel
This is the year I defaulted--IDK what the fuck I was thinking when I offered Shakespeare--and then felt bad and wrote a different story for someone else. And then a tiny pornographic Treat for yet another person. They were both Dark Angel, that being my thing at the time, and Big Love was a surprising hit. I really didn't expect there to be that many people getting so excited about a short G-rated fic about Joshua. But there were, because Yuletide is wonderful.
So the main thing with Big Love is that I love, love, love Dark Angel post-series fic. On the whole I think season one was better, but season two hits so many of my kinks, and the finale--and the promise of what would come after, what Terminal City had become, a movement and a community and a guerrilla army and a family--that is 100% fannish kryptonite to me. I've read so many post-series fics, and I had to write one. I think I only got the idea to do Joshua POV because the person I was writing for asked for him in their requests, but it turned out to work beautifully. The show did very well by Joshua, letting him grow and change and be more complex than he seemed at first, and it was easier than I expected to write from his POV because as a character he makes so much sense, and he has a very distinctive voice. I did have to slip some Max/Alec in there, because I ship them forever and ever and ever. But apparently people appreciated that too.
The other story is just porn. Very short porn with a stupid title that I grabbed from some notable-quotations site. But pretty good porn, I think. Man, there was so much Dark Angel porn I wanted to write. So much. But this was all I ever managed.
2008
The absolute absurdity of end-series items
House of Leaves
...so, yeah. I wrote HOL fic for Yuletide. This was the year I first read and fell in ridiculous forever love with that book, which by the way I am still in and always will be. I talked about this story a year ago, and that remains most of what I have to say on the subject. What I didn't mention there in my litany of things I love about the book, and what I think I failed to capture, is the effect created as the narratives start to collapse in on each other, how you first get to enjoy puzzling out who wrote what and who's more real, and then you realize that it's all equally real and authorship, or being a character, is an illusion. Or something like that. I suspect it's impossible to capture that feeling in a fic, though, unless you flat out recreate it--somehow build a mess of creators and creations in a web as tangled as the one connecting Zampano and Pelafina and Johnny and Will and Karen and the rest of the family. Which would require rather more scope than a Yuletide fic permitted me (and rather more skill than I have).
I am quite proud, though, that I actually wrote HOL fic, and not just fic about the house. There's been some fantastic fic along those lines in lots of fandoms, and I have enjoyed it greatly, but I've never seen anyone write fic about the whole work, not just The Navidson Record. Or I hadn't, until the Yuletide archive opened the year I wrote this story, and someone else had written a Winnie the Pooh crossover/fusion that on the surface is another TNR fic, but in form is a perfect compacted little echo of the whole book. So maybe it doesn't require more scope after all. But definitely still skill.
2009
What falls away
Blows me home
Further adventures in sneaking soon-to-be-popular fandoms into Yuletide! "Sneaking" is not really accurate, since it was perfectly according to the rules, but it felt a bit ridiculous. Not enough to keep me from offering and writing it, though! These are my most recent Yuletide fics and the ones that I think hold up the best. This is also the year that I started writing a few weeks earlier than usual. Certainly these two facts are unconnected.
I quit watching TVD about 2/3 of the way through season one, and never got caught up, and then stopped wanting to catch up. But I really liked what I watched, and I hewed to my usual pattern of liking The Other Guy in the main slash pairing. The one who isn't dark and sexy and sassy and evil. Which is not to say I didn't have very strong feelings about Damon, as hopefully the stories indicate, but I never even considered writing from his POV, while writing from Stefan's was effortless. That's the kind of character who captures my attention, at least these days. I haven't been able to fall head over heels for the Spike type since...well, since Spike, pretty much. I still love watching those guys, but my heart will always settle on the un-sassy guys standing next to them, loving them while trying to keep them from doing so many murders.
toft, which even though I no longer participate because anxiety, I did for seven years so let's do this thing.2003
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
Stargate: SG-1
The first year of Yuletide! Full of non-rare fandoms! Of course it would be completely impossible to administrate a rare-pairings-in-popular-fandoms challenge for more than a couple hundred people, and now there are fandom-specific challenges and exchanges for that. But it was a great idea, even if it did lead to people nominating Harry Potter in every subsequent round.
Anyway, this is my Teal'c/Apophis fic, and being as it is from 2003 there's a LOT of stuff wrong with it, but I still stand behind the concept. I also stand behind the concept of more Teal'c porn in general, because seriously. Teal'c.
2004
And o'er his heart a shadow
The Road to El Dorado
I am not linking this one because I really don't like it. It was also cheating, because I took a commentfic I'd already written and expanded it, though not to very good effect. But it's RtED threesome fic, and as evinced by subsequent creative efforts on my part, this is also an idea I stand behind.
2005
Such deliberate disguises
Batman Begins
So my dirty Yuletide secret is that I actually kept writing rare pairings in popular fandoms for several years after the first round. I just wrote them about the movie versions, so nobody noticed. I'm just not suited for Yuletide, frankly. I can't write about books, or movies, or the kind of TV shows that don't attract fandoms. I mean, look at my list--Stargate, movies about DC comics, Dark Angel, The Vampire Diaries--that is really not in the spirit. Which is one reason I stopped participating.
However, I really like all those unspirited stories! Well, not always "really," but I still have all of them linked on my master list, which is not true of most of my writing before about three years ago. This particular one is about Jonathan Crane. Scarecrow was kind of a peculiar choice to inaugurate a new Batman franchise; I get the thematic idea re: fear (how could you not), but it's still...weird, and kind of unsatisfying. But Cillian Murphy's crazy eyes make it work, so I wrote a story about him. Also I wrote a story about this horrifying and deeply scarring story I read once about a scarecrow. Did anyone else read those "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" books? With the absolutely fucking demonic illustrations? And there was one about a scarecrow that came to life and killed some boys and skinned them. Who the fuck thought it was okay to market those books to children, that's what I want to know. Shit, I started reading Stephen King in fourth grade and his books never bothered me half as much.
Anyway, this fic is terribly self-indulgent and full of unnecessary sentence fragments, but I love it nonetheless. Oh for those sweet and vanished days when I didn't hate Batman and everything associated with him! Alas.
2006
On our finger the ring awakes
Superman Returns
And the award for most inappropriately sourced title in the history of the world ever goes to: me! Probably. It's a poem about the Holocaust (inasmuch as a Paul Celan poem can be 'about' anything), I don't know what the fuck I was thinking. Aside from "oh gosh I love this poem" and "this story is about marriage!" Which it is, even though Richard and Lois weren't married. Because of that, really. I found that fact so interesting, and the general nature of their relationship as portrayed--somehow it was both tenuous and deep, constantly threatened but always sure. So my fic is about how people become married without getting married (but in the dramatic metaphorical sense, not in the sense of common-law marriages).
So ultimately, I guess the poem isn't quite as inappropriate (although still...no), because the story is about the connection between Richard and Lois, the one they continually build and rebuild and affirm over and over, every day, by living their lives--raising their kid, choosing to stay together without being married, Richard choosing to support her even after Superman reenters the picture. And in my fic, Lois choosing--deliberately, consciously--to make Richard a central part of her life.
The story is also about how much I loved Richard. You guys, I really loved Richard. REALLY REALLY. And I loved Lois, despite the movie sometimes trying very hard indeed to prevent my love. At the time I described this fic to someone as a feminist treatise, which it isn't really--it's from Richard's POV and primarily about him, for one thing--but the way I wrote Lois here is my attempt to fix how the movie used her.
2007
Big Love
Probabilities in View
Dark Angel
This is the year I defaulted--IDK what the fuck I was thinking when I offered Shakespeare--and then felt bad and wrote a different story for someone else. And then a tiny pornographic Treat for yet another person. They were both Dark Angel, that being my thing at the time, and Big Love was a surprising hit. I really didn't expect there to be that many people getting so excited about a short G-rated fic about Joshua. But there were, because Yuletide is wonderful.
So the main thing with Big Love is that I love, love, love Dark Angel post-series fic. On the whole I think season one was better, but season two hits so many of my kinks, and the finale--and the promise of what would come after, what Terminal City had become, a movement and a community and a guerrilla army and a family--that is 100% fannish kryptonite to me. I've read so many post-series fics, and I had to write one. I think I only got the idea to do Joshua POV because the person I was writing for asked for him in their requests, but it turned out to work beautifully. The show did very well by Joshua, letting him grow and change and be more complex than he seemed at first, and it was easier than I expected to write from his POV because as a character he makes so much sense, and he has a very distinctive voice. I did have to slip some Max/Alec in there, because I ship them forever and ever and ever. But apparently people appreciated that too.
The other story is just porn. Very short porn with a stupid title that I grabbed from some notable-quotations site. But pretty good porn, I think. Man, there was so much Dark Angel porn I wanted to write. So much. But this was all I ever managed.
2008
The absolute absurdity of end-series items
House of Leaves
...so, yeah. I wrote HOL fic for Yuletide. This was the year I first read and fell in ridiculous forever love with that book, which by the way I am still in and always will be. I talked about this story a year ago, and that remains most of what I have to say on the subject. What I didn't mention there in my litany of things I love about the book, and what I think I failed to capture, is the effect created as the narratives start to collapse in on each other, how you first get to enjoy puzzling out who wrote what and who's more real, and then you realize that it's all equally real and authorship, or being a character, is an illusion. Or something like that. I suspect it's impossible to capture that feeling in a fic, though, unless you flat out recreate it--somehow build a mess of creators and creations in a web as tangled as the one connecting Zampano and Pelafina and Johnny and Will and Karen and the rest of the family. Which would require rather more scope than a Yuletide fic permitted me (and rather more skill than I have).
I am quite proud, though, that I actually wrote HOL fic, and not just fic about the house. There's been some fantastic fic along those lines in lots of fandoms, and I have enjoyed it greatly, but I've never seen anyone write fic about the whole work, not just The Navidson Record. Or I hadn't, until the Yuletide archive opened the year I wrote this story, and someone else had written a Winnie the Pooh crossover/fusion that on the surface is another TNR fic, but in form is a perfect compacted little echo of the whole book. So maybe it doesn't require more scope after all. But definitely still skill.
2009
What falls away
Blows me home
Further adventures in sneaking soon-to-be-popular fandoms into Yuletide! "Sneaking" is not really accurate, since it was perfectly according to the rules, but it felt a bit ridiculous. Not enough to keep me from offering and writing it, though! These are my most recent Yuletide fics and the ones that I think hold up the best. This is also the year that I started writing a few weeks earlier than usual. Certainly these two facts are unconnected.
I quit watching TVD about 2/3 of the way through season one, and never got caught up, and then stopped wanting to catch up. But I really liked what I watched, and I hewed to my usual pattern of liking The Other Guy in the main slash pairing. The one who isn't dark and sexy and sassy and evil. Which is not to say I didn't have very strong feelings about Damon, as hopefully the stories indicate, but I never even considered writing from his POV, while writing from Stefan's was effortless. That's the kind of character who captures my attention, at least these days. I haven't been able to fall head over heels for the Spike type since...well, since Spike, pretty much. I still love watching those guys, but my heart will always settle on the un-sassy guys standing next to them, loving them while trying to keep them from doing so many murders.
no subject
Also <3 to all your yuletide projects! But mostly I just wanted to drop in and say WHAT'S UP, LET'S ALL WRITE FIC 4EVS BASED ON THAT SONNET
no subject