She Is Poetry and Prozac

yuletide reveals are in a matter of hours, and before authors are unmasked, I wanted to sneak in under the wire to heap well-earned praise upon my giftfics and link a few of the stories I've loved this year.

I received two wonderful works:

After The Showdown
Westworld, Maeve Millay, Felix Lutz, Bernard Lowe, Dolores Abernathy
What happened next?
Takes the immediate aftermath of the finale in a direction I never expected. Maeve is every bit as clever and calculating and composed in the face of the new and unkown as we've come to expect, but she's also playing a long game for the good of not only herself but every host like her, who wants the free will they always thought they had. Bernard, Dolores, and especially Felix all play pivotal roles in her plan. An extremely interesting premise that I would love to see expanded.

Lekach
Penny Dreadful, Ethan Chandler, Ferdinand Lyle, Sembene
A cut finger takes Ferdinand Lyle to the kitchens, where he finds warmth, acceptance and help from Ethan and Sembene. They all find ways to look for simple hope and joy in the work of their hands.
What I asked for, in one of many Penny Dreadful prompts, was a bit of a what if throwaway for these three -- what if Sembene conducted baking lessons? What I got was this lovely, poignant, thoughtful slice of life between this trio of men who were, separately, among my favorite aspects of an amazing show. In putting them together, and playing to each of their strengths, my wonderful Yuletide treat author has created something so hopeful and touching and needed that it brought tears to my eyes. In the words of Sara Bareilles' Waitress, it's amazing what baking can do.

I haven't been through as much of the archive as I'd like, but I do want to shed some light on some of the stories that really hit home with me thus far this Yuletide, things I haven't necessarily seen recced elsewhere but definitely deserve to be shared.


Black Mirror

Count the Stars as Blessings
Kelly/Yorkie
She stays quiet, and laughs and cries with Kelly and keeps her thoughts to herself.
Even living out the Ever After, Yorkie still struggles to believe it's real. Achy and lovely and completely believable.


The Bold Type

a long time before we come down
Kat Edison/Adena El-Amin, Jane Sloan, Sutton Brady
A chance (re)meeting on the street.
Love lost and found again, with a side of support from good friends. Wonderful characterization.

keep me (next to you)
Kat Edison, Jane Sloan, Sutton Brady
Five times Jane, Kat, and Sutton end up in a bathtub together. And one time they don't. AKA: The Bathtub Chronicles.
A forever friendship forged (and reinforced) in bathtubs of all shapes and sizes. Pitch-perfect voices, delightful plot points, and a perfect tribute to the bond between these girls. One of my very favorites in the collection this year.

Wanderlust
Kat Edison/Adena El-Amin, Jane Sloan, Sutton Brady
Kat's never seen the world, but it's best with the woman she loves by her side.
Kat leaves home and finds home, with and without Adena. Beautifully, truthfully told.


The Bourne Legacy

All The Way Home
Aaron Cross/Marta Shearing
Three things Marta didn't expect after she went on the run with Aaron.
The two of them, learning each other in the aftermath. Sharp and sparse, in the best way possible.


The Edge of Seventeen

have a heart
Nadine Franklin, Krista, Erwin Kim
Of course it wasn’t until Krista was gone that Nadine realized she’d measured her whole life by her.
Nadine comes to terms. Perfectly captures the tone of the film, and of teenage years themselves.


How to Be Single

'til the party and the music and the truth collide
Lucy/Tom, George
One day she just walks back into his bar… Actually, it's a little bit more complicated than that.
Life is what happens while you're making other plans, as Lucy has discovered. Romcom turned real life, with a well-earned happy ending.


iZombie

Dr. Scratchy, Z.M.D.
Liv Moore, Clive Babineaux, Ravi Chakrabarti
Ravi may have started a zombie health blog. Liv might have some thoughts. Clive allegedly wants nothing to do with it.
Plausible, pitch perfect, and absolutely hysterical.


Jane the Virgin

Follow the Leader
Jane Villanueva, Alba Villanueva, Xiomara Villanueva, Petra Solano
Everyone needs a role model to follow, especially single mothers like Jane and Petra.
The incredible women of JtV, learning from each other and passing each lesson on with love.


The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond

All That Glitters
Jimmy Dobyne/Fisher Willow
“I’m not against you, Fisher.” “But are you with me, Jimmy? Are you with me?”
Wow was someone channeling Tennesee Williams here. Astonishing grasp of the langauge and flow, and of Fisher's drama and desperation.


While You Were Sleeping

Paper & Oak
Jack Callaghan/Lucy Moderatz, Midge Callaghan, Ox Callaghan, Elsie, Saul Tuttle
It’s a whirlwind of too many cooks in the kitchen, and as Lucy takes her seat at the dining room table, she looks around and wonders how she ever spent Christmas without these people.
Another Christmas with the Callaghans, and everything that endeared Lucy (and us) to them in the first place. Super sweet.


Wonder Woman

ruat caelum (fiat justitia)
Antiope, Hippolyta, Diana, The Amazons
“Antiope. Hestia tried to kill her lover just past sunset today.” Diana learns justice and mercy at her mother's knee.
Fascinating look inside Antiope's head, at the things she values, and how far she'll go to protect them.

Stories are live, authors have been revealed, which means it's time for the annual Yuletide post-mortem.

This was my first-ever Yuletide default. I was originally matched on iZombie, a show I have fallen head-over-heels in love with and was ridiculously excited to write. My recipient requested my holy trinity of Liv, Clive, and Ravi — all systems go so far. I spent some time talking through ideas with Sara (my canon beta) and Jules (my brain board), and decided to go with Clive character exploration with a healthy dose of backstory. Still good to go. I wrote roughly 2800 words of banter and research and case fic. I was excited.

Then, "The Hurt Stalker" happened.

December 1, 2015, a day that will live in infamy. Because, folks, iZombie aired my fic on national television.

Oh, the fine details were different. The case itself, for instance. But the vic being Clive's ex? Check. Clive being a suspect? Check. Hints of Creole heritage? Check. There were no fewer than four lines that were nearly identical to dialogue in my fic.

I spent the entire episode texting Sara in sheer disbelief. Here, have a taste of my madness.





As a last-ditch effort, my brain spit out a crack bunny (what if Liv ate a superhero?!). That bunny was promptly boiled, Fatal Attraction-style, by the scenes from the next ep, where (wait for it) Liv ate a superhero.



(Pay no attention to the Hamilton squee behind the curtain.)

So that was that. I slunk away to click the default button for the first time ever. Original recip, I hope you had a wonderful Yuletide. It wasn't you, it was me.

I did, however, pick up a pinch hit. My contribution to this year's crop was one fic in Fast & Furious fandom. If the Kevin Bacon Game has taught us anything, it's that the universe is small and fandom is even smaller, and this year's Yuletide proved it. This was an assignment for the lovely arysteia, who wrote me the world's most perfect fic in this same fandom for Not Primetime earlier in the year. Salute, la mia Famiglia is legitimately everything I wanted and more — an amaizing happily-ever-after for my favorite found-family, without being schmoopy or trite or taking away from anything the films themselves have established.

As you might imagine, this was a somewhat daunting assignment.

arysteia requested F&F in two different permutations — Brian/Dom for the original film, and post-Furious 7 for the perfect square of Dom, Letty, Brian, and Mia. But specifically, she wanted a le Guin-based troped called a sedoretu, where marriages are made up of four people and entail four separate relationships. It was a great premise, and F&F has the perfect pairings for it, so I tried my best. Euclidean (The Sacred Geometry of Chance) took the idea of that square (and several other mathematical metaphors) and spread it over the series, with a focus on the first film, and Dom in particular &mdash trying to trust Brian, not only in general, but with the things he holds most dear, namely Mia (and, unbeknownst to him, Letty). One of the things the Yuleletter mentioned was a love of identity porn, and making Brian literally forbidden from the outset was such a fun way to play with that concept. This fic really wanted to be about three times as long as it is now &mdash to spread out and breathe across the rest of the films the way it is through the first &mdash but deadlines are a bitch. I hope to be able to expand it and tell the story that I meant to tell, and that my recip deserves, but I hope she enjoyed it, anyway.

I received a wonderful slice-of-life Hamilton fic, A Strong Enough Foundation, about Angelica Schuyler being awesome Alexander and Angelica being dear friends in the face of unrequited love and unresolved daddy issues. It is insightful and lovely, go read it post haste.

Until next year!

I just realized that I never managed my annual Yuletide post-mortem. Novel, on February 1st - I'm only a month late. :)

Life got away from me this year. While I had grand plans for multiple treats, work, wedding planning, and travel all added up to enough time for exactly one fic, my assignment (and even that was a near thing). Luckily, it was kind of the story I most wanted to tell.

I wrote The Once and Future, in Edge of Tomorrow fandom. Sara dragged me kicking and screaming into this movie, declaring it a must-watch despite my aversion to Cruise. And man, was she right. It's smart, it's fast, and it's unexpectedly funny as hell. Most of all, it features a flawless performance by Emily Blunt, who is both a costar in every sense of the word and the true hero of the story. I can honestly say that this is the first Yuletide when I've gotten my assignment and gone "yes, that's exactly what I wanted to write". My recipient seemed to love exactly what I did about the movie, but more than that, it's literally a wide-open canon, with infinite possibilities and tons little throwaway moments to expand and explore. The whole film hinges on the fact that Cage is not the first to experience what he's going through, and I thought, what if Rita wasn't, either? I grew entirely too attached to Hendricks (who I really wanted to be Idris Elba, but somehow morphed into Justin Theroux in my head the moment he first opened his mouth) and really, really hated killing him. Over and over. Ad infinitum. But I loved loved loved writing Rita, with all her honor and competence and repressed attachment, and getting to see things (and Cage) through her eyes. Plus, I got to write a non-linear storyline, which you know is one of my favorite things in all the world.

Plus, that Scandal fic that made me flail like a crazy flaily thing? Yeah. martinigrl wrote it. She totally failed at stealth this time around (unlike last year, when she was actually assigned to me and delivered the most perfect Fiona Gallagher fic ever written), but it was absolutely the best present ever.

All in all, another good Yuletide down. Until next year.

Remix authors are no longer anonymous, so I suppose it's time to claim my efforts.

As far as the pinch hit goes, I got the assignment on Sunday. In fact, I took it without even looking at the author's fic beforehand. (Not something I recommend if you're remixing, by the way. I just really lucked out.) The original plan was to remix Wreckage, a 500-word Sam-centric piece with all sorts of awesome possibilities. It was the very first thing I read, a bunny was born immediately, and I spent all day Monday plot pointing and beat sheeting for the fic I would write. I even named it (and y'al know that's the clencher, for me). And then, Tuesday morning, I went to print out the original and made the cosmic mistake of clicking another fic. You know, just out of curiosity. And all of the sudden I was scrapping the original plan to tell an entirely different story, despite the Wednesday night deadline. But I ended up with Shells of a Long-Ago Lifetime (Faces That Once Were Mine Mix), a take on clex_monkie89's lovely Fragments of a Life You Shouldn't Miss. I got to play with structure and symbolism, two of my very favorite things. I got to slip inside Dean Winchester's head again, somewhere I haven't been in awhile. I got to write my very first AU, since the original deviates from canon long before the pilot. And I got to do it all in a really, really tight turnaround time, which was exactly what I needed.

It felt so amazing to write again that when another eleventh-hour pinch hit came through, I seriously contemplated taking that one, too. It got claimed before I could do anything stupid (and in hindsight, thank god), but the bunny stayed with me. And with Remix Madness not opening until the day after the main collection, I just decided to write it anyway. Something to Talk About (The Million Dollar Quartet Cover) is a remix mashup of lady_krysis' So You Know and I Do; It's Official, two parts of a series centered on my one and only OT4. That's right, baby's first poly! As we have already established, I love writing Jake Jensen. As stream-of-consciousness characters go, he's right up there with Tony Stark and Kyle Valenti on my list of all-time favorites. The Losers is an interesting fandom for me, as someone who's lost nearly all of her shippiness, because you can pretty much take one part Jensen to equal parts anyone else and hey, I ship it. Jensen/Cougar? But of course. Jensen/Pooch/Jolene? Don't mind if I do. Jensen/Cougar/Pooch/Jolene? Abso-friggin-lutely. Again, the source fic series was the first thing I read, but there was no going back on this one (seriously, the world needs more of this foursome). The fic was basically built around an amusing hypothetical - what if Jensen made soccer field scenes everywhere? - but it was one scene and one line in particular that kicked things off. Bonus points if you can guess which line that is. :) It was fun to explore how each piece of the puzzle fits, and how the dynamics between all of them are different, yes, but ultimately what makes the whole thing work. I wrote it in a day, which I haven't done in ages, and somewhere along the line it got a little weighter than I wanted it to, but I think that makes it interesting. (I'm also deeply amused that this fic even exists, since I swore I was done with Chris Evans for awhile.)

So that's it for me. Hopefully next year, I'll be able to participate in Remix proper.

Every year I make a writing-relating resolution. It's usually something specific and focused that I can work on slowly (read: procrastinate) for the next twelve months, and eventually never actually finish. This year, after having such a rewardingly-productive Yuletide season, I decided to join forces with the_afterlight and do things a little differently.

And then we completely lost our minds.

So I give you The Resolution Resolution, our pledge to write one NYR prompt a week for the next year. For those of you keeping count at home, that does indeed translate to 52 fics in 52 weeks. I have my "maybe" list narrowed down to about, oh, 620 prompts, so there's no shortage of potential. There will be occassional themes and challenges and surprises, and I think I speak for both of us when I say that it's both exciting and utterly terrifying.

The first fic on the docket is...

Lost In Translation
The Losers, Jensen/Cougar, Pooch, Clay, Aisha, Roque.
For just_katarin and elishavah. Characters are property of Diggle, Jock and Vertigo, I'm just playing with them for awhile. Can you blame me? They're kind of glorious.
Jensen's given a Spanish side mission, and learns more than he thought he would. Sometimes in song.

( "Spanish? Seriously, Clay?" )

This one got out of hand. I will not be writing 6500-word fics every week, I wouldn't survive the year if I did. But this was an absolute blast. I love writing stream of consciousness characters - the ramblers, the blurters, the ones that can't even shut up inside their own heads - and Jake Jensen is among the best of them.

Tris wrote an adorably delightful Final Fantasy XIII fic this week, Might As Well Be Me, so be sure to check that out as well.

See you next time!