The big reveal has happened, and now I can tell you what I wrote for Yuletide.

Before I do that, though — it’s interesting, the ways in which this feels different than linking you to my stories on Beneath Ceaseless Skies or wherever. Those are written for a general audience; as a result, even when they’re connected to a pre-existing text (like the Onyx Court novels), I do my best to make sure they stand alone, and can be read by anybody who’s interested. In the case of Yuletide, though, they’re fanfic, which tends to be heavily in dialogue with the source text, often in ways that bypass the kind of exposition an independent story would need.

Which is a long and overly intellectual way of saying, I have no idea whether any of these stories will mean anything to people who don’t know the sources. Since two, possibly three, of them are on the obscure side, this is me throwing up my hands and going, “I dunno, people, read ’em if you want to.” <g>

My assignment was for the Gabriel Knight series of computer games — the only source I both requested and offered. It’s the longest and most plotty of the four, which I think is fair (given that it was my assigned work), and the result is here: “What Lies in Books.” Spoilers for the second game, The Beast Within — but since the games all date to the ’90s and you need to download special fan-created installers to make them run in modern versions of Windows, I think the expiration date for spoiling is well and truly past. 🙂

Then, when that was done, I decided to write a full-length treat for one of the other sources I had offered, the crazy (and fantabulous) Japanese film K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro the Sexiest Man Alive. (So dubbed by kurayami_hime.) “The Basics of Being a Lady” is silly bit of fun, and not particularly spoilery, though it may not make a lot of sense without having seen the movie. I need to do a recommendation for that at some point, but it deserves its own entry, so for now I’ll just say that if you’re fluent in or a native speaker of Japanese, please check out the notes at the end and tell me what you think gyoukei might mean in that context.

Third up was a pinch hit in a fandom I hadn’t offered, but knew very, very well: the comic book series Elfquest. The recipient requested something about Woodlock and Rainsong, and I obliged with “Desert Rain.” Writing that was a very interesting experience; Rainsong is the sort of character I don’t grok very well, but I feel like writing the story helped me understand her better.

And finally, I did a short ficlet for Yuletide Madness, this one again from my offers; two different prompts for Hamlet combined in my head to produce “More an Antique Roman,” musing on what things were like for Horatio while Hamlet was exiled during Act IV. Not a fully-baked story, just a few hundred words of character snapshot, but it seems to have been well-received all the same.

I’ll have more to say later about the experience of Yuletide, but I want to close out by thanking perryvic, my assigned writer, and meridian_rose, who wrote my treat, for giving me that pair of delightful presents. I’ll be back to comment more on AO3 later — but first, off to my New Year’s party!