Forgot to mention: Yuletide signups are now open. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, there’s a FAQ here that explains a lot. (And also this, but it’s kind of more “entertainingly helpy” than “actually helpful.”)

Signups will be open until the 28th. Further updates will be posted on (official) and (community); also, this post is worth keeping an eye on.

Yuletide is a lot of fun, and includes many things you might not class as “fanfic” in the normal way of things. I encourage people to check it out!

Signups haven’t opened yet, but since I already have this written (heck, much of it is copy-pasted from previous letters) I might as well post it.

Dear Yuletide Writer

For those who are interested, Yuletide nominations have begun.

Note that this is an optional part of the process, even if you want to do Yuletide; it’s only necessary if there’s something specific you know you want to request. (Or offer, since some people nominate based on what they’d be interested in writing.) If you do have something in that vein, though, nomination is the only way to be sure it will be available this year.

(If you’re not sure what Yuletide is in the first place, or want more info, there’s finally an up-to-date FAQ you can consult.)

And we are done with anonymity; the authors have been revealed! I can now talk about what I did for the last month, after finishing novel revisions. 😀

findabair, did you peek or something?! 😉 Because you managed to throw a dart at a board 2598 fics big, and hit my assignment. That’s right, I matched with ladyanneboleyn on Cirque du Soleil’s show Alegría, and as a result, wrote “If You Have No Light.” It’s possibly one of the weirder things I’ve ever produced; while I adore Cirque, Alegría isn’t the one I’m the most familiar with, and so I had to force my brain to do a lot of high-speed composting of all the beautiful-but-strange things floating around the margins of that show. I really do like some of the touches I managed to put into that one, though, and I kind of hope Cirque gets requested again in the future. There really is so much hinted-at story in what they do, that deserved to be teased out more.

Next I wrote a treat, and here I’m cackling about who didn’t guess. Not one but two friends pinged me to say “YOU MUST READ THIS STORY IT’S AWESOME” . . . and linked me to my own fic! <chortle> The tale in question is “The Rest,” which arose out of reading a few prompts for The Sandbaggers, and then one for Casino Royale, which reminded me that SIS = MI6, and a crossover promptly fell out of my head. It probably loses something if you don’t know the first source (or the second, though that’s a much smaller percentage of the population — hi, maratai!), but I hope I managed to interest a few more people in that brilliant, brilliant show.

Then, ladies and gents, I had Angst. I even posted to the Yuletide community about it. I had this idea, see, but it was entirely possible somebody else had the same idea, and if that somebody else was the assigned writer I was going to feel like I’d copied their prom dress . . . and then five minutes after I posted that, the request came up for a pinch hit, and I just about sprained something grabbing it. 😀

Normally, of course, I’d say that two writers can produce very different results from the same idea. In this case, however, there was a lot less wiggle room than usual, because the idea in question was “The Tough Guide to Yuletide.” WOOOO, I managed to write one of this year’s hits! I sort of thought that might be the case, since Yuletide meta is one of the things people tend to like, but I did not anticipate the scale of my success. Prior to this, my most widely-read story was “Desert Rain,” my Elfquest pinch hit from last year. That got 223 hits over the course of the subsequent year. “The Tough Guide to Yuletide”? Had nearly 1400 before the author reveal. Holy cats, y’all.

The other funny thing here is that I had a panic attack of second-guessing: what if my recipient wasn’t all that interested in Yuletide meta? Just to cover my bases, I ran off and wrote a treat fic for the same person, also based on The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: “A Special Limited-Time Offer,” wherein I (lovingly . . . for the most part) mock the current wave of “gritty” epic fantasy. So yeah, two of this year’s three Tough Guide fics are my work, and both got a lot of love.

I also got a lot of love for — let’s see if LJ herniates on this text — “待龙纹身的女孩 (Dài lóng wénshēn de nǚhái) ,” a Mulan fic based on the “Twisted Disney Princesses” fan-art series. (If you can’t read that, it’s characters followed by “Dai long wenshen de nuhai” with a lot of diacritical marks, which is, according to the hippo who helped me, the official Mandarin translation for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”) The fact that I’m playing a Togashi monk in a Legend of the Five Rings game had nothing to do with my interest in that one, nosirree . . . Obvious title is obvious, but I figured I could be a little more creative, and avoid the odds of duplication with somebody else’s fic, if I took it out of English.

And finally, one final treat squeezed out at the last minute, because I’d seen the request weeks before and loved the concept enough that dammit, I wasn’t going to let the chance slip by. “A Devilish Exercise” was inspired by a prompt for a Hamlet crossover with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (and ended up waaaaay darker than the other fic written from the same thing). The bad part? I, er, mentioned in my notes on the fic that I had to stop the story where I did in order to prevent it from turning into a giant Hamlet AU . . . and then every comment I got urged me to go ahead and write the giant Hamlet AU.

The first chapter of that has just gone up.

I had a lot of success this Yuletide; not only did three of my fics get more hits in the last week than my most popular fic before did in a year, but I was lucky enough to see almost all of them recced on the Yuletide member community, several of them more than once. Some of that, I think, is more a matter of fandom than anything else; a lot more people are familiar with, say, Mulan — or Yuletide meta/the works of Diana Wynne Jones — than with the Gabriel Knight computer games. Still, pretty satisfying. 🙂

Heh. Just realized today that in all the madness of writing six fics for Yuletide, I almost forgot about the challenge starlady38 and I are running. The page for that is here, if you missed it before but like the idea, and you don’t have to have participated in the prompt-generation phrase to write fics for any of the prompts there now. (You do, however, need an AO3 account; e-mail me if you want an invitation, which lets you bypass the queue.)

(Also, while I’m still on fanfic-related matters, I should mention that I won’t be replying to any guesses as to what I wrote for Yuletide until after the reveal. But I may offer some kind of prize if there are any correct guesses.)

Happy New Year, all! I’ll see you in 2012.

I don’t know how many of you reading this participated in Yuletide (or at least have been reading through some percentage of the collection), but I might as well toss out some bait for interested parties to try and guess what I wrote.

Nota bene: do NOT go look at my page on the AO3 to see what I’ve written in the past. There’s a bug that causes the fandoms my stories are in to be displayed, even for the stories that are still anonymous. It pretty much gives the game away.

This year I went a bit overboard and produced six stories. (This is a bit of a problem; last year I wrote four, which means next year my OCD brain is going to want me to write eight. At least.) One was my assignment, one was a pinch-hit, and four were treats. Several of those were supposed to be stocking stuffers (meaning less than a thousand words), but they all ended up higher: four were in the 1000-2000 word range, one was 2000-3000, and one was 3000-4000.

I wrote for three stage productions of one stripe or another, two movies, one TV show, one book, and one piece of art. If those numbers don’t seem to add up to six, that’s because three of the fics are crossovers, and I wrote in one fandom twice. Only one is a fandom I’d written in prior to this Yuletide.

Any guesses?

(And yes, we intend for regular posting here to resume before long.)

Back on April Fool’s Day, somebody posted this video, a “trailer” for a TV show that doesn’t exist but should: “The Aurors.”

starlady38 tried to nominate it for Yuletide, but it didn’t make it through to the final list. However, that doesn’t stop us from doing RENEGADE YULETIDE RARRRR a private exchange of our own. If you’d be interested in writing, basically, a “cop drama” story set in the Harry Potter world, leave a comment here and let her know. We don’t have specifics yet, and there’s no commitment; this is just to get a rough head-count before working out the actual mechanics of the exchange.

. . . man, I would love to see that show be real. Alas, this is the closest I can come. 🙂

<hands on hips>

Okay, who is/are the overachiever(s) that already uploaded three fics to the Yuletide collection? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PEOPLE, ASSIGNMENTS WENT OUT A FEW HOURS AGO.

Yuletide signups are open, and will run until 8 p.m. EST on Monday, if you were thinking of joining us for some holiday fun.

Onward to the details for my signup.

Fandom nominations have opened. If you haven’t been following the admin community, be aware there are some changes: three fandoms, four characters each, and only characters who have been nominated will be eligible for requests or offers. There’s a partial list of ineligible fandoms, as well as a post (with spreadsheet) for what people intend to nominate (so people can avoid duplication) and a post for what has been nominated so far (since the official list won’t be visible until it’s over).

You have until 21:30 EST (edit: on Monday, sorry to have left that bit out) to get your nominations in; signups will open soon after.

Happy Yuletiding!

Yuletide being my first official foray* into fanfiction, I’d like to spend a little time thinking about it. Out loud, of course, because that’s what LJ is for.

(*Technically a lot of the stuff I made up in junior high was fanfiction, either of the “insert my own original character into this novel” or the “huh, I really like this setting, let me run amok in it with only passing references to the canon” varieties. But most of it never got written down, and none of it was really shared with anybody. Hence unofficial.)

I had to offer 4-8 different fandoms, and the ones I chose were: the Gabriel Knight computer games, K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, Hard Boiled (the John Woo film with Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung), Into the Woods (the Sondheim musical), Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Norse mythology, and Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

How did I choose them, from a list of about four thousand? It was complicated.

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>

And the four stories are . . . .

Now that the AO3 is no longer weeping for mercy, I feel safe in pointing you all at What I Got For Yuletide.

A few days before Christmas, I noticed I had two gifts listed on my profile. My assigned writer had turned in their piece, and some total stranger had decided to write me a little something extra. Not until Christmas, though, did I discover what they were. Remember that crazy crossover idea, the The Nightmare Before Christmas/Hogfather mashup I really wanted but had no guarantee I would get?

Dear Readers, I didn’t just get one story of that sort; I got two.

My assigned writer produced “‘Twas the Night,” in which an unexpected midair collision between two sleighs leaves Discworld’s Death and Halloweentown’s Jack Skellington debating the nature of reality while Sally and Susan Sto Helit team up to fix the problem. A bit less than six thousand words of awesomeness, featuring guest appearances by characters from both stories, including (eeeeee!) the Death of Rats.

Then! Somebody else browsed the list of prompts, saw what I had requested, and wrote me “The Ill-Advised Skeletal Exchange Program,” wherein Death and Jack Skellington are pen-pals and arrange a temporary swap. Sally is Helpful, and Susan is Not Amused, and the Death of Rats shows up again, because he’s just too awesome to leave out.

Folklorist Brain is entirely fascinated to see the differences and similarities that result when two writers produce their own takes on the same prompt. Yuletide Brain is bouncingly happy to have gotten an extra gift. Anybody who’s interested is welcome, nay, encouraged to share in the bounty; go read the stories, and if you get a 502 error just try again later, when the archive has once again staggered to its feet.

(I can’t tell you yet what I wrote for Yuletide; that has to wait until after New Year’s, when the authors are revealed. Until then, I’m having to sit on my hands not to respond to the comments I’ve received so far. If anybody wants to play the “guess what I wrote?” game, though, your clues are that I wrote four pieces, one over 4K, two in the 1-2K range, and one less than 1K for Yuletide Madness; none are for novels, and no two are in the same fandom or media type. Also, no RPF: the modern stuff squicks me and the historical stuff was too much like work. Given that there were over three thousand stories produced for Yuletide 2010, though, and I have no pre-existing track record of fanfic for you to base your guesses on, I don’t expect anybody to spot my work. If you do, I’ll find some prize to give you.)

Woot. That’s a draft of my Yuletide story, in less than four thousand words. Time to sleep now; in the morning, I can decide if it works.