Yuletide reveals
My AO3 name is drayton, and I wrote the following fics for Yuletide, all in the Oxford Time Travel Universe:
A Different Perspective
Bombed Out
Facing Dragons
Nothing Lost
This is my first Yuletide. Last summer, I went on a Connie Willis binge and took it into my head to write a short fic (The Best Laid Plans). At the time, I didn't even know what Yuletide was.
I spent most of September dithering about whether or not to sign up while a few OTTU ideas were rattling around in my head, gaining momentum. The first, which remains unfinished, was about Basingame's relief at getting away from the tedium of being Head of History, only to return to Oxford and discover one of his student historians is in 1348. I shelved it when I realized I was far more interested in what happened to Dunworthy, Kivrin, and Colin than I was in Basingame, but that failed story eventually lead me to Facing Dragons. Told from Kivrin's POV during the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, it's my personal favorite of the stories I wrote for Yuletide, but I found myself wondering about a few things Kivrin couldn't have witnessed, which is why Colin got a sidecar story, A Different Perspective.
Bombed Out is a direct response to a prompt I saw when the letters post went up. I wrote a first draft of it I called Removed For Safekeeping, hated it, scrapped it, and started again with a new title and different POV. I was much happier with the second version.
By the time the letters post went up, I'd decided to sign up for Yuletide, and possibly write treats and/or pinch hits. In the meantime, my recent re-read of All Clear had gotten me wondering how, exactly, Colin had spent those ten years it took him to find the missing historians. I started noodling around with plot possibilities, writing down the constraints I had: when had Colin known/done X? Why had it taken him so long? I wrote a chapter, to see if I liked it. I liked the chapter, but not the working title (Nothing Lost), and the story didn't map well to any Dear Yuletide Writer letters I could see. I decided to write it anyway, on the side, and post it sometime after Yuletide. That made the most sense, as I was guessing the finished story length would be between 75K and 80K. I was not going to overcommit. I was going to Do Yuletide Sensibly.
And then everything went off the rails. The day after I signed up for Yuletide, my elderly Mac died. I wasn't sure when I'd be able to replace it and had horrible visions of getting an assignment I'd be struggling to write because I didn't have regular access to a computer. I dropped out of Yuletide in a panic and by the time I got my hands on a new computer, signups had closed, so I continued working on treats, including the monster fic. I did NaYuleWriMo, but underreported the number of words I'd written and tried to make it sound like I was working on a truckload of short treats to deflect any possible curiosity about what I could be writing that would need so many words.
I had a bad few days when I thought I'd seriously misjudged the length of the piece, and it would be coming in closer to 100K than 80K, but I went off and wrote something else for a few days while I rejiggered the plot to make the chapter lengths more even and bring the overall length back into line. I also worried about whether Colin seemed to be maturing during the course of Nothing Lost, but the next time I took a quick break from it, I went back and re-read Facing Dragons and realized that Colin sounded much younger in it to me, so I think it came out all right.
I don't think I would have finished in time if I hadn't done NaYuleWriMo, but by the beginning of December, I had an aching elbow/wrist and a first draft of everything. I spent December polishing my fics and adding another several hundred words to Nothing Lost, only to discover an "I love everything about this fandom! Anything would be great!" sort of request for OTTU, so it ended up in Yuletide, after all.
I made a few half-hearted attempts to write two more treats in mid-December, but by then I was pretty fried. Would I write 93K worth of fic for Yuletide again? Oh, hell no. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :-)
A Different Perspective
Bombed Out
Facing Dragons
Nothing Lost
This is my first Yuletide. Last summer, I went on a Connie Willis binge and took it into my head to write a short fic (The Best Laid Plans). At the time, I didn't even know what Yuletide was.
I spent most of September dithering about whether or not to sign up while a few OTTU ideas were rattling around in my head, gaining momentum. The first, which remains unfinished, was about Basingame's relief at getting away from the tedium of being Head of History, only to return to Oxford and discover one of his student historians is in 1348. I shelved it when I realized I was far more interested in what happened to Dunworthy, Kivrin, and Colin than I was in Basingame, but that failed story eventually lead me to Facing Dragons. Told from Kivrin's POV during the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, it's my personal favorite of the stories I wrote for Yuletide, but I found myself wondering about a few things Kivrin couldn't have witnessed, which is why Colin got a sidecar story, A Different Perspective.
Bombed Out is a direct response to a prompt I saw when the letters post went up. I wrote a first draft of it I called Removed For Safekeeping, hated it, scrapped it, and started again with a new title and different POV. I was much happier with the second version.
By the time the letters post went up, I'd decided to sign up for Yuletide, and possibly write treats and/or pinch hits. In the meantime, my recent re-read of All Clear had gotten me wondering how, exactly, Colin had spent those ten years it took him to find the missing historians. I started noodling around with plot possibilities, writing down the constraints I had: when had Colin known/done X? Why had it taken him so long? I wrote a chapter, to see if I liked it. I liked the chapter, but not the working title (Nothing Lost), and the story didn't map well to any Dear Yuletide Writer letters I could see. I decided to write it anyway, on the side, and post it sometime after Yuletide. That made the most sense, as I was guessing the finished story length would be between 75K and 80K. I was not going to overcommit. I was going to Do Yuletide Sensibly.
And then everything went off the rails. The day after I signed up for Yuletide, my elderly Mac died. I wasn't sure when I'd be able to replace it and had horrible visions of getting an assignment I'd be struggling to write because I didn't have regular access to a computer. I dropped out of Yuletide in a panic and by the time I got my hands on a new computer, signups had closed, so I continued working on treats, including the monster fic. I did NaYuleWriMo, but underreported the number of words I'd written and tried to make it sound like I was working on a truckload of short treats to deflect any possible curiosity about what I could be writing that would need so many words.
I had a bad few days when I thought I'd seriously misjudged the length of the piece, and it would be coming in closer to 100K than 80K, but I went off and wrote something else for a few days while I rejiggered the plot to make the chapter lengths more even and bring the overall length back into line. I also worried about whether Colin seemed to be maturing during the course of Nothing Lost, but the next time I took a quick break from it, I went back and re-read Facing Dragons and realized that Colin sounded much younger in it to me, so I think it came out all right.
I don't think I would have finished in time if I hadn't done NaYuleWriMo, but by the beginning of December, I had an aching elbow/wrist and a first draft of everything. I spent December polishing my fics and adding another several hundred words to Nothing Lost, only to discover an "I love everything about this fandom! Anything would be great!" sort of request for OTTU, so it ended up in Yuletide, after all.
I made a few half-hearted attempts to write two more treats in mid-December, but by then I was pretty fried. Would I write 93K worth of fic for Yuletide again? Oh, hell no. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :-)