Yuletide reveals

draytons — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 04:42:34 GMT

This was my second Yuletide, and the first time I'd actually signed up. I wrote six stories:

Rewritten (Incompetent Time-Travelling Saxophone Haters)
Thursday Next and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Fic (Thursday Next)
Patron Saint (The People)
Postscript (The People)
Recalled to Life (Oxford Time Travel Universe)
Revenant (Oxford Time Travel Universe)

Last summer, I took a look at the Some Day My Fic Will Come spreadsheet and saw that there was a request for Zenna Henderson's The People short stories. I'd read them a long time ago, and decided that if I could get my hands on the canon, I'd write a treat. As it turned out, I double-matched to my recipient (on The People and OTTU), so they got an unexpectedly bountiful Yuletide.

Patron Saint is a response to a prompt to show how the People might use present-day technology, such as the internet, to locate lost members. Originally, I thought of having some sort of gift for computers/networks be a new Persuasion, but then decided it would be more fun to tell the story from the POV of someone not in the know, which eventually led to the idea of a video game: something that could be widely dispersed to a general audience, which would serve as a message to scattered members of the People who remembered the Crossing, and might be used to locate unaware descendants.

Postscript is a direct sequel to one of Henderson's stories. Gilead tells how Peter and Bethie found their way to Cougar Canyon and the People, but ends with a hint that Peter isn't going to instantly blend in. Postscript takes up the action from there, and details Peter's struggle and journey of self-discovery.

Revenant is the third story I gave my Yuletide recip. Actually, it was begun first, before I could get my hands on a copy of Ingathering, but sat unfinished for some time. It shows us Kivrin a few years after the events of The Doomsday Book. Although she's mostly recovered from her practicum, Kivrin is trying to gather her courage to return to Ashencote and bury Roche. I enjoyed showing her interacting with Dunworthy, but spent a ridiculous amount of time looking up things, especially medieval saddles. I spent a lot of time researching saddles, and ended up scrapping nearly everything I'd written about them.

Thursday Next and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Fic is an idea that had been floating around in my head without really congealing for months, and it seemed likely to stay that way, since I was the only person who requested Thursday Next for Yuletide. While skimming through the letters looking for treat ideas in general, I was intrigued by one which said, "Any of these prompts or anything I've requested for any previous Yuletides." I didn't know any of their 2015 prompts, but their letter made me curious about their previous letters. When I saw a request for meta for Thursday Next, preferably set early in the series, I decided it was time to gather my half-ideas and set them down. I'd like to say it took me a lot of time to find all those tropes and badfic crimes but that would be a total lie.

Rewritten was a treat that became a post-deadline pinch hit. I'd loved the idea of Incompetent Time-Travelling Saxophone Haters from the moment I first encountered it, during nominations. I even offered it, thinking I'd probably write some sort of slapstick about incompetents who spent more time arguing over which instruments should be erased from history than actually achieving anything. I didn't match on it, and put the Saxophone Haters on the "maybe" pile. When the request went out for a pinch hit the first time, I almost bid for it, but held back because I didn't have a solid story idea and Revenant was getting longer and longer. By the time I actually sat down to write something, my initial idea had morphed from incompetent comic figures to a usually-competent-but-mysteriously-foiled graduate student. In between, I'd toyed with the idea of having Adjustments be a government/military unit, but when Weird Paul showed up, I knew I'd have to go with academia. Despite being a 5-minute fandom and a relatively short fic, the worldbuilding in this one took a lot of "thinking" time.

Recalled to Life was the last story I wrote for Yuletide. I'd considered treating the "show Dunworthy and Polly, either in 1941 or after their return" prompt from the time that letters went up, but didn't have any ideas that seemed workable to me. When the request went out for a late pinch hit, I decided to redouble my efforts to come up with a story idea for a treat. I wanted to write about how Dunworthy felt during the days when he believed that he hadn't broken history after all, but believed he wouldn't be retrieved before his deadline. I was still struggling with not-quite-connecting bits and pieces the evening I had to go sing in the chorus for a Messiah sing-along. Sometime during the solo "The People That Walked in Darkness", I realized I had the glue I'd been looking for.

Looking back, it was fun to write in a lot of different fandoms. (Last year, I wrote four treats, but they were all in the same fandom.) Next year, I'll probably try to do the same, although next year I'll know that 5-minute fandoms don't lead to 5-minute fics!

Yuletide reveals

draytons — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 03:20:10 GMT

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. :-)