nomadicwriter: John "Ludwig" Taylor (Ludwig)
Hello to any prospective [community profile] caseficexchange writers! This is one of my absolute favourite genres of fic and I have pretty broad tastes when it comes to what I read, so please don't worry about sticking too closely to any specific prompts if you've got your own ideas; I'm just trying to offer a few suggestions because I know casefic plots can be difficult to come up with from scratch.

My AO3 name is Nomad (nomadicwriter). I've requested fic in all the fandoms below, but if you're feeling extra generous both fic and comic treats are very much welcome!

General Likes and Rambling )
Cadfael Chronicles - Ellis Peters )
Jonathan Creek )
Ludwig )
Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators )
nomadicwriter: John "Ludwig" Taylor (Ludwig)
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition random Candy Hearts treat in a fandom I've never written before!

Been feeling like my media-consumption has been a bit backward-looking in recent years, what with my project to reread and rewatch a bunch of stuff and the fact I don't really do streaming, so I've been making an effort to dust off my neglected iPlayer account and also check out some more recent books and DVDs. Hence this fic for Ludwig, a BBC detective dramedy from last year that I really enjoyed. It stars David Mitchell as a reclusive puzzle-creator who's roped into impersonating his missing police officer twin by his sister-in-law, Anna Maxwell Martin.

The Simple Things You See Are All Complicated (Ludwig, John/Lucy UST, 3250 words)

The longer James is gone, the more complicated things get. Still, at least they have John's natural grace in navigating emotionally difficult situations to see them through.

Might try and write some more fic for the fandom, since mine is currently only the sixth in existence. (Apparently I can get into newer canons, but still unerringly lock on to ones that are tiny in terms of fannish activity, because that's just how I roll.)

Other things:

I watched S1 of Severance, since it got a DVD release ahead of the new series. Didn't love it as much as I hoped, though sticking it out resulted in a more favourable opinion than I might have had if I'd bailed early on. Very slow-paced, and doesn't really start getting rolling until episode six of nine; there's a lot more focus on atmospheric worldbuilding at the expense of plot progression than is really my thing, and while the cast is strong and it had its moments, I ultimately didn't get very invested. Wouldn't completely rule out watching more, but no burning urge to, either.

Tried out and bounced off a lot of other things as either too-humourless dramas or too-episodic sitcoms, and as a result currently seem to have fallen into watching Jonathan Creek. Which is rather counter to my objective of watching more recent canons, but it's surprisingly hard to find the sort of procedural dramedy I'm apparently in the mood for right now. At least it's mostly new to me, aside from the odd snippet caught on TV here and there.

Book-wise I've also been checking out the Slough House/Slow Horses books. (I've heard good things about the TV series, but it doesn't seem to have a UK DVD release.) Wasn't sure I was going to get on with the writing style at first, but the sense of humour won me over, and on the strength of the first book I bought the next few in the series to read. Currently halfway through the second.
nomadicwriter: Valeria Richards building things in the lab (Valeria Richards)
Yuletide reveals are upon us! This year I was unusually organised and rewatched a bunch of potential fandoms earlier in the year instead of trying to cram everything in November, so I actually ended up signing up again instead of just treating. Which worked out well for me, since I received a delightful Drop the Dead Donkey fic, The Hero We Deserve by brutti_ma_buoni!

My plan for my own writing was to have a nice relaxing time writing my main assignment in a fandom I know well and then attempt some treats at my leisure. Then my assigned fic got very long and ambitious, I picked up a late pinch hit in a fandom I've never written before, still wanted to tackle a couple of my planned treats, and generally finished up in the usual chaotic scramble. I ended up writing four fics in total, for Blackadder, Yes Minister, the UK House of Cards Trilogy and NetHack.

General Relativity (Blackadder, 20k words, Blackadder/Darling)

Darling's remarkable resemblance to French traitor the Duc de Darling - no relation - sees him unwillingly sent to infiltrate a German-occupied château. Blackadder accompanies him even less willingly, especially when he learns exactly what it is they're looking for.

(Baldrick is also there, but no one bothered to find out if it was willingly or otherwise.)

An old favourite fandom of mine I was delighted to be assigned! I was intrigued by the recipient's time travel prompt, and so this turned into a pseudo-crossover between Blackadder Goes Forth and Blackadder II, with supporting plot elements borrowed from the canonical time travel adventures in Blackadder: Back and Forth. I could tell it had, perhaps, got a little ambitious plot-wise around the point I was 10k in and they still weren't inside the time machine. Still, it was a fun challenge trying to distinguish the characterisations of the different versions of Blackadder. (Lord Blackadder is really much more of a charmer and more status and image-conscious; Captain Blackadder is very tired and done with everything and definitely doesn't care what impression he's making on anyone. Baldrick II is also, not precisely brighter, but a bit more in touch with reality and aware of his Blackadder's various shortcomings.)

A Matter of Definition (Yes Minister, 3,800 words, gen)

Early on in his time at the DAA, Jim attempts to pin down some important details about the department he now runs. Such as what it is that it actually does...

I rewatched YM early on last year, having planned for years to do so and never quite managed it in time for Yuletide. When I realised how long my assignment was getting, I regretfully gave up on having time to treat it, but then a pinch hit came up pretty late in the writing period and like a lunatic I claimed it. The recipient gave free rein to write anything, so I ended up spinning up an episode-style plot out of nothing in particular. Which feels sort of fitting for the show, really.

Set My Life Upon a Cast (House of Cards Trilogy UK, 2,400 words, gen)

Francis Urquhart is not a man to believe in visions other than his own.

I was actually just finishing watching the House of Cards trilogy when Yuletide assignments went out. (I did a bit of a themed rewatch of 80s and 90s UK political shows this year, on a sort of cross-pollination theory that elements from one might help spark fic ideas for another, though I'm not sure how that actually worked in practice.) The prompt suggesting throwing something out of context like supernatural elements at Urquhart caught my eye, but again I'd sort of given up on finding time to write it until I saw the recipient go out as a pinch hit and was inspired to finish the treat. It seemed natural to write it in first person, given FU's habit of addressing asides to the audience. I considered the more obvious Something Wicked This Way Comes for a title, given all the Macbeth references, but decided that this Richard III line which FU also quotes was more fitting.

Any Other Business (NetHack, 1,200 words, gen)

Minutes of an emergency meeting of the Minetown Council Action Committee.

Always excited to see people asking for fic for old-school roguelikes! Seeing this in the tagset got me playing NetHack again for the first time in about fifteen years. (I'd been meaning to check it out again ever since the devs returned from their long hiatus and started to release new updates in, cough, 2015, but never quite got round to it.) I initially had the idea of writing something from the POV of the Minetown watch, but didn't have a clear idea for a plot, and so the recipient's liking for in-universe documents gave me this idea for a framework. Typically, just when I wanted to revisit Minetown for some in-game inspiration while I was writing, I managed to get a really good game going that went all the way to ascension, so I never got a chance to repeatedly replay the early game as is the more usual NetHack experience.

*


Overall, glad I managed to sign up! Received a great gift, wrote some new and different things, and generally had a pretty good Yuletide all round.
nomadicwriter: Doctor Doom shooting fireballs (blast radius)
Jumping back in to sign up for Yuletide again for the first time in quite a few years! Hi to any prospective writers, and please try not to stress too much about writing for me. I have pretty broad tastes when it comes to the kind of fic I read, and am really just looking for more about my favourite characters rather than having my heart set on any one particular type of story.

My AO3 name is Nomad (nomadicwriter), and treats are enabled and very much welcomed if you're feeling extra generous!

Some General Likes )
Drop the Dead Donkey )
Infamous Iron Man )
Yes Minister )
nomadicwriter: Valeria Richards building things in the lab (Valeria Richards)
This is your annual "resurfacing from lurkdom to post my Yuletide fics" post! Had a bit of a tough writing year this year, for no obvious reason other than I was probably due one after having had some really prolific Yuletides in recent years; I was only writing treats but just lacking in any inspiration for ages and then the writing itself was painfully slow. Thought for a while I was only going to manage two stories and struggle to do that, but in the end I finished my second one with a week to spare and squeaked a third one in under the wire. All humour fics this year, for Terraria, Porridge and Blackadder.

Don't Hate the Player (Hate the Game) [Terraria]
Perhaps a more cautious man would have stopped to ask more questions when the request for a replacement guide had come in with the reason filled out as 'spontaneous combustion'. (2800 words)

I don't play that many recent(ish) video games so jumped at a chance to write for this one, which was possibly a mistake because I proceeded to spend far too much of the early writing period "doing canon review" in the form of playing Terraria. I knew I wanted to write something from the POV of the Guide NPC witnessing the player's bizarre behaviour, but the idea went through many different revisions: I debated whether to go with a humour or horror angle, and considered writing it in the form of reports and diary entries; I started out with the original Guide's POV from the start of the game through to the Wall of Flesh but felt that dragged too long and ended rather darkly, and also came with the issue of having to give the player character a name at some point. Ultimately I switched to the alternative of the replacement Guide's bafflement at arriving in this post-hardmode world where everyone else has had time to get used to the player's weirdness. The narrative also ended up being shaped to an extent by a mix of the particular combination of nominated NPCs and the setup of the world from my playthrough at the time.

A Bit of Bottle [Porridge]
Fletcher's life is complicated by Grouty's latest scheme, some questionable craft projects, the ill-advisedness of carnal thoughts in prison, and Godber. (Fletcher/Godber, 6,900 words)

Trying to write Porridge slash was an interesting challenge, but I was motivated by being surprised to see how little fic existed, a grand total of three crossovers on AO3. I didn't expect a lot, but I did think there'd be a bit more than that. (Of course, Yuletide going the way it does sometimes, by the time I'd finished writing this both people who'd requested the fandom had already received it for their main gift, so we managed to double the amount of fic between us!) At any rate, it was a good excuse to revisit the series, which I probably hadn't seen since the repeats I watched as a teenager in the 90s. Slightly boggling to realise it's now 50 years old; though it has its moments of 70s values, it still holds up very well. I guess the prison setting partly helps to give it a sense of timelessness, but I also watched the spin-off Going Straight for the first time and thought that was equally strong. And frankly worth the price of admission for the first episode with Fletcher and Mackay's final parting alone. All in all a bit of a nostalgia fandom I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting.

Major Opportunity [Blackadder]
After being presumed dead, Blackadder seizes his chance to escape the trenches, and hopefully avoid ending up actually dead. (Blackadder/Darling, 3100 words)

By the time I'd finished and edited my Porridge fic I had about five days left, so I turned to a reliable old standby fandom, Blackadder; I know the characters inside out, the relevant series only has six half-hour episodes, and I own the scriptbook, so it's one I can always dive right back into without needing a lot of canon review. Plus it's always great fun to write capers for! I actually ended up writing for the same person I treated last year, since I sleuthed out that the other possibility had a Blackadder fic as their main gift already (which actually turned out to be the longest story in the Yuletide collection and also written by the person I treated, so good call me). I was still editing at 4am Christmas Eve, again, but glad I persevered and got it finished.

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What else have I been up to this year on a vaguely fannish front? Probably lots of things, but my brain is cheese. Oh, I also rewatched the first series of Yes Minister in the run-up to Yuletide, but ran out of time to watch the later series or write anything. Maybe next year! In a rare foray into currently airing TV I also watched the final series of the BBC's Ghosts, which I really enjoyed, plus the Christmas special. The latter was more of an Ending ending than I would prefer, being generally a fan of open endings where the status quo continues, but it was still fine and didn't ruin anything for me.

My project of attempting to (re)read every book I own in an effort to winnow out my bookshelves continues, albeit in slightly self-defeating style, since I finally got around to continuing with the Vorkosigan books that have been sitting on the shelf since, cough, 2004, and promptly ended up buying even more books to complete the series. (I still have the last two to pick up; I thought Mirror Dance and Memory were the strongest, but like the later books well enough that I might as well finish out the series.)

On the book front I also checked out the Lockwood & Co books when everyone was talking about the Netflix series, since I remembered enjoying Stroud's Bartimaeus books back in the day. I've read three so far and they're fine, readable YA books but not grabbing me at all fannishly. (Predictably, the main character that actually piqued my interest was Barnes; show me a group of plucky teenagers saving the day, and like a heat-seeking missile I will immediately glom onto the nearest tired middle-aged authority figure wearily trying to deal with their antics.)

...I'm sure I must have read and watched more things than this in 2023, but what were they? No idea. The passage of time, how does it work?
nomadicwriter: [Doctor Doom] Victor Von Crankypants (Default)
Hello again, and welcome to your regular 1st January "I aten't dead" post where I surface long enough to throw some Yuletide fics at you before sinking back into lurkerdom. Once again I've only been writing treats instead of signing up, which I've been enjoying as a low-hassle way to participate and get some fics written.

I also seem to have started a new Yuletide tradition of picking up a random TV series off my to-be-watched list and then writing an excessive amount of fic while it's still fresh in my memory. Last year it was Ghosts, where I wrote five fics; this year it was Foyle's War, where I only wrote two but both were long casefic, one gen, one undercover as a couple. (Funnily enough, it's probably indirectly down to Ghosts that I ended up watching it, since doing some research on the WWII home front for fic about the Captain reminded me that I'd seen the early episodes with my dad and always meant to catch up on the rest.) I also squeaked in two other shorter fics in fandoms I've written before, Blackadder and the Tiffany Aching books.

Absent Men (Foyle's War)
November 1942. Sam's out of sorts, Andrew's due home on leave, and Foyle investigates a case involving stockings and wages clerks. (12,900 words)

This was - briefly - the longest thing I've written for Yuletide, my previous longest being just under 8k. I initially thought it might work out even longer, since the plot outline got pretty ridiculous. (52 bullet points!) But it crunched down a lot in the telling, being more just a case of needing a very detailed blow-by-blow of what was happening with the mystery in each scene. Much respect to all writers of TV shows who have to come up with a new murder mystery every episode, even the cheesy ridiculous ones; I had a clear idea of a couple of things from my period research I wanted to build the case around, and the plot was still a nightmare tangle to hash out. Very hard to take a stab at a line between 'too straightforward' and 'wildly over-convoluted', but it seems to have worked for people. Quite pleased with the title, too, which manages to make it seem like I had some sort of deliberate theme in mind to pull all my plot strands together. Haha, no, just happened to work out that way.

Intents and Purposes (Foyle's War)
After resigning from the police, Foyle reluctantly takes an undercover investigation for Hilda Pierce. Sam rather less reluctantly gets herself involved, and doesn't stop there. (Foyle/Sam, 19,600 words)

I was actually under the delusion that this one was going to work out shorter than Absent Men. Tropey undercover-as-a-couple stuff shouldn't require as much plot as a 'proper' casefic where the case is the main point, right? Instead it ended up being basically the same amount of plot plus the ship layered on top, and ballooned into not just my longest Yuletide fic but the longest thing I've written since my Alias trilogy back in, ack, 2009. Very pleased with how it came together, though! The title was initially a stopgap thing intended to do if I couldn't come up with anything better, but the more I thought about it the more I decided it actually worked.

Private Party (Blackadder)
A dubiously merry Christmas in the trenches. (Blackadder/Darling, 2450 words)

By the time I'd edited and posted my two longfics it was already the 21st, and I had devoted exactly zero brainspace to thinking about any other treats. But I happened to have seen this Blackadder request pass by on the pinch hit list, an old faithful fandom where I was confident I could write something short without needing much in the way of canon review, and the recipient's suggestion of a Christmas theme gave me somewhere to start. Blackadder is an interesting case where the title often influences the story for me; I try to keep within the canon tradition of titles themed around military ranks, and so brainstorming Christmas-related options led me to Christmas parties. I debated how much this actually merited being tagged as Blackadder/Darling slash; it's there but it probably falls under the banner of canon-typical silliness.

See Me (Discworld: Tiffany Aching)
It's hard being the local witch when you're still only ten. (3500 words)

I also saw that despite seven requests there were no fics in this year's collection for this series, so, having written it before a few Yuletides back, I speed-read the first few books over the final days of writing time, trying to come up with something I could write without needing to revisit the later books or wider Discworld. I had zero ideas until this concept finally came to me right before I went bed in the early hours on Christmas Eve. It seemed like a bit of a crunch but still doable to write a 1-2k fic in one day despite being at my brothers' for a few hours in the evening. Then it turned out a bit longer than that, and I was still editing at gone four in the morning. (Yes, it could have sensibly waited and gone in Madness, but I was committed by then.) Given more time I would have made some wording tweaks and tried to get more creative with the title and summary, but overall I was very pleasantly surprised with how well it held up when I had my first chance to reread it well after the collection had opened.

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Overall, I ended up writing a ridiculous 38.5k this Yuletide, where even in my most productive previous years I've rarely squeaked past 20k total. So now I will once again leave you with my equally traditional signoff, where I make vague noises about hoping to write some actual fic of my own outside of writing for exchange prompts this year, and then completely fail to do so. See you next January, more than likely!
nomadicwriter: Alison and Mike from the BBC version of Ghosts (Ghosts)
I finally managed something I've been trying to do for years, and actually wrote some treats for Chocolate Box. Three more Ghosts fics; apparently a sitcom with a relatively small number of episodes but a large cast is a good recipe for getting my writing brain in gear.

Familiar Problems (BBC Ghosts)
The house is visited by a shadowy presence. [1300 words]

The shortest of my three Chocolate Box fics (you will note I am bad at writing to low minimum wordcounts), featuring Alison, Mary and the Captain.
DIY SOS (BBC Ghosts)
With Alison away, the ghosts have to rely on Mike for entertainment. [1850 words]

Ensemble fic with Mike and the whole roster of ghosts. Between this and Yuletide I'm getting the definite impression that Mike fic is surprisingly popular!
Past Tents (BBC Ghosts)
The Captain and Pat take a moment to admire their handiwork. (Well, theirs in spirit, anyway. Actually mostly Alison's.) [2500 words]

The second fic I've ended up writing based around the events of the camping episode. And back in the Captain's POV again, which just seems to be the one I find most natural to write out of all the ghosts.

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Writing was slightly hampered by the fact Covid finally caught me in early January. (Less than three weeks after I got the booster jab, so I suspect it snuck in under the wire.) The actual cold-type symptoms were so mild as to be indistinguishable from general seasonal blech, but the fatigue was pretty rough for the best part of a month, and I'm still not quite 100% in terms of building back up to my usual daily walk or how tired I get if I work late or stay up too long. Still, glad to have bumped past the worst of it.

My project of revisiting the books I used to read in my teens continues. I reread the Earthsea quartet, which I had slightly mixed feelings about. I don't think I get on with the more mythic style of the first three books so well any more; Tehanu was a much more engaging read on that front, but also a bit of a downer, and the ending feels a bit out of nowhere. I remember reading the follow-up books back when I came out, but I don't own copies and must admit the reread didn't really ignite my enthusiasm enough to bother seeking them out.

It's been interesting, though, reading this and the Merlin books right on the back of doing a Discworld reread. I feel like Discworld went on so long and became so much its own thing beyond the basic genre parody that it's easy to forget how much the setup and early worldbuilding is actually riffing on this era of 70s and 80s fantasy, especially when it comes to all the tropes around wizards and witches and men vs women's magic. So it's particularly interesting on that front to reread first the original 1970s Earthsea trilogy where those tropes are played very straight, and then Tehanu where they're revisited more critically two decades later.

Anyway, I'm actually now taking a step aside from the fantasy genre to reread the Cadfael books. I own most but not all of them, and it turns out I don't actually have the first, but I've now reread the A Rare Benedictine short story collection and book two, One Corpse Too Many. I can see why they were unlikely favourites of mine back in my early teens - they're surprisingly quick and easy reads to zip through. I've got enough of them to keep me occupied for a while, and then maybe I'll go on to A Song of Ice and Fire.

Still hoping to write some more Ghosts fic outside of exchange prompts, since I don't think there are many big exchanges coming up for a while that are likely to provide treat-writing opportunities while I'm on this roll, but we'll see.
nomadicwriter: Sulky Dorian glowering at annoyed Klaus (From Eroica With Love)
A year of Yuletide treats in new fandoms for me, and all gen this time. I wrote for Mary Stewart's Merlin books after doing a recent reread, plus finally got around to watching the BBC series Ghosts and ended up unexpectedly writing five different fics for it. Wasn't sure I was going to be able to come up for any new ideas for my perennial fandoms this time around, but then at the last minute I managed to squeak in an Eroica fic too.

Forms of Fire (Mary Stewart's Merlin)
Even the simplest tricks can have their uses. (3600 words)

After finishing my Discworld reread last year I revisited some other fantasy series I last read twenty or thirty years ago, including LotR and this series. Reading those two back to back had me thinking on how differently and sparingly the use of magic is depicted compared to more modern series where there's often much more of a D&D/videogame-ish attention to detailed magic systems with clearly defined rules, hence a story themed around Merlin's magic. This is set during the first book about his younger years, which was always my favourite, possibly because it's less restricted by following the outlines of well-established Arthurian legend.

Lend Me Your Ears (BBC Ghosts)
Talking can be difficult, but getting someone to listen might be even harder. (4400 words)

The first of my five Ghosts fics. The recipient suggested a five-times style fic about N times the Captain tried to come out, and that seemed like a great way to get a feel for writing different members of the ensemble without just launching straight into tackling eleven characters at once.

Philosophical Differences (BBC Ghosts)
Thomas and the Captain talk under the stars. Well, clouds. But the stars are still up there somewhere. (2050 words)

Another Captain-POV fic. I find him and Thomas a fun combination to pair up because they're such opposite extremes in terms of dealing with emotions. Like the recipient noted, they don't actually interact that often in the show itself, so this ended up being a missing scene from the camping episode.

Chest Trouble (BBC Ghosts)
A box found in the attic turns out to hold a wealth of history. Alison would have preferred a wealth of wealth. (4700 words)

This one is pure canon-style ensemble comedy hijinks and my first stab at juggling the whole cast all together. Great fun to write and spurred me on to revisit the other Ghosts prompts and see if I could keep the ball rolling with another fic or two. (Yuletide always seems to be a time of sitcom fic for me; I love writing comedy dialogue, but it can be tough to come up with plots without a prompt as inspiration.)

Nothing Sweeter, Finer (BBC Ghosts)
Snowfall brings back memories for everyone, but for the Captain most of all. (2150 words)

Back in the Captain's POV. The prompt was for heavy snowfall bringing back memories, so it seemed natural to set it during the canonical snow in the wedding episode. I ended up doing a ridiculous amount of research into past bad winters for the various ghosts to reference that then mostly got condensed into one-liners where I didn't even name a specific year, as these things usually go. Also, I slightly fudged things in my quest for an era-appropriate title, as it's from the song 'Winter Weather' which is 1941 while the Captain's flashback is to the winter of 1939. But, eh, close enough.

Dead Likeness (BBC Ghosts)
Mike tries to learn a little more about his new housemates. (2450 words)

Set between series one and two, the last of my Ghosts fics and funnily enough the one that most took off. I guess there's a yearning for Mike fic out there? I initially planned to switch to Alison's POV in some sections for logistical reasons, but decided it was stronger and probably funnier to find a way to stick with Mike's POV of not being able to see or hear the ghosts throughout. This went through a succession of terrible titles I was unhappy with until I finally pulled this one out at the last minute.

The Gift of the Major (Eroica)
Klaus and Dorian exchange gifts - in a way. (3100 words)

Much to my surprise I still had several days left to write another fic, so I revisited prompts for old favourite fandoms and managed to come up with a plot for some Eroica shenanigans. Then I had a chance to get my vaccine booster, spent a day and a half mildly feverish and in no mood to concentrate, and suddenly had a lot less time. I was still revising this and not yet sure it was going to come together an hour before I went to bed on the 24th, but it finally clicked. I tried various wordplays on exchanging gifts as a title before this one came to me, so I punted that bit to the summary instead.

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All in all, not sure how or why, but this seems to have been my most prolific Yuletide yet! I managed seven treats back in 2019 as well, but with a lower total wordcount. Might try and keep the momentum going and write some more Ghosts fic while I'm apparently on a roll. (I actually played myself by assuming there'd be lots of shippy requests and so being more of a gen writer I should get a head start on coming up with some story ideas... and then everyone wanted gen. So I might go back and see if I can turn any of those into fics.) But no promises I will actually produce anything.

In other loosely fandom-related news, I'm planning on going back to my project of rereading various book series from my youth after having been briefly sidetracked by filling some gaps in my Stephen King collection and then some non-fiction reference stuff. Earthsea and A Song of Ice and Fire are on my list fantasy-wise, though Yuletide also reminded me that I wanted to reread the Cadfael books. I also finally finished rewatching Cheers earlier in the year, and I did grab the whole-series box set of Frasier to follow up at some point, but I'm not sure I want to commit to another really long show just yet. Ghosts was about the right length for me to breeze through; I'm not so good at making it through shows with multiple seasons of twenty-something episodes these days.

Anyway, I would hopefully like to produce more fic of some sort between now and Yuletide 2022, but if not, see you in next year's version of this post.
nomadicwriter: Valeria Richards building things in the lab (Valeria Richards)
I opted not to sign up for Yuletide officially this year, but I did still manage to write three treats for it. All humour fic for old favourite fandoms this time around.

The Yunk and the Restless (Discworld: Monstrous Regiment)
Polly spends the night in a nest of vampires. It involves questionable accents, even more questionable nightclothes, and a certain amount of confusion over quite how she ended up classified as Maladicta's 'yunk lady'. (Polly/Mal, 3400 words)

Continuing last year's theme of writing for Discworld characters I haven't before, Monstrous Regiment fic! This was also my first attempt at writing a shippy Discworld fic, which I always feel is pretty tricky to pull off while keeping up the canon style of comedy. But, a bit like the Death books, Monstrous Regiment has its own slightly more sombre tone that gave me a little more room to work with. I actually scrapped the start of my original draft for this because I felt it was too gag-a-minute generic Discworld in a way that didn't quite match the mood of this specific book, but I'm pleased with how it eventually turned out.

Major Story (Blackadder)
Blackadder schemes to take advantage of Darling's talents. (Blackadder/Darling, 4800 words)

Another Blackadder Goes Forth fic, which I also wrote for Yuletide all the way back in, yikes, 2015. Blackadder's POV is great fun to write, but also kind of gruelling in terms of the sheer density of jokes required to fill out an episode-style plot. Apparently I had no brainpower whatsoever leftover to think of a remotely witty summary.

Cat Burglar (Eroica)
Dorian attempts to catch an elusive cat and an irritated major, with similar results all round. (1350 words)

I had three days left and I saw no one had written any Eroica fic yet this year, so I thought it would be a great fandom to come up with some sort of short, silly caper I could manage in the time remaining. Then I stared blankly into space for two of those days before finally coming up with an idea on Christmas Eve. "That's all right, it's only going to be a short fic anyway," I thought, and then spent all day getting bogged down in random bits of research on everything from 18th portrait miniatures to pedigree cat names to which types of trees are best and worst to climb. None of which was actually particularly important to the story, but hey.

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So, all in all, not my most productive Yuletide, but I'm pleased I managed to squeak in a few fics before the end of the year. I'm still vaguely hoping to actually write some more fic outside of Yuletide when I finally finish my Discworld reread, but then, I said the exact same thing last year, so who knows?
nomadicwriter: Valeria Richards building things in the lab (Valeria Richards)
Not signing up to Yuletide this year, though I still hope to write some treats for it, so here is my annual, "Yup, still here, still lurking," post that usually comes with it. Fandom/media-wise this year I have been mostly rereading Discworld (I'm on book 39 of 41), rewatching Cheers (originally planned as a prelude to doing the same with Frasier, but nine seasons in I'm not sure I have the stamina for another show of the same length at my slow pace) and playing a lot of Terraria and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. No fic accomplished thus far, but I have some vague Discworld ideas percolating that are waiting on me finishing the reread. Hopefully writing some Yuletide fics will be a good warm-up for maybe tackling something longer in the new year.
nomadicwriter: Doctor Doom shooting fireballs (blast radius)
Reveals are here! I received a fabulous Eroica bodyswap fic, A Different Sort of Day. Despite being tight on time I also managed to have my most prolific Yuletide ever and finish six treats on top of my assignment, much to my own vague bemusement.

The Rotten Heart (Behind You)
Stonetree is a town with a hell of a past. Then again, I have one of my own. (5150 words)

I was assigned to write for the Behind You webcomic, which I treated once before a few years back. After several failed stabs at writing for another of the nominated strips I switched to this one instead, and found the whole story just flowed from there. The name Chatty Alice popped into my head for the ghost right from the beginning, but I have zero idea why. I can guess the Alice might be some mental association with Alice in Wonderland illustrations, but where I got 'chatty' from I couldn't tell you.

Serving Spriggans Dungeonwide (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup)
The Spriggan Bakery Network: purveyors of the dungeon's finest vegetarian menu. Our staff are always happy to help!

Apart from Earl. We're a bit worried about Earl. (1150 words)

I'm always fascinated by requests for fic for roguelike games, which have a whole lot of lore and complexity but almost no plot, and I was playing DCSS a lot earlier in the year so it was still fairly fresh in my mind. It's a game I go back to on and off that seems to release a new version every time I turn round, and in fact when I checked if I was still up-to-date I found 0.24 had just come out during Yuletide signups. That ended up informing some details of the fic, since they made a change to weapons commonly used by spriggan enemies which inspired me to incorporate that and some other past gameplay changes as actual tech advances and cultural shifts taking place for the dungeon denizens.

Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams (Infamous Iron Man)
Victor returns to the ruins of Castle Doom in search of answers. (1450 words)

I always try to write some Doctor Doom fic for Yuletide, so I jumped on this request for more of Doom interacting with the fake version of his mother from Infamous Iron Man. Title is kind of an obvious choice of quote from The Hollow Men; I was vaguely chasing some other poem about shades I thought I remembered reading but couldn't manage to dig it up, so went with this instead. Summary brought to you by the, "Oh, crap, I was all ready to upload but only just remembered I still need a summary," school of half-assed summary composition.

Wayfinding (Discworld: Thief of Time)
All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, including the one to enlightenment. It's just that some people choose to walk a different way. (1900 words)

I started a Discworld reread a few months ago, though it got stalled a bit by various things taking precedence, and I was conscious that I hadn't written any Discworld fic for "a couple of years". (AKA since, yikes, Yuletide 2013.) Thief of Time seemed like a nice straightforward standalone for which I would only need to reread the one book, though it rapidly spiralled into reading all kinds of random other stuff for small snippets of Mrs Cosmopilite and Lu-Tze cameos, none of which actually proved necessary to the writing this fic. But reading a bunch of stuff out of order did reignite my enthusiasm for finishing my readthrough after getting a bit bogged down in the early books, and the fact that only the standalones and less popular subseries are eligible for Yuletide now meant I got to have fun revisiting books I wouldn't normally think to.

The Tortoise Moves (But Not Very Much) (Discworld: Small Gods)
Even the most strong-minded of witches would hesitate to wear a Borrowed body for too long, lest their way of thinking be permanently changed by the new perspective.
But of course, gods are different. (1250 words)

I hadn't initially flagged this request for treating, not remembering the book well enough to have any immediate ideas, but since Lu-Tze makes his first appearance in a cameo in Small Gods, I figured I could kill two birds with one bit of canon review and try to come up with something for it while also looking for any snippets to incorporate into Wayfinding. I was a bit stuck for title and summary when it came to the time to upload, so the parenthetical subtitle went through multiple revisions (I think it was "Slowly" and "But Only Slowly" before I settled on this one) and the summary ended up as just a rather clumsily abridged version of the opening lines.

A Kiss is Still a Kiss (Eroica)
Dorian has a plan. Klaus is difficult, as usual. (1650 words)

Eroica's another fandom of mine I hadn't written for a few years, since most people are pretty flexible about just wanting any canon-like caper and I'm a bit short on ideas by now without more specific prompts. The prompter's choice of phrasing somehow sparked off this one, which was also slightly inspired by a scene from Due South. Again, I was caught short at upload and had to pull out a fairly generic summary on the fly (you may notice a running theme here), but I do quite like this one.

The Bones of the Hills (Discworld: Tiffany Aching)
The old people called the biggest flints 'calkins', which meant 'chalk children'. (4250 words)

"Hey, I've still got four days left, surely I can reread at least the first Tiffany book and squeak another short treat in?" I said. Then it ran 3000 words longer than planned and I somehow decided it was a good idea to take my first stab at both Feegle and troll dialect in the same fic. But it turned out to be my most successful fic by a mile, so I'm glad I went for it. (Honestly quite bemused by how much it outdistanced my other Discworld fic; I had no idea the Tiffany books were so popular!) The troll stuff was probably inspired by rereading the troll scenes in The Light Fantastic some months back, and several little bits of serendipity came together in the writing: I set a scene at the river before I rechecked the description and found the canonical pebble beach, only reached Miss Tick explicitly mentioning a past ice age in Wintersmith after I'd already referenced one, and didn't plan any of the plot around the terrible pun at the end but came up with it in a flash of late inspiration during the writing.

---

All in all, a very successful Yuletide considering I was initially wavering over whether to even sign up this year. It's also kind of given me the urge to resurrect some old ideas for longer, non-Yuletide-eligible Discworld fic, although considering some of those outlines date back to, er, 2004, I wouldn't advise too much breath-holding.
nomadicwriter: Valeria Richards building things in the lab (Valeria Richards)
Hi, thanks for writing for me! I'm Nomad (nomadicwriter) over on AO3 and I'm generally pretty flexible in my reading habits, so don't feel like you have to stick particularly closely to any of my prompts if you've got a great idea for something else. They're really just some suggestions in case you're looking for inspiration.

Some general likes and dislikes )

Fandom-specific details:

Ballykissangel )

Doctor Doom (2019 Comic) )

From Eroica With Love )

Thanks again for writing for me, and, again, feel free to go your own way if you've got a different idea you want to write.
nomadicwriter: Valeria Richards building things in the lab (Valeria Richards)
I didn't officially sign up this year, which is probably just as well since I didn't really get much chance to write until December, but I did manage to finish three treats.

Emergency Procedures (Fantastic Four comics)
Reed notices Victor behaving oddly during a fire drill at ESU. Of course, when isn't Victor behaving oddly? Reed/Doom. (2100 words)

I had to fill [archiveofourown.org profile] chiaroscuros's prompt for Reed/Doom fic involving typical undergrad situations like early morning fire drills, because really I am just endlessly fascinated by this period in Doom's life where he's still living as a relatively normal college student at ESU. "Victor von Doom dealing with completely mundane things" is a genre that will apparently never get old to me.

There turned out to be three other people who also wrote Reed/Doom fic this year, but we all went completely different ways with it, which was fun. I feel like there's been a burst of new interest in Doom as a character from the fic side of fandom since Secret Wars and the whole Infamous Iron Man arc, and having been waving the Latverian flag mostly on my own for many years I'm very here for it.

A Snowball's Chance in Hell (Fantastic Four comics)
Ben tries to extend a hand of friendship to Victor in college. It goes about as well as expected. (1400 words)

My second "Doom in the ESU era" fic of this Yuletide. [archiveofourown.org profile] snowshus asked for something exploring the pre-canon relationship of Ben and Doom, which is something I've been a lot more interested in since their post-Secret Wars interactions with Reed gone and Victor trying to reform. They've always been previously portrayed as boringly one-note hostile, but really there's a lot gone unexplored about the fact that Ben remembers him from this pre-Doom period, plus digging into Ben's background to write this made me realise that really, growing up in poverty on Yancy Street and losing most of his family, he has a lot more in common with Doom's circumstances at this age than Reed does. Plus the contrast of young Victor's likely attitude to cold weather after his father froze to death versus typical US teenagers' response to snow is a theme I always wanted to do something with.

Parting Gifts (IT - Stephen King)
Everyone else might be leaving, but Mike still has work to do. (2750 words)

I wanted to write something more for IT while I still remembered it fairly well from my reread for last year's Yuletide. (For "remembered fairly well", read "vastly underestimated the amount of paging back and forth I would have to do to relocate tons of one-line references I was vaguely sure were in there somewhere".) [archiveofourown.org profile] Maidenjedi had a bunch of different character prompts but for some reason the idea of Mike and Beverly jumped out at me. I'm always interested in this transition period before the group has finished drifting apart, and Mike's is an intriguing position because he's the one who stays behind and remembers. For a while this was almost set at the library with Mike having an early part-time job there, but I decided most of the drifting away happened while they were still pretty young, plus there's so much in the books about his life on the farm that it made a much more atmospheric setting.

+++

So, anyway, these fics will also be crossposted to ff.net... um, sometime. Other fannish activity has kind of stalled a bit since I've been pretty busy at the end of this year, and have also just finally replaced my ancient Windows 7 PC. (It's nice to have one that's much faster, but man, every day with Windows 10 is a new adventure in finding fifteen more settings I need to turn off to stop it using all my bandwidth and sending my data everywhere, and Googling "How do I do extremely basic useful thing that used to be the default?" and to discover the answer is "They completely removed that functionality".)

At least I actually wrote one moderately long non-Yuletide fic as well last year? (Touch Therapy, House/Wilson, 10500 words.) So, again, this year I'll be hoping to catch up on more of my DVDs that have been piling up unwatched for years and write more fic throughout the year instead of just this brief burst of Yuletide activity.
nomadicwriter: Doctor Doom shooting fireballs (blast radius)
Have just crawled out from under a gigantic pile of work with a vague awareness Yuletide is going on, so, guess I'm not signing up this year. Hopefully things will free up a bit nearer the time and I'll still be able to write some fic, but I'm not going to risk committing to an assignment just in case. So, anyway, this has been your semi-regular "still alive and lurking" announcement.
nomadicwriter: House, Cuddy & Wilson (House)
Today in "finally getting around to watching DVDs I've had for over ten years" news: House fic! I'm poking at various longer plot ideas, but I'm only up to the beginning of s3 in my rewatch so far, so I've been writing some practice ficlets to prompts that ended up evolving into a longer House/Wilson thing. Set somewhere around season two.

Touch Therapy (10,450 words)

It's not that House needs the human contact. It's just that when you're sharing an apartment, these things happen sometimes.


Also up on ff.net, if AO3's still playing up as it was when I was trying to upload it.

Wow, this is the first non-Yuletide fic I've posted in years. I've got to try and get back in the habit of writing fic more regularly.
nomadicwriter: [Doctor Strange] Squee! (squee)
Reveals are upon us! My gift was History, an Infamous Iron Man fic by [personal profile] laireshi, who is one of the people I've been excitedly babbling to about my love of this comic (and Doctor Doom in general, but you probably knew that), so, yay!

I wrote three fics this year, which is less than I usually try for, but I've been so busy with various work things my main aim was just to finish the assignment, so I was pleasantly surprised to squeeze in a pair of longer-than-I-expected treats as well. Some babble about the writing of them below:

Interference Patterns (Infamous Iron Man/Fantastic Four)
Victor von Doom has lunch in the park and encounters some familiar faces. (3700 words)

I also matched on Infamous Iron Man as my assignment - in fact, I matched to damalur, who requested both that and the Fantastic Four comics as well, and loves pretty much all the same things that I do about them. So I got to have a lot of fun combining both requests in a fic where Doom meets the F4 for the first time since the events of Secret Wars. This was also my first time writing the new 'reformed' Doom, and turns out that wow, it is hard trying to write a Victor that's still fundamentally Doomy but also actively trying to move beyond the flaws that inform so much of his attitude and personality. It was made somewhat easier here by the fact I was writing from Doom's POV so I could have him still Dooming it up on the inside but keeping a better lid on it in his speech.

I was utterly stuck for a title for a long time, so I went for the tried and tested method of grabbing a random minor detail from the fic that sounds vaguely like it might have some kind of clever double meaning.

Not Bitter, Not Sweet (IT - Stephen King)
Beer and kissing games and memories. (4900 words)

I didn't watch the new IT movie, but the interest around it earlier this year sent me on a bit of a Stephen King revival kick, and I reread a bunch of books that I hadn't read for 20 years. IT was always a particular favourite of mine, and tearupthesky had some great prompts about Richie, Bev and Stan as teenagers (although I managed to take some of the more lighthearted suggestions and wander off into the more melancholy and horror-tinged aspects of the canon with them, so I'm pleased it was still well-received).

This one was very research-intensive, since it turns out writing for a 1116-page brick of a book with a big cast, an unfamiliar but vividly drawn 1950s Maine setting, and a complete pretzel of a timeline that makes it impossible to figure out where whatever scene you're looking for is actually located in said brick is... challenging. I think 90% of the writing of this fic was flipping back and forth between an ever-expanding set of bookmarks trying to find X one-line reference I knew that I'd seen somewhere. Again I had no title, but after some fruitless searching for 1950s lyrics about drinking, it occurred to me to revisit the Rheingold beer advertising jingle I'd looked up for an earlier reference in the fic (I used that brand because King mentions the bottles a few times in the novel) and the "It's not bitter, not sweet, it's the extra dry treat" bit was perfect for the bittersweet tone of this fic.

Needle Through the World (Mrs. Todd's Shortcut - Stephen King)
Ophelia Todd goes for a drive. (2200 words)

Another one from the Stephen King kick, though this is for a more obscure short story from the Skeleton Crew collection. I know I've been bookmarking slr2moons' requests for this on my treating shortlist since at least about 2014, and since I was already in Stephen King mode and looking for something I could treat with only two days left to both revise canon and write it, this was finally its year. (And, through the magic of Yuletide, this turned out to be the same year that someone else wrote a different twist on the same prompt, so, yay, two fics at once for a fandom that had zero before!)

This time I actually came up with the title while I was writing, though my original and preferred version was "Needle Through the Sky". Which sounds better but just doesn't really make as much sense for a story about roads. I've been pleasantly surprised by the attention this one's received given that it's not a particularly well-known story, but I guess since the fic is backstory it's readable to people who like King's stuff in general without knowing the specific canon.

+

So, that was my Yuletide - less productive than I've sometimes managed, but more so than I originally feared. I'm crossing my fingers that I'll also manage to do some writing outside of the annual Yuletide burst next year. (Though these hopes are currently taking the form of plotting something wildly overambitious in a surprise return to HP fandom, so, who knows if that will ever materialise. My brain is apparently a "Less time to write in the evenings than we used to have? Then thiiiis looks like an excellent time to start outlining that ten-part AU spanning the entire events of the Harry Potter series that we always wanted to write" sort of brain.)
nomadicwriter: [Doctor Strange] Squee! (squee)
Dear Yuletide writer,

Hi, and thanks for writing for me! I'm Nomad (nomadicwriter) on AO3. Please don't worry too much about trying to stick too closely to my prompts: in general my tastes in fic are very broad, and I'm happy to read pretty much anything, from fluff and humour to tragedy and darkfic. I love gen fic and am also flexible about reading my favourite characters paired with all sorts of people. All of these prompts are very much optional and just to offer some ideas, so if you've got a story idea that you'd rather write, please do.

General likes and dislikes )

Fandom specifics:

Arrested Development )

From Eroica With Love )

Infamous Iron Man )

In summary: please don't sweat it when it comes to following any of these prompts particularly closely - I'm happy to read almost anything about my favourite characters and really very easy to please. Hope you enjoy writing for me!
nomadicwriter: Doctor Doom on his throne (Doom throne)
Okay, I guess this is my main base of operations now. Look for my regular ~3 posts a year to be posted on Dreamwidth henceforth! Not gonna be either deleting or importing [livejournal.com profile] nomadicwriter since I never used it to archive fic and there's not much of note it would be a big deal to lose if LJ ever goes boom. But I'm not going to bother to crosspost there either.

[livejournal.com profile] doomfans is now relocating to [community profile] doomfans. Entries have been imported and I'll be updating there from now on. There's also an existing sister comm at /doomfans on Imzy if you're over there.

[livejournal.com profile] nomads_gen_recs hasn't been updated forever and isn't likely to be, so I'm just going to leave it up on LJ rather than import it here. More recent recs, gen and otherwise, are in my bookmarks on AO3 anyway. (I am nomadicwriter there too, and still also Nomad1 on ff.net. But mostly, to be honest, I'm just silently lurking everywhere.)
nomadicwriter: [Doctor Doom] Victor Von Crankypants (Default)
Hi, folks. There's not really a lot of point in you watching this journal; it's not going to do anything interesting. This account is mostly just for commenting on other people's entries and posting to communities, and I'm not planning to post or cross-post anything here.

If you're looking for me and my stuff, try:

* My main journal at [livejournal.com profile] nomadicwriter
* My gen fanfiction recs at [livejournal.com profile] nomads_gen_recs
* My Doctor Doom fan community at [livejournal.com profile] doomfans
* My fanfiction at AO3 or fanfiction.net

See memories for links to my previous posts at [community profile] scans_daily

If I have you friended at Livejournal but not here, that's probably because I've failed to notice you have a Dreamwidth account. Drop me a comment to let me know.

Profile

nomadicwriter: [Doctor Doom] Victor Von Crankypants (Default)
nomadicwriter

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