nomadicwriter | Entries tagged with blackadder

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.

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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.

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?

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!

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?