nomadicwriter

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.

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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.

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 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. 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".) 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.

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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.

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!