nomadicwriter

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.

Reveals are upon us! My gift was History, an Infamous Iron Man fic by 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.

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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.)