nomadicwriter

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.

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.