dolorosa_12 | Entries tagged with fanfic

Last night, it was so cold that we elected to put a bottle of wine outside the kitchen door in the garden, instead of in the fridge — and it chilled to a far cooler temperature than would have been achieved in the fridge. Everything is covered with a thick layer of spiky frost that doesn't melt away in the sunlight. I have been outdoors — to the gym and the market yesterday morning, and for a brief walk with Matthias today — but it's a bit too biting even for me. I like to look at the landscape, rather than be within it, if possible.

( Three books and a movie )

Beyond films and books, I've been keeping an eye on the prompts at

threesentenceficathon, and have been sporadically adding my fills to this series on AO3; I'll try to add some prompts of my own once a new post opens up.

fandomtrees is close to opening — there are a handful of requests which need at least one more gift before the collection is ready to go. If you're able to fill any of the prompts here, I'm sure this would be very welcome by the remaining participants. You can see a list of all requests on this Google spreadsheet.

I hope everyone's been having cosy and nourishing weekends.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had a particularly successful Yuletide this year, in terms of both the gifts written for me, and how the fic I wrote was received. (I was completely overwhelmed by travel and visiting my in-laws, however, and didn't have a chance to read anything else in the collection besides my own gifts, so for the first time since I participated in Yuletide, I unfortunately won't be able to include recs from the collection here.)

This year, I received not one, but two gifts, which I can now see were written by the same author.

The main gift was Paige/Arcturus fic for The Bone Season — a pairing and fandom which I have been requesting for ten years in almost every single exchange in which I participated. I'm so delighted that someone chose to write it for me at last, and to have dug into so many things that I love about these characters and this pairing.

Adamant (1024 words) by cher
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Paige Mahoney/Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Characters: Paige Mahoney, Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Additional Tags: POV First Person, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma Recovery
Summary:

Paige vs PTSD, with her usual feelings about battles.

Every year, I've hoped (while knowing that no one is entitled to such things) that someone might choose to write an additional treat for me, and for the first time in ten years of Yuletide participation, someone did! I feel very grateful and privileged, especially since the fic is for a tiny (even by Yuletide standards) fandom of which I thought I was the only person who felt fannish: Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons trilogy. Again, the fic really got to the heart of what I love about this canon, characters, and pairing — right down to the nostalgic 1990s tech and internet!

futurism (1259 words) by cher
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Space Demons Series - Gillian Rubinstein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: pre Mario Ferrone/Elaine Taylor
Characters: Mario Ferrone, Elaine Taylor, Ben Challis
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Mario in the aftermath, reaching for a future.

( My three fics — The Dark Is Rising, and the Winternight series )

So that was my Yuletide. I have today and tomorrow remaining as holidays, before returning to work (from home) on Friday. I'm going to ease my way gently into 2025 with a long yoga class, doing the final bits of set up of my bullet journal, and starting a new book. I hope the first hours of the new year have been kind to you.

It's another long weekend here in the UK, although this time around I have to work on the Monday, so it's just a regular old weekend for me. We've managed to pack quite a bit into the two days nonetheless.

On Saturday morning, Matthias and I headed off fairly early into Cambridge in order to see Furiosa in the IMAX cinema. I'm glad we did so from an audiovisual perspective, since it was a great spectacle, and was served well by the format, but my feelings about the film as a whole are quite mixed. When I first heard George Miller was making a prequel about Furiosa, my immediate reaction was one of Do Not Want — and all those misgivings were confirmed. Fury Road was pretty much close to flawless (it's my favourite film), precisely because it left so much about its world and its characters unexplained, operating in an almost mythic space in which viewers fill in the blanks according to their own experiences. I didn't need Furiosa's backstory, I didn't need to know every little detail about the social structure of the lives of the inhabitants of the wasteland — and in general I'm kind of fed up with this perception that fannishness of a particular fictional universe equates to a desire to see every blank spot fleshed out and every plot hole filled in. The chase scenes, as always, were incredible, visually it was beautiful, the world felt vivid, three-dimensional and lived-in, and Chris Hemsworth was clearly having the time of his life playing a character who was essentially Thor, but evil — but overall, this was not a film that I needed to exist.

We were out of the cinema in time for a late-ish lunch at a Korean restaurant, then sat for a while under the trees in a pub beer garden before heading back to Ely. It was warm and clear enough for us to eat dinner outside on the deck, which was wonderful.

I'm writing this post a bit earlier than I would usually do on a Sunday because we will be heading out after lunch for the monthly walk with our walking group. Unfortunately the lovely clear weather of Saturday has blown away, and it's been raining on and off all morning, with thunderstorms promised. We'll see how that goes. The walk itself will be flat and easy (there's no other kind of walk in this area, given the landscape), along the river and through fields in a loop of about 5-7km. An easy Sunday stroll, and hopefully without rain!

The other thing that happened this weekend was author reveals for

once_upon_fic, so I'll stick my recs for the collection in this post, now that I'm able to give credit to the authors.

I must start, of course, with my lovely gift, which gave me exactly what I wanted in terms of character dynamics from Tochmarc Étaíne fanfic:

Carried by the Wind (1468 words) by Nelja-in-English
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Irish Mythology
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Étaíne/Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Characters: Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne), Étaíne (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Love Potion/Spell, Metamorphosis, Dreams, Magic, Temporary Character Death, Mentions of Midir and Aengus
Summary:

Fúamnach tells the story, this time. And when it gets away from her, she gets help.

I also enjoyed these other fics in the collection:

Gold Tree by

water_bby (I assume the user has archive-locked it so I can't embed it)

Blush-Rose (2893 words) by RussetFiredrake
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid | Gold Tree and Silver Tree (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Craobh-Òir | Gold Tree & An Darna Bean | The Second Wife (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid), An Darna Bean | The Second Wife/Am Prionnsa | The Prince (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid)
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Fairy Tale Retellings, First Kiss, Curiosity, Bisexual Female Character, implied threesome
Summary:

A prince's new bride fears she is in a story where her curiosity will be her downfall. She finds herself in a different tale altogether.

A Rose of a Different Form (1438 words) by BardicRaven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Belle | Beauty & La Bête | Beast (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Le Marchand | Merchant (La Belle et la Bête)
Characters: Belle | Beauty (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | The Beast (La Belle et la Bête), Le Marchand | The Merchant (La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête)
Additional Tags: Redemption
Summary:

As soon as sundown came on the day that the merchant was to have brought his daughter and no-one had darkened his doors, the Beast knew that the merchant had lied

Grant Me Clemency (4039 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Bertilak de Hautdesert & Gawain
Characters: Bertilak de Hautdesert, Gawain (Arthurian), King Arthur - Character
Additional Tags: time loops, A Game of Questions, Rash Actions Lead to Rash Consequences, Ruminations
Summary:

Sir Gawain is trapped in an endless cycle of repetition, from Arthur's hall to the green chapel, attempting to find a way out of his predicament, but he has no earthly idea what he is supposed to change, or who is responsible for this cycle. So he plays the game again, hoping this time might be the one that finally breaks it.

when you return, go to the sea (14840 words) by celaenos
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride), Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Human Husband (The Selkie Bride), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2024, Sister-Sister Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Family Feels - Struggling To Be A Good Guardian, Family Feels - Fraught Sibling Relationship, Fairytales & Folklore, One Shot, Original Character(s), Fic Exchange, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Abuse
Summary:

She learns about her ma three days after her seventh birthday—but she doesn’t learn the whole of it until many years after that.

My own assignment was another fic for 'The Selkie Bride' folk tale. Women/the sea: my ultimate OTP.

Ripples (2035 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Selkies
Summary:

The sea takes, and the sea gives back its own unexpected gifts.

Two of the selkie's daughters try to find their way through uncharted waters in the wake of their mother's departure.

And now the sun has come out! Let's hope the weather holds during our walk.

After a few false starts, summer is truly here in earnest. Matthias and I spent part of the morning in the garden, planting corn, peas, nasturtiums, chives, zucchini and butternut pumpkin, and pulling out handfuls of weeds. The tomato, rocket and radish seedlings I've been growing in the kitchen are off to a good start. We ate breakfast this morning on the deck under the umbrella (and the fruiting cherry, apple and pear trees) for the first time this year.

I've been drinking a lot of iced coffee, and listening to a lot of Miami Horror.

Yesterday (or really the middle of the night on Friday), the Once Upon a Fic collection went live, and I spent most of Saturday afternoon reading through it, and commenting on the stuff I enjoyed. I'll do a full recs post once authors are revealed, but I am very happy with my own gift, my assignment was well-received, so I'd say the exchange has been a success from my perspective.

Other than the usual cooking (a new-to-me Indonesian recipe last night), reading (just more of my Benjamin January reread) and gym/swimming, Matthias and I managed to finish booking all the accommodation and most of the flights/transport for our Finland and Baltic countries summer holiday. The latter half of this is something we've been planning vaguely for a while; the Finnish component is happening because one of Matthias's old school friends is getting married there this summer to his (Finnish) fiancée, which gave us the push we needed to finally make concrete plans for the other countries in the trip. It's a bit complicated (because of the location of the wedding, we ended up needing to stay in five different places for the first five nights), but as long as trains and ferries run as anticipated, it should work out smoothly. I will post more details later on a post just about the trip.

This afternoon will be slow and sleepy: catching up on Dreamwidth, a yoga class, a bit more reading, taking the laundry in, lazily cooking risotto. We are going out to the community cinema to see Challengers this evening, but beyond that it's been a pretty low-key weekend, which was definitely welcome.

Thank you for writing for me in this exchange!

I'm pretty easygoing about what type of fic you want to write for me. I read fic of any rating, and about any characters/pairing I enjoy, although I have a slight preference towards fic that focuses on female characters and is told from their perspective. I mainly read fic to find out what happens to characters after the final page has turned or the credits have rolled, so I would particularly love to have futurefic of some kind. Don't feel you have to limit yourself to the characters I specifically mention — I'm happy with others being included if they fit with the story you want to tell.

Feel free to have a look around my Ao3 profile, as it should give you a good idea of the types of things I like to read.

I have treating enabled on Ao3 and would be delighted to receive treats for any of my requests.

( General likes )

( DNWs )

Fandom-specific prompts:

( The Bone Season — Samantha Shannon )

( The Iliad - Homer )

( The Pagan Chronicles - Catherine Jinks )

( The Queens of Innis Lear — Tessa Gratton )

( Winternight series — Katherine Arden )

Don't feel you have to stick rigidly within the bounds of my prompts. As long as your fic is focused on the relationships I requested, I will be thrilled to receive anything you write for me, as these really are some of my most beloved fandoms of the heart, and the existence of any fic for them will make me extremely happy.

I've been really sick for the past few days, and have essentially spent all of today in bed up until now. I'm exhausted, my bones ache, and all I really want to do is sleep. I've cancelled everything non-essential, but I could definitely have done without being sick right at this specific moment.

In better news, I received a late gift for

fandomtrees after the fest closed: this fic based on Welsh folklore/mythology by

kalloway. That was definitely a lovely and welcome surprise!

One fest closes, another is opening tomorrow:

halfamoon, which is a fest focusing on female characters. The full list of prompts is already available.

once_upon_fic is now open for nominations, with details and the full schedule available in a recent post.

snowflake_challenge is doing its post-challenge friending meme. Click on the poster to join in:

Snowflake Challenge Friending Meme promotional banner featuring a book and an apple on a board with a blanket peeking out and ice crystal snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge Friending Meme.

It seems a waste to write a (rare) post on a Wednesday and not talk about my recent reading, which consists of a single book: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco. This is in some ways the vampire novel of my dreams — when I'm seeking out stories about vampires, this is essentially exactly what I want. Our hero, Remy, is a vampire hunter in a world in which aristocratic families of vampire hunters coexist uneasily in alliances with aristocratic kingdoms of vampires, teaming up against the unspecified threat both of rogue, unaligned gangs of newly-turned vampires, and more established vampire kingdoms.

Remy's backstory piles on the angst — there's a cloud surrounding the circumstances of his birth (which killed his mother), his father treats him as a weapon to be wielded, the other vampire hunters either distrust or use him, etc, etc. Through an escalating series of dangerous circumstances, Remy ends up working with a powerful vampire couple, he ends up falling in love with both of them (and they with him), and a good time is had by all, against a backdrop of epic battles, political machinations, and huge heapings of angst. The worldbuilding is contradictory and at times nonsensical, but that doesn't really matter to me since the draw of the book is the characters and their relationships, which are very much my thing.

If that were all I had to say about the book, I would have given it an enthusiastic five-star rating and moved on (since I give that kind of rating on the basis of how well I think a book has achieved what it set out to achieve, rather than any objective scale of 'good quality literature'). However, it has serious problems on a copyediting level, to the extent that at times I wondered if it had even been professionally edited at all. This is a book professionally published by Hodder & Stoughton — hardly a dinky little small press — the sequel is coming out later this year, and yet there are multiple instances of tense changes not just from sentence to sentence, but sometimes within a single sentence.

This is not the first time I've noticed serious problems with editing (either on the level of copyediting/proofreading, or on the level of the actual structure and content of the book) in professionally published works of fiction, and I'm definitely not the only one to have raised it within my Dreamwidth circle. Without knowing the ins and outs of the publishing industry, my impression is of an industry cut to the bone, with the effects of these cuts and lack of resources starting to be felt in areas that are noticeable to the reader — namely, editing (or lack thereof). My assumption (and this is just a theory; I don't work in publishing) is that it is more cost effective to do book deals with a large number of authors (often with quite low advances), larger than the publisher has the capacity (both financially and in terms of staffing) to edit well, and get all those books out there and published. More books, bought cheaply from more authors, means the potential for more sales, and most readers of these books aren't going to notice or care about poor quality editorial work — and those of us who do have already bought the books, have already given our money, and aren't necessarily going to remember the typos and grammatical errors by the time we attempt to buy another book from the same author or publisher. As I say, just a theory, but whatever the cause, this poor quality editing is something I've noticed frequently, and it's a shame it affected this book as well.

This will be the last Friday in which I use

snowflake_challenge's prompt as my own prompting question in the open thread, for 2024 at least. Their prompt (and mine) is:

Make a rec list of fanworks!

So, rec the thing! Feel free to post a link to your own answer for Snowflake if you've done it already, rather than rewriting the whole thing out again in a comment, if you prefer.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a chubby brown and red bird surrounded by falling snow. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

( My answer )

Do you have rec lists of your own?

This weekend feels more efficient than others so far this year — I've done almost everything I wanted to do, and it's only 1.30pm on Sunday!

Every year, I know this specific

snowflake_challenge prompt is coming: In your own space, create a fanwork. And every year, I swear I'll start working on something so that it will be ready to post by the time the prompt comes around, and every year I end up being completely unprepared.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of metallic snowflake and ornaments. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

However, this year I'm lucky, in that

threesentenceficathon is also happening, with some great prompts, and so I have fanworks ready to post! I've grouped all my fills together in an AO3 series, so if I fill more prompts, they can just get added on, but at the moment there are three ficlets posted. The fandoms covered so far are Greek mythology (Hades/Persephone), Peaky Blinders (Ada Shelby), and the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale (Rumpelstiltskin/Miller's Daughter). There are a couple of other prompts that caught my eye, so I'll see how many more I can add.

halfamoon will be running again this February. This is a fourteen-day fest focusing on female characters. Every two days, there's a new prompt, for which you can create fanworks, or share recs for other people's work that fits the prompt. The prompts list for this year is out in advance.

The detailed nomination statistics for last year's Hugo Awards have
finally been made public, and there seem to be a lot of problems (most notably, a number of works or individuals that were eligible for shortlisting and achieved the requisite number of votes to be shortlisted appear to have been arbitrarily ruled ineligible for reasons that are as yet unclear). Cora Buhlert's blog post is probably the best starting point, as it's a good summary in its own right, and links to pretty much every other piece of discussion of the matter.

Reading-wise it's been a slow week. I've only finished one book, The Last Sun (K.D. Edwards), the first in a series of urban fantasy books in which characters with supernatural abilities have washed up on the shores of Earth after their home in Atlantis was destroyed, and in which powerful, aristocratic Houses (based on tarot — the Tower, the Lovers, the Hermit and so on) vie for control of their new, closed community. Our point-of-view character is the last remaining survivor of the destroyed Sun House, and he works as a sort of supernatural private detective for hire.

It's incredibly tropey, everyone has incredibly angsty backstories and unresolved trauma, and in general I found it fun in an escapist sort of way. I wish more of the secondary characters were women, and that we got to know more of the interior lives of the female characters we do meet, but hopefully there's more of that as the series progresses — it's not going to stop me reading future books, nor indeed the free short stories that the author has posted online. In fact, once I've finished catching up on Dreamwidth, I'm going to read any of those that fit chronologically with what I've read so far.

The current

snowflake_challenge prompt is short and to the point: Rec Us Your Newest Thing.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of snow-covered trees and an old barn in the background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

My newest thing is not new so much as an old thing to which I've recently returned: Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa mystery series.

( Cut because this got really long; warning for mentions of slavery )

fandomtrees has just gone live, and I've received some delightful gifts, representing the full spread of fandoms that I requested, which is particularly pleasing.

sunshine304 made me some absolutely stunning Babylon Berlin icons,

ninthfeather made a great batch of Six of Crows icons, and

hekateras wrote me a very creepy and atmospheric folklore-inspired fanfic:

Harvest (823 words) by Hekachoc
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Slavic Mythology & Folklore, Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Polednice | Lady Midday (Slavic Mythology & Folklore), Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Animal Death, Near Death Experiences, Death, Folklore, Deities
Summary:

Some minutes pass, but it is always midday.

I made two contributions to the fest: some vegetarian recipe recs for

doomedblade, and some Six of Crows fic for

isilloth:

Caught inside every open eye (1791 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Characters: Kaz Brekker, Inej Ghafa
Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary:

'My days of clambering up buildings and sneaking around rooftops as part of some dangerous and complicated heist sparked by your secretive and cryptic whims are long over!'

Inej and Kaz work together on one last job.

I love Fandom Trees, and think it's a really fun event, so I'm glad it went fairly smoothly this year. I hope everyone else who participated had a good time, and received some nice gifts!

Happy New Year to everyone! Matthias and I saw out 2023 in our usual way — with canapes, champagne, and films at home, and it was cheerful and relaxing and cosy. I wasn't quite intending to wake up at 7am, but in the end it was nice to be up and about in the very first sliver of the morning, drinking tea, eating a cooked breakfast, and chatting about which books with which we planned to start our 2024 reading. We then went out for a looping, 5km walk along the river and through the sleepy suburban streets, and back — via the coffee rig in the market square — past the cathedral, drenched in silvery sunlight, watching the canal boats and swans drift by. Here's a little photoset of the transition from one year to the next.

It being 1st January means two things: Yuletide reveals, and the start of

snowflake_challenge. I'm planning to participate in a low key way in the challenge this year: I'll do all the prompts, but I'm not going to link them in the comm. I know this goes somewhat against the spirit of the thing, but I found dealing with the increased replies overwhelming at times last year, and this feels like a compromise that will keep things manageable. But more on Snowflake later: let's get to the Yuletide recs!

I only make rec posts for the exchange once authors have been revealed, because it feels unfair to share all these things I've enjoyed without the authors getting credit, hence why I always wait until 1st January. I'm pleased to see that several of my favourite fics that I'm reccing from this year's collection are written by friends!

( Nine recs behind the cut — mainly book fandoms )

I wrote four fics this year — my main assignment, two treats in the main collection, and one treat in the Madness collection, which seem to have been well received, so from my perspective, this has been a good Yuletide all around: a great gift, a good reception for my own writing, and a collection with some fantastic pieces of work.

( My four fics behind the cut )

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of horse drawn red coach in snowfall. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Today's prompt is:

In your own space, update your fandom information.

My intro post remains up to date, which is pleasing. Something which I had been intending to do for last year's challenge, but which never happened, was writing a template post for fanwork exchange letters, with prompts for all the fandoms I'm likely to request. The idea was that this would save me time and avoid the need to go trawling back through multiple previous letters. I can obviously update it with new fandoms if I decide to request them. I'm really happy that the template letter post is all set up — it should save me a huge amount of time in the future.

And that's

snowflake_challenge Day 1 completed!

The Yuletide collection is live, and I've received a great fic in what I had assumed to be the rarest of my three requested fandoms — so that was quite an unexpected delight! Tochmarc Étaíne is a weird, weird, messy medieval Irish text, filled with animal transformations, people being reborn after thousands of years having lost all memory of their previous lives, soap operatic relationship drama, and the supernatural world constantly bleeding and intruding into the physical world in all sorts of chaotic ways. I requested a fic about two of the women in the story — the titular Étaín, and Fúamnach, who in the text is presented as a stereotypical jealous wife who uses magic to get rid of her rival, but both of whom I've always viewed as having more going on than what meets the eye. My author definitely took that idea and ran with it!

Those Who Play in the Fields of Brí Léith (3363 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Tochmarc Étaíne (Folk Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Fúamnach & Aengus (Tochmarc Étaine), Fúamnach/Étaín (Tochmarc Étaine)
Characters: Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne), Aengus (Tochmarc Étaíne), Étaín (Tochmarc Étaíne), Midir (Tochmarc Étaíne), Dian Cécht (Tochmarc Étaíne), Étaín's Daughter (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Parent-Child Relationship, Pre-Relationship, Canon Relationships, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary:

Fúamnach dies. And yet Fúamnach lives.

I have three fics in the main collection (my main assignment, plus two treats), and an additional treat in the Madness collection which won't be live until tomorrow. Let's hope all of them are well received! For those of you who do Yuletide, I hope your gifts are great, your recipients enjoy the things you've written for them, and that the collection as a whole is to your taste. I think I'm going to wait until tomorrow before diving into the rest of the collection, but there look to be a lot of fun things to read, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Matthias and I have both spoken to our respective families, we went out for a slow, wandering walk around the cathedral and river, and I'm about to start putting together a lunch of cold leftovers from our Christmas Eve dinner. This afternoon, I'll finish off my annual reread of The Dark Is Rising (the plot of the book continues on until Twelfth Night, and to do things properly it should be read in step with the actual days on which the events in the book take place, but I tend not to stretch it out beyond Christmas Day), and get stuck into cooking.

I hope everyone is having wonderful days, wherever you are and whatever you're doing.

Via various people in my circle, but most recently via

evewithanapple and

lirazel: Rules: go through your last 5 fics and share the first and last line. No context.

My most recent fic is my Yuletide assignment, which won't be included here for obvious anonymity reasons, so:

Standing on the Shore

First line: Jamie went back to the sea the next day.

Last line: He was who he was, and felt no need to shed anything.

This marigold run

First line: After our confrontation with Bo, life — and, I suppose, unlife — slowly settled back into their own kind of equilibrium.

Last line: I stayed there, under the earth, with him.

Sirocco

First line: The two young women crouched in the rafters of the stable, taking care not to move too much, trying their best to remain tucked away out of sight.

Last line: 'You're the winner for now, but I'm looking forward to a lifetime of racing horses beside you,' he said.

The Salt Road

First line: The first time she returned to Ketterdam, it was because she couldn't think where else to go.

Last line: Kaz's hand rested easily on the chair's arm, mere inches from Inej, and she wondered if she dared — before the night was over — to reach out and bridge that final gap.

Like a Ribbon, Unfurling

First line: Miranda wandered through the market in Padrino, so overwhelmed by the abundance of it all that she scarcely knew where to look next.

Last line: Their young lives unfolded before them like a ribbon, and it would be many years before their paths would cross again.

Thank you for writing for me!

I'm pretty easygoing about what type of fic you want to write for me. I read fic of any rating, and would be equally happy with plotty genfic or something very shippy. I read gen, femslash, het and slash, although I have a slight preference towards femslash, het, and gen that focuses on female characters. I mainly read fic to find out what happens to characters after the final page has turned or the credits have rolled, so I would particularly love to have futurefic of some kind. Don't feel you have to limit yourself to the characters I specifically mention — I'm happy with others being included if they fit with the story you want to tell.

Feel free to have a look around my Ao3 profile, as it should give you a good idea of the types of things I like to read. You can also look at my Yuletide tag, which includes past letters, and recs posts of my previous gifts and other fic I've enjoyed in previous Yuletide colletions.

I have treating enabled on Ao3 and would be delighted to receive treats for any of my requests.

( General likes )

( DNWs )

Fandom-specific prompts:
( The Bone Season — Samantha Shannon )
( The Pagan Chronicles - Catherine Jinks )
( Tochmarc Étaíne )

Don't feel you have to stick rigidly within the bounds of my prompts. As long as your fic is focused on the characters I requested, I will be thrilled to receive anything you write for me, as these really are some of my most beloved fandoms of the heart, and the existence of any fic for them will make me extremely happy.

Now that the authors have been revealed, it's time for me to write a brief round up of this year's

once_upon_fic exchange, which is well on the way to becoming my favourite exchange in the calendar.

I'm going to share my own gift again, because I'm honestly just beside myself with happiness at the effort and care that went into this. It's definitely my number one rec from this year's collection.

Deals In The Dark (15412 words) by DragonflyPrince
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Rumpelstilzchen | Rumpelstiltskin (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Müllers Tochter | Miller's Daughter/Rumpelstilzchen | Rumpelstiltskin
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2023, Light Angst, Motherhood, Arranged Marriage, the romance stuff is really downplayed
Summary:

A bargain was made for her life. Now she has no choice but to arrange her own escape.

I matched in my own assignment with a request for the Selkie Bride folk tale, and my recipient had prompted a fic that looked at how the selkie's seven children reacted to her return to the sea. This was perfect for me, because it brought together three of my favourite things: transformations, grief, and people whose lives are intertwined with the sea. This was the result:

Standing on the Shore (2504 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie (The Selkie Bride), Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride), Husband (The Selkie Bride)
Summary:

The lives of the selkie's children, after their mother returned to the sea, and they were left behind, to watch the ebb and flow of the tide, and wonder.

I also have a couple of other recs from the collection.

( Four recs behind the cut )

Did anyone else participate in this exchange? What did you most like from the collection?

Other than Eurovision, this weekend has been very much about reading — both original fiction, and fanfic. I've finished three books:

The Heroines (Laura Shepperson), a retelling of the Phaedra story which I would say does a reasonably good job, and doesn't fall into the trap of completely softening the edges of a story about women's power and powerlessness, which sometimes happens in female-character-centric retellings of Greek myths

The Cloisters (Katy Hays), a dark academia story taking place in the eponymous Cloisters gallery in New York, interweaving tarot iconography, toxic relationships, and issues of money and class, and proving my theory that every current dark academia book seems to have been influenced by either Possession or The Secret History — in this case the latter. The book suffers from the fact that it thinks it's being incredibly clever and subtle, but it's not really either of these things (for example there's a death at the heart of it, and the murderer is immediately obvious to the reader, but it takes the protagonist nearly the whole book to figure it out)

The Stolen Heir (Holly Black), the latest in Black's YA books set in fairyland. As with all her fairy books, bargaining, trickery, and the slipperiness of words play a huge role, and her two central characters are a bantering pair of antagonists-to-reluctant allies-to-lovers. You know what you're getting into with a Holly Black book, and if it's something you like, you'll like this one

once_upon_fic opened this weekend, and it's been an absolutely fantastic exchange so far. I haven't read through the whole collection yet, but my own fic (authors are still unrevealed) has been really well received, and the gift I got has utterly blown me away. I'm always really impressed when authors go well beyond the minimum wordcount requirement (that's not to say that I haven't received great fic in the past that was close to the minimum wordcount), and this one is 15,000 words in an exchange where the requirement is only 1000. And what an incredible story is packed into those 15,000 words — the author managed to incorporate a huge number of my requests, and give me a fic that really sees what I see in the original fairytale while also drawing out several things that caused me to see the fairytale in new ways. I'll share it again as part of a recs post once authors are revealed, but for now, I'll post it below:

Deals In The Dark (15412 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Rumpelstilzchen | Rumpelstiltskin (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Müllers Tochter | Miller's Daughter/Rumpelstilzchen | Rumpelstiltskin
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2023, Light Angst, Motherhood, Arranged Marriage, the romance stuff is really downplayed
Summary:

A bargain was made for her life. Now she has no choice but to arrange her own escape.

I hope you're all having lovely weekends!

It's something of a relief to say goodbye to this month, which is always my least favourite of the year (at least while living in the northern hemisphere). All my focus and productivity and sense of purpose from January leaches away, to be replaced by a kind of dull feeling that time is slipping away from me. At least the sun is back — it's been shining all day, and this morning it felt as if I were swimming directly into the dawn when I did my 1km of laps at the pool.

I had grand plans to read through the Candy Hearts Exchange collection and do a full recs post, but in the end I only read a handful of stuff that other people had recommended in their journals. I did enjoy the two following fics, though:

Smoke Immure Us, Light Offend (1833 words) by Triskaidekalogue
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Knives Out (Movies)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Helen Brand & Marta Cabrera, Helen Brand & Marta Cabrera & Phillip (Knives Out)
Characters: Helen Brand, Marta Cabrera, Phillip (Knives Out)
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Candy Hearts Exchange
Summary:

Someone seems to be targeting not only Benoit Blanc, but also his partners-in-detection from recent cases... so they join forces. Together, can they ~~fight~~ ~~solve~~ deal with(???) crime?

Full Tilt (300 words) by team_turtleneck
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Terminator (Movies), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Sarah Connor
Characters: Sarah Connor, Andy | Andromache of Scythia
Additional Tags: Banter
Summary:

Andy leaves out an important detail.

I also particularly enjoyed this article about several feuding Greenwich Village local newspapers, which is Angry People in Local Newspapers taken to a meta level (given that the angry people in question actually run said local newspapers in this instance). The article is in the New York Times, so you may hit a paywall if you're not a subscriber or have read your quota of free articles this month. (Edited to add that

gingicat has shared a link to this story as a gift link in the comments of the post, so everyone should be able to read it for free that way. Thanks

gingicat!)

Media-wise, I've read a book and a short story since I last posted, and watched one film.

The book was Waves Across the South (Sujit Sivasundaram), a history of the colonisation of the parts of the world contained within and around the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The focus is at once on these bodies of water and how they shaped the peoples and histories of these regions, and on European colonisation as counter-revolution, a reaction both to revolutionary currents within Europe and in the global south. I particularly appreciated the author's approach: rather than being chronological, each chapter had more of a geographic focus (so one centred on Madagascar, one on the Persian Gulf, one on Australia and so on), but there was also a really clear emphasis on the fact that the peoples of these various geographic regions responded not only to political and cultural changes in Europe, but also to those in other colonised regions.

The short story was 'The Counterworld' (James Bradley), and I feel a bit uncertain about my reaction to it. The description of the story makes its intention clear: A grieving mother wakes up to find all traces of her lost son have been erased as if he had never existed. Only in the hallway mirror is she able to see a glimpse of the reality she remembers having lived—the reality she wants back. But what it felt like to me was an absolutely spot-on depiction of gaslighting — it's not just that the 'grieving mother' of the story is the only one to remember that she has a dead son, but also that everyone refuses to believe her and behaves as if she is mentally ill and in need of medication and psychological therapy when she brings it up. I found this extremely upsetting to read, particularly because I wasn't sure the author was doing this deliberately — it felt more as if the writer was writing a science fiction thought experiment about a world where traumatic memories could be erased, but unintentionally wrote a real-world horror story.

Matthias and I resumed our Saturday evening film watching with Bullet Train — a silly and undemanding heist/gangster movie set on the eponymous train in which various different assassins end up on the same train with similar and interconnected missions. It's violent in a lurid, comic-book way, and (as is perhaps unsurprising for the director of Atomic Blonde) it's a lot of style over substance, but the style itself is fantastic. I found it to be fun, undemanding Saturday night fare, but do heed my warning about the violence, which I guess I would describe as Tarantino-esque.

Now I need to make a decision about how to spend the last few hours of the weekend. I already spent lunch outside with Matthias, eating Tibetan food from the market in the courtyard garden of our favourite local bar/cafe, so I've definitely taken some advantage of the sunshine. My brain isn't really in the right space for reading, but pottering around Dreamwidth, doing a bit of yoga, and possibly planting some of the vegetable seeds to germinate on the kitchen windowsills might be possible. We'll see.

We're up to the penultimate

snowflake_challenge prompt for 2023: In your own space, do the Fandom Wrap Challenge.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a coffee cup and saucer on a sheet with a blanket and baby’s breath and a layer of snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

( Answers behind the cut )

Today's

snowflake_challenge had me scratching my head for a few minutes:

In your own space, create a fanwork.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of small box wrapped with snowflake paper on a white-pink snowflake paper background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

It's hard for me to write fic spontaneously (I tend to write almost exclusively for exchanges, and thus in response to prompts), I don't have any meta or reviews I'm burning to write this very minute, and as for anything involving graphics, that's basically witchcraft for me.

But then I decided to interpret 'a fanwork' as 'a recs post' and kill three birds with one stone: fulfill today's challenge prompt, make some recs that can be posted on

recthething's Thursday community recs post, and do the 'Community Thursday' challenge of interacting with a Dreamwidth comm on a Thursday.

All my fandoms are small book fandoms — the sorts of things that people only write for during exchanges and fests, if at all — and so they don't have a huge amount of continuous activity on AO3. What I tend to do is periodically sweep the archive for all these fandoms, and read everything new that has been posted that takes my fancy. As a result of this reading, I have three new things to rec.

( Fic recs behind the cut )

This challenge was a good reminder that I should do these kinds of sweeps of AO3 more frequently, and post the results, even if they're likely just to be of interest to me.

Today's

snowflake_challenge gave me the prod I needed to go through the

fandomtrees collection and comment on a bunch of fic:

In your own space, interact with a community or a fic.

This might as well serve the dual purpose as a recs post. I particularly enjoyed these three fics:

Nothing to Fear (300 words) by Shadaras
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Singing Hills Cycle - Nghi Vo
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ho Thi Thao/Trung Dieu
Characters: Ho Thi Thao, Trung Dieu
Additional Tags: Drabble Sequence, Missing Scene, Developing Relationship, Kissing, Fade to Black
Series: Part 71 of Drabbles
Summary:

“Are you afraid?” Ho Thi Thao asks.

Anchor (964 words) by GlassHeadcanon
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Characters: Inej Ghafa, Kaz Brekker
Additional Tags: Reunions, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Banter, Companionable Snark, Trauma Recovery, Home, First Kiss
Summary:

He always knew when The Wraith would return.

After a Hundred Years (Does Anything Stay the Same?) (300 words) by YellowMagicalGirl
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Characters: Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, 100 Years Later, Booker | Sebastien le Livre's Exile, cyberpunk elements, Nicky's there too but he doesn't speak so I'm not gonna tag him, Triple Drabble, My First Work in This Fandom
Summary:

In 2120, the group prepares to meet up with Booker in Istanbul.

Has anyone else found things they particularly enjoyed in this collection (or others)?

The

fandomtrees fest reveals happened yesterday, and I've acquired a great bunch of gifts! I'm feeling really happy and fortunate.

As you can see from my tree, I ended up with four gifts — three batches of really gorgeous icons, and a wonderful ficlet that crossed over the story of Snow White and selkie folklore in an interesting way.

I wrote one gift for this fest, a Kaz/Inej Six of Crows fic for

peaked. You can read it here:

The Salt Road (1997 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Characters: Inej Ghafa, Kaz Brekker
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, 5+1 Things
Summary:

Five times Inej Ghafa left Ketterdam, and one time she didn't.

For various reasons, Yuletide was a really mixed bag for me (not due to my gift, which was lovely and very gratefully received), and I'd been feeling a bit deflated when it came to turn-of-the-year fanworks exchanges, so

fandomtrees couldn't have come at a better time. The reception of what I gave, and the various delightful things I received have absolutely lifted my spirits, and restored my sense of equilibrium when it comes to exchanges/fests.

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Beyond Selidor

A song with a mission

Entries tagged with fanfic

Dance for life

Yuletide reveals

Drowned in a sea of sound

Mirrored in your swimming pool

Dear Rarepair Exchange author

Won't put you on the outside

Friday open thread: rec the thing(s)

Towards the within

Old loves through new eyes; Fandom Trees reveals

Yuletide reveals and recs; Snowflake Challenge begins

This year's Yuletide gift

Fanfic meme

Dear Yuletide 2023 author

Once Upon a Fic reveals and recs

Folklore and rock and roll

Wrapping up February

It's (almost) a wrap!

Snowflakes and fic recs

Snowflakes and baubles

Fandomtrees reveals