Yuletide Author's Notes
Jan. 1st, 2015 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foxinthestarsSeeing other people doing this, I thought I'd post more author's notes on the stuff I made for Yuletide.
By the way, I have now crossposted all the fics to FF.net. And am now bracing myself for the likelihood of some random schuck going "What's all this!? MORE HUNGER GAMES (and/or HARRY POTTER and/or...)"
I was exuberant about Yuletide this year, especially the Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational. As I said, I had only posted a drabble once before (Never What You Ask For, Always What You Want, which also happens to be my only Fullmetal Alchemist fic, and I kind of betrayed the spirit with the Author's Notes, but wth). It was definitely a learning experience about the form, about what I could and couldn't get done in such a restricted space.
I even followed the Birmingham Rule this time, restricting title, summary, etc. to 15 words. Actually for me it was 14, because I counted the "END" at the end --- which in most cases I didn't post after all.
The first one to be written was the Sovay drabble, No One May Point a Pistol At You But Me, which fit pretty well to the space. However, one of my weaknesses as a writer (ie, why I need beta readers) is a tendency to be fancy rather than clear. I actually took this one to my RL writer's group, played the song for them and had them read it, and I had managed to confuse everyone at the end of it as to who was talking, who the gun was pointing at, etc., but that meant I caught the problem and was able to fix it up. Myself, I like to think that Sovay will respect her True Love's willingness to stand up to her, however misplaced...
The Prydain one, The Open Hand's Grasp, was next, also improved by the beta reader's input, and I don't recall any particular problems with it. I guess it's not one of the really memorable ones for me as the writer.
The poor, unloved Hyouka one, Path of Least Resistance, was the first one I did where I really felt like I'd bitten off more than I should have, and I resorted to this kind of telegraphic use of language. I managed to get in what I wanted to get in, but I was cramming.
The two Dana Knightstone ones, Missed and Found and Best-Laid Plans, went relatively smoothly. I was introduced to the games by the fandom pimping post, and I probably spent too much money and time tearing through them all. Oh, they're addictive! But I had a blast, and I enjoyed writing a couple of drabbles, tending a bit more toward meta-crack. I thought about posting these together as a single story but decided not to. The thing that struck me most about the absurd hidden-object-game mechanics was Dana's tendency to discard useful items like knives or scissors after using them only once (unless she was going to need them again --- like what, does she have a precognitive gut sense?), so it struck me in the third game when she really did keep this one screwdriver for almost the entire time. I also felt totally cheated by the ending on that one. (SPOILER) When I realized Sebastian was going to die, I thought okay, our touching ghostly reunion scene is going to be him and Elise and it's going to be great! And then it didn't happen! GRR! So I had to issue a patch for that. The Swiss Army Knife one was basically a joke, and it illustrated something I learned about betaing/critiquing --- that you want to try to look below the surface of the comments you get; sometimes betas will suggest something and you're like "no no no," but you might be able to see the underlying problem that's bothering them and solve it in your own way. My beta on that one didn't like the last line; he found the knife being destroyed in the car crash implausible, and I was like "you're trying to take away my punchline!" but when I got at the underlying problem, it was that the weirdness of the knives' fates ramped up too suddenly, and what I actually had to do was make the second one weirder rather than take the weirdness out of the third. I think it was a definite improvement, and yes, I gave myself props for problem-solving skills there.
I don't remember exactly where the Paper Bag Princess ficlet, The Dragon's Confession, fit into the order I did them in, but it was somewhere along in here. I had initially set out to make this one a drabble, but when I spit out a draft, I could immediately see that I didn't have that much room to cut it, so I just accepted it as a general purpose ficlet. I hadn't read the book as a child that I remember, but I had read it a few years ago. It actually annoys me a bit that Ronald is so one-dimensional, but I think the book comes out of a more second-wave feminist context? Re-reading it for Yuletide, what struck me was that the ploy Elizabeth uses against the dragon really requires the dragon's active cooperation. He literally does knock himself out out of some need to prove that he's as awesome as she's saying he is, so I went with that as my idea, that the dragon was just really insecure, and Elizabeth's skill at cutting through bullshit can bring him some healing as well. And I'm very happy to have granted some childhood wishes for Elizabeth and the dragon to be friends. (I was briefly tempted to do a sequel and fix this dragon up with Hoard of Pastries Dragon for someone who'd requested the Unusual Dragon Hoards. The excitement waned before I got to it, though, and in the end I satisfied myself with sticking a "bunny free to good home" sign on it in my own comments; I think I broke my recipient in a good way.)
The next Drabble I finished was the Mushishi one, However Many Times We Meet. I kind of over-researched this one; my essentially-local library (not the one where I live but the one in the town where my UU church is and where I actually know people) had the manga, and I checked out most of it, actually managed to burn myself out before properly reading it all and just assured myself that there weren't any Tanyuu or Kumado stories I was missing (and it worked out well because it finally pushed me into paying the $25 per year it costs not-actually-locals for a library card there, and I am enjoying the library immensely). As for the actual writing process: perhaps because of working with The 7 Secrets of the Prolific, I've been trying to use a different process and rather than hammering the whole thing out in my head, spit out rough drafts that are actually rough (I've used the word "hash" to set my own expectations properly) and then trim/rebuild/massage them into shape. When I spit out the draft on this one, I had to cut it in half to get it to drabble length, but in this case I think that probably improved it. There were some sacrifices --- the first draft had a line I liked about "Where does (Tama) think they got the idea?" like of course Tanyuu would know how this worked, the hints are all in that mountain of scrolls she knows every word of by heart --- but overall, it was good for it. I'm not sure canon actually supports Tanyuu knowing exactly what's going on, but I think it's a reasonable and interesting take --- especially reading the initial scene with Tanyuu and Ginko as her trying to hint him toward the truth without letting on how much she knows. I didn't have time to wrestle with the whole theory of the soul that we've got going on with Kumado. He seems to have a continuous memory, but it also seems that every time his "soul" gets replaced he's a different person that who he was. Basically, I think the shared compassion for mushi really ties Ginko and Tanyuu together and it's what allows Tanyuu to relate to Kumado the way she does here. Or something, Mushishi is always hard to pin down. Which is part of why I had the worst time finding a beta for this one! I didn't think Mushishi was that obscure, but seriously, nobody had seen it, the first person a hippo found for me went AWOL, and I finally prevailed on someone I was beta-reading for to watch the relevant episodes just to do this, because Mushishi is not a thing where you can just say "here's a summary of what happens; go to town;" I feel like you really have to see it to get it. (Said beta enjoyed said episodes, though, so I have some hope that I have corrupted him. ^_~). In hindsight maybe I could have avoided some of the trouble, but I hadn't hit upon a trick I used later...
Then came the Princess Tutu piece, A Writer and A Duck, which ended up being a matching pair of drabbles --- and this time I did post them as a single story, because they were written to directly complement each other. Actually I set out to write just one drabble here, too, and yeah, that didn't work. Note for future reference: never try to put more than one main idea into a drabble. In this case, though, the two main ideas split into two complementary drabbles very nicely, which let me structure it with the two different viewpoints. I think it really worked out well. I didn't have/take time to review canon on this one and it had been awhile since I saw Princess Tutu, I was just working from my memory of what the ending was like (and my recollection that it left post-canon as something of a blank check), and I was able to find betas for Princess Tutu to help me keep from screwing up. I was going for that "bittersweet and meaningfully ordinary" feel of the canon ending. As I was working on it, I did have attacks of doubt that it was too bittersweet (what is this, about 60% cacao?), but a review of my recipient's letter reassured me, as did one of my betas, and it seems to have gone well.
The Snowpiercer one, The Shiver of Sacredness seems like it kind of just happened. I don't remember exactly how it all came together. I noticed Idhren (akajjhunter)'s request because I remember her from Glitchwidth and see her as like a DW friend-of-friends, and I saw Snowpiercer on the seven-day-checkout movie rack at my above-mentioned library. I forget which of these things happened first, but, well, it ended with a fic, which was heavily influenced by her letter and the excellent meta she linked to (may have over-relied on it, honestly). This drabble did kind of spring from my head fully formed. It worked itself out almost completely one day in the car, the way the FMA one did once upon a time, the way I usually try/wait for things to do, and just because I'm deciding it's better not to rely on that kind of process doesn't mean I'm not happy to accept it if it just up and happens. What I keep saying about Snowpiercer is that it is a wonderfully thinky movie. I admit, I unceremoniously dropped an e-mail chain with one of my betas because with Yuletide coming down to the wire I didn't have time to give in to the temptation of sending essays back and forth about our interpretations of the ideas and characters. But jjhunter got out of the drabble pretty much exactly what I intended, so that made me happy. As I wrote in a note somewhere: "Drugs are a pale substitute for [a kind of ineffable mystical encounter with] reality, and violence is also a drug." This is also the one where I hit upon a new beta-finding trick: if no one had offered the fandom in the beta spreadsheet, I started bothering people other than my recipient who had requested the fandom. Every time I've tried that so far, it's worked.
As I wrote these, I was trying to make the number of pieces I contributed come out to "lucky" numbers (yeah, it's complicated and ridiculous ::side-eyes her OCD!Annie Cresta muse::), and I specifically wanted to end up with nine drabbles. After the Snowpiercer one I was at eight, and I had another idea in reserve, but I saved the last "slot" until the full list of prompts was released, at which point I spent way too much time going through the entire list, only to have nothing new grab me, so I went with the idea I already had.
Said idea was for the Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow one, Strange Reunion, in which Alucard gets to hold Soma when he's just a little bitty baby. (And yes, in my headcanon, when they say Soma and Mina are "childhood friends," they're not kidding.) Castlevania is one of those things where I have this huge elaborate headcanon and nothing much to realistically do with it, but this is a fun little taste. This one was oddly in-between the states that the others fell into. Again, the initial hash had to be cut in half, and overall I think it was good for it, but I still feel like this deserves to be a longer fic. I wasn't straining quite as badly as in the Hyouka one, but I did end up with this frantic pace, which is appropriate to the initial scare, but it could've stood to breathe more on the resolution, and I think in a longer fic I could really explore this moment where the role-reversal inherent in the Sorrow games starts out turned up to 11. But I can always do that later if I want. It got me up to my desired nine drabbles, and it was a little cherry on top to give to my assigned recipient.
And the last Madness piece I did was the Juuni Kokki | Twelve Kingdoms fanart forquicksilver_ink, Christmas Cake. I wanted to do something for quicksilver_ink pretty much all along, but very early on I had to get real about doing canon review for an anime series that's 45 episodes of heavy (awesome, but heavy) stuff. But I could do fan-art, and I quickly had the idea of Rakushun making Youko a Japanese-style Christmas Cake. Guilty admission: I originally intended to show Youko's reaction, but I let it get pretty close to the end before I actually got to work, and when I'd drawn Rakushun, I decided that he was enough. Besides, I already thought my "hand" might be recognized; drawing a human character would've been sure to give me away. I was pleased with how it came out. I was actually surprised that more people didn't take advantage of Madness to post art (AFAIK I was the only one, which was kind of funny when the mods posted the Madness stats: "Shortest fic: 0 words"). I'm half-tempted to put that out there as a sub-challenge next year, but I don't know if I'm up to it...
(This put my Madness count at 11, which is a lucky number because Glitch.)
Before I get to the main gift, I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the betaing I did. I don't want to get into specifics (confidentiality and that), and I'm scared I'm going to forget something, but here are the fics I recall betaing, and I think their authors all did quite well:
Death and Promises in Winnipeg by Rosencrantz (Dana Knightstone --- so much fun!)
Three for Family by NightsMistress (Natsume Yuujinchou --- dang I'm behind on canon, the manga kind of shot forward while I wasn't looking...)
Most Terrible Majesty by mesonyx (Salem --- which I still know like nothing about.)
And in Madness, Long Way From Home by Elfwreck (Okami)
Someone also EMed me looking for a beta for something really long in a canon I didn't know, and I just declined. Afterward I was kind of torn between feeling guilty for not doing it and feeling proud of myself for respecting my limitations and needs.
I haven't done enough betaing, so I was kind of feeling my way into the process. Firstly, I found that I enjoy it. Secondly, I found that Google Docs is very very handy for this sort of thing. I do sometimes have a tendency to get above myself and want to take over the author's story, so I have to be careful about that, but if I'm too careful about it, I fall into my other weakness of being more reticent than I should be. But I think I did all right, even made some quite radical suggestions that the authors seemed to find helpful. Apparently I'm also anal about POV consistency.
And that just leaves my main gift, the Psychic Force technically-a-novelette As Many Lullabyes. First begun, last finished, and the one I could really ramble on about all day...
By the way, for those who haven't experienced the wonderful '90s anime fighting game crack that is this series, have a canon overview post. Getting up to speed isn't too big of a time commitment; maybe more of a challenge on the schlock-tolerance front, but it's worth it. Or you could probably read the fic cold, too.
When I say this was the fic "first begun," I'm not kidding. Guilty admission: I actually started it just after Yuletide 2011, when MarsDragon's prompt got me into this whole Psychic Force thing and I wrote Capital and Labor. The idea of Keith's insomnia (it's specifically onset insomnia, BTW) originated in that story, and led to the idea for Lullabyes. In fact, I recall years ago coming on my journal to ask if "Lullabyes" was an acceptable spelling ("Lullabies" is technically more correct but not as aesthetically pleasing).
At first, I somehow thought it was going to be a cute little fic, and I knocked out Sonia and Wong's scenes quickly and easily. Then I backfilled the opening scene in the lab, which is long and hellaciously dark, followed by Brad's scene, which ran over 2000 words... At that point I accepted that the scope was expanding and went back and fleshed out Sonia's scene more, but not long after that, with Carlo's scene just barely started, I somehow bogged down and it wound up on the shelf.
When I got assigned to write for MarsDragon again this year, I decided I wanted to do a Psychic Force fic. I have another idea or two in reserve, but Lullabyes was a good fit, I could use the kick in the pants to actually finish it, and finishing it seemed like the path of least resistance. I was a bit self-conscious about picking it back up, but it worked out. Continuing the "first begun, last finished" pattern, I was first able to make some forward motion on Regina's scene, but left it unfinished and did the flashback with Burn. I was especially worried about picking Carlo's scene back up and kept putting it off, but when I really started thinking about it it came together pretty easily. That was where I was when the default deadline came up, and I went ahead and posted the story without Regina's scene just to be safe --- it wasn't a placeholder, it was a defensible fallback position. Actually Regina's scene hadn't been in my original concept for the fic, and there were a couple more scenes I had also thought of adding but a) I ran out of time to get them done and b) I decided they didn't actually belong in here (although they might belong somewhere, sometime). I worked on Regina's scene down to the wire, including a major overhaul within 24 hours before the stories went live. It's probably rougher than what I could have done with more time, but it was a big improvement, at least. In the previous draft of her scene I was being stupidly cagey about the sexual aspects of the relationships (damn my painfully straight-laced upbringing!) and Keith was kind of barely in it, like he only had one speaking line. I still worry that her scene breaks the flow, coming as it does in between the climactic disaster revealed in Carlo's scene and the denouement of the flashback, but I think expanding the scene at least mitigated the problem somewhat? Plus it gave me a seasonal tie-in. I had made up the dates back in the first phase of work and I don't even remember what happenstance made me put hers in December, but when I set about expanding the scene I just had to use it.
I kind of want to go through and make even more detailed comments scene by scene, but this post is enough of a monster already. I'll save that for another time.
So there you are. As I said, I do have a few things tucked away to possibly write for New Years Resolution, but those are still classified, and I don't want to go too far overboard with them. I really do need to get back to the Hunger Games stuff...
PS: I bought myself Scrivener. I loved RoughDraft, but it ceased development years ago and it did icky things to my beloved em-dashes. Scrivener is finally something I can move on to. It has most of the features I loved in RoughDraft and more, and it's especially nice since, starting with the Hunger Games stuff, I've been using a more nonlinear process, which was getting unwieldy with all the scrolling around. (Not that I don't waste time clicking around Scrivener projects, but at least I don't get lost on the way to where I was aimlessly going...)
I also changed my journal style on DW. I'd had the old one so long I wanted something fresh, and New Years seemed like a good time.
By the way, I have now crossposted all the fics to FF.net. And am now bracing myself for the likelihood of some random schuck going "What's all this!? MORE HUNGER GAMES (and/or HARRY POTTER and/or...)"
I was exuberant about Yuletide this year, especially the Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational. As I said, I had only posted a drabble once before (Never What You Ask For, Always What You Want, which also happens to be my only Fullmetal Alchemist fic, and I kind of betrayed the spirit with the Author's Notes, but wth). It was definitely a learning experience about the form, about what I could and couldn't get done in such a restricted space.
I even followed the Birmingham Rule this time, restricting title, summary, etc. to 15 words. Actually for me it was 14, because I counted the "END" at the end --- which in most cases I didn't post after all.
The first one to be written was the Sovay drabble, No One May Point a Pistol At You But Me, which fit pretty well to the space. However, one of my weaknesses as a writer (ie, why I need beta readers) is a tendency to be fancy rather than clear. I actually took this one to my RL writer's group, played the song for them and had them read it, and I had managed to confuse everyone at the end of it as to who was talking, who the gun was pointing at, etc., but that meant I caught the problem and was able to fix it up. Myself, I like to think that Sovay will respect her True Love's willingness to stand up to her, however misplaced...
The Prydain one, The Open Hand's Grasp, was next, also improved by the beta reader's input, and I don't recall any particular problems with it. I guess it's not one of the really memorable ones for me as the writer.
The poor, unloved Hyouka one, Path of Least Resistance, was the first one I did where I really felt like I'd bitten off more than I should have, and I resorted to this kind of telegraphic use of language. I managed to get in what I wanted to get in, but I was cramming.
The two Dana Knightstone ones, Missed and Found and Best-Laid Plans, went relatively smoothly. I was introduced to the games by the fandom pimping post, and I probably spent too much money and time tearing through them all. Oh, they're addictive! But I had a blast, and I enjoyed writing a couple of drabbles, tending a bit more toward meta-crack. I thought about posting these together as a single story but decided not to. The thing that struck me most about the absurd hidden-object-game mechanics was Dana's tendency to discard useful items like knives or scissors after using them only once (unless she was going to need them again --- like what, does she have a precognitive gut sense?), so it struck me in the third game when she really did keep this one screwdriver for almost the entire time. I also felt totally cheated by the ending on that one. (SPOILER) When I realized Sebastian was going to die, I thought okay, our touching ghostly reunion scene is going to be him and Elise and it's going to be great! And then it didn't happen! GRR! So I had to issue a patch for that. The Swiss Army Knife one was basically a joke, and it illustrated something I learned about betaing/critiquing --- that you want to try to look below the surface of the comments you get; sometimes betas will suggest something and you're like "no no no," but you might be able to see the underlying problem that's bothering them and solve it in your own way. My beta on that one didn't like the last line; he found the knife being destroyed in the car crash implausible, and I was like "you're trying to take away my punchline!" but when I got at the underlying problem, it was that the weirdness of the knives' fates ramped up too suddenly, and what I actually had to do was make the second one weirder rather than take the weirdness out of the third. I think it was a definite improvement, and yes, I gave myself props for problem-solving skills there.
I don't remember exactly where the Paper Bag Princess ficlet, The Dragon's Confession, fit into the order I did them in, but it was somewhere along in here. I had initially set out to make this one a drabble, but when I spit out a draft, I could immediately see that I didn't have that much room to cut it, so I just accepted it as a general purpose ficlet. I hadn't read the book as a child that I remember, but I had read it a few years ago. It actually annoys me a bit that Ronald is so one-dimensional, but I think the book comes out of a more second-wave feminist context? Re-reading it for Yuletide, what struck me was that the ploy Elizabeth uses against the dragon really requires the dragon's active cooperation. He literally does knock himself out out of some need to prove that he's as awesome as she's saying he is, so I went with that as my idea, that the dragon was just really insecure, and Elizabeth's skill at cutting through bullshit can bring him some healing as well. And I'm very happy to have granted some childhood wishes for Elizabeth and the dragon to be friends. (I was briefly tempted to do a sequel and fix this dragon up with Hoard of Pastries Dragon for someone who'd requested the Unusual Dragon Hoards. The excitement waned before I got to it, though, and in the end I satisfied myself with sticking a "bunny free to good home" sign on it in my own comments; I think I broke my recipient in a good way.)
The next Drabble I finished was the Mushishi one, However Many Times We Meet. I kind of over-researched this one; my essentially-local library (not the one where I live but the one in the town where my UU church is and where I actually know people) had the manga, and I checked out most of it, actually managed to burn myself out before properly reading it all and just assured myself that there weren't any Tanyuu or Kumado stories I was missing (and it worked out well because it finally pushed me into paying the $25 per year it costs not-actually-locals for a library card there, and I am enjoying the library immensely). As for the actual writing process: perhaps because of working with The 7 Secrets of the Prolific, I've been trying to use a different process and rather than hammering the whole thing out in my head, spit out rough drafts that are actually rough (I've used the word "hash" to set my own expectations properly) and then trim/rebuild/massage them into shape. When I spit out the draft on this one, I had to cut it in half to get it to drabble length, but in this case I think that probably improved it. There were some sacrifices --- the first draft had a line I liked about "Where does (Tama) think they got the idea?" like of course Tanyuu would know how this worked, the hints are all in that mountain of scrolls she knows every word of by heart --- but overall, it was good for it. I'm not sure canon actually supports Tanyuu knowing exactly what's going on, but I think it's a reasonable and interesting take --- especially reading the initial scene with Tanyuu and Ginko as her trying to hint him toward the truth without letting on how much she knows. I didn't have time to wrestle with the whole theory of the soul that we've got going on with Kumado. He seems to have a continuous memory, but it also seems that every time his "soul" gets replaced he's a different person that who he was. Basically, I think the shared compassion for mushi really ties Ginko and Tanyuu together and it's what allows Tanyuu to relate to Kumado the way she does here. Or something, Mushishi is always hard to pin down. Which is part of why I had the worst time finding a beta for this one! I didn't think Mushishi was that obscure, but seriously, nobody had seen it, the first person a hippo found for me went AWOL, and I finally prevailed on someone I was beta-reading for to watch the relevant episodes just to do this, because Mushishi is not a thing where you can just say "here's a summary of what happens; go to town;" I feel like you really have to see it to get it. (Said beta enjoyed said episodes, though, so I have some hope that I have corrupted him. ^_~). In hindsight maybe I could have avoided some of the trouble, but I hadn't hit upon a trick I used later...
Then came the Princess Tutu piece, A Writer and A Duck, which ended up being a matching pair of drabbles --- and this time I did post them as a single story, because they were written to directly complement each other. Actually I set out to write just one drabble here, too, and yeah, that didn't work. Note for future reference: never try to put more than one main idea into a drabble. In this case, though, the two main ideas split into two complementary drabbles very nicely, which let me structure it with the two different viewpoints. I think it really worked out well. I didn't have/take time to review canon on this one and it had been awhile since I saw Princess Tutu, I was just working from my memory of what the ending was like (and my recollection that it left post-canon as something of a blank check), and I was able to find betas for Princess Tutu to help me keep from screwing up. I was going for that "bittersweet and meaningfully ordinary" feel of the canon ending. As I was working on it, I did have attacks of doubt that it was too bittersweet (what is this, about 60% cacao?), but a review of my recipient's letter reassured me, as did one of my betas, and it seems to have gone well.
The Snowpiercer one, The Shiver of Sacredness seems like it kind of just happened. I don't remember exactly how it all came together. I noticed Idhren (aka
jjhunter)'s request because I remember her from Glitchwidth and see her as like a DW friend-of-friends, and I saw Snowpiercer on the seven-day-checkout movie rack at my above-mentioned library. I forget which of these things happened first, but, well, it ended with a fic, which was heavily influenced by her letter and the excellent meta she linked to (may have over-relied on it, honestly). This drabble did kind of spring from my head fully formed. It worked itself out almost completely one day in the car, the way the FMA one did once upon a time, the way I usually try/wait for things to do, and just because I'm deciding it's better not to rely on that kind of process doesn't mean I'm not happy to accept it if it just up and happens. What I keep saying about Snowpiercer is that it is a wonderfully thinky movie. I admit, I unceremoniously dropped an e-mail chain with one of my betas because with Yuletide coming down to the wire I didn't have time to give in to the temptation of sending essays back and forth about our interpretations of the ideas and characters. But jjhunter got out of the drabble pretty much exactly what I intended, so that made me happy. As I wrote in a note somewhere: "Drugs are a pale substitute for [a kind of ineffable mystical encounter with] reality, and violence is also a drug." This is also the one where I hit upon a new beta-finding trick: if no one had offered the fandom in the beta spreadsheet, I started bothering people other than my recipient who had requested the fandom. Every time I've tried that so far, it's worked.As I wrote these, I was trying to make the number of pieces I contributed come out to "lucky" numbers (yeah, it's complicated and ridiculous ::side-eyes her OCD!Annie Cresta muse::), and I specifically wanted to end up with nine drabbles. After the Snowpiercer one I was at eight, and I had another idea in reserve, but I saved the last "slot" until the full list of prompts was released, at which point I spent way too much time going through the entire list, only to have nothing new grab me, so I went with the idea I already had.
Said idea was for the Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow one, Strange Reunion, in which Alucard gets to hold Soma when he's just a little bitty baby. (And yes, in my headcanon, when they say Soma and Mina are "childhood friends," they're not kidding.) Castlevania is one of those things where I have this huge elaborate headcanon and nothing much to realistically do with it, but this is a fun little taste. This one was oddly in-between the states that the others fell into. Again, the initial hash had to be cut in half, and overall I think it was good for it, but I still feel like this deserves to be a longer fic. I wasn't straining quite as badly as in the Hyouka one, but I did end up with this frantic pace, which is appropriate to the initial scare, but it could've stood to breathe more on the resolution, and I think in a longer fic I could really explore this moment where the role-reversal inherent in the Sorrow games starts out turned up to 11. But I can always do that later if I want. It got me up to my desired nine drabbles, and it was a little cherry on top to give to my assigned recipient.
And the last Madness piece I did was the Juuni Kokki | Twelve Kingdoms fanart for
quicksilver_ink, Christmas Cake. I wanted to do something for quicksilver_ink pretty much all along, but very early on I had to get real about doing canon review for an anime series that's 45 episodes of heavy (awesome, but heavy) stuff. But I could do fan-art, and I quickly had the idea of Rakushun making Youko a Japanese-style Christmas Cake. Guilty admission: I originally intended to show Youko's reaction, but I let it get pretty close to the end before I actually got to work, and when I'd drawn Rakushun, I decided that he was enough. Besides, I already thought my "hand" might be recognized; drawing a human character would've been sure to give me away. I was pleased with how it came out. I was actually surprised that more people didn't take advantage of Madness to post art (AFAIK I was the only one, which was kind of funny when the mods posted the Madness stats: "Shortest fic: 0 words"). I'm half-tempted to put that out there as a sub-challenge next year, but I don't know if I'm up to it...(This put my Madness count at 11, which is a lucky number because Glitch.)
Before I get to the main gift, I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the betaing I did. I don't want to get into specifics (confidentiality and that), and I'm scared I'm going to forget something, but here are the fics I recall betaing, and I think their authors all did quite well:
Death and Promises in Winnipeg by Rosencrantz (Dana Knightstone --- so much fun!)
Three for Family by NightsMistress (Natsume Yuujinchou --- dang I'm behind on canon, the manga kind of shot forward while I wasn't looking...)
Most Terrible Majesty by mesonyx (Salem --- which I still know like nothing about.)
And in Madness, Long Way From Home by Elfwreck (Okami)
Someone also EMed me looking for a beta for something really long in a canon I didn't know, and I just declined. Afterward I was kind of torn between feeling guilty for not doing it and feeling proud of myself for respecting my limitations and needs.
I haven't done enough betaing, so I was kind of feeling my way into the process. Firstly, I found that I enjoy it. Secondly, I found that Google Docs is very very handy for this sort of thing. I do sometimes have a tendency to get above myself and want to take over the author's story, so I have to be careful about that, but if I'm too careful about it, I fall into my other weakness of being more reticent than I should be. But I think I did all right, even made some quite radical suggestions that the authors seemed to find helpful. Apparently I'm also anal about POV consistency.
And that just leaves my main gift, the Psychic Force technically-a-novelette As Many Lullabyes. First begun, last finished, and the one I could really ramble on about all day...
By the way, for those who haven't experienced the wonderful '90s anime fighting game crack that is this series, have a canon overview post. Getting up to speed isn't too big of a time commitment; maybe more of a challenge on the schlock-tolerance front, but it's worth it. Or you could probably read the fic cold, too.
When I say this was the fic "first begun," I'm not kidding. Guilty admission: I actually started it just after Yuletide 2011, when MarsDragon's prompt got me into this whole Psychic Force thing and I wrote Capital and Labor. The idea of Keith's insomnia (it's specifically onset insomnia, BTW) originated in that story, and led to the idea for Lullabyes. In fact, I recall years ago coming on my journal to ask if "Lullabyes" was an acceptable spelling ("Lullabies" is technically more correct but not as aesthetically pleasing).
At first, I somehow thought it was going to be a cute little fic, and I knocked out Sonia and Wong's scenes quickly and easily. Then I backfilled the opening scene in the lab, which is long and hellaciously dark, followed by Brad's scene, which ran over 2000 words... At that point I accepted that the scope was expanding and went back and fleshed out Sonia's scene more, but not long after that, with Carlo's scene just barely started, I somehow bogged down and it wound up on the shelf.
When I got assigned to write for MarsDragon again this year, I decided I wanted to do a Psychic Force fic. I have another idea or two in reserve, but Lullabyes was a good fit, I could use the kick in the pants to actually finish it, and finishing it seemed like the path of least resistance. I was a bit self-conscious about picking it back up, but it worked out. Continuing the "first begun, last finished" pattern, I was first able to make some forward motion on Regina's scene, but left it unfinished and did the flashback with Burn. I was especially worried about picking Carlo's scene back up and kept putting it off, but when I really started thinking about it it came together pretty easily. That was where I was when the default deadline came up, and I went ahead and posted the story without Regina's scene just to be safe --- it wasn't a placeholder, it was a defensible fallback position. Actually Regina's scene hadn't been in my original concept for the fic, and there were a couple more scenes I had also thought of adding but a) I ran out of time to get them done and b) I decided they didn't actually belong in here (although they might belong somewhere, sometime). I worked on Regina's scene down to the wire, including a major overhaul within 24 hours before the stories went live. It's probably rougher than what I could have done with more time, but it was a big improvement, at least. In the previous draft of her scene I was being stupidly cagey about the sexual aspects of the relationships (damn my painfully straight-laced upbringing!) and Keith was kind of barely in it, like he only had one speaking line. I still worry that her scene breaks the flow, coming as it does in between the climactic disaster revealed in Carlo's scene and the denouement of the flashback, but I think expanding the scene at least mitigated the problem somewhat? Plus it gave me a seasonal tie-in. I had made up the dates back in the first phase of work and I don't even remember what happenstance made me put hers in December, but when I set about expanding the scene I just had to use it.
I kind of want to go through and make even more detailed comments scene by scene, but this post is enough of a monster already. I'll save that for another time.
So there you are. As I said, I do have a few things tucked away to possibly write for New Years Resolution, but those are still classified, and I don't want to go too far overboard with them. I really do need to get back to the Hunger Games stuff...
PS: I bought myself Scrivener. I loved RoughDraft, but it ceased development years ago and it did icky things to my beloved em-dashes. Scrivener is finally something I can move on to. It has most of the features I loved in RoughDraft and more, and it's especially nice since, starting with the Hunger Games stuff, I've been using a more nonlinear process, which was getting unwieldy with all the scrolling around. (Not that I don't waste time clicking around Scrivener projects, but at least I don't get lost on the way to where I was aimlessly going...)
I also changed my journal style on DW. I'd had the old one so long I wanted something fresh, and New Years seemed like a good time.
