A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I wrote three stories this Yuletide!

Kushiel's Legacy - Jacqueline Carey

Fireblossom

Phèdre has an unusual, botanical assignation with Melisande Shahrizai.

I never tire of writing sexy stories for this fandom or those two. The prompt was great and I took enormous pleasure in filling it. Tagged for chemical play, Flowers, Language of Flowers, BDSM, Botany, Heavy BDSM, Whipping, Recreational Drug Use, kinks we don't even have names for, Worldbuilding, Clothing Porn, Boot Worship, Sensation Play, thorn play if that's a thing, Dildos.


Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

The Crystal Cave

James Ritter returns to the House.

I had requested a different minor character for Yuletide this year (Sylvia D'Agostino) so it was fun to match on a request for James Ritter. His time in the House went very badly for him and yet he clearly loves and misses it.


"Sandkings" - George R. R. Martin

WO. AND. SHADE. IMPORTERS. ARTIFACTS. ART. LIFEFORMS. AND. MISC.

Wo and Shade launch their shop.

I've been wanting to fill this prompt for a while, to focus on a pair of intriguing secondary characters in Martin's SF horror classic "Sandkings." Wo and Shade are the proprietors of the shop which sells the main character a set of interesting new pets. I also love them and was delighted to get a chance to fill in a bit of their backstory.

Here is some of my recent fanpottery and fanfic.

Fan Pottery

Star Wars - Original Trilogy

Star Wars Pottery Set. A mug and a bowl depicting Luke's home on Tatooine; a cup and saucer set with the cup painted to represent Luke's Rebel pilot colors and the saucer in his Jedi colors.

Fanfic

Barton Fink

Getting Hot in Here: Horror and Homoeroticism in the B-Movies of Barton Fink. An article on the films of Barton Fink.

Dark Tower - Stephen King

My Love is like a Red, Red Rose.

The river flowed along the Path of the Beam, and the ka-tet walked along its bank. It was good pure water, if very cold. The fish they pulled from it were fat and fine and fairly leaped onto their hooks, and none had three eyes or tentacles or slimy fur instead of scales.

It seemed suspiciously nice for Mid-World.

Equus - Peter Shaffer

White Horses. Dysart tries horse exposure therapy on Alan.

The Expanse - TV

The Woman in White. The crew of the Roci tell ghost stories.

I think all you need to know to read this is that the characters are a crew on a spaceship and they come from Mars, Earth, and the Belt (a set of moons and asteroids), which all have different cultures.

The Long Walk

Hints for the Long Walk. A set of helpful hints for the Long Walk.

I wrote five stories for candyheartsexchange.

Annihilation - Movie

Embrace. 477 words. Lena/Dr. Ventress. Rated T.

The final encounter of Lena and Dr. Ventress goes a little differently.

I love writing for Annihilation - so much beauty and terror and wonder and strangeness in that movie. It gets excellent fic, too.

Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander

With Flowers in her Mane. 679 words. Gwydion/Melyngar. Rated G.

Gwydion gets Melyngar ready for a festival.

The very charming prompt: "I read these books for the first time a couple of years ago and absolutely adored Gwydion but also made an offhand comment to a friend that he was clearly married to Melyngar and shoot, headcanon permanent. Anyway, I am all for sweet moments, fluff, and/or the magical horse-bathing/grooming fic you've always wanted to write.

Fandom-Specific DNW: anything over a G rating"

I could not resist writing G-rated "His wife? A horse."

Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey

Another Round. 1491 words. Jaxom/Original Green Rider. Rated E.

AU of the green dragon's mating flight in The White Dragon. This time, Ruth participates. Which means Jaxom participates.

In The White Dragon, Jaxom has the chance to have gay sex, absolutely freaks out, and has het sex instead. So I was very pleased to see the prompt "but what if he didn't?"

Worrals - W. E. Johns

Special Friends. 1695 words. Rated M. Frecks/Worrals.

A get-together set during Worrals Flies Again, the night Worrals returns after being presumed dead.

That book has a fantastic presumed dead, one of Johns' best which is saying a lot as it's his number one with a bullet favorite trope. But the books stints on the aftermath, so I wanted to remedy that.

A Wolf for Worrals. 4151 words. Frecks/Worrals. Rated T.

“Girls can bond with wolves too,” said Worrals. “There’s no reason they should be kept for the boys.”

“If they let us bond with wolves, they’d have to let us do more than that,” Frecks pointed out. “They’d never waste us transporting Tiger Moths.”

“Exactly,” Worrals said triumphantly.

Worrals and Frecks in an AU where people bonding with psychic wolves is a known, rare, and valuable phenomena. I wrote this for cyphomandra, who wrote me Malory Towers with psychic wolves a while back. All fandoms should have psychic wolf AUs.

I have filled in two squares of my Biggles Bingo card.

From Ashes. 1914 words.

Erich von Stalhein is put before a firing squad.

Prompts: Stood up in front of a firing squad; Daring rescue. (Also a bonus prompt not on my card, a curative nip of brandy.)

Also, here's another which I didn't write for Biggles Bingo as I wrote it before we thought of that, so I'm not counting it for the card, but it does contain a hilarious number of the prompts on my card.

Human Touch. 14,000 words.

Biggles and von Stalhein are trapped together in an evil laboratory.

Prompts: Searching for lost friend(s), Daring rescue, Gunshot wound, A mysterious poison, Nerves, Dinner invitations.

Apparently today is Biggles Day. Guess what option won my poll yesterday?

The Darkening Dust.

This is an outtake from "von Stalhein in the Light." It takes place on the plane, in the time when the story breaks from von Stalhein's POV and picks up with Biggles in the hospital.

You are in the middle of a mission, Erich told himself. You cannot let yourself be distracted by injuries or pain or— He saw the danger in even pursuing that thought, and concluded, or anything. What you need is a task to focus on.

(Clearly the best way to distract yourself from thinking you got the love confession you want more than anything, in circumstances in which you can't believe it's true, is to... Well, here is a very accurate comment I got on this fic, from cefyr: Sometimes all you need in a fic is fluffy angsting over how pretty and competent Biggles is.)

I wrote EIGHT stories for Fic in a Box! I had a really good time with this exchange - I wrote a lot, and there were a lot of great stories to read and beautiful art to admire.

Biggles - W. E. Johns

If you haven't read any of the books, all you need to know is that "Biggles" Bigglesworth and his buddy Algy Lacey have been pilots since fighting in WWI together, and Erich von Stalhein has been Biggles' nemesis since that time. Biggles and von Stalhein have a kind of "beloved enemy," mutual respect, flirt in between shooting dynamic. Canonically, von Stalhein starts out as a German spy in WWI.

Spoilers for his arc in the book series. ( Read more... )

I'm avoiding spoilers for my own stories in the body of the post, but feel free to post spoilery comments in comments.

Biggles in the Dark. Biggles and von Stalhein are forced to work together when an explosion traps them in a pitch-black cave.

This was really fun to write as they're doing all sorts of things in absolute darkness, so there are no visual descriptions for most of it. Also, Biggles is a sort of unreliable narrator in this story, as there's something very important going on that he doesn't understand but the reader does. I love writing with those sorts of pre-set rules/restrictions.

Aid and Comfort. A standoff between Biggles and von Stalhein leads to them spending the night together in a freezing cabin.

Also very fun to write. Biggles is so very Biggles that it nearly breaks von Stalhein's brain. Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Fever, Delirium, Canadian Shack, Home Improvement, Spies & Secret Agents.

With My Own Hands. When an undercover job goes wrong, Biggles is forced to torture von Stalhein.

The torture, I should note, is brief and fairly mild as torture goes. And yes, I also really enjoyed writing this. They're working together rather than enemies in this one, and I love undercover stories and people having to communicate with each other without onlookers realizing what's going on.

Danny Dunn series - Jay Williams

Mrs. Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Date. After an accident at the lab, Mrs. Dunn and Carl Ellison have their first date on the ceiling.

All you need to know to read this story is that Mrs. Dunn is the live-in housekeeper for an eccentric professor who invents things like shrinking rays, and Carl Ellison is a cop who bonds/flirts with her over coffee in one of the books.

I have always loved looking at ceilings and imagining being gravity-reversed so I have to walk around the ceiling fan.

Deliverance (Movie)

Trust Fall. Bobby tries to bury the memory of what happened to him, until his insurance agency mandates a team-building camping retreat.

I watched the movie recently. Cultural osmosis has reduced it to a joke reference to an extremely non-jokey scene, but it's much more than either the meme or the scene. It's got excellent performances, beautiful cinematography, and some interesting commentary on toxic masculinity, nature, and civilization.

But of course, my immediate reaction was that I really wanted to write a coda for Bobby. How do you deal with a trauma that's so socially unacceptable to experience?

江湖 | Triad Underworld (Movie)

Cena. Hung Yan-Jau and Lefty at the restaurant, through the years.

Probably incomprehensible unless you've seen the movie. But just in case: Hung Yan-Jau is Andy Lau, Lefty is Jacky Cheung in paisley velvet, they're gangsters, they have a restaurant.

Star Trek - The Original Series

A Diplomatic Relationship. Federation Envoy Uhura meets Princess T'Pring for diplomacy, flirting, and literary allusions.

AU suggested by recipient. I had a lot of fun with it, and with coming up with Vulcan terms and literary allusions. I now want to read the series of Vulcan pulp novels I invented.

Sandman - Neil Gaiman

Lucky's Chance. A veteran trying not to dream is visited by Delirium and Dream.

All you need to know to read this is that there are seven siblings who embody core concepts like Dream, Delirium, Death, etc.

I wrote three treats for Trick or Treat.

Annihilation (Movie)

The Journey, for Rhizophora. 1366 words.

Lena explores the beach by the lighthouse.

The prompt was "I just want to see Lena exploring more of the Shimmer." Irresistible.


A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin

Five Times Balerion Saved Rhaenys and One Time She Saved Him, for coaldustcanary. Balerion | Rhaenys Targaryen's Cat & Rhaenys Targaryen (daughter of Elia). 5153 words.

A butterfly flaps its wings, a kitten chases the butterfly, and a girl and her cat get a different destiny.

Rhaenys Targaryen was Elia and Rhaegar's daughter, who named her black kitten Balerion after the dragon. She was murdered as a child in the sack of King's Landing. It's implied that the huge ferocious black tomcat who prowls the keep is her Balerion, grown up; Arya catches him as part of her training. The prompt was for more of Balerion, and perhaps an alternate fate for Rhaenys.


The Stand and some other Stephen King works

Flagg by Night, for skazka. 748 words.

Randall Flagg takes a trip down memory lane.

For the ballad Twa Corbies (the second time I've written a story based on it)

Our Dinner Sweet. The corbies feast well throughout the years. 320 words. The corbies eat corpses, but there's no graphic details.

For Biggles, Red as Blood. Biggles and von Stalhein take shelter from a blizzard in a strange castle. 3095 words. Nothing graphic, it's a fantasy story with some dark elements.

My laptop died when I'd written the beginning and end but not the middle, and I had to dictate the middle. Definitely my most hair-raising exchange experience.

The Wilds in the world of the Annihilation movie:

Will you bloom bright and fierce. Martha in the Shimmer. 345 words. Body horror, but the sort that's as beautiful as it is horrific.

I had a dream last night, and I wrote it into a story. All you need to know about the fandom is that the tall man (pictured in my icon) is the personification and ruler of dreams.

Sandman - Neil Gaiman. 718 words.

The tall man paused when he reached me, and looked directly at me with eyes like galaxies.

“No, dreamer,” he said in a voice like black velvet and waterfalls. “This wine is not for you.”

The Mosquito that Drank the Universe

This year I wrote six stories for Yuletide.

The Darkangel - Meredith Ann Pierce

The Gift of Terrain, for edenfalling.

Eoduin should be certain that she’d be chosen as Harvest Maiden. Who but the syndic’s daughter should be the one to mount the stone step with her new kirtle swirling around her ankles and hold her giftfruit high for all to see?

But the syndic didn’t choose the Harvest Maiden. Terrain did.

I think all you need to know to read this is that Terrain is a land on a terraformed, magical Moon.

This was a pinch hit I was hoping to treat anyway. I specifically wanted to write about Eoduin - she comes across very vividly in a very few pages - and her complicated relationship with Aeriel, her slave who is also (sort of) her friend. edenfalling specifically wanted her relationship with Terrain, and a harvest festival came to mind. A magical one, because it's a magical world; a fairytale-type story, since that's such an element of the first book in particular, which is the one where Eoduin appears.

Chains of Iron, Chains of Pearl, for idleflower.

Erin and Aeriel set out to save the Sea-of-Dust, but that isn't all they save.

This is a post-canon story and I'm not sure how much sense it will make if you don't know canon. But if you want to read, here's some canon spoilers. ( Read more... )

idleflower specifically wanted to see how they actually do the healing of the world. I wanted to do a fix-it for the aspect of the ending that I found depressing. And I wondered what would happen to the parts of the land that had evolved a fully-functioning ecosystem that needed the drought.

The New Mutants

Demons, Doom, and Pink Jelly Shoes, for genarti.

I can always tell when a story about summoning demons is written by someone who’s never summoned a demon.

This story will make a lot more sense with canon knowledge, but just in case, Illyana is a traumatized teenage mutant sorceress who knew a version of Ororo in a horrifying alternate universe; the version of Ororo she's interacting with in the story doesn't know about the AU.

Last Yuletide I wrote Ororo giving Illyana a houseplant for genarti. This year I wrote her Ororo taking Illyana shopping at the mall. One of my favorite aspects of the comics is how ordinary teenage concerns co-exist with horrific trauma and also magic and mutant powers. The comics have a bunch of stories along the lines of "Rachel and Amara spend a night in New York," and I always loved those.

I will never get tired of writing about demons trying to "help" Illyana, but I may never surpass the party dress made out of the fabric used to make the tags on the backs of shirts.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

The Woman Who Watches the King, for eglantiere.

For some, the House is a prison. For some, it's a place of healing.

I don't think you need to know canon to read this story, and it doesn't spoil anything. All the characters are original.

I wrote this eglantiere and I am pleased and surprised that anyone else liked it, because it was tailored very specifically for her. Her prompt mentioned the House being deliberately used for religious or spiritual or ritual purposes, and I thought, "What if it was used as therapy?"

This is one of those stories that has a lot of thoughts that are better expressed in the form of the story than in any other way.

The image of the king carrying a corpse comes from Indian mythology - it's King Vikramaditya. In the story, it has another meaning.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke & Grand Designs (TV)

Dorset: Portal to the House, for hangingfire

Maggie and Olabisi plan to transform a ruin containing a portal to the House into a cozy home with an artist's studio. But the ruin's status as a scheduled monument and the unique challenges of its proximity to the House endanger their project.

I don't think you need to know either canon to read this story. The House is a magical house. Grand Designs is a delightful British reality TV series which follows people building unusual homes.

I had never seen Grand Designs before I spotted hangingfire's Yuletide promo post for it. I checked out the show and was immediately addicted, having recently bought a house and nearly gone mad trying to do some renovations. I really identified with the hapless home-builders and the way everything inevitably took twice as much time and cost twice as much as they had planned for.

hangingfire wanted Grand Designs with a fantasy twist. I immediately thought of the House, but wasn't sure if they knew Piranesi, and it was too late to ask via the mods. Then I checked their AO3 history and discovered that they had requested it last Yuletide.

I had enormous fun writing this story, which packs in as many Grand Designs tropes as I could manage.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke & The Magician's Nephew - C. S. Lewis

Flotsam, for gammarad.

Sarah Raphael finds an unusual object while exploring the labyrinth.

This story will make a lot more sense if you know both canons.

I matched with gammarad on two canons, Piranesi and a movie, The Endless. I originally planned to do the latter, and sent a mod query about that. I also provided a bait question asking if they'd be interested in a Narnia crossover with Piranesi. They said yes.

However, gammarad had also requested The Endless for another exchange, and got a story very similar to the one I have planned to write, only better. So I then reconsidered Piranesi, for which their request was a story about Sarah Raphael, with worldbuilding.

Piranesi has several Narnia references, and there's a suggestion that one of the main characters might be a descendant of a certain Narnia character. I was originally going to send Sarah Raphael to Charn, but the Wood Between the Worlds itself felt like a better parallel with the House.

We only ever see one guinea pig in the wood in The Magician's Nephew, and it does get left there as it seems happy there. But we do know that Andrew Ketterley did multiple guinea pig experiments, so it seemed completely possible that Polly and Digory only saw one guinea pig but the Wood contained at least two.

Thanks to scioscribe and sholio for helping me brainstorm some of these stories.