One Ordinary Week, with Party Hats (DS9, gen, Bashir/Garak)

[raspberryhunter]

"Where's Julian? He's usually the first one here!"

"Oh, him," O'Brien said. "He's probably still working on planning that party for Garak. He's a little obsessed."

Near-simultaneously, Kira said, "I'll say"; Odo said, "And what if he is?"; Dax said "Ah, it's cute"; and Worf said, "It is unbecoming."

A03 link here.

I had a blast writing this yuletide treat for elegantpi, which I wrote most of while waiting for assignments to go out, totally randomly because the prompt caught my eye and I kept coming up with different slice-of-life scenes in my head that had been in the prompt, and finally I was all, oh, what the heck, I'm just going to sit down and write all these things down. I... never saw myself as a slash writer, ever, and ElegantPi didn't even request it (though said it would be fine), but I have trouble writing Garak even though he is my favorite character (...perhaps these two things are related, actually), and he demanded something to take the attention off the fact that I can't really write him well, and he seemed happy with Julian to do that, so. Sneaky bastard, is Garak!

So so many thanks to my beta, infinimato, who graciously agreed to beta for a complete stranger, and who besides making the overall writing much stronger also articulated exactly what was wrong with the last scene and how to fix it, thank you! Also thanks to the Misses Clause Challenge, without which Kira and Jadzia would not have known about Portal.

Comments

[scaramouche]

I'm really happy to hear you had a good Yuletide experience! I was wondering whether to poke you to find out what happened.

[raspberryhunter]

I had a great time! My characters/prompt were amazing, and my gift was awesome, and everything was pretty much totally wonderful! (I will admit that I wish I knew that my HB recipient had liked her present, as I tried to make it something she would like, but ah well.) I think that the requirement to write, and the requirement to write to a deadline, was good for me, although I wouldn't have minded having about twice as much time as we ended up having (I might have added another chapter to my HB fic, and I would have restructured the DS9 one a bit). But I suppose if we'd had two months I'd be asking for four :)

Your Wishmaster fic sounds amazing; would it be okay to read it without knowing source?

[scaramouche]

Yay, that's awesome to hear! Deadlines do push you to write more, that's why I started doing fest fics in the past few years. Before that I'd barely written anything, so that extra incentive forced creativity. Now you've got a taste, maybe you'll be looking for more?

I'm not sure whether the Wishmaster fic is readable if you don't know the canon... It's quite specific for my recipient and refers to stuff that happens in the movie without going into full detail, but I saw a rec *cough* out there by someone who said they know nothing about the movie but could follow it anyway, so it's possible?

[raspberryhunter]

Yeah, yuletide was so cool, and I'm happy enough with the result, that I'm kind of thinking I should do more of these. Do you have any suggestions? :)

Hm, okay, maybe I'll put it in on my list of movies to watch, and read the fic then...

[scaramouche]

Well, you already know about Yuletide's New Years Resolution collection, but there's also smallfandomfest, although they have a window for posting instead of a single deadline?

[raspberryhunter]

Hm! smallfandomfest looks pretty cool. There aren't any prompts that I'm extremely excited about this time around, but it looks like something to watch. Thanks!

Yeah, I might end up posting to the NYR collection. There's at least one plot bunny I just ran out of time to polish up...