I haven't read half the Yuletide fandoms half as completely as I would like (I've still got some queued up), but here are some more I did get to and loved. (Rec post 1, including my awesome gifts, is here.)

( Recs in Oryx and Crake, Picture of Dorian Gray, Riddle-Master trilogy, Star Trek - Rihannsu, Tam Lin )

Dear yuletide writer,

Wow, thank you so much for offering to write a story in one of my crazy canons! Feel free to ignore these words — I love seeing how other people think about my favorite fandoms, and I love seeing interpretations that are different from mine (some of my favorite fics are the ones that made me look at things in a new way).

( In random order: Preiddeu Annwn (The Spoils of Annwn); Church Going - Philip Larkin (poem); The Instrumentality of Mankind - Cordwainer Smith )

Consuming canon: I have two small-canon poem fandoms this year: "Church Going" and Preiddeu Annwn." Either of these would take about five minutes to consume. Cordwainer Smith are short stories, and just a couple of them would probably suffice to get the general idea, but they are certainly quite a bit harder to find. I'd very much recommend We the Underpeople as the best introduction that's easily available in the US and cheap. If you happen to be in the UK, my favorite Smith anthology is The Rediscovery of Man. (I'd recommend "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," "Under Old Earth," "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," or some subset thereof, to get a sense of it.)

(Edited 10-30-14 because I really do like all gender-variety of friendships, and to say happy endings and dark endings are both great!)

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS Jukebox 2014 is open!

Someone wrote me "Wish You Were Here" fic. IN SPAAAACE. And with an AI-related post-human! And with this vast implied sweep of wonderfully strange future history -- in about a thousand words! -- that reminds me just a little of Cordwainer Smith, and rumination on what it means to be human and going to the end of all things and it's like the writer read my mind about everything I love best! I love it so, so much.

Actually, go read everything in Jukebox! Don't know the canon? CrazyHelpful Jukebox people have made a YouTube playlist so you can listen to all the songs! I haven't had a chance to read a whole bunch of them yet but hopefully will post some recs when I get a chance to read through the collection.

but especially my gift story because so much love <3 <3

The Zoo at the End of the Universe (1385 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd (Song)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Post-Humanity, IN SPACE!, Bittersweet
Summary:

The last two representations of humanity.

I, uh, have signed up for Remix Madness (thanks lignota for the tip!)... I've never had anything remixed before or done a remix myself, but both those things sound fun!

I've also, of course, signed up for jukebox_fest (which is, I think, my favorite exchange ever). There was a list of nominated songs compiled on Youtube here.

I have my rarewomen assignment in, and am wondering how much tweaking I am likely to do in the next week...

Jukebox 2014 is starting up, which I guess means that I should post about the Jukebox 2013 fic I wrote :) (It got kind of lost in everything that was going on second half of last year.)

I was matched with "Bele Doette as fenestres se siet," a chanson de toile which I had never heard of before reading quillori's dear author letter and which after hearing I immediately signed up for. It is a really beautiful song, and I highly recommend it even if you don't particularly want to read the fic, if you are at all inclined toward medieval music. quillori helpfully translated the lyrics and linked to youtube here.

I was really intrigued by the idea that if anyone comes who has betrayed love, [that person] will not be able to enter the church. And so I wrote a story about love and nuns and magic. I'm quite pleased by how it turned out.

sprocket did the usual amazing job of beta. Thank you!

The Oblate's Tale of the Abbess and the Knight (3156 words) by raspberryhunter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Bele Doette (Traditional Chanson)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bele Doette/Count Doon (past)
Characters: Bele Doette, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Friendship, Love, Nuns, Don't Have to Know Canon
Summary:

Bele Doette is a legend now, a beautiful portrait on the wall of the abbey, a romantic song that is sung by the children in the fields. I am one of the last who can tell you of her as she was, and of the knight who came to her at the Feast of Fidelity.

Ooooh, I got two stories for invisible-ficathon! They are both Horn of Joy by Matthew Maddox (from A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L'Engle). I asked for the women's take on his work, and I got two lovely stories that do this quite differently:

an unknown fire (2816 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kairos (O'Keefe) Series - Madeleine L'Engle, The Horn of Joy — Matthew Maddox (fictional book)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Gedder/Gwen Maddox, Zillie/Brandon Maddox, background Brandon Maddox/Zillah Llawcae, Gedder & Zillie
Characters: Zillie, Gedder, Gwen Maddox
Additional Tags: Brother-Sister Relationships, Doomed Relationship, Psychic Abilities, Kything, Character Death, Fate & Destiny
Summary:

A sister's tale; of Gwydyr's line, how it began, and how it ended. They don’t speak of the story behind their names, not out loud. They don’t have to. It’s haunted them and their kin for as long as their blood memory stretches, to the shores of a lake too far away to fathom and too long ago to comprehend.

From Eyes of Blue (345 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Horn of Joy — Matthew Maddox (fictional book), Kairos (O'Keefe) Series - Madeleine L'Engle
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Zyll, Gwydyr, Madoc, Gaudior
Additional Tags: Scry, unicorn, People of the Wind, treat
Summary:

Zyll was frightened, not of her gift but of the vision it brought her.

I haven't read all the stories, but I liked these very much:

In The Icy Air (2637 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Zombies in the Snow (fictional movie)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Gerta/Young Rolf
Characters: Gerta, Young Rölf
Additional Tags: Sebald Code, Snow and Ice, Zombies
Summary:

Left to fend for herself, Gerta must rise to the challenge and take on hordes of zombies!

The writer even used Sebald Code and made it plot-relevant! I wish I'd written this.

Notes on the system for classifying the animals presented in the "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge" (1063 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge (Book), The Book of Imaginary Beings - Jorge Luis Borges
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: all myths are true


Marvelous. There needs to be more Borges fanfic.

A Violent Connection (502 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: River Tam Beats Up Everyone (fictional movie), xkcd, Firefly
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: River Tam, Original Female Character(s), Malcolm Reynolds
Additional Tags: Ridiculous
Summary:

Two differing viewpoints on the day River Tam beat up everyone.

I... this one just made me laugh.

Wow, thank you for writing me a fic! I am sooooo excited to get a fic about any of these canons. Please don't feel bound by any of my words -- I want to know what you think of these canons!

[Some bookkeeping before I start talking about canon. What I have here is the maximum I expect you to have read to write the prompt -- these should all be five-minute-ish fandoms. If you just read a paragraph and see something that sparks your interest, don't even feel like you need to have read the entire excerpts I quote (e.g., don't feel like you need to have read the entire excerpt of Melusine). I mean, if you want to read more, knock yourself out -- I love all these books and think they're certainly worth reading more of -- but I definitely don't expect it.)
The Horn of Joy is from A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle (particularly Chs 4 and 11).
The Book of Gramarye is from The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, in the chapter of that name.
The Fairy Melusine is from Possession by A.S. Byatt (the most relevant bits are the excerpt at the very beginning of Ch 16 and the discussion in the last couple of pages of Ch 3, from which I've taken the "cosmic battles").
Coriakin's Spellbook is from Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, Ch 10.]

Now for the canons! (I always write staggeringly varying amounts; be assured I want all of these very much, just -- the ones that live in the academic world are easier for me to get wordy about.) ( Horn of Joy, Book of Gramarye, Fairy Melusine, and Coriakin's Spellbook. )

Thanks again! :)

I wrote Magic Flute fic for my Yuletide assignment!

Who Fears Not Night and Death (2960 words)
Summary: Roses always have thorns, but still Pamina chooses the roses.

Yeah, so, writing this one was interesting. I think I put more of my heart in it than any other fic I've ever written. I'm not saying it's actually necessarily any good: my heart being, probably, not particularly that appetizing. I find myself, for this reason, completely unable to assess how good or bad this fic is, which is part of why I was so relieved that lignota didn't hate it. (The other reason for relief is that I was using a two-year-old DYW letter; while I don't mind writing without extended prompts/info in general, I like L'Ignota very much and really wanted to write something she would like.) As usual, many many thanks to my betas, in this case greenlily, who was a useful voice of telling me whether I was hitting any terrible squicks, and sprocket, who did her usual stellar job of pointing out all the places where Things Did Not Work, often over my strenuous protests.

I also ended up, despite the fact that I told myself the fic was Not Going to Be About That, doing some amount of trying to make quasi-logical sense of canon (I love this opera more than I can describe, and yet I feel like the plot and characters Make No Sense), because I CANNOT HELP MYSELF that way. I'm not sure how much of it is apparent to the reader, but I now have this complete headcanon about the backstory to this opera, which I am liable to start ranting about at a moment's notice, about how the Queen and Pamina's father were a flawed version of Pamina/Tamino that succeeded briefly in making the flute together, but in the end failed through their flaws making it impossible for them to understand each other, where Pamina/Tamino succeeded by forgiving each other; and how Sarastro's canonical hatred of women, and the Queen in particular, stems from his total incomprehension of how his best friend, Pamina's father, could go with the Queen. And about how the Queen has this tortured relationship with the truth where she thinks it is very important to tell the truth (hence the whole punishment of Papageno and Pamina's insistence on the truth to Sarastro in canon) but gets around this by telling half-truths. Ahem.

By the very nature of it, I feel like this fic is extremely dependent on my own personal interpretation/reimagining of this opera. (In terms of recordings, I followed closely, or more closely than anything else, the interpretations given on the Gardiner recording and the BBC (2003) video.) I mean… I wrote operafic last year for Yuletide, but that was less writing from my particular interpretation (although I did have one) and more arguing meta with source. This… was different. I feel like I should apologize to lignota in case it isn't her interpretation. (I'm reasonably sure that she doesn't disagree with much of it, but still.)

So I also wrote a couple of other treats. First, The Dark is Rising fic:

And all the flowers that in the springtime grow (2781 words)
Summary: Jane lives her life in the mortal world, and it is not possible to think in the old ways here; but sometimes there are glimpses.

I wish that I had had another month for this one, and then I feel like I could really have edited the crap out of it. (As it is, I am indebted to my betas sprocket and slowmercury for beating it into shape as much as it already is.) But the prompt was so perfect that I had to write for it — Jane, my OTP Will/Jane, and a recipient that enthusiastically welcomed depressing and major character death and so on. Because I have been writing the headcanon for this in the back of my head for about twenty-five years. My first ship that I even remember was Will/Jane, and as a kid (obsessively re)reading these books I was very clear on how Bran wanted the ship to be Bran/Jane, but it so was not, Jane and Will clearly belonged together even if Will totally didn't realize it, darn it all! (Being a sheltered and not particularly imaginative kid, Bran/Will didn't even occur to me until I read lightgetsin's excellent Bran/Will many, many years later. But I digress.) I was also clear that Bran saved the world and that was why he had to stay behind.

I wrote both this treat and Who Fears Not Night and Death at about the same time, working on this one when my assignment was being recalcitrant, and apparently it rubbed off a little; a couple of people commented that this had a theme of choices, which was a conscious theme of my assignment but which I didn't notice at all in this one until it was pointed out to me…

I also quickly wrote this Wicked treat:

Bridges you didn't know you crossed (2117 words)
Summary: Around the time that Glinda first hears Elphaba's song sung around the palace, she starts having dreams of Elphaba.

…this year is apparently my year for post-canon fix-it (or break-it, I guess, in the case of Will/Jane) fic. That is to say, it has always got on my nerves that Elphaba asked Glinda not to clear her name, and Glinda accepted, because it makes no sense. So then of course I had to say something about how Glinda would eventually realize that it made no sense, and the fic followed.

And this quick fix-it for Watson always being annoyingly dense in the Mary Russell books:

The Beekeeper's Doctor (1283 words)
Summary: It does not take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce what is likely to happen when a girl who is about to achieve her majority leaves Jane Austen novels lying about, even if said girl is usually hard-headed and devoid of romanticism.

But, judging from the surprise on my friend's face, perhaps it took a John Watson.

I haven't had time to read that much in the archive, but the ones I have read have been lovely! Here is my present:

To everything there is a season... (11619 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The People - Zenna Henderson
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

This is a lovely story about the power of family/community for redemption, plus which we get to see what happened to Bethie-too, and as an extra bonus that one of the People who was present at the bombing of Hiroshima, which was something I would have asked for if I had had any hope of getting it, and there are so many wonderful details that are so Zenna Henderson. And it is full of life and light and joy and love, just as a People story ought to be. It is probably readable without knowing canon.

( Recs in Arm Joe, Earthsea, Gunnerkrigg Court, and The Lady of Shalott )

Dear yuletide writer,

Wow, thank you so much for offering to write a story in one of my crazy canons! I, uh, wrote a lot of words. I tend to do that. Feel free to ignore pretty much all of them — I love seeing how other people think about my favorite fandoms, and I love seeing interpretations that are different from mine (some of my favorite fics are the ones that made me look at things in a new way).

( In random order: The People - Zenna Henderson; Tillerman Cycle - Cynthia Voigt; Instrumentality of Man - Cordwainer Smith; Mabinogion )

General: Things I love (I don't expect all of these by any means, this is just a random sampling of Things I Like): I love worldbuilding fic and plotty fic because I can't write it myself, but by the same token I know it is hard to write and I certainly don't expect it. I love character-driven fic that thinks hard about the ramifications of characters' choices. I love for there to be some sort of character arc or characters (and/or the reader) coming to a greater understanding of something or someone during a fic. I love and adore friendship/partnerships, especially platonic ones, of all gender-variety. I love it when all the characters are understandable rather than straight-out villainous or malicious, or where expectations of malice are subverted. I am more a fan of gen than anything else, but I'm open to both het and slash, though I tend to be respectful of healthy overt canon pairings (which basically here means that I respect the Tillerman pairings and the People pairings).

Things I don't like: gratuitous violence or gratuitous character death. I'm not a huge fan of anything above PG-13 and will probably skim over anything really explicit unless something about the explicitness itself plays into character or plot development, in which case all bets are off :) I would prefer no darkfic or zany-AU for these fandoms, if that's okay (I'm usually happy with either, but not for these particular fandoms), except for Mabinogion -- I just realized that I would not say no to Arianrhod being the queen of a dystopian AU, or a stellar empire, as long as she retains her power and mystery, and if you want to write darkfic for Mabinogion, heck, Welsh stories always end in tragedy, go for it... (Fork-in-the-road AU is always welcomed.) (ETA 11-29-13: Sorry for the late notice, but it just occurred to me that Cordwainer Smith is often bittersweet or with endings that are surface-tragic, and I am ALL ABOUT THAT, that would be lovely. It's more the "rocks falls everyone dies" sort of darkfic I don't want -- I want there to be some hope!)

If you get stuck with your match… The Mabinogion is probably the smallest canon here (the Four Branches are the relevant bit). As for the others: The People is a large canon of work, but the stories are a fast read, and you could probably read a couple of them ("Ararat" is probably a must, and perhaps "Shadow on the Moon" to get the second-gen perspective) and get the feel of it pretty quickly -- I don't think Henderson herself worried too much about keeping everything strictly canon-compliant detail-wise. Cordwainer Smith are short stories, but a bit harder to find. I'd very much recommend We the Underpeople as the best introduction that's easily available in the US and cheap. If you happen to be in the UK, my favorite Smith anthology is The Rediscovery of Man. (I'd recommend "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," "Under Old Earth," "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," or some subset thereof, to get a sense of it.) Voigt is seven books long, but they are fast reads and probably available at your local library, and really if you read Sons from Afar you could write something on that one alone on James or Sammy, without reading the others, that would make me really really happy, or A Solitary Blue and Seventeen Against the Dealer (which do sort of need to be read as a pair) and something about Jeff, or Come a Stranger alone and something about Mina (although it's curiously hard to find).

Again, please write whatever you want. A lot of this is just my talking to myself; I want to know what you think of my beloved canons! And thank you again!

(Edited Cordwainer-Smith section 10-14-13, added AU/darkfic for Mabinogion and link to Cordwainer Smith 10-15-13. Edited darkfic sec 11-29-13.)