skygiants

REVEALS DAY.

ambyr, thank you again for my amazing Yuletide gifts! I'm so pleased and flabbergasted, I'd no idea!

For myself, I meant to write much more for Yuletide this year than I did, but I did manage two stories:

The Loyal Heart, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow

So my recipient very properly requested Dick/Joanna/Alicia fic, and I said "haha, yes, of course, WHAT A GREAT PROMPT, Alicia spends the entire book hitting on both of them and I ship it one hundred percent!" and then I said, "HOW THE HECK DO YOU WRITE AN OT3, THE EMOTIONAL GEOMETRY IS SO MUCH MORE COMPLICATED!" and also "how the heck am I going to copy Robert Louis Stevenson's fake medieval prose without drowning in a pile of forsooths!"

Really this fic needs a lot more of Alicia seducing Joanna and Dick than it's got right now, and I tried, I really did, but I COULD NOT get any more explicit than a wink and a nod while working within Stevenson's prose style! That said, once I put my inner prose editor in a box I had a ton of fun writing these giant medieval dorks.

In Which Lettie Makes Demands, Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle

Man, after doing my best to pastiche Robert Louis Stevenson pastiching the Middle Ages, pastiching DWJ felt like a walk in the park. But really what happened is I saw the prompt for a Howl's Moving Castle fic from Lettie's point of view in the letters post, and then I had the realization that Lettie thinks Howl/Sophie is GROSS, and then I had the realization that the fact that Lettie found Howl/Sophie incredibly gross was HILARIOUS TO ME, and I knew that I was going to write this fic.

I actually now have a lot of thoughts and and feelings about all the Hatter sisters and their dynamics, and about Lettie as a self-centered but well-meaning seventeen-year-old trying to sort herself out, and Wizard Suliman as a dude from modern Wales trying to fit himself into Ingary culture and also figure out all these feelings he's got left over from being a mixed-up scarecrow, because presumably THAT was a pretty traumatic experience. All of which went into this fic, although some of it got buried way below the surface in favor of a joke. But the only thing I'm really sorry about is that I didn't have time to add a middle section with Martha as I wanted to do. HATTER SISTERS FOREVER.