Eight chapters and two years into this AU I am back in Wen Qing's POV! A new chapter of the Jiang Yanli golden core AU, mostly featuring stressed eldest sisters staggering around in the woods.

A confession: although I have several times received the delight of having someone podfic my fic, and am thrilled whenever it happens, I have always been too chicken to actually listen! I figured the experience would mostly be a constant agony of 'why did I put that word there, what was I thinking, is it too late for me to edit this?!' and have thus avoided it entirely.

However [I added optimistically, when first discussing this on Twitter] if someone I knew ever recorded a podfic for me I would valiantly try to see if the feeling of Friendship could break the block! and I am now pleased to report that it is indeed so; not only did I listen to sophia_sol's recording of on your way up to the light, my Eponine-lives canon divergence AU, ALL the way through, they did the impossible and in fact made me feel feelings about my own words.

Relevant factors:

- I wrote on your way up to the light many years ago and have mostly forgotten the specific words that were in it so it's been too long for me to constantly be wanting to edit it
- I do actually think it's one of the better things I've ever written
- as aforementioned the power of friendship
- sophia_sol is simply a very good reader!!!

Anyway this is really timely because I have yet another original audio short coming out in a few months (for the Lesbian Historic Motif podcast) and I am really hoping that this time I will be brave enough to listen to it when it goes up now that I have had this first and most delightful Listening to Audio Recordings Of My Own Work Experience.

After many months, I have finally written some more of the 'Jiang Yanli loses her golden core' AU, in which, after five chapters, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji have one whole scene together! It goes better than it hypothetically could have!

"All I want postcanon is for Jiang Cheng to be completely drowning in dogs," I said, and then, unfortunately, I wrote 13,000 words of it.

Five Dogs, One Cat

what I should be writing: so many things

what I am instead writing: well, the second chapter the Jiang Yanli AU is up, so that's something? Lan Wangji accidentally stumbles over the wrong missing Jiang sibling, everyone is very tired.

GUESS WHAT it's another ... Jupiter Ascending fic chapter ....?

STILL UPDATING AT A RATE OF SLIGHTLY MORE THAN ONE CHAPTER A YEAR HECK YEAH.

IT ATEN'T DEAD, or, in other words: I have a new chapter of my Jupiter Ascending fic up! A whole ten days before the one-year-since-last-updated mark!

I'M VERY PROUD and I'm sure there are about three of you who are very excited also.

I've read maybe four fics in the Yuletide archive so far that weren't gifted to me -- my own gifts were so amazing and plentiful (THANKS FOR A PERFECT FIC, fahye, YOU DELIGHTFUL RIDICULOUS HUMAN) and then things have been so busy since that I have not had the time! I am very much looking forward to working through everything in a slow and leisurely fashion over the next year. :D

As for what I wrote:

The Raptor, Ladyhawke

I hadn't thought about this delightfully ridiculous 80's film in years -- I actually matched with my recipient on Casablanca -- but when I saw she was asking for prequel fic with, like, actual logistics ... and historical context .... I COULD NOT RESIST. How would you cope if one day you're a fairly ordinary medieval lady and the next day you're spending half your time as an angry bird?

Due to the fact that I am in no way a medieval scholar, this is a fic that was even more of a collaborative effort than usual. I am enormously grateful to actual medieval scholars rymenhild and izilen for brainstorming historical plausibility with me, izilen again for going through and catching all my accidental anachronisms, and genarti and newredshoes for betaing!


Ecdysis, The Lie Tree

Faith, Paul, and ill-advised adventures in Victorian photography!

I'd sort of forgotten that gogollescent made almost exactly the same Lie Tree request I did until it went out on the pinch-hit list, after which I was like "well, probably no one else is going to write Lie Tree fic so I may as well give it a go" ... OH, HOW WONDERFULLY WRONG I WAS. In addition to the adorable Lie Tree fic I myself received, you should also read Gogol's other gift, The Transformation, which features a Faith of a pitch-perfect terrifying fierceness that I can only dream of capturing. I am proud of the Victorian photography details, though. This was a very research-heavy Yuletide year!

I have posted another chapter of Jupiter Ascending fic!

In which literally nothing happens except Aleksa and Tsing eating cheap American-style Chinese food. Um.

The Lost Library exchange just wrapped up -- that's the metafictional one where you write a bit of a book or play or movie that's implied or stated to exist in another book or movie -- and it was, unsurprisingly, delightful.

I chucked two works into the fray, one straight-up unfinished script --

Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter (Draft 2, With Comments)

What has occurred to bring me to this pass?
For on my life, I cannot make it out.

[PERHAPS BECAUSE THE RELEVANT SCENES ARE MISSING FROM THIS PLAY, WILL]

-- and one semi-scholarly compilation, including some script excerpts and a few production reviews.

The Great Fire Lord

CASTING NOTES

FIRELORD SOZIN: Heroic leading man type. Strong, well-muscled, must look good shirtless.

AVATAR ROKU: Attractively sinister type. Small goatee, pencil moustache, fantastic hair.

DRAGONS: At least three actors per dragon. No skimping!

And, in exchange, I received another delightful rediscovered bit of the literary corpus of the Ember Island Players!

The Legend of the Blue Spirit

The BLUE SPIRIT enters stage left. He glides through the fortress like a ghost, kicking, punching, and slicing through the guards. He leaves the last one standing, and places his blades against the guard’s throat.

Honestly, I hope this exchange runs for long enough to build a whole Ember Island Players library. So much hilarious revisionist A:tLA history, so little time!

There's a bunch of other charming works in the archive, which I highly recommend checking out, but I'm just gonna toss out ( a few more recs )