skygiants

I am not allowing myself to dive into the Yuletide archive this year until after reveals due to a bunch of other reading commitments that have to get done by early January, BUT! I obviously made an exception for my own

THREE

INCREDIBLE

GIFT

FICS:

The Knight Under the Apple Tree

“Our crop is well tended,” Celia protested, despite all evidence that it was not. “It grows copiously out yonder.”

Oliver turned his head to look out the window. “Indeed, the grass outside does grow most mightily.”

“It is a sheepcote, sir; as the name suggests, it is for the keeping of sheep. Thus grass is essential.”

“And yet I do not see the sheep.”

I asked someone to sell me on As You Like It's Celia/Oliver side ship and I have completely received my wish: this fic is SO cute and does such a lovely job filling out the relationship between these characters until it feels like something that fully exists and that I want to root for

A rainbow-stripe in another proper world

“None of it ever happened,” said Uncle Nirupam in his precise way, “and so we have no memories of it, of course. But the instincts remain. I felt the same way when I first visited this world. I thought, is this where they burn people like us?”

The first of two excellent Witch Week fix-it fics -- this one is a short little outsider-POV gem in which Janet Chant and Nan Pilgrim are married, which is not something I would have ever thought of in a million years but which delights me deeply! galaxy brain!

Remember, Remember

“To produce the required crispiness, the mandrake is dipped in wallpaper paste, dredged in sawdust, and then pan-fried until it is completely burnt on all sides,” Nan recited obligingly. “It is served with a side of slugs poached in their own slime. Their chewy texture provides a perfect complement…” Estelle was howling with laughter by this point. Nan, as always in such moments, felt as though she were being carried along by an inexorable flood of words quite independent of herself. A rhyme was pushing insistently at the inside of her head, and she let it out without the least idea where it was going to finish up:

“Crispy mandrake, extra fancy,

Bring me something

Chrestomanci!”

and THIS one is a luxurious and voice-perfect THIRTEEN THOUSAND WORDS spent with my beloved terrible children as their memories are returned by way of an encounter with the TRAGICALLY ABANDONED SENTIENT GARDEN IMPLEMENTS. ABSOLUTE GALAXY BRAIN AGAIN ... I'm so happy ...

and having been Yuletided well beyond my deserts, I now leave the archive for now but I look forward to reading everyone's recs on the other side!

My Yuletide recipient wrote me an absolutely phenomenal letter this year with like five different prompts that I wanted to fill, leaving me paralyzed with indecision ... I eventually decided that, in the spirit of Yuletide, I should try from the rarest fandom and work my way back to see what else I could manage to write, which is how I ended up inaugurating the tag for Caroline Stevermer's When The King Comes Home with the memory of paint, a story about Hail Rosamer and Ludovic Nallaneen and artistic semi-immortality.

And then I had to do some unexpected travel and got a little bit sick and thought perhaps I wouldn't have time or energy to write anything else, but fortunately the day before Christmas I got possessed by the muse and wrote A Midwinter Night's Folly; or, Laugh, Lie, Love, a Twelfth Night story about Sir Toby & the gang that is mostly just thirty dick jokes in a trenchcoat (though no one has yet caught my stealth Christmas pun, contributed by genarti.)

(As a side effect, I have now fully brainwashed myself into becoming a 'Sir Toby and Sir Andrew have absolutely banged' truther; if the 'accost, Sir Andrew, accost!' scene is not Toby optimistically angling for and completely failing to land a Toby/Andrew/Maria threesome then I don't know how else to explain it.)

I also jumped in to contribute a little bit to genarti's Operation Mincemeat Hester-focused epistolary pinch-hit, Moments in the Middle of the War, for which she has kindly given me co-author credit even though all I did was write 250 words of largely-redacted largely-nonsense letter. Anyway, the vast majority of it is her excellent work and well worth reading!

HELP going to the pinch hit list reminded me I never actually un-placeholdered this letter! Huge shout outs and apologies to my original assignee and also THANK YOU if you're the person picking this up!

Generally speaking I will be happy with anything you write for me; in all the years I have done Yuletide, I have never failed to be overjoyed by the gifts I've received, so if you write something that makes you happy, I guarantee I will be delighted with it also.

Generally speaking I am always interested in ensemble and family stories, partnership and community-building and community dynamics, revolutionary politics, messy parenting and pseudo-parenting, the terrible idea that is espionage, divorce (romantic and non-romantic), and ghosts (figurative and literal)! For my requests this year I'm generally more interested in expanding on canon than in going AU in either plot or setting, but I'm broadly pro canon divergence AU or crossover if you have a brilliant idea for one.

Some of these canons deal with some pretty serious topics, and dark themes are A-OK if it makes sense for the story, but I tend not to be into graphic and gratuitous violence. I'm happy for romances to include sexual content but I'd prefer it wasn't the entire point of the fic.

Company - Kage Baker
Characters: No characters selected; you may write for ANY (out of Joseph (Company - Kage Baker), Lewis (Company - Kage Baker), Mendoza (Company - Kage Baker), Nancy (Company - Kage Baker), Victor (Company - Kage Baker))

I hadn't been planning to request this this year but then I love everyone in this tag set ... I am especially fond of Joseph and his bad parenting but fic focusing on any of the nominated characters would delight me! I do not like very much what happened in the grand finale of the series so do feel free to stick with canon or go wildly AU/fix-it. For more info about My Feelings On These Books please see my tag but please also feel free to completely ignore that link and consult your own feelings only

(Additional notes: I am most interested in Joseph-Mendoza (parental), Joseph-(/?)-Lewis (partnership defined as you prefer), and Joseph-Victor (???? siblings? thematic parallels? man do whatever you want with this) but I really truly do love all the characters here and would be stoked about anything.)

Our Game - John le Carré
Characters: No characters selected; you may write for ANY (out of Constantin Checheyev | C.C. (Our Game), Emma (Our Game), Larry Pettifer (Our Game), Tim Cranmer | Timbo (Our Game))

we get so much of Tim, would love a Larry POV on Tim and The Situation; would also love a character study of Checheyev or postcanon about Tim & Checheyev working together round the gap Larry left. Would also not at all mind "perhaps Larry ISN'T really dead!"

(Additional notes: I realize I did not mention Emma at all in my brief prompt but fic about what Emma does and how she copes with the aftermath of All This would be great too; it would be so interesting to see her from her own point of view after the hazy mirror image we get of her from Tim.)

Quest For A Maid - Frances Mary Hendry
Characters: No characters selected; you may write for ANY (out of Davie Spens, Inge Wright, Meg Wright, Peem (Quest for a Maid))

I love this book so much and I would love to see the next chapter in the lives of these plucky kids, or, alternately, anything about Inge and Meg (especially if from Inge's POV!)

(Additional notes: if you're going the futurefic route and you want to write either Meg/Peem or Meg/Peem/Davie I am happy with either of those; I am also happy with a platonic story focusing on the four kids building a life together. I love the tension of Meg and Inge's relationship and would LOVE to see that explored in a compelling way, but am not really into incest.)

A Spy Among Friends (TV)
Characters: No characters selected; you may write for ANY (out of Elizabeth Elliott, Kim Philby, Lily Thomas, Nicholas Elliott)

My favorite parts of this show were Nicholas and Lily's bouts of verbal fencing and I'd love to see another round of Their Unlikely Partnership, but, I mean, the breakup umbrella also had me screaming at the screen so if you wanted to riff on Nicholas' Philby Feelings Which He Is Definitely Over then by all means be my guest


庆余年 | Joy of Life (TV)
Characters: Fan Sizhe (Joy of Life), Guo Baokun (Joy of Life), Fan Ruoruo (Joy of Life)

Fan Sizhe is my stupid son and I love him very much. I would love a fic that elucidated on his romantical road trip with Guo Baokun in which they became bonded for life, but if that doesn't float your boat than a Fan Family Fic in which Sizhe and Rurouo got to do things that were plot important would also be a great delight to me!

(Additional notes: at the time I wrote this initial prompt I had not yet finished S2 and so I did not know yet that RUORUO WAS GOING TO ACQUIRE CHECKHOV'S GUN. This is the funniest thing in the world. Would love fic about whatever is going to happen with Ruoruo And Her Gun.)

Thank you SO much again for writing for me! I am so excited for whatever you come up with!

Had I only received a really lovely Yuletide fic this year, it should have been enough; and it had it only been the first-ever fic for this canon (the https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/664755.html">the Hazards of Love webcomic) in the AO3 (which always makes me feel like I'm especially winning at Rare Fandoms Exchange), it should have been enough; but, as the cherry on the sundae, it also has incredible art?!

Hands | Brain | Teeth | Eyes

“These are for eviscerating others, Fawn, not yourself,” he scolds as he applies the bandages, his voice so dry they can tell he’s making fun of them for their inability to master this.

They roll their eyes. “Yeah, well, blame yourself. You’re the one who gave me hands with a learning curve.”

I really encourage you to click on the link even if you don't know the canon just to admire my mystery author's skill at intensely atmospheric composition, I keep just tabbing back over to look at it! Hope everyone else is also enjoying their Yuletide :D

Happy Yuletide reveals day! This Yuletide year I wrote hyper-specific fic with absolutely no intention of broad appeal or indeed being read by anyone other than my recipients, which was extremely pleasing and restful tbh.

My assigned fic was The Branch, a fic about the tragic evil henchman/righteous general pairing that tenillypo and genarti and I made up out of our own heads for the kdrama The King's Affection while watching it and then went ham over their incredible exes energy ... which I guess makes it not a surprise that I ended up assigned to write for tenillypo but it was very funny, especially since we hang out almost every week and traditionally spend a large chunk of that time complaining about the progress of our Yuletides. HAPPY YULETIDE, TENILLE, please forgive my small white lies over the past couple months and I hope you enjoyed my best attempt at a fix-it for these sad old men!

Then, just as I was contemplating resting on my laurels and perhaps focusing on my Festivid early for once, I saw a last-minute Homeward Bounders pinch-hit come over the list ... and then I did some snooping and realized that this stranger and I shared a number of other fandoms, all of which had some kind of multi-dimensional or portal fantasy or transmigration angle, and my fate was sealed. Addendums is an epistolary fic about what Jamie's friends do to try and reach out to him after the end of the book, but it's also a series of hyperspecific crossover jokes wrapped in a DWJ jacket, and if I made myself and my recipient laugh then I succeeded in the goal.

I have read through a small chunk of the archive and am looking forward to perusing through more -- I hope everyone else is having a pleasing New Year weekend in whatever way seems best to you!

Dear Yuletide author,

Thank you so much for writing for me, and apologies for the lack of detail in my sign-up this year -- I had internet issues and was flailing a little to make it happen under deadline! That said, if something in this letter contradicts something that you've started thinking about based on the letter, do not worry about it at all -- in all the years I have done Yuletide, I have never failed to be overjoyed by the gifts I've received, so if you write something that makes you happy, I guarantee I will be delighted with it also.

Generally speaking I am always interested in ensemble and family stories, community-building and community dynamics, revolutionary politics, romance built on loyalty and trust, antagonistic relationships with fate and destiny, and falling in love with ghosts! For my requests this year I'm generally more interested in expanding on canon than in going AU in either plot or setting, but I'm broadly pro crossover if you have a brilliant idea for one.

Some of these canons deal with some pretty serious topics, and dark themes are A-OK if it makes sense for the story, but I tend not to be into graphic and gratuitous violence. I'm happy for romances to include sexual content but I'd prefer it wasn't the entire point of the fic.

Specific requests:

( As You Like It - William Shakespeare )


( Where the Wild Ladies Are - Aoko Matsuda )


( The Once and Future King - T.H. White )


( 시카고 타자기 | Chicago Typewriter )

Thank you again so much for writing for me, I can't wait to see what you do!

Happy Yuletide, everyone! There are three stories floating out there in the archive that do not yet bear my name and one of them does in fact use the phrase "their tongues battled for dominance" for the first and last time in my writing career, so good luck hunting them down.

For my gift, I received -- after requesting it several time, and then giving up for several years, and then throwing it out once more this year as a last desperate call -- an absolutely pitch-perfect fic for L.J. Smith's The Night of the Solstice/Heart of Valor duology:


The Best We Have

“I don’t believe it! You thought you’d make use of our nine-year-old sister? On, what, the off chance that some random rabbit or deer could help you out --”

“It’s not like you’ve never done it,” Janie says.


This is literally a fic I've been dreaming of for years, these kids have one of my favorite sibling relationships in fiction and this story nails the dynamic to a T. I have no idea if it would work without canon knowledge but I am definitely about to once again reread and write up the books, so, you know, first and second steps ....

And, in other Yuletide updates, I have received the extremely delightful news that there are also four Yudah Cohen fics in the Yuletide archive this year -- as a personal rule I do not read fic for my own stuff myself but I'm beyond thrilled to know they exist!!!

ETA: never mind about personal rules, I have been specifically invited to read Rabbi Shaina Cohen Shows Great Patience and Fortitude and we're following vampire rules now. anyway it's one of the absolute best things I've ever read in my life and whether you have or have not read or enjoyed any of my Yudah Cohen stories please go check it out, I'm sitting here simultaneously dying with laughter and clutching my heart with five million feelings.

R' Shaina Cohen (she/they)
radradrabbi

Hate to poop the party, but there is no evidence that Judah/Yudah/Yehuda Coen/Cohen/Cohn existed

He's an archetype of Jewish folklore, like Shlemiel (the fool) or Hershele (the prankster)

1/2

Yuletide reveals!

It will probably not surprise many people to learn that I, a person with many swirling feelings about the Yiddish language and queer Judaism and complicated sibling relationships and problematic revolutions, wrote un mir zenen ale shvester, a Fiddler on the Roof fic for the 2018 Yiddish Folksbiene production. Way early in the Yuletide season, when sovay (with whom I saw the original production) asked if I'd happened to get this assignment, I joked that I could probably combine a bunch of reconditarmonia's fantastic prompts by writing lesbian Shprintze as a socialist journalist going back to Russia to write about the October Revolution and meeting her sisters there, but I wasn't going to do that because I absolutely didn't have time to go on the required Russian Revolution research dive before deadline .... well. Anyway. Here we are!

To Avoid Stagnation, The Romance Must Progress! is a pinch-hit I picked up for Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-Kun. As soon as I saw the prompt asking about how Sakura and Nozaki-kun finally get together I realized I'd had a fairly clear idea about this in my head since I first watched the anime in 2014 or so. So I sat down and wrote this out more or less in one night ... and then realized my recipient was also almost entirely caught up on the manga, which I had never actually read, and zoomed through 100 chapters of scanlations in a panic on December 31st to make sure that none of it outright contradicted anything I'd written. A nice last-minute 11-volume boost to my 2020 reading list! Anyway this was extremely fun to write and gave me an outlet for all the screwball energy that wasn't going into un mir zenen ale shvester.

For the first time in a couple years, I also managed to post a Yuletide treat, that which is worth waiting for. Back when people were posting their letters, which also happened to be square in the middle of my Queen's Thief spiral, I'd also written a couple of bits and pieces of a Kamet/Costis fic with the vague intention of bulking them out into something much longer and more thoughtful as a treat for lirazel's prompt later in the Yuletide cycle .... as it turned out, that did not happen! What did happen is that three hours or so before Yuletide go-live, after finally completing all edits to my two assignment fics (and reading 100 chapters of Nozaki-kun), I looked at my bits and pieces once again and decided I probably had just enough time to write the connecting tissue that would pull them together into something coherent. (I did not, however, have enough time to come up with a good title.)

Thank you to genarti, saramily, gramarye1971, and Roommate M for all the extremely useful and reassuring beta reads, and to everyone who sniped me repeatedly by writing such INCREDIBLE gifts that I have barely had any opportunity to read anything else in the collection yet because I just keep going back to the things that were written for me instead!

Yuletide!!!! I received FOUR (four!!!!) wonderful gifts and I'm really not at all sure what I've done to deserve such bounty but I'm Overwhelmingly Delighted.

Two are for Frances Hardinge's Deeplight and, serendipitously, they work as a set; one is a fantastic, harrowing fic about Quest's backstory from his own POV, and the other is the story as retold by the woman Quest loved, and they both have different exquisitely painful knives with which to stab:

Pieces of the End

It had to be done, he told the sea. My lady, you knew it had to be done.

A seagull cried out over his head: but, Quest, did it have to be you?

Deeplie

“We tell everyone that the gods were monsters, because we cannot believe what real monsters we keep as our friends.”

The other two are for Hotel del Luna! The first thing I saw was that someone had taken me up on my wistful rarepair suggestion of Sanchez/Grim Reaper and written 6K of absolutely adorable postcanon romance, and I thought, 'wow, this is the wonderful Yuletide gift I least expected to get!'

To Steal a Jujube

He always came with gifts—champagne from France, bagels from New York, the softest leather gloves from Rome, and antique vases that Sanchez suspected, but couldn't prove, were worth more than his house. Jujubes, of all things, seemed to be a particular favorite.

Sanchez suspected the Grim Reaper was getting them from Sanchez' own trees.

Again.

And then I dove into the next one, which is 8k of impeccably characterized outsider POV casefic on Gu Chan Seong and Kim Yu Na's postcanon hotelier adventures written in the style of a dry British thriller and featuring a subplot about Scottish lobster smuggling, and I thought 'okay, no, THIS is the wonderful Yuletide gift I least expected to get!' I would never have thought of this conceit and it's INCREDIBLE.

Castle Sonas

I don’t know if the Harvard MBA syllabus includes a module on Advanced Level Devious Bastardry And General Shenanigans, but, if it does, Mr Koo had clearly aced it.

Thank you so much, mystery authors one and all -- I'm beyond delighted by each and every one of my gifts and I'm just going to roll around in them for a while!

For the first time in many years, I only wrote one fic for Yuletide this year, and barely managed to finish that (with much appreciation for agonistes and ep_birdsall for coming to the rescue with my EXTREMELY last-minute requests for beta help). October/November/December were just murderous months for me in terms of free time and the absence thereof.

(Relatedly, I have only made my way through a very fractional portion of the archive, but January should be much more chill so hopefully I will have more time for it soon!)

Anyway, the fic I wrote was The Affair of the Necklace, for the Benjamin January books; my recipient had several prompts, including an exploration of Dominique's relationship with Olympe and casefic about Dominique solving a mystery with Chloé, so this fic is an attempt at doing both those things.

This was a challenging story to write for a lot of reasons, but it did give me the excuse to reread three of my favorite Benjamin January novels. For those unfamiliar, these books focus on a free black pianist/music teacher/surgeon who also finds himself frequently fighting crime in 1830s New Orleans (I have written about them a few times before.)

The books I reread:

Die Upon A Kiss, Hambly's Phantom of the Opera riff and MY FAVORITE MESS. I'm just going to list off subplots until I forget them:

- an angry opera genius attempting to get revenge on his plagiarist
- the financial rivalry between two theater impresarios
- one of whom might unrelatedly be an Austrian spy
- a ring of slave smugglers
- a cold case in which a man murdered his mistress five years ago
- an opera diva attempting to poison her rival
- at least two separate love polygons involving opera personnel
- unrelatedly, the actual main protagonists progressing from a friendship to a romance
- the mysterious attempted murder of a ballet mistress who happens to be the protagonist's friendly ex
- angry Italian nationalists trying to blow things up
- the kickoff of the ongoing subplot about Henri's marriage to Chloé, which was my excuse for rereading the book
- EXPLODING THEATER VOLCANOES

Is that only 12? I'm definitely forgetting some. Anyway, it's nonsense, and I love it. One thousand percent OPERA!!!! ( spoilers )

Wet Grave, which starts off slow and sad with a lot of relationship drama and the sad death of a sympathetic youth, and ends with a band of rogues taking advantage of a slave rebellion during a monsoon to hunt for secret! pirate! treasure!!! An amazing book for Benjamin's sister Dominique and also the proper introduction of Chloé and thus very important for my purposes, but also just a great book in general; in addition to all the other plots, I really appreciate how Ben January spends the whole book in a huff refusing to help his sometime-detecting-partner Abishag Shaw with solving a murder among the upper crust because he's so annoyed no one is working on the other murders that he actually cares about, and then accidentally solves it at the end anyway. Relatedly, GREAT Shaw stuff in this book.

Good Man Friday, a Benjamin January Traveling Adventures book, which usually I don't like so much as the ones set in New Orleans, but this one has a few very important features: a.) Dominique and Henri and Chloé are all there in DC with him and doing interesting things, which means Benjamin's family stuff remains front and center; b.) the emotional dynamics of the B-plot about an alcoholic Kentucky politician and his enslaved half-brother have really good painful sharp edges; c.) Hambly is having SO much fun with 1830s politics and historical baseball nonsense and joyfully self-indulgent cameos. ( spoilers )

I probably should also have reread The Shirt On His Back, because it covers the time period during which my fic is actually set, but a.) I ran out of time and b.) I don't like that one as well anyway.

There are at least two new books since I last checked in back in 2017 -- the last one I got around to was Drinking Gourd -- so catching up on the series will certainly be something I do in the new year!