primeideal

Happy New Year, and happy Yuletide reveals to those who celebrate! As always, if you don't like self-absorbed rambling, you are free to not read this post, that is an option ;)

My assignment was "The Worst Journey in the World," and I had pretty free rein, so I threw in several of the tropes that I like. It's basically a very slightly AU of the Winter Journey where Cherry and Birdie wind up sharing a sleeping bag. So this involved keeping the canon open in the background so I could get a rough sense of the timeline in terms of "when did Cherry's fingers get hopelessly swollen," while trying not to literally repeat canon. And then occasionally throwing in paragraphs from future!Cherry's POV. Some fandoms (like, superheroes with secret identities) have the "love triangle with two people" trope; part of what I like about this ship is the contrast between young!Cherry and future!Cherry's narrative voices. Title is from "Dirge Without Music," because I'm still not over the parallel between the third stanza and Cherry's narration :(

The Indiscriminate Dust (3.5k, choose not to warn; [no deaths during the timeframe but canon-typical discussion of suicide, etc.])

When I saw that Dora and Jean had been nominated in "Debrief," I was a little surprised, since the structure of the RPG really focuses on the two main characters and everyone else is secondary, but obviously there's no problem with writing fic for minor characters, minor characters are great. So the prompt of "What would either of their own character sheets say?" at first struck me as challenging, but challenging in a good/inspiring way. Like, was anyone going to write an entire RPG just for Yuletide? Probably not. But, could I get “the difficulty of interpersonal knowledge” across in a more straightforward narrative format? And that gave me the idea to write a short second-person character study of Dora, where the stuff that Jean's perspective would be different on is revealed in the footnotes instead of an entirely new character sheet. This was one of those fortuitous "start writing a treat and then that assignment goes out for PH the next day, better snap it up!" Yuletide moments.

• When I need names for twentieth-century British OCs, my strategy now is to go to the bell-ringing archives and grab some names that look like they're from the right decade ;)
• The title and summary quote are from "Sister 2 Sister," by Ibeyi, which scored well in my family's music league.
• "Fun" fact: women could not get degrees at Cambridge University until 1948.
• A couple people pointed out one of Russell's lines towards the end, which has a lot of dramatic irony given the events of the game. Believe it or not, this was mostly coincidental! He's just trying to be helpful while maintaining good OPSEC, and is not doing a very good job of it. Of course, it's not a complete coincidence, because that is in-character for him...it just wasn't meant to be ominous foreshadowing. Luck is the residue of design, and all that.
• Sometimes when I'm brainstorming a story, I come up with a line or plot point or something that makes me think "okay, this is going to work, I can build towards this," even well before I've put any words on screen. Footnote 10 was that for this fic. ;)

Souls in the River (3.4k, choose not to warn [canonical offscreen death])

I read "From All False Doctrine" as part of my bingo challenge, and one of the requests (for a recip whom I appreciate as a beta-reader from many years and fandoms ago!) was for Peachy + music. Okay, I can do that...especially because the cathedral where Kit is working at the start of the story is a real place which has now a real bell tower, so any excuse to geek out about bells is welcome. Instead of the "pepperjack cheese" trope where the character has the same hobbies and tastes as I do, I decided it would be funnier to do the reverse and have Serious Musician Peachy mock the unmelodic bell nerds. (I recognize that the gratuitous details may be equally annoying from the readers' POV, though.)

During the Yuletide writing period, a "Jews in science fiction" flash exchange ran. There were lots of great fandoms nominated--Russian Doll! Animorphs! The Yiddish Policemen's Union!--but what I especially appreciated was the encouragement and enthusiasm from the mod, in terms of "yes, non-Jews can and should try to write Jewish characters!" So that was part of what gave me the impetus to include a scene with a Jewish OC whose faith gives him a grounding to resist the forces of evil. (Thanks to seekingferret for mentioning "argument for the sake of heaven" in the comments from three years ago!)

The new carol Peachy quotes at the end is "Now The Green Blade Rises."

"Fun" fact: Kit was in the class of 1916, and enlisted before Peachy (who did so in 1917). Cherry-Garrard left the military with health issues in 1916. Is it possible they could have briefly crossed paths and commiserated about their shell shock? (Okay, no, it's not possible, because they're in different realities, but you know what I mean.)

Verse, Refrain, Chorus, Reprise (3.3k, no archive warnings apply)

There was a Farscape request for Aeryn, Moya, and/or Talyn, and I was intrigued by Aeryn and Crais' offscreen "deal" between seasons 1 and 2. The timeframe is unclear; "Dream a Little Dream" says that Moya, Zhaan, Rygel, and Chiana were traveling among dozens of planets before they spent some time on Litigara, while "Mind the Baby" shows that D'Argo was in a coma that whole time. We don't really know when John regained consciousness in that interval. So the pacing was a bit tricky; I didn't feel like I could fit Aeryn and Crais' banter in the same narrative as John and Aeryn's reunion. I'm pleased with what I came up with, but I also feel like there's a lot more to explore in this timeframe, particularly with regards to Talyn's interiority. And I took a platonic approach to the Crais and Aeryn dynamics, but there's room to read their canon dynamics as /-shippy, too. So who knows,  maybe I (or someone else) will revisit this.

Just An Ignorant Warrior (2.6k, no archive warnings apply)

And for Madness...

Hellspark was another bingo read, and I liked the idea of writing in-universe poetry, like the kind Tocohl performs. I tried to use some poetic compounds, but wasn't really sure what was the correct term for the form I was using, so I was amused that my recip was also like "oh yeah, I get the kennings and the Homeric epithets mixed up all the time." :D

• Are we supposed to infer that the planet Scheveschkem was named after the person Veschke? Or vice versa? Neither? If the former, what was the planet called in her day?
• People really like making fun of "The Song of Hiawatha," for illustrative trochaic tetrameter purposes ;)

Veschke's Refusal (940 words, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death)

The People series was not one I found from the Yuletide promos, but once I found it, it's like, sure enough, people are requesting it here too, small world! I wanted to preserve the ambiguity of "is the cosmonaut from The Indelible Kind part of the People too"--on the one hand, I like the idea of "you don't have to be 'special' to be important and interesting," on the other, I'd be curious to hear more about how the People might have adapted elsewhere on Earth. Ditto for the "goodness" described in "That Boy"--the narrative suggests that places without goodness must be very rare. But not unheard of...One way or another, at some point normal human science is going to make it difficult for the People to stay hidden. What happens next?

Salt Is Good (980 words, no archive warnings apply)