Yuletide guessing game

I don't know how many of you reading this participated in Yuletide (or at least have been reading through some percentage of the collection), but I might as well toss out some bait for interested parties to try and guess what I wrote.

Nota bene: do NOT go look at my page on the AO3 to see what I've written in the past. There's a bug that causes the fandoms my stories are in to be displayed, even for the stories that are still anonymous. It pretty much gives the game away.

This year I went a bit overboard and produced six stories. (This is a bit of a problem; last year I wrote four, which means next year my OCD brain is going to want me to write eight. At least.) One was my assignment, one was a pinch-hit, and four were treats. Several of those were supposed to be stocking stuffers (meaning less than a thousand words), but they all ended up higher: four were in the 1000-2000 word range, one was 2000-3000, and one was 3000-4000.

I wrote for three stage productions of one stripe or another, two movies, one TV show, one book, and one piece of art. If those numbers don't seem to add up to six, that's because three of the fics are crossovers, and I wrote in one fandom twice. Only one is a fandom I'd written in prior to this Yuletide.

Any guesses?

(And yes, we intend for regular posting here to resume before long.)

Locus Podcast on, um, everything?

I thought I had linked to this here before, but if so, I can't find it.

During World Fantasy, Karen Burnham of Locus sat me and Kari Sperring (la_marquise_de_) down in front of a microphone to talk about a topic of our choosing. We chose Kari's "history is not a theme park" rant, and went from there, to, uh, everywhere. Subjects touched on included: The Three Musketeers, Aztecs and cultural relativism, Biblical archaeology, hemming clothing, stew, Mongolian steppe ponies, Minoan murals, authenticity in history, hippie elves, late medieval English blacksmithing guild laws, the Great London Plague of 1665, trousers and pigs, Biblical archaeology, kicking postmodernism in the head, seventeenth-century Parisian mud, telepathic wombats, and "the answer to almost everything is turnips."

All these things and more await you on the Locus website. You can listen to the file there or download it for later hearing. We ramble on for about an hour and twelve minutes; Karen said afterward that normally she waits for a lull in the conversation, then steps in to say "well, that about wraps things up." With us, she had to go in with a crowbar, or we would have kept rolling for another hour. We enjoyed it a lot -- well, certainly I did -- and I hope you do, too.

The DWJ Project: The Spellcoats

Third book in the Dalemark Quartet, which steps way back in history for the founding of the kingdom, when an invading army and an evil mage threaten the land.

A lot of people have cited this as their favorite book of the series, and I can see why. Tanaqui and her siblings are a great DWJ family; they don't all get along, but they're deeply loyal to one another, and all contribute in their individual ways. And the worldbuilding for this novel is especially rich: the Undying, the weaving of the rugcoats, the mages binding their spirits with their gowns, and all the rest of it. The setting we see is very plausibly an earlier society than the Dalemark of the "present-day" books (the ones with Moril and Mitt), and yet some of the things that happen along the way aren't the obvious -- because Jones is good at making things more complex than you expect at first glance.

( Everything else is spoilers. )

Well, I've got <checks watch> about twenty-six hours to make that last post, to finish out this series before the end of the year. Expect that later tonight!

The DWJ Project: The Crown of Dalemark

Conclusion of the Dalemark Quartet. Here we jump all around the Dalemark timeline, dwelling mostly in the "present day" of Moril and Mitt, but spending part of the narrative about two hundred years later, and drawing in components from the more distant past of The Spellcoats.

As a series conclusion goes, it's . . . odd. For one thing, as I mentioned in the post on The Spellcoats, this book came out fourteen years after its predecessor. That's quite a long time to wait for a finale, and I'm not sure why the pause happened -- especially given the way things were left hanging in some of the previous books. Cart and Cwidder ends on a mostly-resolved note (sorry, pun not intended); there's clearly room for more to be told, but if that was the last of it, we'd be okay. Drowned Ammet more obviously leaves things hanging, with Mitt making promises for the future that don't get addressed in his book. The Spellcoats is the most open-ended of the lot, but I'll leave the statement at that, to avoid spoilers.

This isn't your usual sort of last book; the stories it draws together are quite widely scattered. Even Moril and Mitt, who at least exist in the same century, hail from opposite ends of Dalemark, and have never met each other before this story begins. We also get a new character in the form of Maewen, a girl from the future of Dalemark, and quite a bit of the history being addressed is hers -- but although she's a central character, the book doesn't belong wholly to her. It's as much Mitt's book, or possibly more. This leads to some weird structural elements. To say more about those, though, I'll have to get into spoilers.

( Cut time! )

Aaaaand that's it for Dalemark, and for this month of the project. Presuming I manage to stick to my schedule, only three more months and less than a dozen books to go!

. . . yeah, it still sounds like a lot, when I put it that way. Still, weighed against what I've gotten through already, I really am nearly done.