Yuletide after-action report

[swan_tower]

I wrote four stories this year — not anywhere near a record, but the fourth Memoir has been leaving me with very few spare processing cycles.

My assignment was “Crushed Upon the Shore” for the manga Tokyo Babylon. It takes place between that and the anime/manga X/1999, and involves Subaru investigating a case that turns out to have some, uh, personal resonance. WARNING: it is not a nice story. It involves dead children and other less-than-lovely things. Because let’s face it, Seishirou is not a good person, and Subaru’s feelings toward him are more than a little messed up.

Next I took on a pinch hit, which in terms of readership has been my big success of this Yuletide: “Eldest” for the Disney film Sleeping Beauty. The request was for Maleficent backstory that is different from what you get in the Jolie movie. This is the one I think has a dead giveaway in it; I had to name some other fairy women, and after exhausting the obvious two (Titania, Mab) my brain went straight to Nicneven. Who most people have never heard of — but she plays rather a large role in the main conflict of In Ashes Lie.

The remaining two were treats. One, “It’s Betty from Apartment 2204″, was sparked by the recip making an offhand comment wondering what Dana’s neighbors make of all the snarling and such going on in her apartment in Ghostbusters. The other, “The Only Way to Be Sure”, is a brief look at what Rita Vrataski did during and after Verdun in The Edge of Tomorrow. (There are quite a lot of fics for that movie this year, most of them on the theme of “Rita Vrataski is a badass and I heart her.” This is a sentiment I could easily get behind.)

If there are fics you especially enjoyed this year, please link in the comments! I haven’t had a lot of time to read, so recommendations are extremely useful.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[slashmarks.livejournal.com]

Since you asked for fic recs:

If It's Sewing, She Sews (http://archiveofourown.org/works/2830028) is a Westside Story fic following Maria gradually putting her life together (and her sewing career) after the movie ends.

The Fairy-Touched Queen: Discovering the Life of Queen Cinders Through An Examination of Her Mythical Counterpart (http://archiveofourown.org/works/2843747) is a pseudo-academic treatment of Cinderella as legends about a real queen; I gather from the fandom listed it's for a specific Cinderella adaptation but I'm not familiar with it and it made sense to me.

Other stuff I bookmarked this year was respectively for Monstrous Regiment (Discworld) and the Benjamin January series by Barbara Hambly, not sure if you're familiar with them.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I do know Discworld! The Hambly I only know from hearing people talk about the series.

[slashmarks.livejournal.com]

Okay, the Monstrous Regiment fics I read were:

Winter Quarters (http://archiveofourown.org/works/2809196) and New Beginnings (http://archiveofourown.org/works/2810216). Both of them are Polly/Maladict, the second one was my gift.

And I'm pretty sure you saw the Werewolf Marines fics, since IIRC you read Rachel Manija's journal.