AO3 Output: June 02017-December 02017

[silveradept]

Because sometimes people are interested in this sort of thing. Should be current through Yuletide 02017.

1. The Marlboro Menace (2849 words) by silveradept
   Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
   Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Relationships: Rinoa Heartilly/Squall Leonhart
   Characters: Rinoa Heartilly, Squall Leonhart, Fujin (Final Fantasy VIII), Raijin (Final Fantasy VIII)
   Summary:

   It's a date! Except for the monster. And for the Lieutenant that can't actually keep a secret and the other one who doesn't say a whole lot. And the fact the date all happens under a proclamation that says one is technically the prisoner of the other.

   But everything will work out fine in the end. Honest.

   
   Squall is a difficult person to write by himself. But if you put him in a group with people who have much more clearly-defined characteristics, he's a lot easier to get a handle on. Mostly because he's reacting to whatever they're doing, either with stoicism or a complete unwillingness to get in on the fun.


2. The Fans Make The Experience Unique (1557 words) by silveradept
   Fandom: R.O.D: Read or Die & Related Fandoms
   Rating: General Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Relationships: Yomiko Readman/Sumiregawa Nenene
   Characters: Yomiko Readman, Sumiregawa Nenene, Maggie Mui, Michelle Cheung, Anita King, Hishiishi Hisami
   Additional Tags: Slice of Life
   Summary:

   Both Nenene and Hisami are on the same "meet the fans" cruise and spend some time with their bodyguards. As events go, this one is pretty tame. The power goes out only once, and they get locked in somewhere only once.

   
   This one had a good idea to start, but I had trouble getting a handle on it and making sure that it stayed within the specifications that had been laid out. I managed to make my way through it, though, and it turned out to be okay.


3. It Was Always You, Terra (1637 words) by silveradept
   Fandom: Final Fantasy VI
   Rating: General Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Relationships: Tina Branford/Celes Chere | Terra Branford/Celes Chere, Celes Chere/Locke Cole
   Characters: Tina Branford | Terra Branford, Celes Chere
   Additional Tags: Love Confessions
   Summary:

   Many years afterward, Celes is singing and Mama Terra has a worldwide network of orphans to look after. An opportunity at a fundraiser offers Celes a chance to be clear about her feelings.

   
   I had a much easier time with this. It's not easier to write any kind of pairing more than any other, but I find that when I can get locked into the characters themselves and have them start behaving what seems to be naturally and fluidly, the writing comes a lot easier. This story had the benefits of being both a good hook to write and characters that I felt I understood well. It shows, I suspect, when I'm on and when I'm trying to be on. For this one, I felt on.


4. Should All Else Fail, Ask (1899 words) by silveradept
   Fandom: Angel: the Series, Leverage
   Rating: General Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Relationships: Parker/Eliot Spencer
   Characters: Lindsey McDonald, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Parker (Leverage)
   Summary:

   Lindsey is clearly desperate for help, because he's come to see his twin, Eliot, who long ago left that world, for help in evading the Senior Partners. Eliot is reluctant to provide anything at all.

   
   I suppose I have a shared universe that I write in - barring flagrant contradictions, I tend to assume that the characters that Christian Kane plays are all in the same general area. Which made this an easy write on the idea of Eliot and Lindsey are twins, even though the backstories of the characters, as was later pointed out to me, are off enough that if everyone were telling the truth, they wouldn't actually be twins. But it was a small enough bend to my Kane-verse and specifically requested by the person I was writing it for, so I'll just canon-gloss that enough so that they're more properly related when there needs to be a later reference to that work. The recipient really enjoyed this one, which is one of those things that I always enjoy in comments when I get them.


5. Memory Day Distractions (1478 words) by silveradept
   Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
   Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Relationships: Toph Beifong/Iroh
   Characters: Toph Beifong, Iroh (Avatar)
   Summary:

   Toph comes to visit the shop while it's closed to try and get Iroh to cheer up after his annual remembrance day goes less well than planned.

   
   Rare pairs are often fertile ground for characterization to come out, and this one seemed to go in that direction, given that Toph almost always tries to take over whatever scene she might be in by force. It makes Iroh a good contrast, as he's often getting out of the way of someone and letting them stomp around and be big and angry, and then seizing the right moment to deflate them and bring them back down to reality. This one proceeded fairly naturally from the fingertips, even though there wouldn't be any canonical reason for it to happen - sometimes good fandom writing is getting characters to the age and maturity level you need them to be at, at a liminal time outside what is seen in the canon.


6. A Wake For John Sheridan (3394 words) by silveradept
   Fandom: Babylon 5
   Rating: General Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Relationships: Delenn & Susan Ivanova
   Characters: Delenn (Babylon 5), Susan Ivanova, Michael Garibaldi, Zack Allan, Vir Cotto
   Summary:

   Susan helps Delenn grieve after Sheridan goes beyond the rim. Everyone learns a lot more about the ISA president than they had before.

   
   I conceived of this initially as Susan, being at least nominally Jewish, wanting to sit a shiva for John, but I realized that this would be very fertile ground for getting it all wrong, and, eventually, that it wouldn't quite be in Susan's character to want to do it that way for John. So, instead, it became a wake, and I realized there were more than enough opportunities to tell stories and make with the comedy that seems highly inappropriate at the time, but that everyone will look back on later and laugh about, because it actually was funny, once the rawness of losing someone fades a bit. Babylon 5 isn't a fandom I've done a lot of rewatching on, but the characters were still fresh enough to write them in.


7. The Genuine Summoner, Accept No Substitutes (1995 words) by silveradept
   Fandom: Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy X
   Rating: General Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Characters: Fran, Lulu (Final Fantasy X & X-2), Balthier
   Summary:

   Balthier, Summoner and Scourge of Sin, expects a warm welcome from the village when he arrives with Fran, his guardian. Instead, he gets rained on, slapped about, and snarked at from all corners.

   
   And then there are these, which are often a joy to write, because the prompt is just that good, and everything springs up the way you want it to. One of the things I've learned to do when perusing the tagset for exchange signups is to take a look down in "Original Works" and "Crossover Fiction" because there are some suggestions in there where you cackle and understand exactly how well (or poorly) that idea would go if those two universes met or their characters did. This particular work congealed best with the addition of one tiny element that was technically outside the story that was being told, but that had provided an excellent template to emulate inside the story. Sometimes you get to pull a little metareference out and it fits nicely.


8. Faith, Tara, and Love (2275 words) by silveradept
   Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
   Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
   Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
   Relationships: Faith Lehane/Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg
   Characters: Faith Lehane, Willow Rosenberg, Tara Maclay
   Additional Tags: Mind Control, Unintentional Mind Control, Consent Issues
   Summary:

   Willow goes to the one person she can think of who can help her with getting re-sorted into her lesbian life - no, not Tara. Faith.

   
   Sometimes I struggle with a story, not because the story itself is an issue, but because writing it the way that it seems to be flowing runs into one of my personal restrictions. This would have been a lot easier story to write if I were essentially willing to let Willow just override the thoughts of others and do whatever she wanted to and to frankly not care about it. This wasn't a character violation, per se - Dark Willow and Vampire Willow both showed that she had the capacity to not care, but I didn't want to write a story where someone just ran roughshod over another person like that. And it would have made for complications later on in the story, especially things where people would be rightfully angry at Willow for doing it, and I wanted things to have hope and help for her, instead of the opposite. So it took a little mechanic-working and realizing a couple things going on in the scene that I wasn't paying attention to before I created a solution that fit my own restrictions and still seemed to make a good story.


9. The Somewhat Tiny Papen County Baking Competition (2157 words) by silveradept
   Chapters: 4/4
   Fandom: Pushing Daisies
   Rating: General Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Relationships: Charlotte "Chuck" Charles/Ned/Olive Snook
   Characters: Charlotte "Chuck" Charles, Ned (Pushing Daisies), Olive Snook
   Summary:

   Chuck loves a piemaker.

   Olive loves a piemaker.

   This can only mean one thing.

   Pie duel.

   
   I loved Pushing Daisies as a show, and it took me a good long while to figure out how to translate the narrative structure of the show episodes into a recognizable prose format. This is one of those times where it's nice to be able to compose in hypertext, because you can put the markup you want in it and then let it go exactly the way you want it to.
   
   I may have also been introduced to the Great British Bake-Off a little while before receiving this particular prompt, and so that was relatively fresh on my mind. Which is convenient when you're writing a story about a Piemaker.


10. Spirits Night (1564 words) by silveradept
    Chapters: 3/3
    Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Avatar: Legend of Korra
    Rating: General Audiences
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Relationships: Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Izumi & Zuko (Avatar)
    Characters: Zuko (Avatar), Iroh (Avatar), Azula (Avatar), Izumi (Avatar)
    Additional Tags: Trick or Treat: Trick, Trick or Treat: Treat
    Summary:

    On a night when the boundaries between the worlds are thin, the Fire Lord and his daughter meditate and have an adventure.

    
    I do like writing in the Avatar: The Last Airbender / Legend of Korra universe. I have a special liking for a certain tea-shop owner and the way he relates to the world around him. Since this came up as a Halloween-type exchange, and because I've maintained as part of my own head-canon that the Fire Nation is a somewhat Confucian nation, this story popped out of the idea of both filial piety and existing in a world where there's an actual Spirit Realm that someone can go to or visit from when the conditions are right. Some of our ancestors we want to keep around forever, and some of them we have no desire at all to ever see again, and Zuko is very much the character for those kinds of relationships.


11. Around The Campfire: Preliminaries: Pardon Me, Wife (6000 words) by silveradept
    Chapters: 2/2
    Fandom: Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
    Rating: Mature
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Characters: Wife of Bath, The Host (Canterbury Tales), Pardoner (Canterbury Tales)
    Additional Tags: Modern Era
    Summary:

    Two entries in the preliminary rounds of "Around The Campfire", a new television show that pits pseudonymous authors and their stories against each other for a cash prize.

    
    Yuletide always seems to bring out my best writing - or maybe it's because the fandoms are always small and very varied that gives me the opportunity to do work that's way out of my usual spaces. In either case, in both years I've participated, it seems like the story that comes out is one that gets an awful lot of squee and is one that I'm very, very proud of. Maybe it's the enthusiasm of the recipients, but it always feels like the Yuletide story is a great capstone and closeout to the year. I can only hope that I continue to be able to do amazing work for Yuletides and years to come

That finishes out the material for 02017. It's always nice to look back over your accomplishments and reflect on them - they show the improvement of craft and writing in them, even if I don't recognize it immediately. And if I feel like I haven't done anything all year, I can also point at these pieces and say "Hey. This year, that's probably close to 20k words just in fiction exercises. That's not counting all the other writing that you do on the regular, so y'know, regardless of what you feel about the quality of your writing, understand that you're doing the work of getting in between where your taste is and where your skill is."

And if I have to, I can always scroll back through the list of notifications that say "You've got kudos!" Which is essentially what I showed to a young artist at a panel on fanfiction this year - even a person such as me who feels like I haven't done a whole lot in the way of skill can point at the hundreds of kudos, boookarks, and comments that I have. I hope they took my advice and put their fiction out into the universe. Maybe if we meet again this year, I can ask them about it.

Comments

[thewayne]

The Angel/Leverage sounds pretty cool, I'll have to check that out. And Pushing Daises/British Bakeoff sounds like a natural fit!

Have you ever seen the Stephen Chow movie, God of Cooking? I think you'd like it. He's the guy who did Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. It's an earlier film of his.

[silveradept]

I haven't, and I've been meaning to see the other two, so thanks for the recommendation.