Friendship and Finnish by Correspondence (Stand Still Stay Silent, Emil & Tuuri)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I got this wonderful Emil & Tuuri epistolary fic! It's got great character voices and it's sweet and heartwarming, and you should all go read it.

But also! I got two treats in the Madness collection!

Respite and Refuge (Chanur Saga, Pyanfar/Khym)

Okay, I'm not going to lie, a big part of why I'm writing this rec post is so that someone other than me will read this fic and shower my writer with love, because as of this writing my feedback is the only feedback they've gotten, and yeah it's a tiny fandom and I'm sure they knew what they were getting into when they wrote it, but it's a damn shame because it's so excellent and deserves all the love. It's everything I adore about these two in one compact package: the way he quietly seeks her approval, the way she's coming to trust and rely on his competence, the tenderness and familiarity (and mild snark) between them.

Whimsy Above (SkyWorld)

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I requested this fandom, but what I got was pretty amazing. A really interesting premise, an ominous yet inevitable conclusion, and graphics! And, at 100 words long, I can say with confidence that it's definitely worth your time.

And then there were stories that were not written for me!

The First Rule (Stand Still Stay Silent, the crew)

In my personal and unbiased opinion, all five of the SSSS stories in the yuletide collection are excellent and worth reading, but this was--after the one written for me--the one I liked best. It really captured both the humorous side and the perilous-adventures side of canon, with really enjoyable character interactions as well.

Judgment Call (Alliance-Union, Sandor (insert ambiguous but extremely significant symbol here) Allison)

This is such a Cherryh story, with all the solid details of ship-and-station life, and an understated, indirect, but no less powerful exploration of what these two mean two each other, and what they might yet mean to each other.

Worry Not (Sorcerer to the Crown, Damerell/Rollo)

So charming, so delightful, both the use of language and the characters. This pair of secondary characters has clearly got their shit together in re: human/fairy relations (as it were) far more than anyone else in the Sorcerer-to-the-Crown-verse.

Duel to Be Kind (Hark! A Vagrant, Nemesis ♠ Pirate (with bonus Nemesis' Sister ♠ Nemesis' Sister's Nemesis))

So, you may have noticed that I like things that are charming and delightful, with a playful use of language and a loosely Regency England setting. This is another one! With the bonus that you don't have to be familiar with the canon to appreciate it.

* shallow cluster * deep dive * Streaker find * (Uplift Saga, Creideiki)

You guys, somebody wrote trinary haiku. It's perfect, it's brilliant, it's worthy of Creideiki, why are you still reading this when you could be reading it.

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hello! Thank you so much for offering to write me a story in one of my favorite rare fandoms! I really will be delighted to get anything about them, so--aside from the Do Not Wants--please feel free to ignore the rest of this letter. It’s really only here to give you inspiration if you don’t know what to write, but if you have your own ideas already, please go wild with them. I am always interested in seeing new and interesting takes on my favorites, especially ones I would never have thought of myself.

( Read more... )
One more general thing I want to add--I’m not requesting any five-minute fandoms like individual songs or picture books this year, but two of the canons I’m requesting are available in their entirety (or close enough to entirety) online, for free, legally, so if you haven’t yet I really do encourage you to check out Stand Still Stay Silent and SkyWorld, they’re great.

Anyway, If for some reason you want to stalk me, I am dead easy to stalk; I'm minutia_r (or occasionally minutia-r) all over the internet: LJ/DW, AO3, tumblr, deviantart, ff.net, 8tracks, and probably one or two other places I don't recall off-hand. (Minutiar on twitter is not me, though, oddly enough.)

Thank you once again, mystery writer! I am really looking forward to reading what you write for me, and I hope you get an awesome story too!

It's a Kencyrath fic about the beginning of Tori and Grimly's friendship, with cityporn and Tori falling asleep while Grimly recites poetry and platonic bed-sharing!

And for those of you who are familiar with the Chronicles of the Kencyrath--or those of you who just like cityporn so much you are willing to read fic from unfamiliar fandoms for it--you can read it here:

Two from the North

Also, I have not had a chance to read much other yuletide fic yet but so far I can unreservedly recommend In the Right Way which is a really great story about Angelica Petrocchi and tone-deafness and sufficiently-analyzed magic.

There’s this recurring motif in Diana Wynne Jones’ books where there is some sort of magic preventing the characters from thinking about a certain subject, or from talking about it, or preventing other people from believing them if they do talk about it. This is, on one hand, a convenient thing to have in one’s plotting toolkit--it addresses the “but why didn’t they just tell the adults and have them fix it” problem that crops up in children’s and YA books, and it lets you control the pacing of revelations and things like that.

More importantly, it’s often a metaphor for an abusive family situation: the feeling that some intangible malign force is preventing the characters from a) realizing something is wrong, b) talking about the thing that is wrong, and/or c) having other people understand about the thing if they do try to express it.

I mention that in order to mention this:

although you know the snow will follow by greenlily

(Yes, this is a yuletide rec. Maybe at some point I will do a proper recs post? Or maybe not. I’m not done reading yuletide yet, although I have definitely been slowing down.)

Anyway! In addition to being a very good sort of Magids fanfic, and painting a vivid if not necessarily dramatic picture of Roddy’s learning the work of the Lady of Governance and dealing with the emotional aftermath of some of the events in The Merlin Conspiracy, it uses the motif of the don’t-notice-don’t-talk-about-it magic.

Only here it’s not a metaphor for abuse--it’s a metaphor for the erasure of women’s roles in history.

And it works; it’s lovely; it fits in perfectly with the characters and world and themes of the book. And this sort of engagement with and reinterpretation of the source material is one of the things you can do with fanfic that you can’t do in any other genre.

And that’s why fic is so great.

Hello there, yuletide writer! It’s the most wonderful time of the year again--the time when some poor sap has to write me a story for a canon that barely anyone else has ever heard of, let alone written fanfic for. And this year, you’re the poor sap!

Seriously though, if I were you I wouldn’t worry if you have a completely different idea for a story than the optional details below, or if you don’t happen to be the world’s greatest writer, or if you get hit by the Real Life bus and end up frantically banging on the keyboard two hours before the deadline--if by Christmas I have a story in one of these fandoms, I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be thrilled. It’s not like I’m going to be able to compare it unfavorably to the dozens of other stories in these fandoms, right?

( I was born a ramblin' man )

Thank you, happy writing, and I hope you get something you love for yuletide too!

Because my yuletide present is the best:

Dream of Drowning, and Wake in Snow

You guys! It’s Eveshka/Pyetr/Sasha (really mostly gen but not entirely, as the author accurately put it)! And I know you haven’t heard of them, but a) that’s why it’s so awesome that someone wrote them for me for yuletide and b) you really should, because they’re from CJ Cherryh’s Russian Stories (otherwise known as Rusalka and its sequels) and they are great.

And damn if my anonymous gift-giver doesn’t have a near-perfect Cherryh voice, too.

So much love.