The Tyranny of Socks

I had an excellent yuletide -- I received a lovely story and both of the pieces I wrote were well-received. AND I finally persuaded aceofkittens to take part, so I had someone to chat about the exchange with!

My assignment was The View from the Aventine (3097 words) by Vaznetti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Falco Series - Lindsey Davis
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Marcus Didius Falco/Helena Justina
Characters: Marcus Didius Falco, Helena Justina
Additional Tags: historical fiction - Freeform, Flavian History
Summary: From all the way up here, you might almost think you could escape Rome. Falco and Helena at two turning-points, at either end of a decade.

I was really pleased by how much feedback this received, because I honestly thought no one but me and my recipient remembered the series! I realised as I reread a lot of the books that although this series has a lot of things that drive me crazy in other historical fiction canons (misuse of "plebeian" and "patrician"! not caring about how Roman nomenclature works!), I really don't care because I'm too fond of the series and the whole setup of the hardboiled private eye who can't actually be a loner because everywhere he goes he runs into his sisters/parents/nieces and nephews/inlaws.

I also wrote a treat: The Place of Birds (2378 words) by Vaznetti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin, Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Penthe (Earthsea), The House (Piranesi)
Additional Tags: also a lot of birds, Magic, Metamorphosis, Learning to Fly, Crossover, Yuletide Treat
Summary: In the wreckage of the Tombs, Penthe finds her way to the House, and to her own power.

I started about three stories about Penthe, and this was the one which developed legs, despite -- as the recipient pointed out -- the obvious fact that Penthe and The House are a really bad match for each other. And yet I'm quite pleased with how I managed my way through that problem here.

I've been away since the 30th so I still have a lot of stories in the collection to comment on, as well.

Hello! This is, believe it or not, the first year that I have ever done Chocolate Box, but I was experienceing Yuletide envy and went looking at the tag set and, well, here we are. it is also ages since I've written an exchange letter but I feel like I have a lot of things to say here. The first of which, obviously, is to thank you so much for writing for me! I am actually really easy to please and I'm sure I'll like whatever you write for me. I've set out some very basic thoughts and prompts below, but feel free to go your own way, provided you stay clear of my DNWs.

In general, I like the following things: enemies being forced to work together; competent characters doing what they're good at OR being forced outside their comfort zone; relationships between equal partners; happy or hopeful endings; canon-divergence AUs; character-driven stories and plots; adventures, quests and other hijinks. I am perfectly happy to have what seems like a fragment of a larger story, if writing out a whole caper seems like too much work for an exchange with a 300 word minimum!

In terms of my smut likes, I am pretty vanilla. I'm really here for character interaction rather than specific sex acts, so if you want to fade to black that's fine with me. More specifically, hands and mouths are sexy; I love switching and simultaneous orgasms; I kind of like awkward or bad sex, too.

I DNW: A/B/O, D/s and related dynamics; harm to children within the story (references to canonical child death are fine, though); non-canon-setting AUs. In smut, I DNW: humiliation and dirty talk; scat or watersports; anal sex. I also have some request-specific DNWs, which are noted below and on my AO3 signup.

On to the specific requests:

( Ivanhoe )

( Alias )

( Formula 1 RPF )

( Crossover Fandom )

( The Expanse )

( Warrior (2019) )

I have no idea how many years the Three Sentence Ficathon (part 2 here) has been going on for, but this is the first year I have ever managed to participate. I've written three things! As it's my first year, I tried to stick to the three-sentence structure.

MCU, a little Steve/Peggy post-Endgame scene;

12 Monkeys, Jennifer Goines thinks about time and memory;

and 12 Monkeys, Ramse thinks about food, afterwards.

The last two are even drabbles!

I had a good yuletide experience -- I read many good stories, but never managed to pull together a proper list of recommendations. I also received a really wonderful story for one of the most difficult of the difficult women I wanted stories about:

Secrets (1503 words) by Orockthro
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Stephen Maturin/Diana Villiers
Characters: Stephen Maturin, Diana Villiers
Additional Tags: Spies and intrigue, Alternate Universe, Diana Villers POV
Summary: Diana goes through Maturin’s things out of habit. She has done so for years, long before they wed; it is in her unchangeable nature to be suspicious of everyone, especially those she loves. (Or, Diana finds more than she expected in Stephens's belongings. She finds an understanding, and a new aspect of her husband...)

I have always found it very frustrating that Stephen was never honest with Diana about his life as a spy, so this was a very welcome AU for me.

I also wrote one story this year, although there is a prompt I am thinking about writing an NYR story for, because apparently the requester and I have precisely the same opinion about the requested character.

...for wage or yet for wed (4031 words) by Vaznetti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny/Christian Stewart
Characters: Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, Christian Stewart, Gideon Somerville, Kate Somerville
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary: Two meetings between Francis Crawford and Christian Stewart, in the music room at Flaw Valleys.

The recipient seemed to like it, as did a few other people. It was interesting to write the AU pairing; I like Christian a great deal but by the time I finished the series was 100% committed to Philippa. But just revisiting book 1, which I probably reread twice in the course of writing this story, I really warmed to Christian and her relationship with Francis.

In other news, it is Wednesday! And I have read some things, most recently the new Rivers of London book, which I liked very much; I thought it handled the Faceless Man plotline extremely well, and it was very good to see Nightingale taking a more active role in the story again. I might someday write a more specific review of it but would love to discuss it in comments as well -- but we have allowed Spartacus to have the Kindle recently because he is running through the Magnus Chase books at a very quick pace. So in the moments I have access to it, I am a little way into the first and second of those books.

For life-schedule-related reasons doing a January talking meme is a bad idea for me, but I am thinking of a February one. The thing is that I have got out of the habit of talking about myself and it is a very difficult habit to get back into, but obviously it cannot be healthy to assume that there is absolutely nothing interesting about your life or anything about your interests that would appeal to other people. I just need to get back into the habit of talking (or writing) about myself and things that interest me.

I need to work on my crossovering story! I should not be browsing the Yuletide tag set! Although I think I have found a new fandom to offer -- Battle of the Tollense River rpf. Ando someone nominated Trollope's Palliser novels!

Hi! So it's been a while and I have a lot to catch up on.

I have written a few things since last I posted.

For Alternate Songs, the ASOIAF/GOT AU exchange:
The Battle of Storm's End: Arya, Sansa and Aegon Targaryen IN SPACE! With sentient direwolf spaceships! Having spent a long time being snobbish about only liking canon-divergent AUs it turns out that I was totally wrong and everything is better IN SPACE!

For the multifandom drabble exchange I wrote a pinch hit & two treats:
Wolf in Hiding (ASOIAF; Sansa Stark) a drabble sequence about Sansa and the wolves which are and aren't with her.
Re-cognition (Westworld; Dolores Abernathy & Bernard Lowe) where Bernard and Dolores talk about tragedy.
The Second-Years are Probably Expendable (Oxford Time Travel Universe; James Dunworthy, Badri Chaudhuri). No living second-years were harmed in writing this drabble.

I thought a while about signing up for the AU exchange but in the end wasn't really excited enough about it despite my newfound love for putting everything IN SPACE, and I am so glad that I didn't because crossovering is back! This year I am absolutely going to nominate to make sure that all the fandoms I want are there!

And finally, I am namesquatting over at pillowfort here but have no idea how it works and haven't filled out my profile or posted anything, and it seems like the whole site is about to self-destruct in some kind of tumblresque purity wank anyway.

SO here I am, posting new fic for the first time in years. I had an excellent crossovering exchange. I wrote TWO stories, and I received something really amazing in return. First, my gift:

a wolf age ere the world falls (10031 words) by wnnbdarklord
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Thor (Marvel), Bran Stark, Ned Stark, Lyanna Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Background & Cameo Characters
Additional Tags: Crossover, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Infinity Gems, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Time Skips, Background Character Death, Canonical Character Death, references to canon typical violence and sexual assault
Summary:
The boy in the weirwood dreams of another world, where heroes exist that can help save them all. He reaches through and pulls. Blue light fills him as the universe tears apart. The world changes.

---

An MCU/ASoIaF crossover where the Avengers are pulled into Westeros to help with their White Walker problem. Except they get overshot and get sent farther back than intended. What else is Tony Stark going to do but build his way out?

I have wanted some version of this crossover for years, and this was wonderful beyond my wildest dreams. Everyone in it is perfect, especially Tony, but really, everyone. It is perfect!


Meanwhile, I wrote a SPN/SW story as my assignment, which was a lot of fun, but also challenging because I've never written SW (barring some 30-year old Mary Sue drawerfic) and it's been a long time since I've written SPN, and I really didn't want this to be like the last time I wrote Winchesters in Space. Also, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that in this universe Sam and Dean would name their spaceship Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell.

Paved with Bad Intentions (The Road out of Hell) (7815 words) by Vaznetti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Supernatural
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sam Winchester, Han Solo, Dean Winchester, Chewbacca (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Crossover, Action/Adventure, Pre-Star Wars: A New Hope, SPN S3
Summary: Sam finds a way to save Dean from Hell; it involves sending them both to a galaxy far far away. Set in SPN Season 3, and some time before ANH.

I also wrote a very last-minute treat crossing over Game of Thrones and the Vorkosigan books, which in the way of last-minute treats was very well received, and now I might have to write more of it.

Winterfell Tales (2615 words) by Vaznetti
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Game of Thrones (TV), Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ekaterin Vorsoisson Vorkosigan/Miles Vorkosigan
Characters: Miles Vorkosigan, Ekaterin Vorsoisson Vorkosigan, Sansa Stark, Armsman Roic, Tyrion Lannister
Additional Tags: Crossover, crossovering treat, Game of Thrones spoilers
Summary: It's like something out of an old story, Miles thinks: a Betan's idea of what Barrayar was like.

a. I stopped reading The Power for a little, and started to read Neil Stephenson's SevenEves, which proceeded to keep me up at night because it was so completely depressing and horrible, but in the compelling Neil Stephenson way. I read it very quickly because I just skimmed through all the stuff about physics and spaceflight, and have finally reached part 3; A suggested that I would really like the last 200 pages or so of the book, so I am somewhat hopeful. I am also perpetually interested in Stephenson's ongoing attempt to write female characters who are more than their cup sizes (see earlier comments on Cryptonomicon, Anathem, and Reamde; I bounced off the Baroque cycle). I guess I find it interesting because on the one hand I admire Stephenson for trying, and think he should be given credit for doing so. He doesn't have to: there's a perfectly good market for books in which the female characters are basically walking brassieres. But also because I think his failures are interesting. As A put it here, he is trying really hard here to prove that he can write lots of different female characters, and mostly succeeds until he suddenly reduces them all to archetypes. And I find the limits of what he thinks possible interesting, too -- as with pure theory in Anathem, for example -- because here is a guy who is actually very imaginative, but htere are still really clear limits on what he is capable of imagining. And there are things here about women and power that I don't like, but again, I find it interesting that Stephenson can't escape from certain ideas about women and femininity.

It will be good to get back to The Power after this, because of the ways that book does understand gender as a social construction, and power as ungendered.

b. I am 2000 words into my crossovering story and... the main characters have met, at least? I can see that this will be a story where I have to get that very rough first draft written before I can go back and add in the emotional stuff that will make the whole thing work. I hope!

c. I have thoughts about the last season of Game of Thrones, mostly to do with pacing and plot logic. Here is one thing about the Winterfell plotline: ( under the cut )

4. On a completely different note, my Florida cousins, whose usual hurricane preparedness involves vodka and junk food, are clearly a little worried about this one. So I am too, on their behalf.

The AO3 uploader hasn't been working for me recently for LJ (I understand that this is a general problem), so I have been uploading some old fic from my webpage, which does not work as smoothly but does work. This mostly means some older XF fic -- and of course I reread as I go. I had forgotten how frequently I used the Balkans as a setting (although it was generally justifiable for plot of character-related reasons); I didn't post one or two things last week, because of the news about Radovan Karadzic. It just seemed weird and tacky.

I am also remembering my issues the X-Files. Wow, do I have issues; I can't even watch an episode now. Anyway, the short version is that although I kept watching, canon and I parted company definitively after Two Fathers/One Son: nothing after that made any sense to me at all, and frankly, given how little sense most of the stuff that happened before then made, that's pretty damning.

The next thing I think I should post is Parallel Catastrophes (which for those of you who joined this journal after 2003 or so is a crossover between XF and Harry Potter in which WMM is Pansy Parkinson's grandfather and Marita Covarrubias and Narcissa Malfoy are sisters. Obviously, this was all before OOtP came out.) The problem is that there's a huge plotty story which I have never posted, because I don't like how it starts, and I haven't even looked at it in a couple of years -- but it needs to be there to make the fragment I wrote back when I did that big crossover meme.

* * *

Speaking of which, I saw this meme at rhi's journal:

Give me two fandoms and I will tell you about their crossover OTP(s).

Like Rhi, I'll add a plural, since there may be more than one, and add that my OTPs may be gen.

I accidentally changed my journal style, and then had to find something I liked well enough to keep for the moment. I need the text to be black-on-white, or something near enough to that, otherwise I get cranky.

So, I am writing this story, and it is about two-thirds done, or maybe a bit more than that. It's about 5000 words now, which is pretty long for me. But I keep looking at it and thinking that in the hands of some other writer, this would totally be a novella, at least. I just don't know what do do about that. Where do all the other words come from?

Anyway, I think I am just going to have to go ahead and finish this draft this weekend, which will at least keep it from being Kripke'd any more (which, believe me, I started it last spring, and that has been a problem). Because I really need to get the yuletide story rolling, and right now it's just fits and starts and disconnected themes. Funny enough, the missing pieces? are all plot and mytharc. I roll my eyes at my own craziness.