Yuletide Reveal

[thisbluespirit]

As I said, I managed to write four fics, and here they are, plus some thoughts on them that probably nobody wants to hear, but never mind:



In Darkness (4869 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sapphire and Steel
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Silver (Sapphire and Steel), Sapphire (Sapphire and Steel), Steel (Sapphire and Steel), Plutonium
Summary:

Silver doesn't like assignments that begin with him alone in a place where nothing is as it seems. These things shouldn't happen to a technician, especially not more than once.

I don't think anyone who knows me and who saw this will be exactly shocked to learn that this was my assignment this year. The funny thing about it was that I saw sophiap's request when the letters went out and drafted the first version of this as a treat the next day. (I quote: "In terms of characters, Silver is always delightful to read about." Clearly, me being assigned was a terrible mismatch. :lol: ♥) And though I had it drafted out before I got the assignment, it took a long time for me to be happy with it, as it felt rather pointless (nearly 5000 words and nothing happened!) and that worried me; also I thought it was something only me and (hopefully!) the recipient would like. (I was finally happy with it on about Dec 23rd, I think. Heh.)

But the starting point was sophiap mentioning Transuranic Elements and Silver in the same paragraph. Because then the idea of a Transuranic vs Silver set up, so basically it's like the fable about the wind and the sun - a powerful being up against one that's weaker but more quick-witted, which is always fun. And also about Silver's nature as a technician - that he's designed to assist operators and therefore he's not able to do so much on his own and in the dark (and doesn't like it). High concepts, indeed, yes, I know. :lol:

It did involve me being fannish about the periodic table yet again and I had to do lots of intensive research look up the Transuranic Elements on Wikipedia to create Plutonium. (Who also I didn't want to be evil, or even gone to the other side - I thought it was more interesting if it was for other reasons.) Also Neptunium is the most stable of the Transuranics, so I had to use that. (I did think about having one of the more randomly named Transuranics go evil, just so someone could say, "Curse you, Rutherfordium!" Well, not seriously, but this is why I shouldn't be allowed to look at the periodic table until I get over the S&S obsession. War amongst the Transuranics! It would be priceless. Damn that Thingyingyniumiumum.)

Anyway, I really didn't expect it to get much response, so I was thrilled that it did get a couple of comments (and even 2 recs) from other people - and the most important thing, of course, that the recipient seemed to like it.



Of Elements and Existence (2642 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sapphire and Steel, Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Steel (Sapphire and Steel), Sapphire (Sapphire and Steel), Silver (Sapphire and Steel), Death (Discworld), Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Esmerelda "Granny" Weatherwax, Gytha "Nanny" Ogg
Summary:

There are some places even Elements should never go. The Discworld is unquestionably one of them...

So... there I was with my assignment all drafted out before Yuletide had even started, worrying about it and having a sort of reverse-Yuletide panic. So I decided to try and write something as different as possible to go with In Darkness - the prompt was pretty wide open with lots of suggestions, including a crossover. So I looked at my recipient's fandoms for any we shared and saw Doctor Who (which has been done, and is also full of many pitfalls, as those of us in the fandom know - what if I picked on the one era/Doctor/companion she couldn't stand?) and Discworld. Well, crossing S&S with the Discworld was obviously completely impossible and would break S&S if attempted.

And then... I wrote it. Silver and Nanny Ogg occurred first and amused me (you know, if it hadn't been impossible, that could have been pretty funny) and then I thought of Death and Steel and the whole thing worked. The Disc even sort of makes sense of Sapphire and Steel and the reverse, too, and I'm probably more pleased with it than I should be - mostly because I really didn't think I could get it done, as well as I liked the way it turned out. Sapphire got the wizards because it seemed a good idea, and also for pure pragmatism in getting a solution to the confusion without too many words. Also, Steel, on Death: "Not very helpful, are you?" :-)

I thought about trying odd things in this to try and disguise it was me, but I didn't think it was worth it in the end. I don't think anyone did get that I did both (or did you?) so that was good. (To me, it felt OBVIOUS that both were me.)

Also, persiflage_1 beta-ed both of these for me. (Thanks, Pers! ♥)


Vigil (1246 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Measure for Measure - Shakespeare
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Isabella/Duke Vincentio
Characters: Isabella (Measure for Measure), Duke Vincentio
Summary:

Isabella is a woman who may never be a nun; the Duke a man who is not in truth a monk. Stranger alliances have been made.

Actually, all of the treats were written while letter reading before sign-ups - it just took forever to get them all typed up. This one was for angevin2 and as soon as I saw the request for any take on the play's ending (as regards the Duke and Isabella), I wanted to write it so badly it overcame sensible thoughts such as me never having dared write Shakespeare fanfic before, only having watched the BBC version once (while ill and befogged) etc.

Anyway, I thought I would go for it as a treat, because I suspected I might well be the only one who'd write how it could have worked. (If you don't know, M4M, it ends with four highly random and inadvisable marriages being made. Well, that's not true, one of them is relatively sensible, but including the manipulative Duke proposing to Isabella, a novice about to take her vows.) I was really worried about this one - it came pretty much as is, but that turned out to be kind of terribly idealistic for the source material. Anyway, thankfully, angevin2 did like it, and the comments I've had have been - I don't know how to say this properly, but more than one person remarked on the compassion of it, which was unexpected, and rather a lovely thing to have said about your writing.

I was, rather ironically, so worried about it, I couldn't send it to a beta. (I needed to know who knew M4M before I could even ask...)


New Tricks for Old Dogs (or Five Alternate Universes Where Sandra Pullman Was Always Awesome) (2744 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: New Tricks
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sandra Pullman, Jack Halford, Brian Lane, Gerry Standing, Robert Strickland
Summary:

When the members of UCOS are around, it's just never like it is in the stories...

This was the first one I wrote and the last one to be finished - newredshoes's prompt jumped out and mugged me! She'd suggested an New Tricks AU and I instantly had hilarious images of the team being so very much themselves in other times and places. I panicked a bit after writing it, for reasons, so it was saved from never being posted at all, by a beta (arriving in at the last minute!) from aralias - I'd asked her because she writes in Hornblower and was therefore a good person for Age of Sail info. (Because if my Unconvincing pirates with a mauve flag were historically dodgy, it would have been terrible... Heh.) Unfortunately (for her) she turned out not to know New Tricks at all. Anyway, she still made the point I need to hear to then manage to sort the fic out & people seem to have found it amusing in the right way. (My sense of humour cuts out v quickly when I get tired - it's alarming typing up a story that's supposed to be funny when you can only see dull words.)


Also: LJ has been down - obviously - but I can't seem to get it back for long enough to post or comment, so hopefully it will sort itself out now. (I assume this, following an unusual amount of spam is probably not a coincidence?) In the meantime, I'm not trying to ignore anyone. It is terrible, how even though I have a Tumblr and a Dreamwidth and there was Yuletide on AO3, the internet still goes immediately sad and pointless with no LJ.

Comments

[justice_turtle]

LJ has a maintenance post up (on LJ, which is sort of pointless) saying that most people should be able to reach them - I can - but if you are not, you're probably on an ISP that has been involved with the latest round of spammerz so they have blocked it, and they suggest you might trying using the Opera browser which has (apparently; I've not used Opera much myself because I am a creature of habit) a "Turbo" mode which acts like a proxy server and could possibly get you round the block.

They're hoping to get it down to blocking ONLY the spammerz and no one else, at some point, but... o_O

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, LJ is a little better today, but I still can't quite get it to stay if I want to actually click on many posts, or reply to things, so it's really frustrating. I hate it when it's down. Still, I'm sure they'll defeat the spammers soon. *sigh*

I can't reply methodically to things and I keep talking to people on AO3 and I think I'm still too tired for that sort of muddle. Grr.

Anyway *hugs you* for luck for the New Year; your stories were all pretty marvellous from what I can see and thanks so much for reccing mine even when you didn't know it was me. ♥

[wytchcroft]

lj just deep fried my computer and i've only just got it running again. le sigh. le lj. le crock.

[thisbluespirit]

Oh, and I offered an icon (*gasp*) to anyone who guessed one of my fics, and so if you want me to make you one, I will. You can have anything you wish, if you can send me a screencap, otherwise any quote you choose, or something I have screencaps from. (Umm. Trying to think what of those would be useful for you - I have some caps from Spearhead from Space, less from Silurians, and Terror of the Autons and Planet of the Spiders capped pretty well. Also Robot and Revenge of the Cybermen. Otherwise some Five, Six and Seven.) Anyway, let me know. Don't worry if you don't.

[pedanther]

I think I'd have known the New Tricks one was you, if I'd seen it before the reveal -- it's got one of your idiosyncratic phrasings in it.

I don't suppose there's any point pointing out that there's around a two-century gap between the end of the Golden Age of Piracy and the invention of the word "mauve"? No, thought not. :)

[thisbluespirit]

Now I'm curious - what did I write? :-)

:lol: You know, it did cross my mind to wonder about that somewhere about Christmas Eve, but since almost every word of actual dialogue itself was (sort of deliberately) anachronistic I didn't bother to even look. Esther wanted mauve and so mauve it was. (I shall note that if I ever attempt to write convincing piratical AUs in future: no mauve pirate flags, not even if people want a nice ambiguous colour. :lol:)

And, since LJ is not playing nicely with me, in answer to your other comment somewhere: of course I remember your Monkey island drabbles! I don't think I'd ever seen any others. I hoped you'd see enjoy that one, if you hadn't already found it for yourself.

[pedanther]

When a character in one of your stories hesitates before speaking (usually because somebody else has just done something discombobulating), you often use the word "paused". That always catches my ear, because to my mind a pause is when you briefly stop doing something, so it seems odd to me for a character to pause first.

There's three of those pauses during the superhero outfits conversation (lots of discombobulation happening there).

[thisbluespirit]

Aha! Thank you. And three times definitely sounds like too many in one short section; I must watch that. That is very useful to know. (Though since I mean that someone was about to speak/do something and paused before doing it, it seems fairly reasonable to me in principle. But probably not to fall into too much of a habit with.)

Mind, it catches your ear and not your eye? ;-p

[pedanther]

Well, really it catches the verbal processing centre of my brain, but there isn't a handy figure of speech for that. (Except that I suppose that's what "caught my ear" means really, anyway.)

If you mentioned the beginning of the action, that would seem less odd to me, I think. "Sandra opened her mouth, then paused as Brian's comment registered", something like that. Or "Sandra paused in the act of opening her mouth to reply".

[paranoidangel]

I posted my reveal post yesterday and keep trying to get it to cross post to LJ and it won't. I did discover this morning that they posted to LJ (but not LJ status or twitter) that they're being attacked, hence it being really temperamental (it took me three goes to load that page).

It seemed like it was better at work than home, but that's just because the internet's faster, so when it worked it worked really well, but when it didn't work it was just the same.

[paranoidangel]

When I saw the Discworld/S&S crossover I thought of you, but because you talking & write about it a lot, it never crossed my mind that you might have written it!

[thisbluespirit]

Aha! My cunning plan of being as obvious as possible worked! :-)

[thisbluespirit]

Today seems a little better and the crossposting worked. I can get LJ, but it just won't stay for long enough still.

ETA: And, ha, I was sure you'd written A Quarter to Midnight (how many other PG/B7 fans are there out there with a suspiciously similar style to yours?) and I did think maybe you might have done the Servalan drabble as well - but I didn't suspect you of doing the Sand one at all. I don't know why. Anyway, thank you! I loved them all in different ways and the story especially was huge fun. I do hope that isn't the last time you write longer B7 because you had all the voices and tone down right and it was thoroughly enjoyable. :-)

As to your comments over on AO3, my Tarrant/Dayna headcanon is somewhat nebulous. (Sort of that they are an item of some sort by the end of S3/start of S4, then Animals messes things up, then just when they were starting to get round that, Sand messes it all up again, and just when they might have worked something out, there's the ending and that annoying Pink Princess.)

[paranoidangel]

Sometimes LJ works and sometimes it doesn't - but downrightnow.com shows it being more down at some times than others. On the basis that most people can't read LJ anyway, I'm not too worried about the cross posting at the moment.

When I wrote A Quarter to Midnight I realised I was enjoying it and would quite like to read more :)

Your Tarrant/Dayna headcanon makes sense.

[thisbluespirit]

When I wrote A Quarter to Midnight I realised I was enjoying it and would quite like to read more

\o/

Actually, somewhere in my notebook, I have a page or so of an attempted Tarrant/Dayna fic for a treat for shipswap, for you! I should probably go find it some time, see if it's workable, shouldn't I?

[paranoidangel]

I won't complain if you do :)

[mab_browne]

I always enjoy the YT reveals because it's not a good time to read over the holidays for me, so seeing that such and such an author wrote or recced certain stories makes life easier. :-)

LJ apparently has some sort of attack situation to add to their dodgy access since the middle of frakkin December....

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, I'd gathered Lj was enjoyed a bad spam attack. (LJ vs the Spammers could probably even be a Yuletide category, knowing Yuletide...) Still, it's definitely a little better today, maybe tomorrow it'll improve again. *sigh*

Yuletide's worked out for me - but I'm so slow at the moment, I've still read hardly anything. I did make some recs in the previous post as well, but a fairly motley collection of v obscure fandoms!

:-)

[john_amend_all]

I did wonder whether Plutonium was your creation, knowing your tendency to create OC Elements. And your speculation about transuranics makes me wonder if new ones appear when humans create/discover the corresponding little-e element, or perhaps when they find a proper name for it (since if they all had temporary names starting "Unun..." or "Eka-" it might be a tad confusing :-) )

[pedanther]

Another possibility is that Elements have always existed as long as elements have, and the only thing human discoveries alter is what an Element translates its real name to when speaking to a human.

Not that I'm saying you're wrong, mind you, but it seems more in the spirit of the thing to have multiple possibilities and no way of knowing which is correct. :)

[thisbluespirit]

Not that I'm saying you're wrong, mind you, but it seems more in the spirit of the thing to have multiple possibilities and no way of knowing which is correct.

Yes, indeed! :-)

[thisbluespirit]

Hah, thanks. But my recipient thinks a bit like me - she asked for OC Elements, or particularly for the Transuranics, and for Silver. :-D

I don't know, it's a mystery, isn't it??

[vilakins]

So it was you who wrote that Discworld crossover! The DW character voices were just spot-on (I can't comment about the S&S ones as I don't really know them).

I adore the New Tricks one too; you're so good at voices and it made me grin with delight. Did you read the one with Sandra and Strickland in the lift? I wouldn't have been surprised if you'd written that one too.

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, thank you! I was definitely more worried about the Discworld characters - I've been writing the three Elements quite a bit, so I'm more confident with them.

And, yes - I am finally off to catch up with my LJ comments and I have one from you saying you liked that fic from my rec post I made the other day! But, yes, it is good and I'm v glad I didn't write it, as I had all the fun of reading it and would never have done it quite so well.

[wytchcroft]

well more treats for the reading! nom nom nom :)))

[thisbluespirit]

:-)

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

For your future reference - I have read nearly all of Shakespeare's plays, even if I haven't seen them all - so ask away!

Also, I loved your S&S fics!

[thisbluespirit]

Thank you! :-)

And I probably would have sent it to you anyway, if you hadn't been in the middle of your internet troubles at that point, but thanks - noted.

I think LJ's nearly normal again today... *fingers crossed*

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Well, pages are taking longer than normal to load, but they ARE loading, so we're getting there!

Oh, well I was still beta-reading throughout December, so you only had to ask...

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed all of those. Of course, since it's my fandom, I particularly liked "Of Elements and Existence". I was in stitches with Nanny flirting with Silver. And the idea that the Elements are being rewritten to their nearest Discly equivalents in accordance with Narrative Causality was neatly done.

Although ... Fun With The Periodic Table and Discworld crossovers have left me with a bit of a worrying plotbunny of my own. "Stygium and Octiron have been assigned..."

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, thank you! (All of them? You must deserve some sort of medal...) I must admit the Discworld cross just seemed to make itself work - I think obsessing over S&S while slowly and doggedly re-reading Discworld this past year or so must have left stuff in mym head I wasn't aware of. But thank you.

:lol: Well, you know, don't let me stop you...