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The high: For the first time ever, someone asked if they could podfic one of my stories!

The lovely speakwithmagic reached out about recording my 2010 Yuletide story, Down a Dark Desert Highway, my crazy crossover of A Knight's Tale and Hotel California. Yes, the song. It's one of the stories I'm most proud of, quite possibly because it was such a nutty idea, so I was very chuffed by the request.

The podfic is now up here, and it's wonderful, bookended with two different versions of the song. So, if you've got 12 minutes to spare, give it a listen!

The low: after nominating fandoms and mulling and debating, I decided not to sign up for Yuletide this year. I've been doing the challenge since 2009, have only ever missed one year before, and even in years where I haven't been writing much, I've managed to get my assignment done.

But this year felt different.

I think it might be partly that I'm still dealing with the grief of my mother's death (still miss you, Mom), and partly because I've got several big projects at work, writing a ton of not-at-all interesting technical manuals that have burned out my writing brain. Whatever it is, at the last minute I decided to give myself the grace of not landing that kind of pressure on myself.

I have, however, looked at the tag set and read a few Yuletide letters, and I'm hoping I have the energy to at least do a little treat or two. Fingers crossed!

I'm a bit late on posting about my Yuletide gifts this year. In my defense, I've spent most of the holidays relaxing and staying off my computer.

I was fortunate to get two wonderful Yuletide gifts this year, for the Enola Holmes movies and Batman: Wayne Family Adventures. I can totally recommend them both!

The Enola Holmes story concentrates on Enola's (and Sherlock's) mother, Eudoria Holmes, and the growth of her friendship with her best friend and radical suffragette, Edith Grayston. Told from Edith's POV, it's a wonderful story, and really gets into the details of how a working class Black activist could befriend a posh white woman in Victorian England. (Thank you beatrice_otter!)

Women's Will (2046 words) by Beatrice_Otter
Summary: 'Mrs. Treven' was not the first wealthy woman gone slumming with radicals in search of adventure. They were not terribly common, given the sort of social consequences polite society would heap upon them if it became known, to say nothing of the other sort of consequences their male relations might dole out.

But they did happen. Edith cast a cool eye over the newcomer.

---

The Batman: Wayne Family Adventures has Jason and Damian bonding over reading books in the Wayne mansion library and contemplating what they'd do if they weren't vigilantes. It's got a wonderful sense of both their voices.

Fragile and Unprovable Things (1780 words) by Rivulet027
Summary: Jason tries to cheer Damian up. He wasn't ready to question what he wants for his future.

The good news is I have miraculously finished my Yuletide assignment, well ahead of the deadline. And I even think I stuck the landing! I have time to do treats! Or a pinch hit!

The bad news is I just realized I haven’t come up with a title for the sucker yet. (I hate coming up with titles.)

This year I got matched on Real Genius. Which, if you've never seen it, is an '80s comedy starring a very young Val Kilmer about a bunch of physics students at a CalTech-like college who get tricked into building a laser weapon by a cartoonishly evil professor and then take revenge on him with science and popcorn.

I adore this movie. I was finishing up my first year of astrophysics when it came out, and in spite of the over-the-top comedy of it all, it felt really true to my experiences and I recognized more than one of my classmates in the characters. So, I was happy, and a bit terrified, to get matched on it.

The story I ended up writing was A Physicist's Guide to Love and Lasers (2900 words)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chris Knight/Mitch Taylor, Jordan Cochran & Mitch Taylor
Characters: Mitch Taylor, Chris Knight, Jordan Cochran, "Ick" Ikagami
Summary: Dr. Jordan Cochran (you can call her Jordan) knows all the history of her Pacific Tech classmates, including how Mitch and Chris finally got together. If you ask (or even if you don't) she'll tell you the whole story. (A hint: Jordan may have had something to do with it.)

In the movie, there's one girl physicist in the class, Jordan. (This is the one thing that wasn't true to my experience in uni. There were a bunch of other women in my class - though our profs told us we were a statistical blip and had a much higher percentage of women, 30%, than the cohorts both before and after us.) Jordan is a motor mouth, clearly has ADHD and is in constant motion. She knits a sweater for Mitch, the newest student, overnight, and is always building some new contraption.

My Yuletide recipient asked for me to pair up Mitch and Chris, Val Kilmer's character, but I knew I wanted Jordan to play a key role. So, I wrote the start of Mitch and Chris' relationship from Jordan's POV, which meant I got to write in her voice. Which was challenging and fun.

Another fun piece was finding a bit of real science to salt into the story. Mitch and Chris both work with lasers, and I remembered that a Canadian woman physicists, Donna Strickland, won the Nobel prize for an article on lasers that came out in the early '80s. If you're interested in the science, you can read her Nobel lecture here.

It's another Yuletide, and I could not be more excited that you're going to write a story for me. If you already have an idea, I'm sure I'll love it. But if you'd like some guidance about the things I like, here it is.

( Things That Make Me Happy )
( DNWs )

I am open to treats.

And here, again, are the details about my requested fandoms:

( Summer Lovers )
(  Hawkeye Freefall  )
( Batman: Wayne Family Adventures )
( Enola Holmes )
In the end, I hope you write something that gives you joy. That's sure to bring me joy as well.

I got two lovely gifts for Yuletide this year!

The first was for the thing I most wanted fic for, but figured was a long shot. The Crimson Kimono is a noir-ish movie from the '50s with two cops, one white and one Japanese American, investigating a murder. The cops work together, live together, and are very slashrific. Though the movie has a woman push them apart at the end, I'm a firm believer that the three of them should just form a happy little polycule.

Almost Makes You Feel Alive gives the backstory of the Japanese American cop and how he and his partner met, and gives a nice fix to the ending of the film. It is fab! You should read it! And also watch the film because it is great.


The second was an adorable story for the Batman: Wayne Family Adventures webcomic, my current favourite DC title. (For reasons possibly related to the ongoing pandemic and world-wide trash fire we're all living in, a Bat family title focused on low stakes domestic comedy is very appealing to me these days.)

Curriculum has Alfred getting Jason to help Damian with his English homework, and features Alfred Pennyworth's famous chocolate chip cookies. It is an absolute gem.

I managed to finish my Yuletide story well ahead of time this year. Yay! Pressure off!

But then...I was looking at pinch hits, and there was one that languished for several hours without being claimed, and it's for a fandom source I know very VERY well, even if the requested character is not one of my absolute faves.

So, yeah, I now have until Tuesday at 4 a.m. to write for this pinch hit.

Yikes! Pressure back on!

In the midst of writing my Yuletide assignments this year, my trusty MacBook started throwing battery errors and not holding a charge nearly as long as it used to. I crossed my fingers and got all my stories done, then took my machine in as soon as we got back from my mom's after Christmas, figuring it would take, what, a week to get the new battery installed?

But you know, supply chain, blah blah blah, and it took almost a month. But now I've got it back!

All of which goes to explain why this is a very, VERY late Yuletide post.

I got a truly lovely Yuletide gift for the Marvel What If...? series. It was my way of sneaking a Stucky request into Yuletide, and the result is a really beautiful story.

Moonglow (3558 words) by lionessvalenti
Fandom: What If...? (TV 2021), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter, Howard Stark
Additional Tags: Episode: s01e01 What If... Captain Carter Were The First Avenger?, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Getting Together, Dancing, Time Skips
Summary: After the war, Bucky pines for Steve while Steve pines for Peggy, who is gone.

I ended up with two Yuletide assignments. My original assignment was for Political Animals, and the recipient asked for a happy ending for TJ. I was very happy to oblige.

Making Friends in Rehab (10975 words)
Fandom: Political Animals
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Characters: Thomas "T. J." Hammond, Margaret Barrish, Agent Clark, Douglas Hammond
Additional Tags: Recovery, Rehab, Fluff
Summary: TJ Hammond managed to wait until his mother was elected President to fall off the wagon. But now that he's in rehab, he's going to need friends to help him figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

The second story was a pinch hit for Point Break, one of my all-time favourite films. I had just four days to write the story, and I spent three of them doing a deep dive into surfing in Indonesia and Fiji, as you do. Fortunately, I miraculously managed to vomit out a 4K word first draft on the fourth day, then had a couple of days before the reveal to do a bit of tweaking.

Doing What You Love (4376 words)
Fandom: Point Break (1991)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Bodhi/Johnny Utah
Summary: What if Johnny didn't miss Bodhi in Fiji?

I've just finished and posted my Yuletide story (nearly 11K words and done early! Yay!) So I figured why not break my not posting slump and do the Yuletide meme.

1) First year you signed up for Yuletide
2009.

2) Last year you signed up for Yuletide (other than this one)
2020. My Yuletide story was about the only thing I wrote last year. Funny how a pandemic will do that to you.

3) Have you signed up this year?
Yep!

4) Have you skipped signing up any years since you first took part?
One year. 2015, which was the year I both turned 50 and did my black belt in Taekwondo. That year I didn't do much besides training, sleeping and working. The crazy amount of commitment, plus a few injuries I still haven't fully recovered from, are why I no longer train in martial arts.

5) How many years have you defaulted by the default deadline?
None!

6) How many years have you treated in addition to your assignment?
Two. Three if I get the one I'm planning done this year.

7) How many years have you treated but not signed up?
Never. Part of the fun (if you can call it fun) for me is the anxiety of not knowing what fandom you're going to be matched on. Just picking a fandom to write almost feels like cheating.

8) How many different canons have you covered in your Yuletide stories?
Thirteen, not including this year. A new one every year:
Tombstone
Buckaroo Banzai
Haywire
Edge of Tomorrow
Spy
Gifted
The Nice Guys
Stumptown
Random Harvest

And then my two crazy crossovers, which I am inordinately fond of:
Wild Wild West/A Study in Emerald
A Knight's Tale/Hotel California (yes, the song)

9) What AO3 ratings have you covered in your Yuletide stories?
Not rated: 6 (Unless there's stuff that really requires ratings, I hate rating my stories.)
Gen: 2
Teen: 4

10) What AO3 categories have you covered in your Yuletide stories?
It always surprises me that in spite of considering myself mostly a slash writer, I've written a lot of Gen and a bit of het for Yuletide.
M/M: 5
F/M: 2
Gen: 5

Owing to the fact that it's been one hell of a year, my Yuletide reveal and year-end writing wrap up are exactly the same thing! The only piece of writing I finished in 2020 was my Yuletide story.

That story was for Random Harvest. It's a movie I've adored since I was as a kid, and is perhaps the Ur-amnesia story. It also has just soooo many fucked up twists that when I sat the Sweetie down to watch it on the grounds that we couldn't be together if he hadn't seen it, he was having WTF moments every 20 minutes. So, if you haven't seen the movie, go watch it!

In doing research for the story, I came across a gorgeous colour pic of the stars, Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, and couldn't help using it to make a banner:



Many Roads (8025 words)
Fandom: Random Harvest
Relationships: Margaret Hanson | Paula Ridgeway/Charles Rainier | Smithy

Three chapters, three AU ways to give Paula and Smithy a happy ending, including one that fixes the, IMO, most tragic loss the two of them experience in the movie.

If you've now seen the movie, this story will hopefully fix some of those WTF moments for you.

And that was it for my stories (or story!) this year.

It was not, however, the only writing I've done. I've got an MTH auction story that has now been delayed by a broken wrist, a concussion and a pandemic, and is over a year late, but I'm still plugging away at. I've had the last two weeks off and have used it more as R&R recharging time, but I'm going to spend the next couple of days figuring out what kind of a regular, manageable writing schedule I can put together to finish it. Once that's done, I want to get to work on a Pacific theatre AU Stucky story with a racebent Chinese Bucky that I've been wanting to write for several years now.

Fingers crossed, 2021 is a much better year for all of us.