L'opera, mi amore!

Dear Yuletide Author,

If you were matched with me... we should already be friends! Why aren't we friends? (Or maybe we are and you're just awesome at keeping secrets.)

So this year's theme (I never set out to have a theme, but it tends to kind of happen) is ALIVE AND TOGETHER.

( ALSO IN LOVE )

Thank you for following my link! I'm so incredibly excited, and I know this is going to be fantastic. Thank you for being willing to do this for me.

So here we go:

( The list! )

I knew it was a crazy idea when I signed up for it - on the heels of NaNo, a fic of over 1000 words in an obscure fandom, due right in the middle of finals. I offered a lot of fandoms, including a lot that I was generally familiar with but had never written. (I'm sort of considering as a challenge to myself, going down my offered list and writing something for all of them.)

Yuletide's a pretty awesome concept in general, but additionally thrilling was the week in between the story reveal and the author reveal, in which complete strangers recommended my fics.

Anyway, so this is what I did:

I was lucky enough to match two fandoms for my recipient, Daria and Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy, both of which I'd never written for. I started tearing my hair out, but I went back and re-read (most of) Fire From Heaven, which I HIGHLY recommend. Getting it up to a thousand words was a major challenge, because it wanted to clock in at about 850, but I managed it and I'm pretty proud of "In Two Bodies.

Considering how close to the deadline I cut it to actually post the fic, I'm really proud of myself for managing it. (At one point finch said to me, "If you default, it's not the end of the world," and I snarled back, "YES IT IS." I'm sorry for being such a crabby bitch at the deadline; I love you for putting up with me. NaNoWriMo made me want to slit my wrists in the last week before the deadline as well; deadlines and I don't get along.)

Yuletide Madness meant an opportunity to get a crack at other people's request prompts. At one point I had probably a dozen prompts open, but when it came down to it, I wrote Finding Zihuatanejo, an ending to Stephen King's wonderful novella, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption." That one actually got rec'd by several different people, which was totally thrilling and gratifying.

And of course since Repo! qualifies as a tiny fandom, I had to write a Madness fic for that, and the fact that I filled finch's prompt was sheer coincidence so I banged out the Luigi/Amber fic This Christmas in about an hour, posting in the last two minutes before the collection was locked down.