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Current Mood: completist
Current Music: And a choir of archangels a-caroling come

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story index

Story Index 2025

Leitmotif of the year:
I can't focus on long things, but by all that's unholy, I can write limericks and drabbles! I wrote other things, too, but golly.

My best story of this year:
Stand back, I'm going to try science!, in which Obi-Wan accidentally gives Anakin a complex about his body, and Anakin 3D prints himself helpful things. This one is deeply silly, and yet affectionate.

My favorite and/or truest story of this year:
The leaves grow bright before they fall wins this one for me, with Anakin and Obi-Wan doing the Hades and Persephone dance, in their own particular, backward, inside-out and upside-down sort of way.

( Read on )

Reveals approaching! Help us get there!

Posted by morbane

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/300629.html

There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding Reveals approaching! Help us get there!. Please note that there may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.

You can go through to DW to check the details:

Dreamwidth Post

If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed anonymous comment.

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/300629.html

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books

Recent reading

Read A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews, a slim, unconventional memoir. Framed as her repeated failure to respond to the prompt why do you write? to the satisfaction of a literary conference in Mexico City (she was eventually uninvited), it reads like a commonplace book: a mix of anecdotes, and copies of letters Toews exchanged with her sister over the years (the answer to why do you write? being, originally, because she asked me to), and musings on the concept of a "wind museum", and random quotes and poetry and historical figures who died by suicide. It helped to know a bit about Toews' background - mostly that she was raised Mennonite and that both her father and sister died by suicide - because eventually both of those things are clearly stated, but I did get a sense that she presumed someone picking up Toews' personal non-fiction on why she writes has already read at least some of her novels, many of which have drawn-from-life elements.

In other writing about writing, I received This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days by John Darnielle as an early birthday/Christmas gift - an illustrated, annotated collection of the Mountain Goats' lyrics - and, of course, immediately just skimmed it for my favorite songs, which quickly turned into reading random chunks because each "annotation" is a short paragraph, max - sometimes about the context for writing the song, or commentary on the characters/story, or what inspired it, or how people respond to it, or some observation/quote/etc. that is not obviously related to the song in any way - so once you've opened it to a specific page it's easy to just keep going for a while, and anyway, now I have to figure out to actually read this book. Just read it cover to cover? Listen to each song in the order they appear, and read the accompanying passage? (Which is a cool idea, but would take forever. Theoretically, I could do one song per day, devotional-style, but I know my attention span well enough to know that's not happening.)

Entry tags:

fan art,
guardian

(no subject)

Da Qing and young!Zhao Yunlan wrapped in blankets, with the title "Teaching the way of the Cat".

Image: colour pencil sketch of a black cat wrapped neatly in a blue blanket, and a young man (Zhao Yunlan) sprawled/face-planeted under a red blanket, with his feet sticking out the bottom and one sock fallen off. He is holding a lollipop.

notes

* Perspective is really hard. ;-p
* Still avoiding drawing faces.
* I think my attempt at Da Qing is on a par with Guo Changcheng's notebook sketch, but in my defence, that is one weird-looking cat. ;-)

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12 Days (til) Christmas Day 6

We are halfway through! And we’re going back to Oxford. This is maybe cheating a little – the story itself was written for Yuletide, and is dated the 6th of December, but there isn’t anything especially Christmassy in it.

In 2075, OUP publishes a festschrift (this is, for non-academic types, a book of essays honouring a particular distinguished scholar) celebrating the world of James Dunworthy. It is edited by Colin, now a fellow of Balliol himself, who writes the introduction to the volume and the various things in it. It’s one of my favourite Yuletide experiences – something about the connections of people through history, and the value of good teaching, really hit people (including me, unexpectedly, while writing it). So here is:

Paradox (Oxford Time Travel, gen)
Rated G

‘It is traditional to begin this sort of project with a biography of the person to whom it is being presented, and following that, to list the contributed articles and how the author and outcome of each was started on its path by the eminent scholar being celebrated within the pages. In this case, it seems both unnecessary and redundant, as the essays themselves have become more retrospective than tribute.’

Song: Stop the Cavalry (there IS in fact a Christmas song for time travellers!), version by the Cory Band and the Gwalia Singers

Fic rec: Once and Future by phoenixflight (The Dark is Rising, Will/Bran)
Rated T

Christmas is still a good Dark is RIsing time, and this little treat is full of great lines (Bran's reaction to Will getting a bit melancholy about eventually losing him is brilliant) and, like all the best TDIR fics, evokes a strong sense of place and atmosphere.

Back to Day 5 | On to Day 7

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Aha!

With the help of multiple people, I finally got the ancient $15 scanner to talk to my computer via shareware. Woohoo!

(Meanwhile, I can't write a story to save my life. Argh!)

Entry tags:

12 Days (til) Christmas Day 5

Back to Kirk and Spock again! Told you they’re almost half the list. Advent 2012. The Enterprise crew carry out their mission to investigate weird shit wherever they find it. Guided by a Christmas star (kind of) they stumble on an unexpected birth (kind of). One of my favourite things about writing Trek fic is how weird and unexplainable you can make things (this will come up again later).

Nativus (Star Trek Reboot, Kirk/Spock)
Rated G

‘By the time they reach the surface, it is no longer the barren wasteland the initial scans had indicated. They stand surrounded by vegetation, lush and thick and a shade of green so bright it's almost gold; by the sound of trickling streams and the growing thrum of insect life. The tricorders vibrate with each new discovery as lifesigns appear around them with increasing rapidity, and above them coloured clouds rush through the sky like a gymnastic rainbow.…’

Song: Silent Night (There are of course many versions; this is the absolutely haunting one by Sinead O'Connor.)

Fic rec: Feast of the Unwise Men by Drayton (Oxford Time Travel)
Rated G

Technically this is an Epiphany fic, but since I'm doing pre-Christmas days and not post-Christmas days, here we are. It's about those few days after Dunworthy and Colin retrieve Kivrin from the Black Death, and the fallout - while knowledge of the canon will definitely help here, it's also a fic for anyone who has had to deal with university administrations.

Back to Day 4 | On to Day 6

Current Music: I am wearing a hat / After winter, I'll marry / I'm entitled to that

Entry tags:

book: the expanse

If there's one thing I learned from finishing The Expanse novels

I was right to say I do not understand one goddamn thing that happens in Amos Burton's head when I asked for him for Yuletide.

I don't know that I have the Chrisjen Avasarala/Bobbie Draper series of my heart in my fingers, but I will be over here shippin' it like whoa.

Overall, they were a lovely ride. The audiobook reader learned to pronounce gimbals very late in the canon, and got the stress pattern wrong in Avasarala, but was quite good at voice distinction, and definitely didn't do the All Women are Falsetto crap.

Current Mood: poetically inclined
Current Music: He's invoking the powers of Bryan Adams!

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So you want to listen to some poetry

hannah and James Marsters have got you.

1969 by Alex Dimitrov is Hannah's recommendation to start with, and it's a banger. Wander the archive of that tumblr and enjoy!

2025 Deadline Has Passed - What Next

Posted by morbane

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/300321.html

There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding 2025 Deadline Has Passed - What Next. Please note that there may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.

You can go through to DW to check the details:

Dreamwidth Post

If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed anonymous comment.

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/300321.html

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books

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - Douglas Adams

Read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams, picked up at a used book sale; it's technically the sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a book I have never actually read,* although it made enough sense on its own and the parts that were cheerfully nonsensical would not, I suspect, have been made less so by reading the first book. If I had a nickel for every novel I've read about Norse gods running around 1980s England, I would— scratch that, I'd only have one nickel, because it turns out Diana Wynne Jones' Eight Days of Luke was published in 1975, but look, my point stands. (Ooh, now I want the fanfic where a now-adult David and Kate meet and compare notes.) It also reminded me a lot of Good Omens, even more than the usual base level of Douglas Adams 🤝 Terry Pratchett similar vibes, maybe because the two meet on the middle ground of "fantasy in (then-)contemporary real world" between the usual distance of Adams' sci-fi and Pratchett's secondary-world fantasy? Anyway, found myself boggled by some of the specifically '80s details, including the depiction of a pre-2000s airport and the running joke that a. pizza delivery was not a thing in London (?) and b. that this was the main thing New Yorker protagonist Kate was homesick about. (I found this especially curious since I don't associate New York City pizza places with delivery, but then again, I don't live in NYC...?)

* I watched the delightful and sadly short-lived TV adaptation that shares a title and apparently little else, some years back, and definitely tried reading the book at some point after that, but it didn't take.

Entry tags:

12 Days (til) Christmas Day 4

On to Day 4!

It wouldn’t be Christmas season without The Dark is Rising! What surprised me the most is how few I’ve apparently written that are actually Christmas-centric, when it’s such an important part of the series! (It might also be that I just don’t have them anymore, or didn’t post them to AO3, because I’ve been writing for this fandom a long time.)

This one was, as the author notes indicate, scribbled out quickly during Christmas Eve church, and fixed for posting afterward. I did go back more recently and do some edits. I didn’t live in Wales yet in 2002, so got a few little things wrong – mostly younger!Ash didn’t quite get the church/chapel divide, and had them all heading into Tywyn to the local Anglican church even though Owen is explicitly noted as going to chapel. The further problem is that by the time this takes place, the chapel in Tywyn was already turned into flats, though I think the one in Abergynolwyn (closer to Clwyd farm anyway) was still going. I realise these details are really not that important to most readers, and especially have no real bearing on the direction of a very short fic about accidentally coming out to your parents, but well, I live here.

It is very short – barely over 1k words – so I don’t want the intro to end up longer than the fic.

While Shepherds Watched (TDIR, Will/Bran)
Rated G

‘It was the first Christmas Eve of his lifetime that he had not spent with his family, noisy and bustling in the bright din of a two-storey farmhouse full of children and spouses and nieces and nephews and neighbours dropping by just to say hello, the smell of cinnamon and apples and pudding, the warmth of the fire interrupted by bursts of cold air when the door opened, the sound of six or seven Christmas carols all jangling together at once.’

Song: While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night
(I wanted the Welsh version but couldn't find a good one, so we went with Carols from Kings for choirboy Will.)

Fic rec: We Wish You a Logical Christmas by little_ogre (MDZS Star Trek AU, wangxian)
Rated M

What caught my attention first about this fic is that it's the JIang, not the Lan, who are Vulcans. Half-Vulcan WWX brings LWJ home during Christmas shore leave, and pon farr happens. It's excellent.

Back to Day 3 | Onward to Day 5

Entry tags:

weekly update

Me-and-media update

Previous poll review
In the Mind's eye poll, 22.4% of respondents said their mind's eye is as vivid as IMAX (wow!), 20.7% said pretty vivid, 25.9% said they can visualise if they work at it, and 22.4% said it's a bit patchy/vague. Nearly fourteen percent, including me, have no mind's eye. (I do occasionally see things in my dreams, eg, wake up with the memory of an orange cat, so I voted "other" as well.)

In ticky-boxes, spices (56.9%) came second to hugs (67.2%), followed by being able to name characters from Winnie-the-Pooh (39.7). Thank you for your votes!!

Reading
I was trying to write romance for Yuletide, and digressive murder mysteries were not helping my subconscious to deliver the romance beats/pacing, so I stepped away from Murder Must Advertise (Peter Wimsey) for a while and read a Jennifer Crusie instead. Not one of her better ones, but I've read the better ones so many times... I haven't returned to Murder Must Advertise yet, but I will (and I'll have forgotten everything, oh well).

In audio, I'm relistening to The Wedding People by Alison Espach, read by Helen Laser. It's so good! Phoebe's POV is specific and observational. As I said last time I read it, "Give me all the middle-aged women's midlife crises! Warning for suicidal protagonist, but the book is overall life-affirming."

Kdramas
Still loving Knight Flower. It's adorable and dramatic and silly, with many great women. Competent goofballs FTW! And Andrew and I started Jeongnyeon: A Star Is Born, set in the 1950s after the Korean war, about an all-female theatre troupe. It is fabulous, incredibly gay, and I love everything about it. See also "so many great women!" Moon Okgyeong is mesmerising, ahhhh, I totally understand why everyone's smitten with her (or is it him? or them?). We are racing through it (by our standards).

Other TV
We finished Down Cemetery Road, and I want more, especially of Emma Thompson as Zoe. Finished The Lowdown with Ethan Hawke. We're still going on Pluribus, which continues to be fascinating, and Prehistoric Planet. (My Apple+ subscription runs out on Sunday.) We finished the available episodes of Stranger Things, and I have Robin, Will and Max tied for first place as MVP.

I'm having a bit of trouble with season 3 of The Cleaner, but we might watch some more. And then there's Krapopolis, which is mixing things up this season. My sister and I are still watching Fringe and Bluey.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, Letters from an American, Cross Party Lines, some Brandon Sanderson youtube lectures.

Online life
I am seriously not keeping up with Dreamwidth or my inbox. Sorry! I keep opening things in tabs to read/reply to later, but I'm going to have to give myself an amnesty and just close a bunch of them.

I'm enjoying the hockey show squee on my reading page, and though I don't know if the show will be for me, I plan to take a look at some point, just in case.

Writing/making things
I had a good writing run in November, but we got some bad news and now brain is refusing to brain, stories are refusing to story, sentences are refusing, etc. I ended up defaulting on Yuletide, though there is still a chance I'll finish the fic.

I am enjoying doodling, though -- it's freeing not having a clue what I'm doing. I posted one pic to Tumblr and it got notes and everything, and I just posted another to

fan_flashworks. (I bought an ancient second-hand flatbed scanner for $15, but I couldn't convince my computer to recognise it, so I guess I'll continue to photograph my sketches for now, even though it messes with the colour balance. I don't know how long this art phase will last, so investing in a newer scanner seems premature.)

Life/health/mental state things
I've been staying up too late lately (including to write an angry submission on a stupid roading project), and it's taking its toll. Offline things are a bit stressful and distracting (stuck in a waiting phase). Summer keeps coming and going. Christmas is imminent.

I need to get more active here on Dreamwidth again. *clings to you all*

Goals
Maybe I should make some of these for next year? Hm.

Good things
The boy! The cat! The house! Coloured pencils and a sketchbook and an ArtLine pen. TV that centres female characters. Also: Guardian! The slo-mo rewatch. ♥ ♥ ♥ Christmas mince pies. Early Christmas present bone-conduction earphones (after years of using this kind of earpiece, now I have stereo sound!).

Poll #33963 dance dance revolution

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

Have you danced this week?

View Answers

yes, with other people
3 (6.0%)

yes, with a pet or other animal
1 (2.0%)

yes, on my own
14 (28.0%)

kind of / only briefly
15 (30.0%)

no / not yet
23 (46.0%)

other
1 (2.0%)

ticky-box full of "Fighting!" (화이팅!)
9 (18.0%)

ticky-box full of books borrowed from an acquaintance quite some time ago, which really need to be returned but it's super awkward
9 (18.0%)

ticky-box full of enthusiastically and fervently loving what you love
32 (64.0%)

ticky-box full of giant prehistoric otters roaming the savannas
26 (52.0%)

ticky-box full of hugs, so many hugs
38 (76.0%)

The Randall Morgan Memorial Archive is Moving to the AO3

Posted by Elintiriel

https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-randall-morgan-memorial-archive-is-moving-to-the-ao3/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=273779

The Randall Morgan Memorial Archive, a Queer As Folk (US) fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

This memorial account was set up with the assistance of Open Doors and Irishcaelan, the maintainer of Randall’s personal website, Randall’s Rambles. Randall also wrote under the pseudonym Brian Hennessey. Randall Morgan was taken from us in 2013, and this site is a permanent place where the fanworks he so loved to create will go on.

Open Doors will be working with Irishcaelan to import Randall Morgan’s works into a separate memorial account on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving his works in their entirety, all graphics currently in his works will be hosted on the OTW’s servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works by Randall Morgan to the AO3 after December. You will find them on the RandallMorgan_memorial account.

We’d also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Randall Morgan and Randall’s Rambles on Fanlore. If you’re new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We’re honored to be able to help preserve the works of Randall Morgan, and while we mourn the loss of Randall, we also realize that we are fortunate that he had a friend who was given permission to collect and preserve his works on the AO3 so that they will not be lost. Thinking about the death of a fandom friend may be difficult, but it can also be an opportunity to consider what will happen to your fanworks and accounts and those of your friends after your deaths. The Archive of Our Own has an option to name a Fannish Next of Kin, someone who would be able to gain access to your accounts in the case of your death or incapacitation. By naming someone who can act on your behalf, you can decide ahead of time how you want your AO3 accounts handled going into the future.

– The Open Doors team and Irishcaelan

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-randall-morgan-memorial-archive-is-moving-to-the-ao3/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/?p=273779

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12 Days (til) Christmas Day 3

So the many times I wrote for the K/S Advent Calendar mean there are more Star Trek fics on this list than anything else. This was 2010’s offering, in which Spock convinces Jim to go home to Iowa and see his family for Christmas. We do spend a bit of time grappling with nu!Trek Jim’s troubled childhood, but it’s still ultimately a happy story about growing up, and coming home.

Delusions of our Childhood Days (Star Trek, Kirk/Spock)

‘He glanced over at Spock. “Sick of hearing this shit yet? Ready to tell me it’s illogical?”

“Jim,” Spock answered patiently, “I agreed to accompany you on this outing. I am aware I influenced you in choosing to pursue it in the first place for the sole purpose of confronting the emotional upheaval of your past. Since then I have partaken of an intoxicating substance and am sitting with you, in subzero temperatures, on the roof. No part of this scenario is the least bit logical.”

Jim reached for Spock’s hand, holding it between his own, still gazing off toward the trees. “But you’re here.”’

A song to go with it: Thunder Road (not a Christmas song, but relevant to the story)

And a fic rec:The Cold Days of Winter (Eight Days of Luke, David/Luke) by Daegaer
Rated G

So it's probably important to know the canon for this one (and the more about Norse mythology the better) but if you do it's exquisite. There are moments - David's hesitation to light a match, not because he's afraid Luke will appear but because he's afraid he won't, and he'll have to let go of the idea that it was ever more than his imagination. Luke's fierce protectiveness is lovely, but there's a very definite shudder of dark things to come at the end. A good fic for a cold night!

Back to Day 2 | On to Day 4

(Less Than) 48 Hours to Deadline

Posted by morbane

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/300260.html

There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding (Less Than) 48 Hours to Deadline. Please note that there may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.

You can go through to DW to check the details:

Dreamwidth Post

If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed anonymous comment.

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/300260.html

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12 Days (til) Christmas Day 2

I've been awake for just over 23 hours so going to dive right in here.

This 2015 Yuletide fic features THREE SEPARATE Christmases, so it’s like a free gift with purchase! Or something. Connie Willis’ Oxford Time Travel Series always makes me think of Christmas, partly because the first one I read was Doomsday Book (which happens over Christmas in several time periods) and second because I wrote Yuletide fics for it three years in a row.

If you don’t know it, you should check it out – it’s not always an easy read, and there are some weird little linguistic catches that can grate (the English people in these books talk like an American imagines English people in the 1920s might have spoken). I found Blackout/All Clear a frustrating slog until suddenly I didn’t, because somehow the experience of going through all that repeatedly with the characters made sense.

Anyway, if you do know it, then this fic follows Colin through the years between Doomsday Book and post-All Clear, but is much shorter than any of those and will not take so much dedication to read.

A Carol of Dreaming Spires (Oxford Time Travel, Colin Templar/Polly Churchill)

‘It was tradition, by now: Dunworthy in his armchair, Badri folded onto one end of the faded sofa and Kivrin curled against him. Colin stretched out on the floor in front of the blocked-off fireplace. The only new addition this year was Polly, perched on the floor with a tartan blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Colin snuck looks at her while pretending to read the book Kivrin had given him.’

A song to go with it: The Atheist Christmas Carol

And a fic rec: Yippee Ki Yay, Father Christmas (Everwood, Bright & Ephram) by Cyren2132

Have you seen Everwood? One of the best shows the CW decided not to keep; the premise is so cheesy but the characters were so, so good. (And Bright is Chris Pratt at his young, pre-being-a-super-Republican-for-some-reason best.) Anyway this is the one where Bright and Ephram get stranded in a roadside motel on Christmas Eve.

Back to Day 1 | On to Day 3

Current Music: Stalker's Tango - Autoheart

Entry tags:

books

Recent reading

Read Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh, one of the later installments in her Roderick Alleyn series (published 1972) and set against the backdrop of a country manor being restored by a wealthy eccentric, whose particular eccentricities include hiring a domestic staff consisting entirely of convicted murderers. I enjoyed this one a lot: Alleyn's wife, painter Agatha Troy, is the focal character until he shows up halfway through to figure out whodunnit, and I always love Marsh's Troy-centric novels; the wealthy eccentric was also a really great character. And it is, as the title suggests, seasonally relevant/a Christmas Episode!

Read The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir (translated from Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal), a novella about a woman who is either having a mental health crisis or in the throes of something more supernatural when she finds herself waking up each morning to the increasingly violent aftermath of apparent sleepwalking episodes. Shades of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest & Relaxation, but darker/creepier/gorier. Do not read if you are particularly fond of cats. I picked this up after seeing a review from

rachelmanija that both piqued my interest and tempered my expectations, and I'm glad I went in forewarned that the plot's ambiguity is never actually resolved and nothing is explained; I didn't mind the Wouldn't that be messed up? Anyways I'm Rod Serling approach, but it would have been annoying to have expected answers that never came.

Have made some progress in the audiobook of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and this is hardly a new/unique observation, but it really is wild to read the classics that have become so diffused into general pop culture, because you'll be like yeah, yeah, we get it, it's a famous book and then you'll actually read it and it really is That Good???

Posting; Pinch Hit; Betas

Posted by morbane

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/299835.html

There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding Posting; Pinch Hit; Betas. Please note that there may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.

You can go through to DW to check the details:

Dreamwidth Post

If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed anonymous comment.

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/299835.html

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Twelve Days of (until) Christmas, Day 1

The thing about being in fandom for a long time, or at least one of the things, is that I have written a lot of holiday fics over the years. And I thought it might be fun to do a sort of Advent Calendar and revisit them!

It's a good excuse to give some old fics some air time, and also to spread the love and post some recs for other holiday fics I have loved.

Day 1:

We kick things off with some light-hearted fun! This was written for the Kirk/Spock Advent Calendar in 2011. I’d written a couple more serious fics for the same event in previous years, so wanted to change it up a bit and go full-on ENTERPRISE SAVES CHRISTMAS SPECIAL for this one.

Operation Sugarplum (Star Trek Reboot, Kirk/Spock)
Rated Gen
‘The transporter room was full of them, most in dress uniforms from their cadet days, some in Operations red, and most with a fluffy red Santa hat perched jauntily on their heads. Spock was uncertain where all those had come from. One belonging to a young officer from Medical looked suspiciously as if it had spent a previous incarnation as a sock, but Spock did not consider himself an experienced judge of Santa Claus paraphernalia, so neglected to mention it.’

A song to go with it: Santa Claus is Comin to Town, of course!

And a rec: merry christmas ya filthy animal by belovedmuerto
(The Untamed, wangxian but it's Jin Zixuan POV, modern AU)
Rated Teen

Picked this one because I'm headed to L.A. tomorrow and because I wanted to get an MDZS fic in - none of mine are going to be, as I haven't written any AUs and there is an understandable lack of Christmas in Ancient Fantasy China. It's the final one of a series, but I read them out of order and it was fine - they're pretty standalone, as long as you grasp the uncomplicated premise that WWX ran off to California where LWJ lived. I love the whole series because I love L.A. and it's so full of place, and this is just one of those warm fuzzy things where people basically get along and have a cosy time together and it's all very sweet.

On to Day 2