Yuletide Reveal

[beatrice_otter]

I wrote three fics for Yuletide this year!

My main assignment was an Enchanted Forrest Chronicles story, In Which Cimorene Settles In As Chief Cook And Librarian and Deals With Politics, for ApocalypseAngel.  They gave me nothing but a fandom--no prompts, no letter, no DNWs, not even any characters.  Which in some ways is nice, and in others is nerve-wracking.  The fic started out as just "let's fill in a little bit of the stuff between books 1 and 2" and then turned into me exploring a lot of my feels about protocol and soft power and the role of women in medieval power structures, and then Cimorene's mother showed up.  I love the books, but they are very much built in "fairy tale land" which takes for granted and assumes all our modern stereotypes about the middle ages, very little of which have anything to do with actual reality, so I end up arguing with them a lot or rolling my eyes because it just didn't work that way.  Grump Harump.  Anyway, mlraven was an EXCELLENT beta, and a great help for me to work through the issues and figure out where the plot was going after Cimorene's mother showed up.  I was down to the wire, and I knew I could only finish it if I knew where I was going.  (I can crank out a TON of words in a very short time, IF AND ONLY IF I know where I'm going.  She was a marvelous help.)

Then I also picked up two pinch hits.  The first was Need To Know, a Murderbot Diaries fic for wickedwords.  One of their prompts was asking why Asshole Research Transport has a "debris deflection system" anyway, and so I wrote a fic about the final stages of ART's construction.  It was fun, but at the same time I was a bit nervous about whether I was getting ART's voice right.  sanity was an excellent help reassuring me about that.

My second pinch hit was for a prompt by litra that I'd had my eye on to consider treating already, so I snaffled it up when I saw it on the list.  They wanted to see Terry (from Batman Beyond) actually trying to be Bruce's PA instead of just using it as a cover when needed, and so I wrote Assisting Mr. Wayne, which was fun.  karanguni was a great beta, they're the go-to person for BB.