ceb, posts by tag: yuletide - LiveJournal

One of the story prompts from Yuletide last year stuck in my head, and I found myself writing Lego noir:

The Danish Connection (2310 words) by molybdomantic
Fandom: Lego - All Media Types, Lego modular buildings, LEGO Detective's Office
Additional Tags: Detective Noir, Baked Goods, cheap plastic imitation Philip Marlowe, perfectly innocent cookie-smuggling operation
Summary: On the mean streets of Lego City, Ace Brickman is on the trail of the shadowy Cinnamon Whirl Crook.

comments at Dreamwidth

Dear Yuletide author,

Thank you for writing for me! I love hand-made presents and I am easy to please. I hope you will find something you enjoy writing here. This is me at AO3.


General likes/dislikes:

DNW: I've been finding real-world politics massively depressing recently, so please don't include real-world stuff. Invented politics, especially if played for black humour, are fine.

No RPF for preference, please, I feel kinda conflicted about it.

I would strongly prefer gen fic for all the fandoms I've nominated, though plot-relevant sex is OK if that's where your plot needs to go. I don't mind whether I get a happy ending or not. This is normally where I say I prefer bittersweet to crushing doom, but actually crushing doom would fit all my requests pretty well this year, so if that's what you want to go for then knock yourself out. Bittersweet and/or ambiguous endings are still a thing I love very much though!

I like competence and the ability to think things through; I am annoyed by plots where a character does something out-of-character stupid just to advance the plot. I have no problem with in-character mistakes and if written well they can make the story. Obviously if you're writing Paranoia then this can be quite a fine line to walk!

I adore unusual formats (and, apparently, lists). Please, if you want to, tell me a story as a game or a series of drabbles or a shopping list or a puzzle or a 1-line fic with a very large set of intertwined footnotes or a poem or an ASCII map or half of a scribbled note exchange... if there's some crazy thing you've been wanting to try to write forever but aren't sure if it would work or if your recipient would get it, I am the right person to send it to. If you're not that person and just want to write a story, I will also be delighted, so please play to your strengths and don't feel you need to reach for a weird format if you don't want to.

All my specific suggestions are intended as idea sparks, I don't have my heart set on any of them and I will not be even slightly disappointed if you have a different idea you'd like to pursue. Run with them, or not, as suits your story.


AO3 Name: molybdomantic

Fandom 1: Pandemic (Board Game)
Characters: any

Fandom 2: Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (Board Game)
Characters: any

I would be delighted with any story set in the Pandemic or Pandemic Legacy universe, whether it features the role characters, world-building, or board-game meta. I'm lumping them together in this letter because a lot of my prompts could apply to both. I've played Pandemic a lot and am familiar with the base game and with the On The Brink, In The Lab, and State Of Emergency expansions. Edit: I've just finished Pandemic Legacy Season 1 (we won!).

I have many suggestions to offer... The diary of a field operative. The many and varied logistical headaches of a dispatcher. The operations expert's promotion on the release of On The Brink. What's it like to be an air-drop pilot? Or a victim of one of the diseases? The story of an outbreak told in overly-sensational tabloid headlines, or press releases from the CDC, or a shopping list of lab supplies, or the academic write-up for the Lancet afterwards, or as choose-your-own-adventure from the point of view of the diseases... I love unusual story formats and I love meta-analysis of the game elements of the situation. Also I recently finished an epidemiology degree, so if you want to give me something hugely technical like the speculations on the transmission mechanism and reproduction number of the different diseases, or the lab book of the poor technician who has to try to isolate the infectious agent from a small blue wooden cube then I will be over the moon.

Pandemic Legacy massively spoilery prompts here, highlight to read:
We lost our Generalist when the EVIL EVIL plot twist came and I am still traumatised. We shared a birthday and everything! I loved her very much. How have the army and the CDC ended up on such different sides of the battle? I would love to hear how we got into this situation. Give me all the sinister machinations :-)

(PS Our Coda was black.)


Fandom 3: Dwarf Fortress
Characters: any

Oh how I adore this game, with its ludicrous combination of simulationism and gaping holes. It is my very favourite spectator sport. (Possibly my favourite thing is the way that dwarves can brew dozens and dozens of specific types of alcohol from dozens and dozens of specific types of plant, but the process doesn't involve water.)

The game's most recent contribution towards simulating Knowledge (yes, all of it) added poetry and poetic forms. Dwarven bards roam the fortresses, declaiming poems with incredibly complex auto-generated forms. For an example see footnote [*]. Bards can learn from each other and invent new forms. I would love a story that's something to do with this new development. Maybe the travels and education of a Bard? One-up-dwarf-ship and conflict as bards compete to create the next hit poem-form? Or a long epic poem describing a notable fight (elephants slightly grazing the right upper forelimb of an antelope &c. - I literally never get tired of DF combat descriptions). Or the history of a fortress in a new song form that menaces with spikes.

Alternatively, here is my prompt from last year, and although tuesday wrote me a completely fantastic set of book excerpts for Yuletide last year (An Incomplete Compendium of Magma Use in Dwarven Problem-Solving), there are SO MANY books I still don't know about. So in case you find this more inspiring:

Fortress libraries are full of such inviting tomes as 'Visions Of Steamfaces' and 'Civilisation: Or Else' ... but they're all blank. I NEED TO KNOW what's in these books. You have quite a lot of leeway with this request. You could write me a specific book on any Dwarf Fortressy subject you feel like (quest records? autobiographies? stone-carving manuals? the mayor's diary? bestiaries? cook books?), or the reviews section of the local fortress newsletter, or fic about the fortress librarian's job, or some sort of meta about how the game world changed with the sudden appearance of libraries that have retroactively always existed.


Fandom 4: Paranoia (Roleplaying Game)
Characters: any
I adore this game also, and the re-release has got me excited! I'm happy with any of the flavours of Paranoia; original/XP/recent re-release/whatever really. I love the Brazil-esque computer bureaucratic ludicrousness, the Catch-22 logic gotchas, the constant secrecy and doublethink, the accusations and the in-fighting and the pointlessness of trying to achieve anything sensible.

Ideas? The computer's daily to-do list. The top secret recruitment manual for a secret society. The complex machinations required to do even such a simple task as making a sandwich. An insight into the life of an Alpha Complex filing clerk or the person who runs the morgue. Some great work of literature after it has been through the Computer's censorship programs. Ingenious solutions to impossible problems set by the Computer. Fun! Adventure! Mystery! Dead clones!


Thank you again and I hope you have a fun Yuletide!


( waffly Dwarf Fortress poetic form footnoteCollapse )

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I seem to have neglected to write about the things I wrote for Yuletide, oops. This year's theme seems to have been "fitting in as many allusions to the source material as I can".

A Mystery! Solved (2641 words) by molybdomantic
Fandom: Edward Gorey's PBS Mystery Intro, GOREY Edward - Works</p>

This was my assignment; the canon is a collection of short animations by Edward Gorey for the opening credits of a mystery TV series. I had great fun seeing how many of the elements I could shoe-horn into a story, and less fun trying to concoct a plausible ending, which was quite hard. Not helped by damerell's beta comments which attempted to convert the entire thing into an extended Flash Gordon pun. :-P

"Just because it says READ ME doesn't mean you should" (1650 words) by molybdomantic
Fandom: Nethack (Video Game)</p>

NetHack fic, because how how often am I going to get the chance? The title, and the calendar's helpful mottoes, are all from rumors.tru (which is the source of the minor oracularities). I loved the idea that the Oracle might be lazily repeating aphorisms from an aphorism-a-day desk calendar rather than making them up herself.

And then two poems that I'm quite pleased with:

Survival Is Insufficient (106 words) by molybdomantic
Fandom: Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel</p>

Tell Them What You Know, Little Bird (118 words) by molybdomantic
Fandom: Birdhouse in Your Soul - They Might Be Giants (Song)</p>

The Station Eleven one came first, because the world NEEDS Station Eleven fic in the shape of Shakespearean sonnets and I was just waiting for the excuse to write it. I've got Shakespearean apologies for the roughness of the production (Oh, for a muse of fire &c.), and after careful scanning of the sonnets for typical Shakespearean images I could use I settled on stars. Not as common as flowers but way easier to squeeze in. That rhyme scheme is just how sonnets come out of my head, apparently; they feel wrong without the extra syllables.

Then I saw elisem asking for _Birdhouse in your Soul_ fic, and having been thinking in iambic pentameter all week I found myself with 'There IS a LITtle BIRDhouse IN my SOUL' running round my head and then that had to happen too. (Well, strictly, I tried to banish it, and then I was ambushed by the bees line and *then* it had to happen.)

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Yesterday I made 2 and a half book blocks (photos when the books are glued together). Turns out there's a reason that when we made this binding in class it was in a narrow landscape book. If you make a portrait A5 book then you need new thread about once a page. Tedious and messy!

Relatedly I absorbed a lot of media, mostly _Edwardian Farm_ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcBl4_2FJX4 ; massively interesting live history/archaeology recreation, only let down by over-dramatic narration) and the soundtrack to _Hamilton_ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slt18JWkdj4 and lots more; rap-influenced musical about the US founding fathers).

Both of these were Yuletide's fault. I have a *lot* of Yuletide tabs open at the moment, and am working through them when I feel like stopping sewing for a bit. My stories seem to be hitting theeir mark, which is nice! :-) I received two! presents, and they were the two things I had been most hoping to receive:

Exclusive Content (3964 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Sesame Street (TV)
Summary:
In old days, Cookie think, just having monsters on television was spooky. Monsters doing classy drama was transgressive. Transgressive mean it a thing that people not expect you to do, and they think you strange when you do it. It special kind of surprise.

A completely marvellous collection of Monsterpiece Theatre scripts and ideas (including MR James' Number 13, <3), wrapped in a fantastic story about monster identity politics, and with many many annotations and links.


An Incomplete Compendium of Magma Use in Dwarven Problem-Solving (1291 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Dwarf Fortress
Summary:
A collection of such vaunted texts as Civilisation: Or Else, "You Accepted Torture," and the much-celebrated Common Sense Dwarf series! Discover the answer to haunting questions like, "Can dying save the world?" and, "What can't magma solve?" (Trick question: magma can solve anything!)

Somene wrote me Dwarf Fortress books! I am over the moon :-)


And another lovely Dwarf Fortress fic, with the tone and details spot on (this one sadly not for me):

Fell In Love (3030 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Dwarf Fortress
Summary:
When a dwarf gets moody, the whole fortress suffers. The manager of Moonprairie tries to find an upside.

comments at Dreamwidth

Dear Yuletide author,

Thank you for writing for me! I love hand-made presents and I am easy to please. I hope you will find something you enjoy writing here. This is me at AO3.


General likes/dislikes:
I would strongly prefer gen fic for all the fandoms I've nominated. I don't mind whether I get a happy ending or not. If you go for an unhappy ending I would prefer bittersweet to crushing doom (bittersweet and/or ambiguous endings are a thing I love very much).

I adore unusual formats (and, apparently, lists). Please, if you want to, tell me a story as a game or a series of drabbles or a shopping list or a puzzle or a poem or an ASCII map or half of a scribbled note exchange... if there's some crazy thing you've been wanting to try to write forever but aren't sure if it would work or if your recipient would get it, I am the right person to send it to. If you're not that person and just want to write a story, I will also be delighted, so please play to your strengths and don't feel you need to reach for a weird format if you don't want to.

No RPF, please, I feel kinda conflicted about it.


AO3 Name: molybdomantic

Fandom 1: Sesame Street
Characters: Cookie Monster, Count Von Count

I am an adoring fan of Monsterpiece Theatre and Mysterious Theatre, and it would make me extremely happy if you were to write me a story as mangled by one of these esteemed entertainments. You could either go for an original composition or a cross-over with something classic. (As with the original Theatres, plots need neither be complex nor at all faithful to the original! :-)

I have nominated Cookie Monster aka Alistair Cookie but if you would rather write Vincent Twice Vincent Twice then that is completely fine with me; I am also a huge Vincent Price fan. And I've nominated Count Von Count, who is my very favourite Sesame Street character, but if you come up with an idea that he doesn't fit into then I won't be heartbroken if you leave him out. I'm in the UK and have never seen Masterpiece Theatre or Mystery! so won't get any references to those. However this Yuletide has introduced me to the completely delightful Edward Gorey Mystery! intros if that's a direction you'd like to take this.

[If you would like a more specific idea (and really, don't feel you need to go with this if it doesn't inspire you) the thing that sparked this idea was re-watching old TV - the BBC, ages ago, produced an absolutely fantastic series of adaptations of ghost stories called A Ghost Story For Christmas, which were shown late on Christmas Eve. Many of these were stories by MR James, an excellently creepy Victorian ghost story writer for whom I have a particular fondness. The fic of my heart has Monsterpiece Theatre completely mangling an MR James Ghost Story For Christmas. Maybe 'Number 13' disintegrating into chaos as the Count repeatedly counts all the windows and doors? Or an overly-literal interpretation of 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'?]


Fandom 2: Pandemic (Board Game)
Characters: any

I would be delighted with any story set in this universe, whether it features the role characters, world-building, or board-game meta. I have played this game quite a lot and am familiar with the base game and with the On The Brink, In The Lab, and State Of Emergency expansions. I have many suggestions to offer... The diary of a field operative. The many and varied logistical headaches of a dispatcher. The operations expert's promotion on the release of On The Brink. What's it like to be an air-drop pilot? Or a victim of one of the diseases? The story of an outbreak told in overly-sensational tabloid headlines, or press releases from the CDC, or a shopping list of lab supplies, or the academic write-up for the Lancet afterwards, or as choose-your-own-adventure from the point of view of the diseases... I love unusual story formats and I love meta-analysis of the game elements of the situation. Also I've just finished an epidemiology degree, so if you want to give me something hugely technical like the speculations on the transmission mechanism and reproduction number of the different diseases, or the lab book of the poor technician who has to try to isolate the infectious agent from a small blue wooden cube then I will be over the moon.


Fandom 3: Dwarf Fortress
Characters: any

Oh how I adore this game, with its ludicrous combination of simulationism and gaping holes. (Possibly my favourite thing is the way that dwarves can brew dozens and dozens of specific types of alcohol from dozens and dozens of specific types of plant, but the process doesn't involve water.) A recent release involved steps towards the simulation of Knowledge (yes, all of it) and added books. Fortress libraries are full of such inviting tomes as 'Visions Of Steamfaces' and 'Civilisation: Or Else' ... but they're all blank. I NEED TO KNOW what's in these books. You have quite a lot of leeway with this request. You could write me a specific book on any Dwarf Fortressy subject you feel like (quest records? autobiographies? stone-carving manuals? the mayor's diary? bestiaries? cook books?), or the reviews section of the local fortress newsletter, or fic about the fortress librarian's job, or some sort of meta about how the game world changed with the sudden appearance of libraries that have retroactively always existed.


Fandom 4: Knightmare (TV)
Characters: any

World-building or gaming meta, please! I have long loved Knightmare's boundary-blurring combination of reality and gaming and I would love some investigation of how the Knightmare world works. Maybe the mechanics of how the puzzles are set up - is this just the way the world works, or is it engineered as entertainment for tourists? Or an exploration of why the world has different levels and what that means for the inhabitants. Or a discussion of how the magic system works and how it got that way.

I am not so interested in the Knightmare characters for themselves, but feel free to include any that make your story work, or to invent new characters as suits you.


Thank you again and I hope you have a fun Yuletide!

comments at Dreamwidth

On Tuesday I handed in my Masters project report. Now I am free! I can do things again!

Since Tuesday I have been idly doing things with no great pressure, including nominating things for Yuletide, ticking off a few of the small jobs that have been piling up over the past few weeks, and unpiling some of the literal piles of things that have been literally piling up because of lack of time to put them away. Today I cooked! It's amazing how much less of an brain-filling imposition it is when my brain doesn't start out already full.

Because of timing infelicities I also did some exciting things in the week before the deadline, including a book-making course (photos to follow when I unearth my camera) and a Night Vale Live show (mini-review: excellent but not as good as The Librarian (spoilers), which had stretches of complete genius).

ETA: I've just replied to my Yuletide comments from last year! Only 9 months late... must do better this year.

comments at Dreamwidth

In no particular order, here are a bunch of not-written-for-me Yuletide stories I enjoyed:

Cities: Capital (2048 words) by the_alchemist
The anthropomorphic personification of London has a night out.

Blackadder: Trousers (2589 words) by girl_called_sun
Regency Blackadder to a T, wickedly dry humour.

The Phantom Tollbooth: From the Mountains of Un by Idhren
Academic writing, whimsical Phantom Tollbooth style.

The Muppet Show: The Whole Yule Ball of Wax (1745 words) by Missy
A muppets episode, equal parts touching and madcap.

Watership Down: Fragments of a Life (873 words) by Syksy
A moving set of scenes from Hyzenthlay's life prior to the events in the book.

Ancillary Justice: What's Caught Is Gone (4382 words) by Hokuto
A lovely set of sketches from the downtime between scenes in the Ancillary series.

Amber: Through the Water Brightly (1017 words) by Shadowlover
Duty and wishful thinking. (I was lucky enough to get to beta this one.)

The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Complete Metamorphosis by resistate
What's the Very Hungry Caterpillar's motivation? Complete genius.

Two Monks Inventing Things: Two Monks Invent Mr. Darcy (1043 words) by Bow
Completely stupid and extremely funny.

Just William: William and the Fond Reunion (8930 words) by halotolerant
Lovely Just William story, very true in style to the original (I kept hearing it in Martin Jarvis' voice), with a sympathetic and unconvential portrait of Ethel.

Sleeping Beauty (Disney): toast and tea, sunshine and shadow (8423 words) by ephemeralblossom
Clever and lovely reimagining of Maleficent's motivation for cursing Aurora.

Cowboy Bebop: Light Fandango (5117 words) by sally
A story narrated by Ed (you have to have seen the original to realise how hard that is and what an achievement this story is!).

The Culture: First Steps (11207 words) by Bagheera
Engaging Culture fic about Demeisen.

Little Red Riding Hood: Rory Red Coat (7340 words) by akamarykate
A fantastic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.

Steve Jackson's Sorcery!: The Sorcery Cook Book (2491 words) by yhlee
Sorcery! explored through the medium of recipes.

comments at Dreamwidth

I am getting THREE Yuletide stories! This is wildly exciting, I am becoming incoherent.

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I had a day booked off work today, during which I sorted all the remaining Christmas presents, ate steak frites, visited the Whipple, had coffee and cake, investigated laptops, got home to find a Lego Research Institute waiting for me, and hosted another lovely Yuletide writing thing (at which I betaed a story and wrote two drabbles, one of them collaborative, and almost everyone finished their stories).

Actually yesterday was pretty nice too. One of my study co-ordinators gave me a Christmas present, I won some very pretty cake tins in the Christmas party raffle, and one of our receptionists picked me to ring for help when she was stuck in traffic (a double-edged sword but quite flattering).

Tomorrow promises cake decoration and a preformance of some Edgar Allen Poe stories, so will probably also be good.

comments at Dreamwidth

Dear Yuletide author,

Thank you for writing for me! I love hand-made presents and this is the first Yuletide I've properly taken part in, so I am extra easy to please. This is me at AO3.


General likes/dislikes:
I would strongly prefer gen fic for all the fandoms I've nominated. I don't mind whether I get a happy ending or not (though if you go for an unhappy ending I would prefer bittersweet to crushing doom).

I adore unusual formats (and, apparently, lists). Please, if you want to, tell me a story as a game or a series of drabbles or a shopping list or a puzzle or a poem or an ASCII map or half of a scribbled note exchange... if there's some crazy thing you've been wanting to try to write forever but aren't sure if your recipient would get it, I am the right person to send it to. If you're not that person and just want to write a story, I will also be delighted, so please play to your strengths and don't feel you need to reach for a weird format if you don't want to.


AO3 Name: molybdomantic

Fandom 1: Pandemic (Board Game)
Characters: any

I would be delighted with any story set in this universe, whether it features the role characters or wider world-building. I have played this game quite a lot and am familiar with the base game and with On The Brink (though I haven't yet played the bioterrorist version). I have so many suggestions to offer... The diary of a field operative. The many and varied logistical headaches of a dispatcher. The operations expert's promotion on the release of On The Brink. What's it like to be an air-drop pilot? Or a victim of one of the diseases? The story of an outbreak told in overly-sensational tabloid headlines, or press releases from the CDC, or a shopping list of lab supplies, or the academic write-up for the Lancet afterwards, or as choose-your-own-adventure from the point of view of the diseases... I love unusual story formats and I love meta-analysis of the game elements of the situation. Also I'm studying infectious disease epidemiology at the moment, so if you want to give me something hugely technical like the speculations on the transmission mechanism and reproduction number of the different diseases, or the lab book of the poor technician who has to try to isolate the infectious agent from a small blue wooden cube then I will be over the moon.


Fandom 2: The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
Characters: klapaucius, Trurl

I love these stories for their whimsicality, their combination of fairy tale tropes with hard maths and physics, the way they are sweet but always in an unforced, natural-feeling way. I also love Trurl and Klapaucius' rather competitive friendship. Please tell me a story of an unlikely invention, the problems it causes, and how Trurl and Klapaucius find their way out of the mess again. Or something else in keeping with the tone of the originals, if you have a better idea. Definitely gen fic only for this fandom, please. Though there's plenty of mention of love and relationships in the stories I would prefer this kept as background detail, as in the originals.


Fandom 3: STÅLENHAG Simon - Works
Characters: Young man on flooded clockwork

I'm not the original nominator for this fandom but this picture (http://www.simonstalenhag.se/bilderbig/flooded_clockwork_1920_badge.jpg) really caught my imagination. What is this place and why is it important to the person in the picture? (The character is listed as "young man" but I would be happy with any interpretation of gender/species/robotitude/etc.) Do they have a history there? Have they heard stories about it? Maybe they're about to help bring the contraption back to its former glory, or oversee its destruction? (If you like writing crossovers, it reminds me strongly of the Myst games.)

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