auroracloud | Entries tagged with yuletide

Yuletide fics have been revealed a couple of days ago, and I got this delightful story in one of my teeny tiny fandoms, Gail Carriger's Finishing School series. Which series, by the way, I much recommend for anyone who might enjoy reading about young ladies in the 19th century at a boarding school where, under the guise of becoming fine society ladies, they actually become fine highly-trained intelligencers and spies for Her Majesty. And in between, drink lots of tea, and mess around with entertaining steampunk gadgets. But anyway, I got an incredibly fun story about Sophronia and her friends having to help out Sophronia's nemesis, Monique. The characters are their delightful selves, and the story most definitely doesn't lack in entertaining steampunk gadgets or references to tea.

The Christmas Pudding Caper (2926 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Finishing School - Gail Carriger
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sophronia Temminnick, Monique de Pelouse, Genevieve Lefoux, Agatha Woosmoss, Mademoiselle Geraldine, Lady Linette, Dimity Plumleigh-Teignmott
Additional Tags: Boarding School, Holidays, christmas pudding, experiments gone wrong, Enemies to Friends
Summary:

Monique has her last chance to Finish at the Headmistress' Christmas tea. If she doesn't, the school itself might be Finished. But she needs a little help from an unexpected source.

There are many other fine stories in the Yuletide 2017 collection, though I haven't yet got around to reading nearly all that I wish to read.

Crossposts: https://auroracloud.livejournal.com/50352.html

I hope you all are enjoying a lovely Christmas or any other midwinter festival you might celebrate! I've had a pleasant Christmas with family and good food, and though we don't have much of a white Christmas (alas) we have beautiful clear skies. I've got two new wonderful books, a blissful number of days off, nothing much to do, and it's almost Yuletide. Not that I edited until the last minute, myself. Never would do that, me. Well, maybe just a teensy bit.

The books are The Glass Town Game by Catherine M. Valente, which I've wanted ever since she told the audience at Finncon 2016 that she was writing a book about the Brontë siblings in which their shared fantasy world becomes a real place where they travel; and Messages from Islands by Ilkka Hanski, a nature book which I've heard much about.

I also saw a lovely Nutcracker performance just before Christmas. Our National Ballet's version is so beautiful, and they've set it into early 19th century Finland which warms my history-geeky heart. The wonderful Hanako Matsune was Clara, and oh, she's my princess. I don't have a video from it, but here, have a gratuituous Royal Ballet Nutcracker video instead.

Watch on YouTube

Crossposts: https://auroracloud.livejournal.com/50160.html

Sorry for the delay in posting the letter, but here it is. I may still do little tweaks and edits during the weekend if I realize something could be worded better etc. but you're safe going on based on what I've got here.

Fic likes: I love gen, femslash, slash, het; I love hurt/comfort, adventures, daily life moments and domesticity, angst (but hopefully with a happy/comforting ending), fluff, porn (though preferably so that the sex tells something about the characters), first times, established relationships, kisses, space, history, worldbuilding, character-centric fic, intelligent/geeky women, relationships between women, loyalty, friendship, found family, teamfic where applicable, characters coming to accept some previously neglected/repressed part of themselves, canon divergence AUs (various ”what if”s changing some event or element of the canon but still keeping the world basically the same), epistolary fics, crossovers with fandoms you know I like, etc. etc. Really a lot of things, so feel free to let your imagination roam as long as you respect my Do Not Wants / dislikes.

If you write a romantic/sexual relationship, there can be no sex or a little sex or lots of sex, however you like. Anything from handholding or sweet words to hot steamy sex is find by me, though I prefer no complete PWP.

Do Not Wants/Dislikes: graphic violence, gore and torture, rape/non-con, sexual abuse, incest, underage sex (by this I mean under 16, which is the age of consent in my country), character bashing, mpreg, wildly different AUs of the coffee shop / high school / werewolf etc. variety. It depends a bit on the canon how much violence/torture/abuse I can deal with, but generally, please not higher level than the canon. Please stay away from sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other such things. Please no 2nd person POV, it hardly ever works for me. In fic 1st person rarely works for me unless it’s in diary/epistolary format; the exception here would be Skuggserien, where the original canon is written in first person, so if you want to write the fic that way as well, it’s fine.

( Le Comte de Monte Cristo | Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas )

( Wayfarers Series - Becky Chambers )

( Skuggserien (Shadow Series) — Maria Gripe )

( Finishing School - Gail Carriger )

Crossposts: https://auroracloud.livejournal.com/48396.html

Yuletide authors have been revealed and the New Year's Resolution collection has opened! First off, before I link to my story, I want to enthuse that with the opening of NYR, I got yet another beautiful ficlet for Skuggserien, the book series of my heart I just enthused about in detail while squeeing about my Madness gift. This one is after book 3, and I'd always wanted to know more about Rosilda, Arild and Lydia after the events that pass there, and this one beautifully explores the communication between them all, especially the siblings.

Here it is:

- pronounced -
Author: mayachain
Fandom: Skuggserien | The Shadow Series - Maria Gripe
Category: Gen
Words: 303
Characters: Rosilda Falck af Stenstierna, Arild Falck af Stenstierna, Lydia Stenstierna
Additional Tags: Triple Drabble, Post-Canon, Family Issues, Recovery

Also, I noticed that the author has posted a story this autumn (after the last time I checked the fandom tag) that deals with exactly the thing I always wish the books had dealt with because damn it that needed more exploration so um, reading's going to be in order.

Anyway... Now that Yuletide authors are revealed, here is the story I wrote. It's on the Wayfarers series / The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and for paperclipbitch.

Complications of Interspecies Relations
Fandom: Wayfarers Series - Becky Chambers
Words: 6655
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Categories: F/M, Gen
Relationships: Ashby Santoso/Pei (Wayfarers Series)Ashby Santoso & Sissix (Wayfarers Series)
Characters: Ashby Santoso, Pei (Wayfarers Series), Sissix (Wayfarers Series), Kizzy (Wayfarers Series), Dr. Chef (Wayfarers Series)
Additional Tags: Cultural Differences, Interspecies Relationship(s), Friendship, Interspecies Romance, Pre-Canon, minor appearance by Jenks

Summary: It's complicated enough for a Human to find himself having an affair with an Aeluon. It's even more complicated when he isn't sure how to tell his crew about it, in particular his best friend.

The story takes place a couple of years before canon, and is focused on Ashby's early feelings about the relationship with Pei on the one hand, and how it might have been sorted out in his friendship with Sissix and his relationship with some of the crew.

I'm awfully thankful for

_profiterole_ for beta-reading this in the busy pre-Christmas days as the only person I knew who knew the canon, and for reassuring me as well as giving some helpful comments to make it better! Also, from the Yuletide beta spreadsheet I helpfully got Bookwyrm as a native speaker to beta my English into shape despite not being familiar with the canon. For a fic this long, when I haven't done much creative writing in English for years, I had all sorts of weird things there and it's good to know most of them have been caught out. If any language mistakes remain, it's my fault - I did fix some story-related things after the beta and may have created new mistakes.

( Read more... )

What with the nasty cold starting to hit me from Boxing Day onwards, I never got around to squeeing here about my Yuletide Madness gift! That must be corrected, because it was wonderful - even though the chances of any of my followers knowing the fandom are probably tiny.

Here it is:
Totentanz
Fandom: Skuggserien | The Shadow Series - Maria Gripe
Characters: Rosilda Falck af Stenstierna, Arild Falck af Stenstierna
Words: 315
Rating: General Audiences
Summary: Living in Rosengåva is almost not like living at all.

The story is lovely, but before I say more about it, let me write about this book series. It's one of the beloved books/series of my heart, one that I've been reading and rereading since I was about 11, and has shaped my literary tastes and fascinations and thoughts more than I can even understand. I don't know what languages it's been translated into - the original is in Swedish, and I've mostly been reading it in Finnish translation. It consists of four books by the Swedish author Maria Gripe, telling a story of families and secrets, growing up and much more, set in early 1900s Sweden. They're historical novels that don't read like typical historical novels but focus on the hearts and minds and interactions of the characters, while the age and place they live in influence them greatly. The series is known as Skuggserien - the Shadow Series - because each of the book titles includes the word shadow, and shadows are a constant theme of the books - in the form of secrets and hidden things, dreams and fancies, dark places, long shadows cast by the past, and more than I can explain here.

They've got many elements of Gothic fiction, while going my deeper and psychologically truer than any Gothic fiction I've read; I only understood in adulthood that this is where my love for mysterious houses, family secrets, hidden identities, secret sisters, mysterious pasts, dreamy gardens, burning houses, written secrets, dark corridors and all that originates from - and why I always yearn for much more depth than just the outer trappings, because these books already gave it to me when I was very young. They're beautifully written, deep and complex, and though they were accessible to 11-year-old me (I was precocious; I think the intended target group is a bit older), they've got at least as much to offer over 20 years later. The books fascinatingly walk along the border between realism and fantasy, and though the events never cross over to overtly supernatural, you have the sense of reading something between Gothic fantasy and psychological, complex historical story.

( Cutting this a bit, because it got LONG. )So, I did get this story in Yuletide Madness! Though just a few hundred words long, it's complete in itself, a kind of a dreamy reflection that fits the atmosphere of the books perfectly. It has the heartaching wistfulness associated with the books and with the Rosengåva siblings in particular, it's incredibly beautiful just in the way the books are, and Rosilda and her longings feel just right, as does the sense of together-yet-separate she has with Arild, and it succeeds in giving me new insights about these characters I've been fascinated with for over 20 years. And it's simply enchanting to know there are other people who love this story and these characters enough to write this, or read this.

That's exactly what Yuletide is for, isn't it?

It's Yuletide! The archive is open! And this is what I got as my gift in the exchange:

Fandom: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
Title: Beatrice, or, The Mechanical Yule Goat
Summary (as posted on AO3): Charles Babbage constructs a Terrifying Literary Engine, driven by Steam and Diverse Mechanical Linkages, in order to complete his Yuletide assignment. Said automaton proceeds both to irritate the Countess of Lovelace and to destroy much of London.
Hijinks ensue.

The story is here.

There are footnotes! Wonderfully random mathematical, scientific, and literary references! Capering Caprine Yule-Horror!

Let me quote the first two lines:

”BABBAGE!”, screamed Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, down a speaking tube. “WHAT IS THIS ABOMINATION?”

“Which abomination in particular do you mean?” came Babbage’s voice, rendered a bit tinny by its return passage through the same tube.

Delightfully zany, rich in the sort of alternate-historical hilariousness that is so enjoyable in the canon, and Lovelace and Babbage being their wonderful selves. I'm sure many Yuletide authors can relate to Babbage's desire to construct the engine that he did. (I'm wondering if there's any way... Never mind.) And if you want to read it, the canon is delightfully easy to get into: it's a webcomic (available here, and also as a book) on AU versions of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, in a timeline where they did construct the Analytical Engine and proceed to have all sorts of steampunk-y adventures in an alternate 1840s London. Much recommended by me.

I haven't yet much read else at the archive, but there are fics in many of my little fandoms, such as Gail Carriger's verse, Wayfarers, and various 19th century literature things. Will be excited to discover them.

According to my dashboard, I also have a gift in the Yuletide Madness collection, but that only opens tomorrow. Looking forward to it!

Merry Christmas / holiday of choice to everyone! I am bravely holding on despite our abysmal weather and the onslaught of depressing Finnish Christmas carols on the radio (seriously, WTF, I just don't get it, what's wrong with our people? why do carols have to be super-depressing?). The Christmas tree is pretty, there are lights, I've already had the traditional rice porridge and am now waiting for the Christmas dinner. I expect to get quite stuffed.

Today's writing

I finished all my Yuletide edits! Unless it occurs to me to improve the summary or the tags, I don't plan to touch it anymore before the reveals. About time! I also wrote a little more on the fic I began two nights ago, but I don't currently believe I'll manage to finish it as a treat. No matter, I'll finish it later and post it whenever it's done.

Tally
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Day #19:

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