Fest and Event Roundup

[argentum_ls]

The end of the year is always a busy season for fests and events, and the collective excitement is so exhilarating that I always get swept up in it and overbook. This year, I vowed to be more responsible about what I signed up for and how I went about fulfilling my obligations.

The biggest change was my involvement in NaNoWriMo. While I've participated since 2004, and have won nearly ever year, I've never finished anything. So, this year, I decided to use NaNoWriMo to write for all the fests, with the goal of finishing things. In the end, I wrote roughly 34,000 words during the month and finished 6 things (if we count chapters as a finished thing). Overall, this was a successful decision, even if I didn't end up "winning."

Other sign-ups included the tw_holidays, hlh_shortcuts, yuletide, fandom_stocking, and a pledge of 5000 words toward the Teen Wolf Rare Pair November event.


Teen Wolf Holidays ended up being a mixed bag. About 20 minutes after getting my assignment, I defaulted. This is the first fest I've ever defaulted on and I still feel guilty about it. My recipient and I matched on a rarepair, yet from word one of her letter, she talked only about how much she loved Sterek and how she wanted any story to "keep them together." Every prompt had "endgame Sterek" in it. Since I couldn't figure out any way to fulfill both the letter and spirit of the exchange, I bowed out.

In hopes of picking up a pinch hit later or, at the very least, having something to gift to the comm, I wrote Only the Young, an Erica/Boyd AU story. Since I was neither asked to PH, nor approved to post to the comm, the story ended up a stand-alone.

But then, reveals came and my gift was the amazing (and far better than I deserved) Far From Where You Are (~5K) by kissoffools. The summary: The upcoming SATs are the most stressful thing going on in Scott McCall's life - or so he thinks. When his study sessions with Allison begin to bring out dangerous, uncontrollable urges he hasn't felt in months, Scott's worried. Really worried. OK, so Scott/Allison are a canon pairing, which means they show up in a lot of stories. Unfortunately, those stories are rarely about them. Scott is a reviled character in the fandom, so most of the time the Scott/Allison in stories is an excuse to write him out or to bash him because of how "obsessed" he is with Allison. Kissoffools not only wrote a story about the two characters, but it's from Scott's POV and it's fun. Everyone's in character. The story is well-paced and interesting. And it makes use of my love of supernatural characters running into real-world conflicts because of their supernatural state. Really, there's nothing about this story not to like.



My pledge for Rare Pair November was 5000 words. I ended up meeting and exceeding the pledge by quite a margin.

The first one finished was in response to a prompt asking for interaction between Scott's two fathers: Fatherly (~1K). What I love most about writing prompts is getting to put characters together, or to envision scenarios, I never would have thought of on my own. This was the epitome, as I've never written either Agent McCall or Peter Hale, and figuring out POV and perspectives on two characters I'm usually happy to write around was a lot of fun. I have a second "interaction" started for this one, and someday it will decide what shape it wants to be so I can finish and post it.

Second up was From My Heart and From My Hand (~5K). This was unprompted and came from an absolute burst of inspiration. The story was finished about 40 real hours after it was started (which included two full work days and a night of sleep), though I did come back to it later to add another 500 words so I could use it for a longfic_bingo prompt. The story is a Lydia/Danny/Jackson fusion with the movie Weird Science, in which Lydia and Danny set out to build their perfect man.

Third was Only the Young (~7K), since it wasn't accepted as part of Holidays. About a year ago, in a different rarepair fest, I prompted a Boyd/Erica/Allison story based on the Rush song "Dreamline." The song talks of youths setting out in search of their dreams. Across the iterations of the chorus, the youths "travel on the road to redemption," "travel on the road to adventure," and "travel in the dark of the new moon" and learn that they're "only immmortal for a limited time." Once the prompt was made, it wouldn't leave me. I mulled it over, made a few attempts at it, and ended up with OtY.



Highlander Shortcuts this year was the best kind of challenge. I wrote Troll the Ancient (~3K) for eliyes. It was hard not to notice that the one-shot character Cory Raines is her favorite. She also indicated a like for other one-shot characters, most of which happened to fall in the same teacher-student "lineage."

The first difficulty is that most of these characters never appeared on the same screen with each other, and they're only "related" via the information provided in extra-canonical material. So, I had to first figure out which characters to use, and then to bone up on all their particular backstories, and then figure out how they might interact with each other and why. Historical fics are, erm, not my thing. But it's hard to write Highlander without going there, so I tried. Fortunately, Highlander canon provides lots of examples of hand-waved history.

The second difficulty was figuring out what story to tell. I knew right away that I wanted Cory at the center. I've never written a heist, either, so I wanted to do that. But a simple heist would be too simple. Cory complicates things. He's a Robin Hood-like character with a tendency toward melodrama. So, then I started thinking about a reverse-heist. Instead of having Cory steal from, what if he stole to. Which led to the idea of Immortals having some kind of super-valuable (and possibly illegal-to-own) gag gift that they trade off every Christmas in a "it's your problem now" kind of way. Along the way, I played with the idea of Cory stealing something that was originally his in the olden days, and therefore not considering it stealing.

Ideas, as they do, mutated. The gag gift started as a book, became a painting, then switched through various kinds of jewelry until it became a signet ring. Then the gag gift idea fell away, the reasoning for the heist shifted, and in the end, there was a mild case of hypothermia and a reindeer antler headband.

On the whole, the story was a blast to write, though I'm not sure my NaNoWriMo writing group was impressed when I opened the kick-off party with "What would an Immortal with a Robin Hood complex want to steal and why?" They told me "dragons."

What I received was The Loch Job (~4K) by idontlikegravy. I got a crossover with Leverage!. The summary: Amanda finds herself in prison for a murder she didn't commit. Her brilliant lawyer, Richard Barrett (Richie), knows she didn't do it, but the evidence is overwhelming. What they need is a little Leverage. So, Richie and Amanda are the stars of this one, and it is quite a romp, with a neat little twist at the end. It's so great to get a Richie-centric story, and one that puts him in a positive role. Plus, the caper itself and the interaction with the Leverage crew was fun to behold.



Yuletide coincides with Finals, and every year I manage to forget just what a time commitment Finals is. This year was no exception. Where I was planning to write my assignment and several treats, I ended up only pulling together the assignment.

This seemed to be the year for people to tailor their assignments. My gifts were Extreme Circumstances (~7.8K) by htbthomas and a treat Echoes in My Head (~1K) by estirose. Those are discussed in a previous post, so I'll leave them out of here.

I wrote Mindful (~3.7K) for skieswideopen, a story for The Listener. I know that she put her prompts for this fandom together with me in mind, which made it all the more amusing when I got assigned to her. The story itself wasn't too hard to come up with since skies and I have talked quite a bit about the show and what we like and don't like in it. The characters, OTOH, were more of a challenge. I've always found Toby difficult to write because where he's coming from in life is not a place I can relate to. However, I find Tia and Toby to be delightful together and the chance to explore the morning after they get back together was too good to pass up. The first half of the story came together quickly in November, and then was left to languish while I finished everything else and worked out how to do an actual plot. While I got the story finished in time, it was all I was thinking about for a couple days when I should have been grading papers. Like a lot of my stories, this one started with a single line around which everything was based. Or, rather, it ended with a single line up to which everything was supposed to lead. Also like a lot of my stories, that line didn't make it into the final version because it started to sound really sinister to me; the story was supposed to end with Tia thinking, "I can't wait to get to the bottom of who Toby Logan is." As much as I like the idea of Tia investigating Toby, I don't think he'll be really comfortable with the idea and I didn't want it to sour their mood.


Updated for Highlander Shortcuts. Updates pending for fandom_stocking.