circadienne

This year for Yuletide, I wrote Yum Cha, a post-canon story for the very cute movie Saving Face. Yes, mostly this was an excuse to write a sex scene involving custard bao. My proclivities, let me own them (I also managed to work trains into this story! No mammoths, though. Alas.)

I didn't realize until yesterday that this was actually the second story I wrote last year in which people go for dim sum. Clearly, I should be brunching more often.

Well, the archive is down at the moment, so this seems like a fine time to post the results of my first day of reading.

First, of course, I got an absolutely darling Up story, told from Carl's POV, with Ellie being bright and fantastic and admirable and wise and, hey, getting actual dialogue. We'll Make It A Joint Venture is a lot of things I wanted to see in the movie and didn't, and I'm just so pleased to have it. I love the high school scene. Thank you, Yulewriter!

Funny stuff: Wait Wait Don't Eat Me is...pretty much Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and Zombies. I sat here at the breakfast table and read most of this one aloud, and I recommend that you do the same. Also quite funny (and very meta) is The Pigeon Wants A Story, in which Mo Willems' pigeon writes Yuletide. Hee. And, slightly more adult, For The Sake of a Motorized Scooter is an entertaining Flight of the Conchords story in which Brett and Jemaine once again fail at adulthood and engage in shenanigans (including huddling for warmth).

We got a really great Love and Rockets story this year, El Búho de Engranajes, in which Our Heroes are growing older and more surreal and Ray learns what Maggie's superpower is. I am impressed.

Stories in which I was impressed by the use of a historical setting (look, we all have our own reasons for liking stuff, and I will totally cop to mine): Underground, a Kavalier and Clay story which uses subways as a metaphor in ways I appreciated. Reservoirs takes Bran and Will from Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series and recontextualizes them into modern Welsh politics; there were some things about this story which weren't very clear to me, but I liked the writer's effort to take Cooper's characters out of the deliberately-timeless world of the series.

Saddle Up is my favorite of this year's Buckaroo Banzai stories. In Which Tazendra Catches a Thief is a story set in Brust's Dragaera, in which Tazendra picks a fight with the wrong Jhereg. And I have kind of mixed feelings about Baga, a story set in the future of McKinley's Damar, in that I don't know that I buy its take on Damarian gender relations, but I do like having a slightly different take on the Northerner problem.

And there's a quite a nice story for Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road (which I totally meant to request myself, this year, but failed to); sadly, it didn't get into my bookmarks and the archive is still clonking, so you'll either have to look for yourselves or wait and see if I get around to writing another links post.