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I'm back. The wedding was a success, Singapore and Bali were wonderful. Shim and I are now as married as we're gonna be. (And it shows; on the flight back we both requested the non-veg meal option, and my nice white boy partner got given a kind of white-sauce-gooey-chicken-broccoli thing, and looked despairingly over at the sensible, homely, decent chicken-curry-with-tadka-dal they'd given me; when faced with Balinese public transport a few days ago he was heard to remark, "I miss India, where things make sense."

Quite.)

Anyway, I will tell y'all about the wedding and the subsequent meanderings across Southeast Asia when not at work just coming off a terrible head cold and fifteen hours' flying time. In the meantime, let me just tell you all what I wrote for yuletide. I think I might have mentioned before that I wrote five stories in four different fandoms? A couple of people did come close to guessing! Here they are:

Stand In The Place Where You Live [Parks and Recreation, for soupytwist]
Snapshots from the Knope presidential campaign.

So I've had this story in my head since I saw my very first episode of Parks and Rec, and soupytwist and I have been talking about it forever, so I really wanted to finally sit down and write it for her, but it wasn't coming together. Then, quite by chance, hedda62 introduced me to a song she thought I'd like - "Half-Acre", by Hem - and after I'd listened to that 65 times in a couple of days (that's... something I do, okay), it came together bit by bit. I am amazed no one guessed outright that I wrote this, it has my narrative kinks spread incriminatingly all over it - politics! science fiction! documentary format! - and while it isn't a departure for me, either in style or content, I think I'm pleased with how it came out. The hardest part was the science fiction aspect, unsurprisingly; Parks and Rec and hard SF don't really go together, but I found myself really invested in making Leslie's 2024 a real place, not just a future of slightly shinier iPhones. Runaway climate change seemed the obvious, if depressing, way forwards.

everyone says this love will change you and I ask, isn't that what love's supposed to do [Parks and Recreation, for doyle]
"Who hasn't had gay thoughts?"

Years ago, when it was a smallish fandom - seriously, I know - I used to run Doctor Who ficathons. I ran three of them, small enough to hand-match, and the one perk you get running hand-matched ficathons is to choose your favourite author of those who signed up to write for you. Which is how Doyle ended up writing a lovely Doctor/Rose/Jack story just for me, and why eight years later, when I realised Doyle wanted a story about Ben's gay thoughts for yuletide, I thought it might be time to return the favour. I had enormous fun writing this and again, I'm amazed no one guessed outright it was mine - people working out their own queerness in adulthood is one of my favourite things to explore in fic and Parks and Rec, with its lovely mixture of political themes and ordinary small-town life, is basically the perfect fandom to explore it in.

(What I found kind of darkly amusing about this story is that Ben is the POV character throughout, it's a tight third-person POV, and Ben spends it drunk, then delirious, then in various elevating states of hysterical, then drunk again, and tied up, turned on, kind of weirdly-subspaced, post-coital and finally, for the last 500w, reasonable, rational and in his right mind, all at the same time. I really did have a lot of fun writing it.)

Epiphany [The Middleman, for metonymy]
"Hey, what do I get my boss for Christmas-Epiphany-general-festival-of-expressing-love-through-capitalism-whatever?"

MIDDLEMAN YAY. I've never written Middleman fic because I just, the show is perfect, who can add to it. So this is not long, or plotty, or profound, it's just 1200w of SPARKLY SPARKLY LOVE. This stupid show.

a glass poured to air [Gentleman Bastards, for labellementeuse]
There comes a day months afterwards, almost enough to begin counting in years, when Locke Lamora stops in front of a mirror and says, "Lamor Acanthus."

The funny thing about this story is that it's sort of not true to what I think? With regard to the revelation in The Republic of Thieves, I fully believe that it won't turn out to be either true or complete bullshit; it'll be some elegant halfway-there method for Patience to fuck with Locke, and watching her do so will be enormous fun. But I read the novel on a plane and basically wrote this straight after, waiting for my ride in a cafe in Heathrow Terminal 4 arrivals: I just really wanted to explore the idea of what might happen if it were true. And if it is true, then that's what I love about this series - it's still epiphenomenal. Locke is still Locke, because as the narrative continues to remind us, Locke is Locke, Locke is Jean and Sabetha and Chains and the city of Camorr and what all those things made him. If the novels as a whole have a theme, it's that, surely: that there's no such thing as caste, or place in society, even in this high-fantasy setting complete with nobility and high magic. What there is, is communities built up from nothing and how they shape their people. I like that a lot, hence this story.

Things That Are Really There [Parks and Recreation/Welcome To Night Vale for grangerbutstranger]
The hooded figures tried to stop Leslie from going into the dog park.


...yes. That was a thing I did. It was a good Yuletide for me this year! I really should go and read the stories written for me a mere two weeks late. The next thing on the list.

More on the year's writing, the year as a whole, wedding no. 2, general flail, the meme answers I haven't done... at some point. Some point soon! But on the other side of sleep and some nice peaceful days of doing my actual job and hammering my to-do list until it fits on one page. Oww.

I can't write, I'm too hot and have a banging headache, so let me write about writing.

First of all, I just finished Red Seas Under Red Skies, and I loved it. It's Scott Lynch's second novel, the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I liked and didn't love. With Red Skies, though, andrew notes that it's as though he wrote 350 pages and then someone said, dude, where are the women? So he thought about that, and after not passing the Bechdel test at all the novel then passes it continuously for another hundred pages. It's very cheering. And there is so much else to like about it - wacky adventures, pirates, ridiculously complex plots, really fucking awesome dialogue. And then, there is a scene in this book, right. ( spoilers - and why the women are so great ) Where is the fic. Seriously. A03 has a little, but where is the fic, someone write me fic, I am DEMANDING. Bah. Yuletide soon.

And now for the other thing, which I have been pondering. (I miss, sometimes, having people around who write. I know a lot of you do, and it is very nice to have you on the internet - but it has been a long time since I had meatspace people close by who write, and write in the same sort of way I do, idly, without a great deal of ambition-to-go-pro but a regard for the craft, nonetheless.)

Anyway. A little while back gavagai asked me for a bit of fic: Komal/Preeti, from Chak De! India, or something about Garak and Mila from Deep Space Nine. Chak De! India - I've written about it at greater length here, but in short: it's a marvellous film about the Indian women's hockey team, and their rise to meteoric stardom. I have much love for it.

Anyway, I found both ideas equally possible, so while I've never written for the fandom, I opened up a blank document to have a bash at it.

...and then stopped and thought, huh. The problem - CDI is in Hindi. And for me, fanfiction is about voices - it's about hearing those characters' voices in your head. Sometimes it's about other things, sometimes it's about a plot or a mood or a particular thematic study, but when I sit down to write a fic for someone else at the tip of a hat, it's about seeing if I can evoke the source material for that person.

And, well. How to write it? I couldn't write a story about them with them speaking in English. They don't - they're Indian women, they're Hindi speakers. I couldn't write about them in Hindi I think. Perhaps I could, with a great deal of time and patience. (I wonder - is a feel for language language-locked, like software to an operating system? One day I plan to learn enough of my native tongue to find out.)

But even if I could have written about them in Hindi, that would be no use to gavagai. And while I could possibly have written them in English with only the dialogue in Hindi, footnoted, that strikes me as messy.

I do wonder, also, if the matter is complicated by the fact that I am, myself, a Hindi speaker. If I didn't speak a word of the language, would that help? Could I, say, write Amelie fic in English? (Let us please put aside my incredibly limited French.) Might it also help if the subtitles for CDI were not so incredibly, laughably, hilariously awful, and were written in such a way to convey a "feel" for each speaker? I don't know.

I really don't know, and I'm not writing this to lead up to any particular conclusion. I'm just wondering if you all have any thoughts on the matter. I mean, people writing fic in English for anime and manga fandoms have surely hit this problem before, and I'm sure people wrote fic for Chak De! India itself a couple of yuletides ago. I'm just wondering.