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inmyriadbitsKatie left me today to go back to the wild wilderness of Connecticut. I'm trying to decide whether curling up on the couch and watching Benton Fraser be a giant goofnut or watching angst-filled anime on Netflix instant viewing would be better.
Oh! And I just remembered that I never posted about the fic I wrote for Yuletide! My recipient was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
automaticdoor, and she requested fic for L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle. I wrote Once In A Blue Moon for her, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.
For those of you who have never read The Blue Castle, allow me to highly recommend it. You can read it online here thanks to Project Gutenberg (*draws nerdy hearts*). Valancy is a really fun character, full of guts and a snarky sense of humor that I would enjoy in a modern heroine, much less a book set in 1926, small-town Canada. She's totally awesome, and the book itself has some really hilarious scenes. (I made Katie read it when she was back for Christmas, and she was laughing out loud.) Go read! Especially if you're already an Anne of Green Gables fan! You won't regret it. :)
Original prompt: "I would really, really love a Valancy/Barney fic! Maybe some sort of insight into how their feelings started to change for each other. I would even be okay with some smut, but totally vanilla, because I don't see any kink happening here. Please try to stay true to LMM's writing style."
Additional Dear Santa details: "I requested Barney/Valancy because I find it one of the sweetest relationships in any of the books I've read. Montgomery is just a magical writer, and you can almost feel the mist rising off the lake, you know? I really, really hope that you capture some of the whimsy and sparkle of the original. I love missing moment fic, so it could be a scene from their domestic life, and I also love scenes as retold from someone else's perspective, so maybe from Barney's POV? Cecily's? One of V's nasty relatives?"
I signed up for her pinch hit because I had conveniently just read TBC, thanks to this bandom not!fic byskoosiepants piquing my interest, but I also had the backup option of writing for the Abhorsen series (I ADORE Sabriel, guys).
I was really struck by the idea of writing a missing scene/alternate POV fic, because Barney is very enigmatic throughout the book. He's a very interesting character, though, and I wanted to get inside his head. This particular structure let me do that in a more subtle way than LMM's info-dump/visit-from-the-exposition-fairy monologue at the end of TBC (and also not have to come up with an actual plot). :D
The things I like best in this fic: my only-I-know-this-and-it-will-make-me-secretly-gleeful reference to "trees bent like old men," which are real trees in the Black Forest called "Windbuchen" ("wind beeches"); the stories of how Banjo and Good Luck show up; writing Roaring Abel, who is a delightful character; the section with Valancy running her fingers over Barney's face in the dead of night; my tiny sex scene, because trying to get it to the point where it was sensual but didn't jar with LMM's more conservative style; and Valancy's habit of telling stories.
Imitating LMM's style in the fic as a whole was really enjoyable (although I did try to use less exclamations than dear LMM, among some other changes). I had a teacher once tout doing a short story entirely in the style of a different author as an excellent creative writing exercise. Fanfiction is kind of perfect for that, I think. My favorite fic writers have the uncanny ability to mimic the canon style of whatever fandom they write in -- some examples that immediately spring to mind arescrunchy's Sports Night fic, pretty much anything copperbadge writes, and one spectacular instance by yahtzee63 that I swear psychically channeled Lemony Snicket. :) I was at least partially successful, in my own opinion.
The only thing I'm significantly not happy with (i.e., bigger than still waffling over diction and the like) is the ending. I rushed writing the last section because I was down to the wire. It's not appallingly bad, but I know I could have done better. I'm not going to dwell, though.
I'm going to repost the fic here in my journal in just a bit, for the sake of tagging OCD/archive crash paranoia. :)
Oh! And I just remembered that I never posted about the fic I wrote for Yuletide! My recipient was
automaticdoor, and she requested fic for L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle. I wrote Once In A Blue Moon for her, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. For those of you who have never read The Blue Castle, allow me to highly recommend it. You can read it online here thanks to Project Gutenberg (*draws nerdy hearts*). Valancy is a really fun character, full of guts and a snarky sense of humor that I would enjoy in a modern heroine, much less a book set in 1926, small-town Canada. She's totally awesome, and the book itself has some really hilarious scenes. (I made Katie read it when she was back for Christmas, and she was laughing out loud.) Go read! Especially if you're already an Anne of Green Gables fan! You won't regret it. :)
Original prompt: "I would really, really love a Valancy/Barney fic! Maybe some sort of insight into how their feelings started to change for each other. I would even be okay with some smut, but totally vanilla, because I don't see any kink happening here. Please try to stay true to LMM's writing style."
Additional Dear Santa details: "I requested Barney/Valancy because I find it one of the sweetest relationships in any of the books I've read. Montgomery is just a magical writer, and you can almost feel the mist rising off the lake, you know? I really, really hope that you capture some of the whimsy and sparkle of the original. I love missing moment fic, so it could be a scene from their domestic life, and I also love scenes as retold from someone else's perspective, so maybe from Barney's POV? Cecily's? One of V's nasty relatives?"
I signed up for her pinch hit because I had conveniently just read TBC, thanks to this bandom not!fic by
skoosiepants piquing my interest, but I also had the backup option of writing for the Abhorsen series (I ADORE Sabriel, guys). I was really struck by the idea of writing a missing scene/alternate POV fic, because Barney is very enigmatic throughout the book. He's a very interesting character, though, and I wanted to get inside his head. This particular structure let me do that in a more subtle way than LMM's info-dump/visit-from-the-exposition-fairy monologue at the end of TBC (and also not have to come up with an actual plot). :D
The things I like best in this fic: my only-I-know-this-and-it-will-make-me-secretly-gleeful reference to "trees bent like old men," which are real trees in the Black Forest called "Windbuchen" ("wind beeches"); the stories of how Banjo and Good Luck show up; writing Roaring Abel, who is a delightful character; the section with Valancy running her fingers over Barney's face in the dead of night; my tiny sex scene, because trying to get it to the point where it was sensual but didn't jar with LMM's more conservative style; and Valancy's habit of telling stories.
Imitating LMM's style in the fic as a whole was really enjoyable (although I did try to use less exclamations than dear LMM, among some other changes). I had a teacher once tout doing a short story entirely in the style of a different author as an excellent creative writing exercise. Fanfiction is kind of perfect for that, I think. My favorite fic writers have the uncanny ability to mimic the canon style of whatever fandom they write in -- some examples that immediately spring to mind are
scrunchy's Sports Night fic, pretty much anything copperbadge writes, and one spectacular instance by yahtzee63 that I swear psychically channeled Lemony Snicket. :) I was at least partially successful, in my own opinion.The only thing I'm significantly not happy with (i.e., bigger than still waffling over diction and the like) is the ending. I rushed writing the last section because I was down to the wire. It's not appallingly bad, but I know I could have done better. I'm not going to dwell, though.
I'm going to repost the fic here in my journal in just a bit, for the sake of tagging OCD/archive crash paranoia. :)