Snowflake Challenge - Day 8, 2019
Jan. 15th, 2019 06:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maidenjediDay 8 - In your own space, post self-recs for at least three fanworks that you created.
This is always a little harder than you think it's gonna be. (Also - I wanted to post yesterday and DW was down for me all day long. Pout pout etc)
To the Future in the Distance (Star Wars, Kaydel Ko Connix, Leia Organa) - I'm starting off with a rec that has a major caveat. I wrote this last year, and last year was *not* my best year for writing. I struggled immensely with everything I started, and had to plow through because each one was a commitment for an exchange. This story, in my head, is a pretty big story. The prompt I was given stirred the idea of a Kaydel (played in the new movies by Billie Lourd) who works with Leia as a member of her Senate staff - a "West Wing" sort of story. And....ta-da! It wasn't precisely West Wing in nature - more inspired by my own experiences as a staffer, and then worked out as a "well, shit, there goes the New Republic" sort of process story. So here's the issue. I established in my earlier Snowflake entry about my writing process that I have trouble with outlines and such. And this was a hugely ambitious story! I wanted to basically tell the Resistance's origin story through the eyes of a staffer. I got most of the way there, I think, and that's why I'm reccing it. The caveat is that, for all that it is up and complete and what have you, the story stayed with me, and I think this is no where as good as it could have been. So I want people to read it, and I hope that what's there is enjoyable in spite of its flaws (which are legion). I did a lot of background reading for this one - it's got callbacks to the original EU (expanded universe) of Star Wars, and I drew a lot of inspiration from the structure and feel of the New Republic as we once knew it before Disney erased canon. I revised this heavily during the writing, trying to lean into Kaydel more than Leia, but needing Leia at the same time. This was for all intents and purposes the first Star Wars fic I really ever wrote (not counting the Firefly/Star Wars crossover with Boba Fett), so putting out there at all was a big, big deal for me.
They Who Bear the Cost (Mercy Street, multiple characters, Jed/Mary) - Despite deep fannish feelings for Mercy Street, I managed only two stories in the fandom. Notably, however, these are the last stories I have written that weren't for exchanges. This is the longer of the two, and the one I like the best. The show's second season led them up to about the time of the Battle of Antietam (or Sharpsburg) in 1862 (if I recall - they may have covered that time), and this is the story of how the Mercy Street Hospital dealt with that battle. What I loved about the show, and what makes me so sad about its cancellation, was how it dealt with the fact that it was a two-sided war. I mean, shocking, right? Two sides to a story, even one so obviously lopsided in terms of good and bad; sympathetic characters with ugly belief systems, unsympathetic characters otherwise on the side of righteousness - that is a messy proposition for any network, but especially for one whose biggest current hit was the relatively schmaltzy Downton Abbey. PBS cited costs for why they ultimately cancelled the show, but I think it was more the 1) loss of their lead actress in the second season (Mary was played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who was double-timing on Fargo at that point) and 2) the fact that eventually, they'd have to leave off the light-hearted storyline attempts and confront historical truth. Anyway! My story! I put in some fairly detailed research to write this story; my husband and I have a ridiculous number of books about the American Civil War, and I studied maps and looked up historical facts to ground the story. In the end, it's still very fictional - the real Mercy Street was too far away to have housed many casualties of Antietam/Sharpsburg, but in terms of emotional impact, and how it shifted the war narrative, it would have had the most impact on the tone and direction of the show. Not unlike what Gettysburg does in Gone with the Wind, really. In GWTW, it has to be Gettysburg because, generally, that's the battle that changes the war for the Confederacy (arguably - it's more Gettysburg combined with Vicksburg, over the same three day period, that shifts the tide practically, IMHO). In Mercy Street, the proximity to Antietam makes a difference, and the fact that in a lot of ways, the battle was an emotional defeat for the Union - though both sides would claim victories, one reason why it has two names. That would have impacted the show in a sweeping way if the writers had wanted it to, and that's where this story originated. I think it's readable from a historical interest perspective as much as fanfiction for a cancelled, niche television series.
All That Once Was Good (The X-Files, Mulder/Scully, William) - If you were around for the end, and by that I mean seasons 8 & 9, of The X-Files, and you were in the online fandom, you may recall the violent backlash against "kidfic." Stories about William were largely derided or at least ignored, and many writers just didn't go there; for myself, I wasn't interested in William as a baby, but I was very interested in what he would turn out to be like, especially as a pre-teen. Back then, I wrote William post-adoption, and without Scully or Mulder there to see any part of his childhood; he is the central character in what was really the story I put the most work into, and which took me the longest to write of any I ever have, "Bleeding Kansas." In that, I kill off his adoptive parents and let him learn about who and what he might be through a weird roadtrip with Marita Covarrubias. But that's not this story. This one is a piece of Mulder introspection that assumes he and Scully get William back - but get him back with all the trauma of the childhood I imagined for him in "Bleeding Kansas." You don't have to read one to "get" the other - there's enough here in "All That Once Was Good" for William's trauma, and Mulder's by extension, to be clear. Since I wrote this story in 2009 (notably, long after the series ended but before it was given a regrettable coda), I've done a few baseball stories, but in this one the sport is really my story device and not the story itself. This was before, I think, I wrote "The Poetry of the Curveball", too, which is another story featuring baseball but not really about baseball. In the notes, I say I wrote "All That Once Was Good" to combat my own winter ennui; there's hope in every swing of the bat, etc. It is very much about Mulder and William and fatherhood and childhood, but it is also about innocence and the slice-of-life stories being as romantic, if not more so, than sweeping epics. In some ways, this is one of my favorite of the XF stories I've written. And, it's my favorite title.
This is always a little harder than you think it's gonna be. (Also - I wanted to post yesterday and DW was down for me all day long. Pout pout etc)
To the Future in the Distance (Star Wars, Kaydel Ko Connix, Leia Organa) - I'm starting off with a rec that has a major caveat. I wrote this last year, and last year was *not* my best year for writing. I struggled immensely with everything I started, and had to plow through because each one was a commitment for an exchange. This story, in my head, is a pretty big story. The prompt I was given stirred the idea of a Kaydel (played in the new movies by Billie Lourd) who works with Leia as a member of her Senate staff - a "West Wing" sort of story. And....ta-da! It wasn't precisely West Wing in nature - more inspired by my own experiences as a staffer, and then worked out as a "well, shit, there goes the New Republic" sort of process story. So here's the issue. I established in my earlier Snowflake entry about my writing process that I have trouble with outlines and such. And this was a hugely ambitious story! I wanted to basically tell the Resistance's origin story through the eyes of a staffer. I got most of the way there, I think, and that's why I'm reccing it. The caveat is that, for all that it is up and complete and what have you, the story stayed with me, and I think this is no where as good as it could have been. So I want people to read it, and I hope that what's there is enjoyable in spite of its flaws (which are legion). I did a lot of background reading for this one - it's got callbacks to the original EU (expanded universe) of Star Wars, and I drew a lot of inspiration from the structure and feel of the New Republic as we once knew it before Disney erased canon. I revised this heavily during the writing, trying to lean into Kaydel more than Leia, but needing Leia at the same time. This was for all intents and purposes the first Star Wars fic I really ever wrote (not counting the Firefly/Star Wars crossover with Boba Fett), so putting out there at all was a big, big deal for me.
They Who Bear the Cost (Mercy Street, multiple characters, Jed/Mary) - Despite deep fannish feelings for Mercy Street, I managed only two stories in the fandom. Notably, however, these are the last stories I have written that weren't for exchanges. This is the longer of the two, and the one I like the best. The show's second season led them up to about the time of the Battle of Antietam (or Sharpsburg) in 1862 (if I recall - they may have covered that time), and this is the story of how the Mercy Street Hospital dealt with that battle. What I loved about the show, and what makes me so sad about its cancellation, was how it dealt with the fact that it was a two-sided war. I mean, shocking, right? Two sides to a story, even one so obviously lopsided in terms of good and bad; sympathetic characters with ugly belief systems, unsympathetic characters otherwise on the side of righteousness - that is a messy proposition for any network, but especially for one whose biggest current hit was the relatively schmaltzy Downton Abbey. PBS cited costs for why they ultimately cancelled the show, but I think it was more the 1) loss of their lead actress in the second season (Mary was played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who was double-timing on Fargo at that point) and 2) the fact that eventually, they'd have to leave off the light-hearted storyline attempts and confront historical truth. Anyway! My story! I put in some fairly detailed research to write this story; my husband and I have a ridiculous number of books about the American Civil War, and I studied maps and looked up historical facts to ground the story. In the end, it's still very fictional - the real Mercy Street was too far away to have housed many casualties of Antietam/Sharpsburg, but in terms of emotional impact, and how it shifted the war narrative, it would have had the most impact on the tone and direction of the show. Not unlike what Gettysburg does in Gone with the Wind, really. In GWTW, it has to be Gettysburg because, generally, that's the battle that changes the war for the Confederacy (arguably - it's more Gettysburg combined with Vicksburg, over the same three day period, that shifts the tide practically, IMHO). In Mercy Street, the proximity to Antietam makes a difference, and the fact that in a lot of ways, the battle was an emotional defeat for the Union - though both sides would claim victories, one reason why it has two names. That would have impacted the show in a sweeping way if the writers had wanted it to, and that's where this story originated. I think it's readable from a historical interest perspective as much as fanfiction for a cancelled, niche television series.
All That Once Was Good (The X-Files, Mulder/Scully, William) - If you were around for the end, and by that I mean seasons 8 & 9, of The X-Files, and you were in the online fandom, you may recall the violent backlash against "kidfic." Stories about William were largely derided or at least ignored, and many writers just didn't go there; for myself, I wasn't interested in William as a baby, but I was very interested in what he would turn out to be like, especially as a pre-teen. Back then, I wrote William post-adoption, and without Scully or Mulder there to see any part of his childhood; he is the central character in what was really the story I put the most work into, and which took me the longest to write of any I ever have, "Bleeding Kansas." In that, I kill off his adoptive parents and let him learn about who and what he might be through a weird roadtrip with Marita Covarrubias. But that's not this story. This one is a piece of Mulder introspection that assumes he and Scully get William back - but get him back with all the trauma of the childhood I imagined for him in "Bleeding Kansas." You don't have to read one to "get" the other - there's enough here in "All That Once Was Good" for William's trauma, and Mulder's by extension, to be clear. Since I wrote this story in 2009 (notably, long after the series ended but before it was given a regrettable coda), I've done a few baseball stories, but in this one the sport is really my story device and not the story itself. This was before, I think, I wrote "The Poetry of the Curveball", too, which is another story featuring baseball but not really about baseball. In the notes, I say I wrote "All That Once Was Good" to combat my own winter ennui; there's hope in every swing of the bat, etc. It is very much about Mulder and William and fatherhood and childhood, but it is also about innocence and the slice-of-life stories being as romantic, if not more so, than sweeping epics. In some ways, this is one of my favorite of the XF stories I've written. And, it's my favorite title.
