Yuletide Reveal

[rosie_rues]

First of all, my thanks to AlexElizabeth for A Conversation in Hollywood, to tagalongcookies for postmarked (a study in contrasts, to bookchan for Different Dreams and to katayla for Wintle's Wonders All Grown Up. So much love for this fandom this year, and all of these stories explore the girls' future in brilliant and satisfying ways. Thank you, wonderful writers all :)



Fools Rush In (12058 words) by Rosie_Rues
Fandom: Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Angelica Petrocchi/Tonino Montana
Characters: Angelica Petrocchi, Tonino Montana, Cat Chant
Summary:

Angelica Petrocchi is taken aback when a strange Englishman begs for her help solving a missing person's case. She's never heard of Tonino Montana, or any of his family, and she isn't sure what the worst spellmaker in Florence can do to help. Meanwhile, Tonino finds himself trapped somewhere very peculiar. Mostly gen, this, with some light Angelica/Tonino.

I end up writing DWJ fic most years, but this was the first time I got it as an official assignment, so I went a bit mad with this one. My recipient wanted Angelica and Tonino from The Magicians of Caprona, something sweet and plotty and mostly gen. With that freedom, I started considering which elements of the books I'd most like to write about, and settled on the real seediness of a lot of magical users - the area where Cat grows up was one of the first things that captivated me when I read Charmed Life as a kid, all the dodgy little shops and dealers and clairvoyants and the slightly dubious dabblers in the occult. So, I wanted to work with that kind of Victorian underworld, and with that very Victorian and Edwardian occultism. I'd also noted that my recipient liked tarot, so that got added to the mix, and there are already angels and demons in Caprona, so I threw that in too. I liked the idea of Cat and Tonino being undercover investigators for Chrestomanci very early in the plotting process - it seemed like a good bit of practical experience for them both, and a neat way to get them into the kind of trouble they need Angelica's help dealing with (and then, of course, I had to decide why she wasn't working with them in the first place). I had almost all the pieces of this worked out before I started writing (the only major thing I worked out as I wrote was that Raffi had lost his memory completely). It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, this one, slotting everything in an the right moment, and all the clues are there - in the title, in 'takes a fool to know one'. Hell, I even (sort-of) pinched the dog from the Book of Tobit.

The character arcs, however, suffered a little while I was being ingenious with plot. They were both meant to be about family and independence, but it didn't quite mesh together. Eh, never mind, I like the kitten, and had great fun with adult Cat and deciding just how Chrestomanci-ish he needed to be, and mapping the various characters onto tarot cards was fun (and there's a reason behind every choice, including those like Renata and Paolo being pages, which got cut). My recipient never commented, but others left lovely comments, and it was good to really play in a fandom I'm sure I'll visit again.


Of Smiting and Sugar Mice (2795 words) by Rosie_Rues
Fandom: Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Marianne Pinhoe, Cat Chant, Gwendolen Chant, Julia Chant, Christopher Chant
Summary:

This was a Yuletide Treat which grew. I was intrigued by the idea of Cat and Gwendolen meeting again, and started thinking about how the rest of the castle family would feel about it. Or, more simply, Marianne Pinhoe is not impressed.

This one, on the other hand, was just a last minute bit of fun. The prompt mentioned Cat meeting Gwendolen again, and I thought that, of course, the best thing he has on his side is all the people who would stand with him. I love Marianne, and thought, given her family, that she'd give short shrift to tantrums and Gwendolen's sort of nastiness. This was the most popular thing I wrote this year - I guess a lot of people must have wanted to see Gwendolen get her comeuppance. It's also, of course, about Marianne letting herself be confident, and about the ways all the castle kids work together to help each other out.


Ursula Vernon's art - Gearworld

The Grace of the Golem Keeper (2871 words) by Rosie_Rues
Fandom: Ursula Vernon - Works
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Bear Golem, Angel, Mechanical Badger
Summary:

Angels and goldfinches transform the life of the Golem Keeper and her charges. Gearworld.

Based primarily on a few pictures - the Bear Golem, the angel, the steampipe forest, and Invasion, though I've drawn on many others as well. There are no direct references to The Book of the Gear, but I've drawn on the imagery a bit.

I fell in love with this prompt, and just had to write it. I've loved Ursula Vernon's art for years, and Gearworld has always been my favourite - one of my commenters used the word numinous, and that's exactly what I love about this world. I went back and looked through again, and there were so many possible stories, but I really wanted to write about the girl in the chador and why she's in the steampipe forest and what her connection is to the bear golem. The challenge with this was to keep the mystery - I had a whole backstory worked out for her, but revealing it would have weakened the piece. Maybe she's a goddess (they do seem to cover at least parts of their faces in gearworld), maybe she's another type of angel, maybe she's just a girl brought up by golems. I decided it was better if I didn't know either.


Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin

The Ghost of Orrimy (2792 words) by Rosie_Rues
Fandom: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ged (Earthsea)
Summary:

Once, in the days when there was still an Archmage on Roke, the men of Orrimy sought his help to lay a ghost.

I felt so presumptuous even dabbling in this fandom. I was intrigued by the idea of writing about Ged as archmage, especially given the glimpse we're given at the start of The Furthest Shore, and how he doesn't use magic for ordinary things. From that came the idea of someone demanding the Archmage's help and being put off because Ged is off, y'know, being a tree or something. Of course, then it twisted around on me, and became far less light-hearted. It's a fable, and a familiar type - the man who overlooks the solution for his problem because he's too arrogant to accept the form helps comes in, and it's constructed that way, right down to the tripartite structure. It's not a story about a ghost, of course. It's a story about a marriage, and could only have been set before The Farthest Shore (I could maybe have written to the same plot and set it later, but it would have had to be through Honey's eyes then, not Cray's - locking it into the male gaze like this, despite the tinge of feminism, places it at a certain point in the series). A few commenters noted this - that it feels like early LeGuin, and I think this is why (I kind of want to write the other story now). I was worried as I wrote this that it would turn out too cruel and hectoring, but then Cray sat down on the quay and pushed his hat back and I realised the poor bastard actually loved his wife, even though he didn't respect her, and that made the piece much richer and sadder. Because a fable is one thing, but an ordinary, flawed guy, shaped by his own privilege - that makes it a story.

Um, yeah, so obviously I'm quite proud of this one, despite the odd reservation about the perspective, and it was the one that got most widely recced this year, which I was very pleased about. I'd have a go at writing Earthsea again now, not least because it's so damn pretty - you can do wonderful things with the weight and flow of the language.

Italo Calvino - Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities

Niobe (549 words) by Rosie_Rues
Fandom: Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Summary:

The city of Niobe is made entirely from ice.

This was a little Madness treat, and such fun to write. Worldbuilding is my self-indulgence when it comes to writing, and I love this book so much. Writing a city and trying to capture the right mixture of reality and metaphor, in the right tone, was great fun (I want to write more, just to play with all the infinite variations of human imagination).

Comments

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I much admired your Earthsea story, one of the best from this year's Yuletide for me so far. If you're interested in writing more in the fandom (pretty please!) would you like to join the Earthsea fiction comm earthsea_fic? It's pretty quiet at the moment, but I'm hoping to get back to moderating it more actively over the coming months.