Yuletide 2014 recs post 1

So... I guess there's this fanfic exchange going on? I've been, like, going to the zoo with my kids, and teaching the older one old family-favorite board games, and... I don't even know what. Oh, haha, reading non-Yuletide fanfic, because the new chapter of Never Been Kissed posted on Friday, and Dira is finally posting the Stiles/Derek hookerfic she's been talking about for ages, and I mostly never talk about stuff I read in big fandoms here (because if you wanted to be reading hockey RPF or Teen Wolf slash you would probably already be reading it, but, then I guess the same could go for anything, so I don't know, maybe I should rec more fanfic in general). ANYWAYS.

What we are actually doing here is talking about Yuletide! Yuletide Yuletide Yuletide.

Let me show off to you my stories that were written for meeee!

Bzzt is my big assigned gift story and it is so super awesome. Remember the gun safety ad where the kids find the one mom's sex toys? This is about what the moms do after that. It is hot and delightful and the kind of thing that Yuletide was made for.

I also got three treats, eee! How About A Demonstration is a perfect little drabble, also for the gun safety ad.

Five Cups of Tea and Carpe Diem, Delilah Dirk are both Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant stories, both under a thousand words, both adorable and happy and glee-inducing.

I have to say, I feel pretty smug about my Yuletide requests this year; the archive didn't have any Delilah Dirk fanfic before and now it does, and I don't think the Playthings PSA would even exist as a fandom if I hadn't thought it should be one. Obviously way more of the credit should go to the talented and generous authors who actually did all the work, but I am pleased with myself for my little part in leading to a couple more little candles being lit in the great blaze of Yuletide fandom proliferation.

Yuletide 2014 recs post 2

So last year I tried going by medium (comics, books, movies, etc) and never got to half of what I wanted to rec, and before that I used to go alphabetically which was not the order I was actually reading in and took more effort to keep track of. So... I don't know. Maybe there isn't really a good way to do this and I should just embrace the random, scattershot nature of my actual reading in my reccing? Let's try it.

So Belle and The Golem and the Jinni were the other two fandoms I requested, so I was of course very interested to see whether anyone else got stories in those fandoms. There are two stories in each, and they are all good!

Belle:
Fair Play is about Dido and Elizabeth when Dido has just come to Kenwood House, and the importance of dolls.

There but by the grace of God is a sweet moment from Dido's future with John.

The Golem and the Jinni:
My Unshaped Form and Let My Beloved Come to His Garden are both Chava/Ahmad, about Ahmad coming back to New York, and about them figuring out their relationship, what it is, what it isn't. Both are quite good but are unsatisfying in that I could easily read an entire additional book about them and their evolving relationship, which is not at all the fault of the authors who deliver everything you could ask for in a 1000-3000 word short story, just, you know, this is a case where I wish the fandom was big enough that people were writing really different approaches to their story and taking it in all sorts of directions. I am a greedy reader, is what I'm saying.

It doesn't look like there's a breakout hit this year like "Texts from Cephalopods" that's gotten picked up and linked to outside of fandom, but here's something I found by sorting by hits (because I'm curious about what everyone is reading):

Pining for You is Rocket/Groot, and I thought it was rather sweet (but obviously you should not read that if the idea squicks you).

A study on the aerodynamics and parabolic arcs of viscous fluids in a low gravity environment is a hilarious and touching story about Mark Watney from The Martian and coping techniques and space masturbation and readjustment. (Don't read if you haven't read the book yet.)