greerwatson
15 October 2024 @ 12:31 pm
greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites. (Treats are enabled and always welcome!)


GENERAL POINTS:

  • I love stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.

  • I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.

  • I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (There may be other specific exceptions.)

  • I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)

  • I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.

  • No second-person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.

Read more... )
Tags:
 
 
greerwatson
08 September 2024 @ 07:55 pm
Once again, it's that time of year. The annual Yuletide gift exchange has just opened nominations. (See the post.) This year is definitely the last one that Forever Knight will be eligible for it has, at this moment, 924 works in AO3 that are complete, in English, and over 1K words in length.

If there are other FK fans thinking of doing Yuletide this year, we should coordinate. When one is actually signing up for Yuletide, one is only permitted to request/offer characters in the tagset; so it's important to get in the ones you want to ask for.

One is permitted to request four fandoms, with four characters per fandom. Obviously, FK has far more than that! However, by coordinating with one another, we can ensure that we each nominate different ones, thus getting a larger tagset. If we don't coordinate, there's a high probability of duplication.

Nominations are open until 20 September 9am UTC. Note that local time for you will vary depending on your time zone.

To repeat: if you plan to request/offer Forever Knight for Yuletide, we should coordinate in order to get as many different characters as possible into the tag set.
Tags:
 
 
greerwatson
20 October 2023 @ 02:02 am
greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites. (Treats are enabled and always welcome!)


GENERAL POINTS:

  • I love stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.

  • I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.

  • I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (There may be other specific exceptions.)

  • I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)

  • I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.

  • No second-person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.

Read more... )
Tags:
 
 
greerwatson
24 September 2023 @ 01:13 am
Are there any other Forever Knight fans planning to do Yuletide this year? If so, we should coordinate on nominations. These will continue through the 27th (Wednesday) ending some time on the following day, varying depending on your time zone.

FK is eligible again this year because of changes in the rules.

One is permitted to request four fandoms this year; but only four characters per fandom. However, by coordinating with one another, fans can ensure that they each put in different nominations, thus getting a larger tagset. When one is actually signing up for Yuletide, one is only permitted to request/offer characters in the tagset; so it's important to get in the ones you want to ask for—and equally, of course, the ones you are willing to offer.

Because of the cast changes over the three seasons, FK has quite a large number of regulars, let alone occasional supporting characters and guest stars.

I plan to nominate Nick, Schanke, Vachon, and LaCroix—which makes a rather "guy-heavy" selection, I know, but I want to cover as many bases as possible, i.e. both vampire and cop plots.

If you plan to do Yuletide, you might need to get in a different set of nominations to make the requests and offers you hope for.
 
 
greerwatson
10 August 2023 @ 05:46 pm
The new rules for the Yuletide fanfic gift exchange, i.e. dropping FF.net when calculating eligibility, means that Forever Knight should once more be eligible.

Forever Knight fans take note!

There are well under 1000 FK stories in AO3 that are in English, complete, and under 1K words.

When nominations start, do please consider including FK among the fandoms.


 
 
greerwatson
16 October 2022 @ 12:02 am
greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites. (Treats are welcome!)


GENERAL POINTS:

  • I love stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.

  • I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.

  • I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (There may be other specific exceptions.)

  • I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)

  • I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.

  • No second-person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.

Read more... )
Tags:
 
 
greerwatson
21 October 2021 @ 12:56 am
greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.


GENERAL POINTS:

  • I love stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.

  • I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.

  • I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (There may be other specific exceptions.)

  • I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)

  • I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.

  • No second-person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.

Read more... )
Tags:
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
22 October 2020 @ 03:15 am
greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.


GENERAL POINTS:

  • I love stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.

  • I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.

  • I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (There may be other specific exceptions.)

  • I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)

  • I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.

  • No second-person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.

Read more... )
Tags:
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
26 September 2020 @ 04:39 pm
I've just put in my nominations for the [community profile] yuletide gift exchange: Forever Knight, Mary Renault's The Charioteer, and the old British comedy cop show, New Tricks.

I feared that last year would be the end of FK's eligibility. In fact, we now stand at 976 fic spread over AO3 and FF.net, which means we are still (barely!) under the cut-off. I guess there were fewer personal sites discontinued this year.

Anyway, I nominated Nick, Schanke, Vachon, and LaCroix. If any other FK fans are doing Yuletide this year, do please consider adding more characters to the tagset. Sadly, one is only allowed four per fandom, and there are so many fascinating people in the FK cast.

YOU CAN NOMINATE HERE.

There are so many missing characters! The absence of women is particularly obvious. If you do decide to nominate, please comment here or on the mailing list so that people can coordinate.
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
25 June 2020 @ 02:25 pm
All told, I wrote five stories for Yuletide in 2018. Besides the two Renault fic I wrote, there were "Joust on Vellum" (medieval manuscripts), "Flight at Christmas" (Mrs Pollifax), and "The Dapple Flows into the Dawl" (Lud-in-the-Mist). From which one may correctly conclude that no one requested Forever Knight that year—besides me that is—for, if they had, I would certainly have contrived to come up with something, whatever they'd asked for.

"Joust on Vellum" was written for [profile] oneirad. Odd illustrations in medieval manuscripts were a nonce fandom that Yuletide; and several writers essayed their own takes on the subject. The "old parchment" background represents the source material; and the border around the story is dominated by a broad band of oak, representing the tables and desks in the scriptorium of the monastery. This is light oak because it darkens with age, and the furnishings back then would have been newly made. For further decoration, I snipped out a number of details from pictures of actual illuminated manuscripts—being sure, of course, to include a jousting snail.

"Flight at Christmas" was written for [personal profile] philomytha. With no idea how to "Pollifax" the webpage design, I decided to go for a Christmas theme. For the main background I used a tile of snowy branches, laying over it my usual animated snow graphic. The border panel is red, green, gold, and tartan, with touches of ice and snow.

The Dapple Flows into the Dawl" was written for [personal profile] moon_custafer. It's a brief postscript to Hope Mirrlees' fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist, which is a great favourite of mine. I don't think I've ever seen it requested in an exchange before: it is one of the rarest of fandoms. I was utterly delighted to write a treat based on it. To illustrate the story, I modified a layout that I'd created some time before, but never used. The main background is a variant of brown128.jpg in shades of beige and aqua blue. The dominant panel in the border is a muted aqua green tile from BoogieJack.com, which I've used before. Here, it is combined with a glistening pale blue variant of Heather's Animations' gold-refraction.jpg, and a light variant of marb032.jpg from GRSites.com. To glitz all this up a bit, I added a couple of narrow ripply cream tones. All in all, quite a variety of shades were used. Nevertheless, they produce an overall pale, cool pastel impression. Very dainty, I think. Perhaps too much so. As an accent, therefore, I outlined the panel with a dark brown texture.

 
 
greerwatson
03 November 2019 @ 03:07 pm
greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.


GENERAL POINTS:

  • I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.

  • I prefer gen; but I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships. However, I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me. For pairings, my tastes are pretty vanilla.

  • I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. (There may be other specific exceptions.)

  • I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)

  • I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.

  • No second-person fic, please. My feelings on first person vary. As a rule, I don't care for it with TV fandoms; but it is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author.

Read more... )
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
07 October 2019 @ 12:55 pm
UPDATE


I have nominated Forever Knight with the following characters:

    - Nick Knight
    - Lucien LaCroix
    - Don Schanke
    - Javier Vachon

One is only allowed to nominate four characters. So if there are others you feel should be in the tag set (e.g., Natalie, Janette, Tracy, Urs, Screed, Grace, etc.), then someone else will have to add them.

Nominations remain open until October 10 or 11 depending on your time zone. If you want to know more about Yuletide, have a look on [community profile] yuletide_admin. Adding to the tag set is done on AO3 here.

I do hope there are other people wanting to request and/or write FK this year!
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
06 October 2019 @ 12:32 am
It's that time of year again! Yuletide nominations have started and, as usual, I plan to nominate, request, and offer Forever Knight.

If anyone else is planning on nominating FK? If so, perhaps we could get together in order to ensure that we don't put in duplicate characters. One only gets four slots for characters; and there are are a lot of intriguing people to write about.

By the way, I was surprised to discover that there are over 900 FK stories that are 1K or more in length. That's combining AO3 and FanFiction.net. (Not the big FK archives or the personal sites.) This means that 2019 may be last year that FK is eligible for Yuletide.
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
10 October 2018 @ 05:12 am
greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I've listed them in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.


GENERAL POINTS:

  • I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.

  • I prefer gen; but I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships. However, I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me. (When I encounter it in stories, I skim over it.) When pairings are essential to the story, I feel that curtainfic > romance > smut. BUT character and plot are the best!

  • I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. (There may be other specific exceptions.)

  • I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)

  • I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.

  • No second-person fic, please. My feelings on first person vary. As a rule, I don't care for it with TV fandoms; but it is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. (Please see the specific fandom.)

Read more... )
Tags:
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
13 September 2018 @ 01:15 pm
I know it's hard to believe at this time of year. I mean, the weather pundits in Toronto promise a return to hot-and-humid for the weekend! Nevertheless, the Yuletide mods ([community profile] yuletide_admin) have already opened nominations.

I plan to nominate Forever Knight, of course. Probably Nick, Natalie, Janette, and LaCroix—those being the characters most likely to be requested by people who aren't the ardent fans some of us are. However, in my opinion, the more characters the better. It would certainly be good to be able to request fanfic focusing on Nick's partners or the Season 3 vampires.

So ... do please consider nominating FK. If you do, leave a note here so that people don't duplicate your noms. (Dupes won't count, and mean a lost opportunity to add someone different.)

Nominations will close on 21 September. At that point the mods will clean up the tag set, removing duplicates and correcting spelling errors. Sign-ups run 10 to 21 October.

Read more... )
Tags:
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
18 January 2018 @ 06:13 am
This Yuletide looked at first as though it was going to be rather frustrating—not because of my assignment in itself (for it was fine), but because I had writer's block. My story ground itself out slowly, even though I had it planned out well ahead of the deadline. Then, when I was finally raring to write treats in the last days before Christmas, there was so much shopping to do that I never seemed to have time to write.

Still, all's well that ends well. I did manage to squeeze out writing time, especially on Christmas Eve. At least in part this was because much of the tree-decorating was done by Flo. So much thanks to her!

Read more... )
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
04 October 2017 @ 03:08 am
First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I've listed them in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.


GENERAL POINTS:

  • I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.

  • I prefer gen; but I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships. However, I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me. (When I encounter it in stories, I skim over it.) When pairings are essential to the story, I feel that curtainfic > romance > smut. BUT character and plot are the best!

  • I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. (There may be other specific exceptions.)

  • I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)

  • I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.

  • No second-person fic, please. First person is fine, especially for book canons that were written that way by the author.

Read more... )
Tags:
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
11 September 2017 @ 05:50 am
It's that time of year again! Yuletide nominations are now open, and will close on September 16th at 9 a.m. UTC (which basically, for most of us, means Thursday night).

I've added Forever Knight, with Nick, Natalie, LaCroix, and Vachon. I figure that to be a selection that gives people scope for requesting vampire, cop, or historical fic, as well as stories focusing on the new third-season characters.

On the other hand, it's a pretty short list! Is anyone else planning to nominate Forever Knight?

I hope so. With so many characters to pick from, but only four permitted per nominator, it would be good to have at least one other person (even two!) adding more characters. If so, we should coordinate our efforts so that we don't waste any slots through duplication.

Information about nominating can be found here on [community profile] yuletide_admin. You're allowed to suggest a maximum of three fandoms, with up to four characters for each of them.

After the tag set is checked over by the moderators, sign-ups will open on October 1st.
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
05 January 2017 @ 11:55 pm
This year, despite having extra time (since nominations/sign-ups started earlier), I still only got four stories written. My usual, in other words. I guess doing Trick or Treat for the first time is some sort of excuse. After all, I wrote four stories for that, too—but they did tend to be shorter, as one would expect. The truth is, in early December I came over to visit Flo for a long Christmas break, and I spent the first couple of weeks lounging around, watching TV and reading, getting over jetlag, and basically doing nothing about Yuletide except a bit of canon review.

Ah, well ... I clearly needed the time off.

My assignment, "A Correspondence between Gentlemen", was written for [personal profile] elsa, who wanted a Charioteer story about Laurie and Ralph. It took me a while to decide how to tackle this; and, in the end, I wrote epistolary fic (having got the okay through the Yulemods). The "gentlemen" of the correspondence are Mr Jepson and Mr Straike; and all Charioteer fans will appreciate the irony of applying that appellation to them. What starts as Jepson congratulating his old school friend on his recent engagement finishes up with revelations about Ralph's expulsion. Straike is not amused.

This was uploaded before I headed over to England; so the delays in getting back to writing only affected the treats. I had a little list....

Okay, like a lot of other people, each year I go through the requests and copy-paste intriguing prompts. I never do even as many as half of them. However, with all the extra time this year, I thought that I should be able to manage at least one or two more stories than usual. Certainly, I was determined to write a Forever story that I'd not had time to do last year, when so much of November and December had been taken up with caring for my mother (who had finally died a week before Christmas). I also wanted to write a Forever Knight treat, since I always do.

Of the other prompts on my list, I was less sure. However, I brought over to England my copy of Georgette Heyer's Venetia, being uncertain if Flo had a copy. (Just as well: she has several Heyers, but not that one.) I read it on the plane; arrived with it fresh in my mind; and ideas started to flow. It was therefore the first story I started: "The Rape of the Book", written for [personal profile] morganmuffle, who wanted a story about Venetia's younger brother Aubrey.

It seemed to take bloody ages to write. I mean, seriously, there was a point where I wondered if I'd even finish in time to write any other treats. First, I kept looking things up on line—Wikipedia, mostly; but also Google maps, and sites about Austen's Regency England. I spent several days investigating routes from York to Cambridge, and finding out the names of inns that are old enough to go back that far. That section of the story took about three days to write for fewer paragraphs! In the end, the story finished up about twice as long as I'd originally thought it would be.

As I'd failed to write the Forever story the previous year (and I'm terrible at doing NYRs, needing hard deadlines to get me to start writing), I had been really glad when [personal profile] argylepiratewd included the same prompt in this year's Dear Author Letter. So "Whisper" simply had to be written next: no way was I going to risk running out of time. The prompt was for a story in which Henry got ill, and had to cope like anyone else, since people knew how sick he was. For this, I had what seemed like the perfect plot. Back in the spring of 2015, I'd come down with a truly horrible cold that turned to laryngitis, bronchitis, and (according to the X-ray) pneumonia. None of which I wanted my mother to catch, of course, which had led to its own complications. Add a touch of humour, and voilà!

Fortunately, "Whisper" didn't need much in the way of research. (Or, to put it another way, I'd already done the research the hard way.) So, on the 23rd, I was free to tackle a third treat, "The Father, the Son, and the Unholy Ghost". For this, I did not have a definite recipient. In fact, I initially was quite uncertain what to write: I just knew that I always write FK for Yuletide, and had every intention of doing so again, if I could come up with something.

Now, I did have an idea that had been kicking around in my mind for a while: to write a story about LaCroix's daughter, Divia, who had been turned into a vampire back in Roman times and brought her own father across at the time of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. I think it's fair to say that she is far from my favourite guest star; however, I thought her motivation in that episode deserved a closer reading than it usually gets. She's his daughter and his master; and it seemed to me there was more to be said about this than had ever appeared in the script. However, Divia had not been nominated. Eventually, though, it occurred to me that all three of the other people requesting Forever Knight had asked for LaCroix; and recasting the story from his perspective might actually yield deeper insights.

I had then to decide which of the three potential recipients I'd give the story to. It proved very simple. One person DNWed character death: Divia dies in "Ashes to Ashes"; and I'd opened the story with the cremation of her body. A second person DNWed noncon and underage: Divia is only twelve and canonically tries to persuade LaCroix to commit incest. Fortunately, [personal profile] astolat seems to be fairly squick-free; so I gave it to her.

Each of the four stories got very nice comments from their recipients; and each has at least one comment from someone else, as well. Add the fact that the two gifts that I got were both wonderful, and I had a great Yuletide!
 
 
 
 
greerwatson
02 January 2017 @ 04:50 pm
This has been a very lazy Christmas. Apart from writing (and reading), I've mostly spent it watching television. And nibbling, of course—no doubt far more than I should. However, I have been feeling noticeably little stress, which in turn makes it clear that this past year, living with my mother's empty chair in the living room, so to speak (and literally, too), has actually been far harder than I'd realized.

Since my sister works long hours and has to commute, she commandeered her computer over the Christmas weekend, pointing out that I'd have it later in the week when she had to go back to work. She also grabbed it for much of the evening most days. As a result, I'm still working my way through the Yuletide collection.

I did, however, manage to read my own gifts on the day. As I went out to pinch-hit and neither of them is tagged as a treat, I don't know which of them is my official gift. However, it doesn't matter. Both are thoroughly enjoyable; and I heartily recommend them.

"Serial" was written for me by [personal profile] fabrisse. It is a deliciously plotty Forever Knight casefic in which Nick and Schanke must solve a series of murders in which the victims were exsanguinated. Immediately, one's mind flies to vampires; but the injuries suggest otherwise. The question therefore is who and why—and discovering the truth drags LaCroix and Janette into the investigation, each of whom has insights to contribute. The result is a story that could easily have been an actual episode of the show.

"Serial" is, I fear, ill-served by its Author's Note. I am sure Fabrisse merely wished to warn people who might be triggered by the suggestion of blood; but the wording suggests a degree of gore that is not actually in the story. Be not warned, in other words; or, at least, be not warned off.

My other story, "Universally Challenged", is a Yes, Minister fic written for me by [personal profile] machiavellijr. My prompt said, "I'd like something similar to the series, whether it's a tale of mutual political intrigue or just a scene in Hacker's office involving all three of them. I particularly love the repartee...." Well, that's exactly what I got. In "Universally Challenged", the newspapers have got hold of statistics indicating that British universities have been frivolling public money away on such things as cleaning the silver and stocking the wine cellar. The Minister comes up with a marvellous scheme to counter bad publicity by establishing a new Institute of Technology (in a marginal riding, of course). Sir Humphrey and his civil service peers are rather more concerned to save the status quo. Wit ensues, as it always does.

So .... going out to pinch hit can, as rumour has it, yield much reading pleasure! I have, in fact, been lucky in Yuletide. (Knock wood.) Though I don't always get a treat, I've always received well-written, thoroughly enjoyable gifts. This year has proved no exception.

As for the writing department, I managed to complete four stories. Eventually, I'll do webpages for them; and I'll say more then. All my recipients wrote nice comments; so ... a good Yuletide all round!