Edited to say: - I hope everyone's new year is productive, safe, and better than the last year. May you have almost enough contact with your loved ones, nearly enough food, less work than you can stand to do and not quite as much beer as you can stand to drink.
***
Time for Yuletide Reveal:
We Were Her People, a cross-over between Neil Gaiman's
American Gods and the movie
Gladiator.
The land was there before the people, and before their gods.***
I might talk about writing this one, as it was a) the only finished thing, fiction-wise, that I've done this year and b) while not the hardest story to write, ever, turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. The story was not what I started to write, and I took out - or never wrote - the parts I loved best of it. (And let's not go into the spelling/typo issues.)
I am very grateful to have drawn a request that allowed me to work with this story, which has been with me for a long time. I wish I had done better with it.
As always, crit and comments always welcome.
***
I'm not a fan of OTW/Dreamwidth/Archive of Our Own -
- for reasons I have gone on record for and at length, and will not repeat here, except that I was thinking over this yesterday (again), and the Virginia Wolfe ref, and its implications, hit me anew.
I don't want a room of my own. I have a life of my own. And that life should be lived with the greater world, not separated off into some other corner. OTW, from the ground up, feels separatist. I don't want to be a part of that -
- and the shift of Yuletide to AOOO hasn't done anything to change that. (Yes, the editing feature was
way cool. But come on, the pit of voles lets you edit stories.)
I do, however, remain very appreciate of the hard work that has gone into putting together the Yuletide exchange and the archive. (Which doesn't stop me from thinking some things should have been done better. One can acknowledge the difficulty and sacrifice involved in any task (such as, f'stance, being POTUS) and still strongly disagree with things done in the pursuit of that task.) It has taken talents and time I don't have, and resulted in an impressive collection of stories that seems to grow in both quality and number every year.
When the rest of the Yuletide archive shifts to AOOO, I will most likely orphan any works of mine. (If they weren't gifts for other people, I'd likely delete them.) I don't anticipate doing Yuletide next year, or in future years, so long as it stays with AOOO.
It seems rather small to be saying this when the Yuletide
Random Older Story of the Day is one of mine, but I'm not ego-centric enough to think the dice rolled like that just to shame me into joining up with AOOO whole-heartedly.
***
Again, the lovely stories I received this year were
Of Scotsmen and love remembered and
Sirocco, both of which I recommend.
