coprime

Now that it's January 1st, I can say I wrote The Spring Thaw for jesidres, and jesidres wrote the lovely Symbiotic Nature for me. I'd wondered when I saw that there were all of three Mushishi stories this year if maybe my recipent and I had gotten assigned each other. And it turns out we were! It is a funny old world sometimes.

I really enjoyed writing The Spring Thaw, although it took me a while to write because I was worried that I wouldn't be up to the challenge of Mushishi and blending my typical writing voice with the feeling of the series. My idea for the kaihyouki actually came from an art piece by jesidres, and the rest of the story sort of formed itself around the fact that I wanted to use these mushi she drew in her story. I don't think it was very obvious that I borrowed them from her art though.

I have discovered that there are only so many times I can see people reccing Merlin stories that can be more or less summarized by "Arthur and Merlin act like morons" before I succumb and start reading them. Without having seen even a scrap of the actual show, mind you, which led to the interesting visualization of Uther being played by Patrick Stewart. And when I started watching the show, it was a bit funny because I already knew each episode's basic plot and resolution. But I've been enjoying them all the same, and Patrick Stewart no longer shows up when I read fic, so it's all good.

...I think I've finished my Yuletide story. \o/! All it needs is a title, summary, and final editing to make sure I haven't missed anything. I'm rather pleased with it myself and I think my recipient will like it, so that's all I really care about. Hopefully I will still like it just as well in the morning.

I have no clue what to title this thing though. And no clue if, in the athor's notes, I should include a link to a particular thing of my recipient's that helped to inspire her story. Something to debate while Christmas shopping tomorrow, I guess, because I need to get my story uploaded tomorrow or else it won't be uploaded before the deadline. (RL dictates that I won't have reliable internet access on the 19th and 20th.)

But my story's finished, whoo-hoo!

Yuletide 2008 sign-ups opened today, so now I get to agonize about what I'm offering to write. The requests were fairly easy to decide this year, although now I have to figure out what I want to write as prompts for them.

However, the slightly odd yet awesome start to this year's Yuletide is that my third request from last year got written as a NYR story. Painted Love by misura is exactly what I wanted when I asked for Jules and Robin from Suzanne Brockmann's Troubleshooters Inc books. There's romance and Jules being awesome and oh, I love it.

So Painted Love was a surprise but also a really good reminder of why I want to do Yuletide again: So I can (*crosses fingers*) make someone as happy with their story as I was with each of mine last year. I think this is a good reminder because I can already feel anxiety about ruining someone's Yuletide creeping up on me.