2 January 2018

larryhammer: drawing of a wildhaired figure dancing, label: "La!" (celebrate)
Yuletide 2017 has done its author reveals, which means I can confess to jump up and down about not only completing my assignment but managing a treat as well -- which makes it the most sustained writing I've managed since parenthood.

My assignment* was:

Weaving Rumors for fresne -- the fandom being The Odyssey, requesting a Penelope story. The prompt, slightly edited, became the fic description:
Penelope was waiting, waiting, always waiting. What did she do besides weave?

Well, for one thing, she ruled.
One thing I’ve always wondered is how Penelope could effectively regent the multi-island kingdom of Ithaca while trapped at home by needing to host a, er, host of suitors. So, a exploration of some of her tools. Phene is indeed the real, if obscure, goddess of rumor and news borne from other places, and canonically Penelope was already leaning upon her.

The length of this one surprised me -- when I got to the end of what needed to be said, I was just over the 1000-word limit.

My treat was was probably more obviously mine:

Cut-and-Dried Sleeve for Quillori, with whom I’ve exchanged Asia-related fics over the years (this year they wrote me Five Views of Mt Fuji). This was a return to Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio and another “lost” tale from the collection (so the tag “Don’t Have to Know Canon” applies):
There was a gentleman living in Puyang named either Wei or Li or Cao. This man had two peculiarities. The first was that he always spoke in cliches. The second was that he was of the cut-sleeve persuasion.
The tags “Cliche Storm” and “Significant Sleeves” are intended as content warnings. “Cut-sleeve” was a literary phrase for a man who prefers other men, and it’s even used as the title of one of the original tales. I had fun, this time, playing with levels of irony and meta in ways I hope are faithful to canon.


* We actually matched on two fandoms, but the locked-room mystery solved by the Wife of Bath during a pilgrimage never gelled enough to write.** In other news, the way I plot stories is not the best tool for writing locked-room mysteries.

** It's probably just as well someone else wrote it.


---L.

Subject quote from "To Young Leaders," Guante & Big Cats. Listen to the beat [taps heart].

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