Dear Once Upon A Fic 2021 Author

Hi! Thank you for writing for me, I appreciate it more than you know. My goal for this year's exchange is basically... just to come away either smiling or thinking "huh". By which I mean, you don't need to be earth-shattering. I'll be delighted with pretty much anything as long as you don't stumble into a DNW!

General Likes

• People having fun! Shenanigans! I like when characters are fond of each other and genuinely enjoy spending time with each other.
• Found family! Found family! Especially queer found family!
• Secret relationships, and the ways people still connect though they're publicly not affiliated
• Deep trust and connection and loyalty, knowing people very well and showing it
• Deep longing (especially if it gets resolved in the end)
• Small details! Things people are passionate about that creep into the story/narration are my JAM
• Established relationships where people are still deeply in love
• I like moody/atmospheric things this year, the kind of story you can just sink into

None of these likes are requirements, they're just there in case you're looking for guidance!

( DNWs )

The Silkie of Sule Skerry

• I adore Maz O'Connor's rendition here, I love the longing that's sad but not heartbroken. Almost hopeful? It's very much a sort of tale, not a current agony.
• It's very much a song about the inevitability of fate/prophecy. Does it always have to come true? What does "come true" really mean? Poke all that with a stick, I'll watch happily.
• You don't have to stick exactly to the story in the song, you can take the basic concepts and run wild and I'll be delighted.
• Similarly, is this song necessarily the exact true events? Or is this what someone came up with after they heard this story from a friend of a friend of a friend? Has this been given PR spin on twitter, so to speak? What's the difference between the real story and the song, if any?
• If you want to genderbend and make this queer, I'm into that.
• Specific DNW: sexual/romantic coercion of the woman by either the hunter or the silkie.

The Sealskin

• As you can tell by the fact I've requested two canons about selkies... I really like selkies. This is your permission to write a story about selkie mythos in general and have fun, if you so desire!
• I don't necessarily want this to be a dark story and I definitely am not looking for a hopeless one, but there's room in this story I think to just... sit still and look around at loneliness and obligation and feeling out of place.
• This is a story that could have SO many interesting subversions. Was the selkie like the little mermaid and just wanted to see the dry world and this was how she got to do it? Did she arrange this with the husband? Was this a way for her to get away from her family in the sea? Could she never figure out how to pick locks, did she want to stay? Could her seal-children not visit her on land? Couldn't she visit her land-children later?
• I'm deeply in love with the idea of a magical and eldritch and incomprehensible but maybe sometimes kind ocean. Water? Love it.
• Genderbending/making this queer is GREAT and VERY COOL and you're welcome to.
• Specific DNW: on-page noncon/dubcon, a heavy focus on sexual noncon/dubcon aspects, if you're going with a standard "selkie is captured and doesn't want to be here" please don't genderbend/make it queer.

The Odyssey

• My requested characters are: Athena, the Sirens, and Penelope. This does not mean you have to put them all in the same story. I mean if you want to knock yourself out but I'd be equally happy with any individual one of them.
• I've always been so fond of Greek myth since I was a little kid and Athena has long been one of my favourites. Weaving wisdom and war. She's so cool. I truly do not understand why she's so horny for Odysseus so if you figure you know why or want to create some sort of argument for it, I'll be your rapt audience.
• I am so weak for the trope of gods/goddesses hidden among humans and also the ways in which they shine out and are obviously divine to those who are looking. What else was Athena involved in during the war? Were there any other humans she had an interest in? How does she appear to different people, especially those who worship different aspects of her (e.g. how she appears to a woman spinning wool as she walks away from her war-torn home vs how she would appear to a soldier vs a general vs Penelope etc etc etc).
• I've been in love with fibre crafting since I was a little kid — I used to weave by sight on a loom under the covers after lights out because if I turned on a light to read a book I'd get caught. Penelope did that on a scale times a million — she was so skilled in a very difficult thing and she kept the whole thing going for so long.
• Again for Penelope, I love the sort of... power behind the scenes/underestimated trope. Penelope is very much overlooked and put in a box of assumptions. Who was she, really? Who is she to herself working her fingers raw in the middle of the night? 
• You don't have to, but Athena is the goddess of weaving. Does she also have a fondness for Penelope? Does she keep her company? Does she lend her magic, or just a listening ear? Can she really understand, as a sort of eldritch figure, the very real things that Penelope has to deal with? Does she want to understand?
• Related: Odysseus isn't a character I nominated because I'm more interested in the women for the most part, but I'm down for a Penelope/Athena/Odysseus story especially if its while Odysseus is still off who-knows-where and Penelope is at home and Athena visits each of them in turn. I'll also lift my "no cheating" because I really do think its a grey area if you want to do Athena/Penelope without Odysseus's knowledge while Odysseus is off on his journey.
• Specific DNW: We all know the Greek gods are Like That™ but please don't lean into their incest, please don't have onscreen noncon with Penelope or have a big focus on her being scared of sexual violence, Odysseus or other characters appearing is fine of course but don't make the story entirely about them/him.

The Iliad

• Me reading the Iliad for a class: shut the fuck up about the men where are the WOMEN. *gets to a scene with a woman* You're ten thousand times more interesting than the men even though the author clearly didn't intend you to be, damn.
• Again, I love juxtaposition. Cassandra is so powerful, and she's powerless. She's caught in this impossible situation and she knows exactly how impossible it is, and how it will end.
• If you want to save Cassandra... I'll be there. What are the loopholes? For instance: Odysseus is overrated but he is "nobody" — will he believe her? Will she actually engage with him once she realizes he is capable of believing her?
• Her and Apollo. There's... a lot there. I'll say this: I'm a big fan of gods being a little off, a little odd, a little eldritch, a step to the left of humanity. He's ancient and inhuman. That means its not that simple. Does he still care for her? What does her care for him mean? Does he forgive her? Does he even understand/care for forgiveness as a concept?
• Do women react any differently to Cassandra and her reputation or prophecies? Do her sisters? Do children? 
• Can Cassandra get around people not beleiving her? For instance, her nephew Hector's sun gets yote off a wall and she must know this. Does she/can she just... steal the baby and give it to a family she knows is leaving the city? Can Cassandra's own personal actions affect things even if her words can't?
• Specific DNW: Apollo being just 100% vindictive (being nasty and complicated is okay as long as it's more than a purely negative relationship), and we know the Greek gods are Like That™ but please don't lean into their incest. And please no onscreen/main focus noncon.

2020: roundup

Voila! I survived the plague. That means I did things. This post is about bringing everything up to date so in the future I can look back and go "huh" or if anyone else wants to dig into stuff.

You probably know me from tumblr as writerproblem193 or ao3 as ThatAloneOne. This place is behind the scenes stuff and journalling. The journalling is mostly access locked, but only so it doesn't go floating around the internet at random.

Specific roundups:

• Writing
• Reading
• Audio

I tag stuff mostly consistently, and tend to clean tags up over time so stuff should be pretty findable.

This is a post in progress, stay tuned!

2020: writing

2020 was an interesting year for writing. It started off well, but then there was this funny little thing that happened that perhaps sent me spiralling. I also had a busy academic year, especially with the transition to online classes which teachers have not been good at teaching.

AO3 says I wrote 13,828 words this year but that's not the full story. Final count of everything I wrote is 19,582 which is... lower than last year but honestly, I get it. I wrote what I could, and I wrote some bangers, so that's good enough for me.

First off, original work. This clocks in at 12,875 words. I wrote three stories for Once Upon A Fic right before the pandemic kicked off, and I dearly love all of them. They are:

• silkies upon the sea: a polyam fix-it fic for a ballad about selkies (spelled silkies here). What if the lady saved the life of her son and lover AND still had her husband? 
• what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?: a story about Orpheus and Eurydice from original myth, where I make Eurydice deaf and really sit and explore love as possessiveness and living for yourself.
• winged words, spoken honey voiced: a story about Cassandra and Apollo and prophecy. Bitter longing and acceptance and standing next to Helen at the prow of a boat and wondering if it was worth it. I really, really love this story.

In other original works, I did write a short fic for Ladiesbingo based on the story of nettle shirts and swan brothers, but I never ended up having the time and energy to write the rest of the bingo and so never posted it. For class, I wrote a story that basically pried all the ugly feelings of family out from under my ribs and plopped it on a platter. I got a good mark! I also tried to start a novel but it got about a page in before I went ah, hate this, goodbye! Oh well. I'll try again later. The rest of the wordcount in original is the continuing adventures of Terrible Porn Man & Co. that I mentioned last year. I can only assume this will continue in 2021 and likely further. I've made my choices and I regret nothing.

The remaining 6707 words are fanfic. I wrote a short Doctor Who ficlet about 13 and Donna, a very silly TAZ Amnesty fic followup to a fic from last year, and four fics for Gideon the Ninth/The Locked Tomb. Two of those were for Yuletide — my first year participating! I think my favourite of them is a second book speculative fic I wrote before the second book came out, about Harrow and grief. You can't blame me for the title, it's a canon quote but here: your echo is louder than your voice.

I also feel way better about the downward trend in my (fiction) writing wordcount over the past couple of years because it occurred to me to wordcount my academic writing and... holy shit. How am I alive. I wrote 43,973 words of academia in 2020 alone, which brings my total wordcount for the year up to a horrifying and respectable 63,375 words. Go me!