corilannam | My convoluted Yuletide!

First, I received an absolutely marvelous Bourne story from

winter_baby -- Three Dead Men and the Women Who Did Not Mourn Them.

I had given a rather vague prompt about wanting to see something exploring Nicky's relationship with Bourne, and

winter_baby expanded it into a powerful look at all three of the important women in Bourne's life, and through them, at Bourne himself. The characterization is perfect and the language recreates that certain harshness of the films. Fantastic work, and you should all go check it out and leave her glowing comments.

On the writing end, I wound up having my most stressful and complicated Yuletide ever, although it was also a lot of fun (once I knew I wasn't going to have to change my name and move to Alaska). See, when I was doing my sign up, I decided at the last second to offer The Family Stone, which is a wonderful movie I love and decided I wouldn't mind trying to write about. All my other offers were the usual safe stuff, since I didn't want the kind of stress this year that I had last year (HA!).

Now, The Family Stone also happens to be one of the very favorite movies of my beloved best friend

chelseafrew, mostly because her very favorite deaf actor has a pretty sizable role in it. She requested it last year, and again this year, and this year she was the only one who did. At some point it occurred to me that it would be REALLY REALLY STRESSFUL to write a Family Stone story for

chelseafrew, particularly what with all the hiding and lying and stuff.

So I decided to change my sign up to take out The Family Stone. And I was really, really sure that I had done just that. Except I hadn't. I got my first assignment, and laughed at having

chelseafrew as my recipient, already knowing that the first assignment was invalid, and assuming I had gotten an amusing mismatch. I even told Chelsea about it, and we laughed and laughed. Then I got my second assignment, and thought, WTF? This is still wrong! Only it wasn't, and that's about when I started freaking out.

I told our mutual friend

stellarmeadow, and she had the bright idea of telling

chelseafrew that I had gotten

stellarmeadow as a recipient. The logic was that Chelsea would assume I was writing a Duran Duran story for Stellar, and wouldn't want to see it, nor bother to seek it out on Christmas, being as Chelsea has no interest and a bit of antipathy toward the RPS of the Duran Duran variety. Thus would I neatly evade the necessity for a decoy story.

Except that I made the mistake of agreeing that it wouldn't be very Yuletide-y to just write more of the same thing I write all year anyway. And five minutes later, I found myself having agreed to write a story for Goal, which is a fantastic and immensely slashy soccer movie. Chelsea even offered to come up with the idea and write half of it. "But... but...," I wanted to whimper. "It's going to be hard enough writing a story for one friend, let alone two!!"

But the stories got done, and my lies were (mostly) successful, and by Christmas Eve I had even recovered enough to bang out a quick Duran Duran treat for

patterns_rhyme. That one was a fun challenge, since it was Nick/Simon rather than my OTP of John/Simon.

So the final Yuletide 2007 results came in as follows:

Main Story -- For Everything, The Family Stone

Decoy Story -- Switching Teams, Goal! The Dream Begins, co-written with

chelseafrew

Yuletide Treat - The Promise, Duran Duran (Nick/Simon)

As a final trivia note, my Yuletide was a very small world this year. My recipient was

chelseafrew, whose recipient was

winter_baby, whose recipient was me. As well, I wrote a Duran treat story for

patterns_rhyme, who wrote a Duran treat story for

stellarmeadow, for whom I wrote my decoy story. Next year I swear I'm branching out!