a_t_rain | Entries tagged with vorkosigan fic

So I wrote some more Elizabethan theater RPF (Vanity, in which Richard Burbage's idea of a suitable activity for a date is to drag a whole bunch of people off to look at paintings of skulls), and also got around to posting a bit of really old Vorkosigan saga fluff that had been sitting on my computer for ages (In-Laws, Ivan-and-By banter, post-canon).

And now that I seem to have found myself a new fandom ... I'm noticing that LJ / DW comms just don't seem to be a thing any more. Has anything replaced them, in terms of spaces to rec / plug / find recs for other people's stuff / generally nerd out with people who might be writing the same sort of thing you are? (Hopefully not Tumblr, I just don't get how to navigate Tumblr.) It feels kind of like a ghost town here, and I guess I've been spoiled with Vorkosigan fandom, where there's a lively enough built-in audience on AO3 and an abundance of character- and plot-driven genfic.

So it appears that someone has been translating some of my Vorkosigan fics into Russian again, in this case A Brief History of Pornography in the Imperial Security Service (Simon, gen, implied sexual violence). As usual, I couldn't resist taking a look via my browser's automatic translator. I am greatly, greatly amused that "You can see a penis any old time" in the original has somehow been converted into "In the old days straight penises were everywhere"!

* It occurs to me that I have been remiss about linking to my Vorkosigan fic on LJ, so here's the rest of the roundup for the semester:

We That Are Young (young Piotr, King Lear, gen)
Give My Regards to Brodsky (Alys, By, gen)
Cargo (Shiv / Udine backstory)
On a Cold Planet (By / Rish, post-CVA but pre-epilogue)
Ordinary (Topaz, Pearl, gen)

Apparently someone decided to translate my Vorkosigan fic Cold Case into Russian. This was a complete surprise, and I'm not sure why they picked that one, since it's neither the first nor the most popular in my series of behind-the-scenes-of-ACC fics, but it is the closest thing I've ever written to M/M slash (although it's very brief, incidental, and plot-driven), so I guess that might explain it. Anyway, I'm flattered.

But OMG, reading your own stuff translated into Russian and then converted back to English via Google Translate is surreal. A sampling of my favorite lines:

The combination of Vor gentleman with a tarnished reputation, very lovely commoner and semi-legal tavern remarkable in itself, but the general weirdness going wild when the two of them were taken to view the paper of the working file.

"No, I do not Sociopath Pierre and Pierre the Hermit. I'm just a nice-Pierre Small-and-sometimes-Libertine".

And, you know, I can usually do not start to get drunk right at dawn. Despite the fact that we are with you relatives.

Well, for example, chatting with him for a while, do not be tempted to cram yourself earplugs and loyalty still humming a little song to himself ...

Always fun to see the reaction of the interlocutor, you should talk to him about bisexuality in plain text.

Yet one thing was fucking unfair to rabies.

So, after more than a year and 200+ pages, A Bit Too Much Good Work is COMPLETE. Remind me never to attempt novel-length fic again, and especially not alternate-POV-of-a-canon-book fic, because that stuff is a bitch to plot and write. Bonus ficlet about Amiri Arqua here: Magnetism and Gravitation.

The rest of this post will be a very long and rambly discussion of That Shakespeare Scene, plus a few notes on the development of various OCs, since there were a few people at AO3 who asked for it. (Everything under the cut is extremely spoilery, and will make no sense if you haven't read ABTMGW anyway.)

( Read more... )

... on the burning question of "What would have happened if Macbeth had access to Vorkosiverse reproductive technology?" As you do. (No, it isn't really a crossover. It may be shamelessly self-inserty.)

Mike Adams, Justina Vorrutyer, and Wyx Hargraves, Authors of Macbeth. Makes use of places and concepts from Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, but totally OC-centric and not otherwise spoilery.

Misc. new and new-old stuff, posted at AO3 over the last month:

-- Chapters 2-6 of A Bit Too Much Good Work, in which most of the major plot strands are set up, and this story finally passes the Bechdel test. Damn, I'd forgotten how confusing and complicated longfic is to write.

-- A couple of spinoff ficlets set in the same general universe, The Fast-Penta Test (young!By, helps if you've read at least one of the others first) and Loyalty (even younger!Rish, stands alone). The latter, I note, is the first thing I've written in this fandom that doesn't have any Vorrutyers in it. I am one-track and predictable.

-- A revised version of Out of This House, my old Tonks-kills-Bellatrix fix-it fic, now tweaked a bit to be more or less Deathly Hallows-compliant (to the extent, obviously, that a "what if" AU can be anything of the sort).

Going to Chile with my dad for a couple of weeks, starting tomorrow. It will be my first time in South America. Should be fun!

So, I've finally started to post the plotty By / Rish casefic I've been hinting about for a while, a.k.a. the story that I went hunting for immediately after finishing Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, discovered that it didn't exist, and then had to write myself. There was no way to write this story without massive numbers of OCs, so this post is intended as a sort of cheat sheet for anyone having trouble keeping track of all the names.

I've thought it best to make this a sticky post and edit and update it as characters are introduced, and to organize the list chapter by chapter, in order not to give away too much up front. (If, say, the cast of characters included "Lord Vorvyctym," "Lord Vorvyctym's brother and heir," "Lord Vorvyctym's wife," "Lord Vorvyctym's wife's lover," and "Lord Vorvyctym's butler," it would be a dead giveaway that Lord Vorvyctym was going to be an important character, and readers could make certain inferences about his role in the plot.) Characters will be listed under the chapter in which they're first mentioned by name, even if they don't actually appear for a while.

Generally, my standard for including a character in this list is "are they going to be mentioned again in a later chapter?" If someone doesn't make the cut -- like the two call girls in Chapter 1 -- you can safely assume that they're not at all important to the plot, although not everyone who makes the list is going to be particularly important.

( The List )

Posted the last bit of the Vorrutyers-now-being-slightly-less-performative series to AO3: Dirty Angel, missing scene between Dono and By right after the Council of Counts vote.

Going to Budapest tomorrow, not really sure where after that. (The nice thing about Budapest is that there is basically no direction you can travel from there that will not be interesting.) If anybody has particular favorite destinations in the Hungary / Austria / Slovakia corner of the world, please tell me about them! (I have a bit less than three weeks to play with, which is not really long enough, but it was as much travel as I could squeeze in between conferences.)

Part Four of the ever-growing Vorrutyers Doing Stuff During ACC series (I think I need a better title than that). In which Byerly decides to investigate the lightflyer crash that killed Pierre's third fiancee.

Blanket warning for Richars-related content, although "exactly how awful is Richars?" is kind of the crux of this one, and for Vaguely Exploitative Spy Sex.

( Cold Case )

( Notes )

So I wrote, uh, Ivan-and-Byerly-dispose-of-a-corpse fic, because apparently when you spend your office hours browsing the Bujold listserv, you end up developing a strong conviction that this is a thing that needs to exist. (It also ended up being fairly long, so I figured I'd link rather than cross-posting.)

Vaguely inspired by the excerpt from the new book, although not really spoilery. In which Ivan serves as Miles's voting proxy, and has to deal with an unusually large number of female lobbyists.

( Twenty-One Girls )

Part Three of an occasional series of behind-the-scenes of A Civil Campaign one-shots. In which Dono flirts briefly with convention, and then breaks up with convention to flirt with Olivia.

Hat tip to Umberto Eco for the labyrinth, to

nineveh_uk for noting the absence of one particular class of puns in the books, and to various online spam ads for ... well, you'll see.

( We're All Mad Here )

... on the general theme of Vorrutyers Being Performative, because apparently that is all that I want to write in this universe.

Missing scene from toward the beginning of A Civil Campaign, in which Byerly goes to work on Richars. Gen, but contains Richars, and hence, discussion of sexual-violence-related ickiness.

( And Cry 'Content' to That Which Grieves My Heart )

OK, so this is the ~~Vorrutyer~~ Vorkosigan saga fic that I actually set out to write. Because clearly, Donna + Shakespearean comedy = OTP, and how awesome is it to play around in a universe where a cultural obsession with Shakespeare is actually canon?

Summary: Lady Donna Vorrutyer never cared much for Shakespeare. Lord Dono just might.
Rating: PG-ish, I think? Very oblique references to sexual violence.
Notes: The last set of quotes are from As You Like It; I think all of the others are identified within the text of the story.

( Fidele )

I should note that neither this nor Protective Coloration were the stories I set out to write in this fandom. What I intended to write were some missing scenes with the various (more Byronic than the Byrons, and two-thirds awesome) Vorrutyer cousins during A Civil Campaign, but for some reason I seem to be having an attack of burgeoning backstory. Oddly enough, I think this is backstory for Richars more than any of the others, even though he's barely in it, because that is pretty much the only way to write a story in which Richars is an even vaguely sympathetic character.

Five cousins, various equations of protection. Gen, but has references to rape, abortion, homophobia, and (probably) prostitution.

( I Am Myself Alone )

Young!Byerly, gen, contains at least one major spoiler for A Civil Campaign. Pretty hard to write a proper summary without giving away said spoiler, so I will just say that this is dedicated to everyone who has ever had to deal with That Student, everyone who has ever been That Student, and (especially) everyone who has ever been on either side of the desk when That Student suddenly turns out to be something other than what they seem.

( Protective Coloration )