extrapenguin

I'm

ExtraPenguin and this is my Yuletide letter. Contains: Children of Time, The Luminous Dead, Thrawn Ascendancy, and Uplift.

Navigation:
Likes
DNWs
Children of Time
The Luminous Dead
Thrawn Ascendancy
Uplift

Likes

Same-sex relationships, especially F/F.
Narratives of reconstruction: fixing something, whether that be a country, a piece of equipment, a relationship, or a person. (Examples: Nirvana in Fire, Zuko's arc in Avatar: the Last Airbender)
Journeys of discovery, whether the discoverers be the characters or the reader.
Redemption arcs. Rehabilitative justice.
Narratives where something happens; plot. External conflicts. Casefic.
Comedy of Errors -type things.
Crack taken seriously.
Untitled Goose Game crossovers of the type where the goose comes to visit the canon.
Alien settings: Dyson spheres, ringworlds, planets tidally locked to their red dwarf stars, artificial habitats on otherwise inhospitable planets, planets with large axial tilts, planets that are actually moons of gas giants, etc.
Engineering, especially of the sort that keeps civilization running – sewage, maintenance, transport etc – plus fault analysis and infrastructure design stuff.
Characters expressing caring for each other by feeding each other/giving each other tea.
Established relationships.
Good mentor figures/teachers who have their students' best interests at heart and succeed.
Class issues and other tensions between origins and current presentation (eg. alien whose species is considered monsters in disguise as a human).
Worldbuilding!
Weird physics.
Tea.
Competence porn.
Enthusiasm in general.
Xenobiology, aliens, very alien aliens.
Loyalty, loyalty kink, people loyal way past the point of reasonableness.
Loving descriptions of small details/of how systems run; insertion of Shown Their Work details.
Happy endings.

I like both shipfic and gen. If you're choosing between something you think the characters would do in a situation and something on my likes list, please err on the side of what you feel is right for the characters and story in general.

DNW

Setting change AUs (eg: Hogwarts AU, Coffee Shop AU) (exception: In Space AUs of canons not already In Space are fine)
Christianity, mentions of "sinning".
Humiliation, especially public.
Incest, including foster/adopted relationships.
Stories about motherhood.
Unrequested het between humans or humanoid creatures. (Dolphins are fine, spiders are fine, people having parents is fine, the fabric of society being canonical and het-enabling is fine.) (Ar'alani/Thrawn is also fine.)
Requested characters being presented as/rendered utterly helpless; the "damsel in distress" trope; woobiefication.
Stories about mourning unwelcome changes to/realizations about the body, with "body" defined broadly, (ex: acquiring a disability, infertility, weight gain) and the associated grief/angst.
Stories about mourning a dead person.
Stories where the characters have never loved or could never love anyone but each other, incl. soulmates, demisexuality, single-target sexuality, etc.

( Children of Time, The Luminous Dead, Thrawn Ascendancy, Uplift )

juletide for info.

( Guardian, The Luminous Dead, Sect Leader & Shimei, Uplift )

I wrote lots of stuff this year! Mostly for Guardian, since lots of people requested that, but also one fic for Sha Po Lang!

My main assignment:
The Darkest Hour (Brings the Dawn) (E, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, casefic, post-canon get-together) for

jo_lasalle
One of the fun bits of Yuletide and other exchanges is tailoring a giftfic to as many of the recip's likes as possible. Having a prior acquaintance with

jo_lasalle, I had a lot of material to go with, and stuffed as much as I could in there. This is also the longest fic I've written for Yuletide, and my first try at casefic proper! I'm pretty pleased with myself.

Then, the treats:
Start the Sex Cycle (E, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan) for

jo_lasalle
Because Jo has the best ideas and put them in a letter, I was consumed by the need to write the washing machine sex she'd prompted for. The title came to me in a fit of inspiration on the 24th.

No Tome Unturned (T, Ye Zun & Ya Qing, mind control and bookstores) for

lannamichaels
I actually wrote this one during sign-ups but only posted later. What can I say? I love cracky prompts.

Reformation (G, Shen Wei & Ye Zun, Zhao Yunlan) for

lannamichaels
I spotted Lanna make a comment along the lines of "damn, I wish I'd prompted for this in my Yuletide letter", so I wrote what is probably the least anonymous Madness treat. :P

Shaving Face (G, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, identity borrowing) for

teaotter
When I went on a second dive through the letters, I came across a wonderful prompt for Zhao Yunlan impersonating the Envoy, so of course I had to deliver. In retrospect, it's obvious why this was the most popular of my Yulefics, though while writing I was too busy panicking about whether I'd written WHALING ISSUEFIC to realize that. :P

Storm-blind (E, Chang Geng/Gu Yun) for

shadowsapiens
I got a bit tired of Guardian for a moment, and had just caught up with Sha Po Lang, so I went and looked at the SPL requests and wrote shadow some porn to order.

Recentre the Heart (T, Shen Wei & Ye Zun, hurt/comfort) for

lynndyre
At this point, I was feeling a bit self-conscious about being, like, 20% of the fics for Guardian, so I set my spellchecker to British English in a fit of pre-Christmas panic.

Total: 17329 words across 7 stories. I think I can give myself a pat on the back, even if I didn't manage to write treats for all the people whose letters looked cool. *goes off to reply to more comments*

And here's the recpost sequel, with main-collection Guardian and Untitled Goose Game, plus Madness! See also Part #1.

( Read more... )

It's time for the annual Yuletide Recs post! Draws from Main. See also Part 2 for Madness, Guardian, and Untitled Geese.

To start with, I got two gifts:
the desert repenting, Machineries of Empire, Cheris & Jedao hunt down a wild moth. I enjoyed the thoughtful running through of the human-scale consequences of the books' plot.
The Great Goose Heist, Guardian, Zhu Jiu & Ya Qing recruit geese to steal the Hallows. I enjoyed the zany plot and humorous moments.

Other recs:
( Read more... )

(Guardian, Untitled Goose Game, and Madness will come in a forthcoming post.)

Hi! I'm

ExtraPenguin. Likes, DNWs, and prompts beneath the cut.

( Read more... )

Authors have been revealed for Yuletide; it is now officially 2019.

fandom_snowflake is up and running, though I'll participate only selectively. The intermittent power outages caused by snow crashing down on power lines have stopped (another New Year's Eve tradition), and I can start on my 2018 Fic Year in Review. (Also, I posted on 22 days out of 31, this past December! It is quite an achievement. I'll see if I can aim for at least twice a week this year.)

My wonderful gift, This Hour, This Night, was written by

Ryuutchi! It is, of course, the only thing they've written for the fandom to date. Oh well!

I wrote four fics this year. My assigned recip was

Untherius, and I wrote him 3.7k of Voynich Manuscript gen: If I Must Leave the Long River of Time.

Iau fingered the ceremonial knife hidden in her dress. It'd take Maria some time longer to return, so she quickly drew both it and the box. In the gloom of the small building, she made a small cut to the finger of her disguise. Blood welled from the wound, a deep blue in the lack of light.

This one went down much better than I expected – I seem to have forgotten the good reception Yuletide's 5-minute fandoms get. It has a bunch of comments and a decent amount of bookmarks! I'm satisfied with this one and how it went down.

Then I was stuck in a sort of rut of ennui, panic over things unrelated to Yuletide, and a lingering sense of bleh, so I did what we all do in such situations and went to browse the letters database for all the canons I recognized. From

naye's postings I recalled that Guardian the TV show was a Thing, and had seen some gifsets with sleeping-on-a-shoulder, so I went and looked at the Yuletide prompts for it.

kyrilu's were RTMI (time travel!!!), so I watched the entire damn show and wrote What a magnificent bed we lay in for them. It's 5k of E-rated Zhao Yunlan/Shen Wei. Rereading, I don't quite think I hit the mark I aimed for, but ah well. One can't always win Yuletide with all of one's fics, and the fandom/ship got some very nice fics in the general Yuletide bounty.

I looked through the Guardian requests again to see if anyone had requested anything different (I have a big problem of not being able to write a pairing twice in a row), and saw

naphyla prompt for Shen Wei/Ye Zun sibling incest, so I went and wrote some sibling incest: As I Return from Ten Thousand Years Away is T-rated and 3.5k long. This one was more niche, but succeeded better at what I wanted it to be, and I think I improved in characterization? I also got to wrap Ye Zun in a blanket.

On Christmas Eve, I was idle and thus idly browsing prompts, when I came across someone requesting switching (or, top Wei Wuxian) for Modao Zushi! Over the span of about 6 very interrupted hours, I wrote A Day in the Life, 1.8k of E-rated Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji for

Findarato! It's mostly just porn, but it's very sweet porn in accordance to the recip's wishes.

All in all, I wrote over 12k for this Yuletide, as opposed to 11k last year and 10k the year before. Even my Yuletide wordcount is going up, albeit not as drastically as my total AO3 wordcount, which I doubled this year.

Recpost! Yuletide collection. Less stuff in both the tagset and actual collection for me to appreciate this year than last year.

My gift is This Hour, This Night, 2k of T-rated Jiang Cheng/Wei Wuxian for Modao Zushi. It perfectly captures the comfort and coziness they have around each other!

Here come the other recs!
( TGE, Guardian, Modao Zushi, Course of Honor, Voynich )

Hi, I'm

ExtraPenguin. Here's my Yuletide letter! Likes, DNWs, and prompts beneath the cut. Fandoms listed: Uplift Saga, Memory of Water, Módào Zǔshī (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) the book. Minichallenge links: Yulebuilding.

( Read more... )

Time for the Yuletide Reveals post!

But first, in news utterly unrelated to Yuletide, I wrote a The Goblin Emperor ficlet: Thwap! is 700+ words of G-gen fluff with Maia participating in a good-mannered snowball fight. Blame #thegoblinemperor.

My gift, Root and Bough and Branch and Leaf was written by the lovely

gileonnen, who has an excellent taste in literature! (Go read it, it's got tags like "Heraldic Symbolism as an Intimidation Tactic".) Summary: When Cheris and Khiruev discover a scoutmoth drifting in space, they immediately suspect a trap. Instead, though, they find a message of hope.

On the other half of the equation, I wrote multiple things! Let's go in chronological order.
How far I came for you, for

lalalalalawhy, was a treat written during sign-ups, and was the first fic in the collection! (I even got the pleasure of poking the mods to open the collection – it's a separate ticky box on a separate page that one will always forget when running matching and sending assignments.) It's 1k of Space Vehicles Anthropomorphic, and the pairing is Cassini/Saturn. Yes, the space probe and the planet. It's also got poetry that was praised by lots of commenters.

Then, with that posted, I opened my assignment e-mail. I got the best prompt in all Machineries of Empire fandom, and wrote Mirror Dance, for

indigostohelit, 1.8k of Kel Cheris/Shuos Jedao porn. It may be the least popular of my works this Yuletide, but whatever, I aced my assignment. Also, it's hot. In addition to the dubcon mirror sex and masturbation, it's also got a bit of glovekink as a spice, and of course power gradients galore. (Because really, what is porn without power gradients? Certainly not a thing I can write.)

I was in a bit of a creative slump and unfannish for a bit, but then I checked out Nirvana in Fire (reactions etc here) With new fandom energy, I went through the Yuletide prompts and ended up writing two things!

The first, What Sorrow Still Binds, for

realface, is 3.7k of post-canon fix-it fic that gives Mei Changsu and Jingyan a happy ending. Lin Chen also makes an appearance! Tbh, I didn't have much of a ~creative process~ for this beyond thinking a bit about where to put the Jingyan plotline in relation to the MCS plotline. It took a few tries to get one where Jingyan didn't disappear for a huge chunk and MCS's recovery and journey to Jinling took place at a reasonable juncture.

The second, Never Gonna Give You Up, for

telarna, is 4.5k of canon divergence AU! I'd already done one post-canon thing, so I thought about how to change reality so that MCS would believe he deserved a happy ending. (As a side note, I am not 100% wedded to the One True Interpretation for most characters; it's more of a cluster of interpretations that make sense, of which I'll choose the one that makes most sense for the fic I want to write.) Now, that objection about how he'd "taint Jingyan's rule"? The best way to get rid of that is to force MCS to be morality and virtue. And the best way to do that is to make Jingyan evil. (Or, rather, convinced of his own evilness.) Also qualifies as a terrible thing to do for MCS! All his plans about being the evil plotty one of evil in the shadows, down the drain! I'd have wanted to make this fic a bit longer, but there's really only so much canon retread that people are willing to read, and had I written it longer, I would've had to diverge from canon more explicitly and thus put way more thought to it, and I had scant hours to go before I had to get on a train and sod off with only my phone for company, so I did a quick spellcheck and posted it. As for the title, well, I did my classic "how does titles" dance, then got Never Gonna Give You Up stuck in my head when thinking about how MCS won't give up on Jingyan, went "fuck it, that's a remarkably decent title", and rickrolled everyone.

The recs post I made still stands. The Yuletide collection is still there. I might do a look-through for fandoms I've missed.

For 2018, I'll continue with some Nirvana in Fire fic, and for the spring/summer exchange circuit, I'm eyeing

smutswap (with wiser offers than last year),

space_swap,

fandom5k (for the challenge to myself),

jukebox_fest, and

auexchange.

worldbuildingex is good and nice, but the stuff I want worldbuilding in is all space stuff and thus falls under Space Swap's mandate quite nicely. Coronation Ceremony will run in the autumn in its usual time, and I'll participate in Yuletide and the Nirvana in Fire exchange, should that run again.

I'll see about doing

snowflake_challenge; it typically has niceish prompts. However, I won't be properly home at my desktop until partway through it, so I might just grab the cream of the crop when it's ongoing and do the rest on my own time later on.

Happy 2018!

My gift is Root and Bough and Branch and Leaf, 2k of Machineries of Empire fic set post-Raven Stratagem and centering on Cheris and Khiruev. It's very good and reads like a missing scene!

Improvise
Dinotopia, G, Gen, 4k
A TED talk by a famous Tyrannosaur actor! It's about theatre, and the role of the carnivores sequestered in the Rainy Basin, and the ability to speak for oneself. It's very touching.

Just Another Day
Ghost in the Shell, T, Gen, 1k
A scene from a very long and action-y day for Section 9. Canon-typical violence. Tachikomas!

The Lady of Song, the Daughter of Water
Kalevala, G, F/F, 7k
Aino/Kyllikki F/F get-together with casual magic and shapeshifting, plus the Finnish summer. Very sweet.

Handshake Protocol
Murderbot + Crossover, G, gen, 9k
Murderbot on its journey and voyage away from Dr. Mehta, taking it to a Star Wars bar, a crash site with Data, and beyond.

Random Access
Murderbot, M, gen, 1k
Pre-canon: the moment Murderbot decides to hack its governor module.

Terra Nova
Murderbot, T, gen, 7k
Pre-canon: the mission that has Murderbot hack its governor module.

Inside Job
Murderbot, T, gen, 5k
Murderbot gets a boring job as shuttle security. Then the shuttle explodes.

On The Trail Of The Killers Of My Father
Murderbot, G, gen, 4k
Murderbot just wants to access the leaked pilot for a Sanctuary Moon spin-off.

All That You Need to Say
Nirvana in Fire, E, M/M, 15k
Mei Changsu/Xiao Jingyan tme-travel fix-it to get a cure, with bonus identity sheanigans and porn.

Impermanence
Nirvana in Fire, T, gen, 1k
An alternative take on how Lin Shu changed his appearance and survived Meiling.

Pride of London
Rivers of London, G, gen, 3k
Ghostly animals at the Tower of London: Peter and Nightingale investigate.

The Mock
Rivers of London, unrated, gen, 6k
Yule-time traditions and worldbuilding on the nature of magic!

Positronic relays, surging in the dark
Robot series - Isaac Asimov, E, M/M, 5k
Human/humanoid robot porn which is touching and with an intriguing use of the Three Laws.

around the lake, around the world
Sharing Knife, G, gen, 2k
A nice and sweet set of outsider POV scenes from Dag Redwing's life.

Two heroes, a river, and love
Sino-Soviet Propaganda Posters, G, M/M, 3k
A sweet tale of finding love in an unlikely place.

go out the door
Tang Dynasty RPF, G, gen, 3k
It's mythology magical realism set IN SPAAACE, what more could a penguin ask for? A poet is trapped with a military garrison on a planet surrounded by mines, preventing launch.

What she learned in whispers
The Traitor Baru Cormorant, T, gen, 2k
A pre-canon character study of Tain Hu.

Genuinely Self-Absorbed and Deeply Shallow
Vorkosigan saga, G, gen, 2k
A character study of Ivan Vorpatril growing up.

ETA 6.10. there is now Baru Cormorant!

Hi, I'm

ExtraPenguin. Here's my Yuletide letter! Likes, DNWs, and prompts beneath the cut. Fandoms listed: Kerbal Space Program, Uplift series, Pushing Ice, Machineries of Empire, Vorkosigan saga, The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Art prompts over here. Yuleporn.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: excited

What I got:
The Huntsman's Reel – Vorkosigan, T, Simon/Alys, 4440
"Somewhere in this party," said Captain Illyan, "there are four Cetagandan assassins."
A truly fantastic casefic-type where Alys gets to shine and solve a political problem.

Found in the Stars – Yoko Tsuno, G, Khâny/Yoko, 1044
Khâny missed Yoko.
Yoko and her group, at the start at what will no doubt be an exciting Vinéan adventure. Khâny and Yoko have a moment.

* shallow cluster * deep dive * Streaker find * – Uplift, G, gen, 41
When asked later why he chose to investigate the shallow cluster, Captain Creideiki would not, or could not, offer any explanation beyond this particularly obscure piece of Trinary haiku.
THE HAIKUS ARE EXCELLENT.

Other recs:
( Main Collection )

( Madness )

MY ASSIGNMENT IS THE MOST BESTEST

Preamble

Hello, I am

ExtraPenguin on AO3, and this is my Yuletide letter. I started writing it in January (and in general have obsessed too much over it), so I hope you can find at least something useful for you in it! :P Try to have fun?

In General

If none of this year's prompts speak to your soul, feel free to look at any prompts I might've provided for these fandoms and characters in previous exchange letters.

POV/tensewise, please no 1st person present, 1st person past, or 3rd person present tense narrative. The "default" of 3rd person past is fine. (If 2nd person or any other nonstandard tense-mood is what makes best sense for your fic – go ahead.)

Formatwise, I am okay with the classic fic format and 3rd person past. For The Long Earth, feel free to write an encyclopedia entry/do a logs-of-the-expedition thing/whatever feels best, but for others, I'd appreciate most of it being in the basic fic format. (If you want to intersperse it with, like, epic poetry, go ahead.)
( More within! The Goblin Emperor, The Long Earth, Uplift, Vorkosigan, Yoko Tsuno. )

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Rammstein – Sonne

My 11/10 gift, The Iron Gates, was written by

sunsmasher ! (Hello, let's be friends forever!)

I wrote a number of things this Yuletide:
Lady of the Sea (Rivers of London, casefic) for

litalex [Peter and Nightingale deal with a disturbance involving mermaids.]
Daughter of Fishes (Imperial Radch, fluff) for

sixthlight [Zeiat discovers a new use for fish sauce, to Kalr Five's detriment.]
Not Victorious and Rather Nonstellar (Incompetent Time-Traveling Saxophone Haters, humor) for

lalalalalawhy [A pair of grad students invent the time machine and attempt to murder Adolphe Sax.]
The Hand That Takes (Vorkosigan saga, porn) for

karanguni [Simon Illyan participates in the training of Byerly Vorrutyer. Noncon, breathplay, drugged.]
Sing the Song of Future Power (Kalevala, poetry) for

gileonnen [Louhi takes on Aino as a pupil.]
Control (Imperial Radch, angst) for

kerithwyn [Tisarwat's angsting is interrupted by Basnaaid sending her a plant.]

My awesome, 11/10 gift:
The Iron Gates
Vorkosigan saga, 10k words (!!!), the ending of Diplomatic Immunity from Ekaterin's POV. IT'S AWESOME, GO READ.

Other neat stuff found in the main collection:
Case for Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion..., 6.5k, three different, intriguing styles of text on post-apocalyptic humans' findings on the nuclear waste storage sites of the past. No canon knowledge required.

The Captain's Report
FTL: Faster Than Light, 2.5k, a Captain Church has to explain the hilarious doings of her crew to Admiral Tully. No canon knowledge required.

Formality
The Goblin Emperor, 11k, Deret Beshelar pines for the Emperor and is distressed when the pining is requieted.

Orbit
Vorkosigan saga, 2.5k, Simon Illyan associates with Aral and Cordelia over the years.

Of Guardsmen, Empress Laisa, and the Art of Trust
Vorkosigan saga, 4k, Ivan befriends Laisa, to the worry of many guards. No canon knowledge required.

Collaboration
Vorkosigan saga, 2k, Helen Vorthys through the years: her marriage, her studies, her children, Barrayar.

Name of the Game
Vorkosigan saga, 1.5k, Miles convinces Gregor to go on vacation and gets drafted as an assistant.

Mind the Gap
Rivers of London, 4.5k, Peter and Nightingale deal with a disturbance in the tube.

Neat stuff from Madness:
Ivan's To-Do List
Vorkosigan saga, 107 words, companion to "Of Guardsmen, Empress Laisa, and the Art of Trust"

Winds of Change
Incompetent Time-Travelling Saxophone Haters, 855 words, a group of grad students attempt to murder the inventor of the saxophone.

To start with: thank you! I am easy to please; here are some prompts on what I'd like, but if you get a genius idea, feel free to write it. This should be a nice place to start.

Things I like: Plot! Characters! Comedy! Tragedy! Infodumps! Exchange of ideas! Stuff that makes me think! Literary references! – Pretty much everything, actually. I'm easy to please. (For reference, I really like Big Ideas Sci-Fi.)

Things I don't like: Character bashing. Explicit religiousness from main characters. Rape/sexual coercion. If there is going to be sex, please no rimming/scat. Please, no violence to eyes or fingers. Please check your grammar and spelling, it's one of the few things that can ruin a fic for me.

Sex is fine (though plot would be appreciated), angst is fine, hurt/comfort is fine, and sad stuff is fine, though I'd rather not blub my eyes out at Christmas. Happy/neutral endings preferred.

( Honorverse, Europa Report, RoL, Long Earth, Vorkosigan, Imperial Radch )

THEY'RE HERE

Going through, I’ll ask for Honor Harrington series, Rivers of London, Vorkosigan Saga (I didn’t think this’d make it through but okay??), Europa Report, and the Long Earth series, plus maybe Asimov’s Robot series but I got the perfect Susan Calvin fic in 2013 so maybe not.

I’ll offer some of the above plus Kalevala, Solar System anthro, and FTL: Faster than Light.

(I really need to get my paws on Ancillary Mercy. I also really didn't expect for Vorkosigan Saga to be there. Whut.)

Summary: Yoko visits Khâny on Vinéa. A terraforming device is stolen, with potentially planet-wrecking consequences.
For

xenakis.

( Vinea )

Profile

ExtraPenguin

Navigation

April 2025

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Night Sea for Tranquility III by branchandroot

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated 23 Apr 2025 16:20

# If you're great at leaping — bite the sun! #

Entries tagged with f: yuletide

Dear Yulegoat

Likes

DNW

Dear Julegoat

Yuletide reveals!

Yuletide Recs #2

Yuletide Recs #1

Dear Yulegoat

Yuletide author reveals!

Yuletide Recs

Dear Yulegoat

Yuletide

Yuletide recs

Dear Yulegoat

Yuletide recs

(no subject)

Dear Yulegoat

Preamble

In General

Yuletide 2015: Reveals!

Yuletide!

Dear Yuletide Writer

Yulete tags!

Yuletide fic: Layers (Yoko Tsuno, T, F/F)

Profile

Navigation

April 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags