This time last year, I was manically writing fanfic for Yuletide: I think part of this was displacement activity because I was sick of sending the Digital Doorstop off and getting it rejected, and part of it was displacement activity because my husband was flying to New Zealand on Boxing Day.
This year, I’m doing Yuletide again and have written the story I signed up to write, but the pinch-hits [1] keep dropping into my inbox and I keep thinking ‘Meh, I could do that if I wanted to familiarise myself with the source again’ or ‘Meh, I could do that, but someone else could do it a lot better’ rather than frantically competing to write them.
I’ve been feeling like writing short fiction again, but I’m much more interested in my universe than I am in anyone else’s. Also I’ve been thinking for some time about putting up some of the out-takes from The Maker’s Mask and The Hawkwood War that got cut because they weren’t doing all they might to advance the story.
So, I’ve set up a Requite Stories page, and a short story, Out of the Spire. I absolutely don’t guarantee when anything else will show up, and I’ll be surprised if I write any non-Requite short stories at all – I’ve never been good at creating a world in less than fifty thousand words. 😉
[1] Yuletide is a seasonal fic exchange: a pinch-hit is a set of requests from someone whose assigned writer has had to default for whatever reason.
Ankaret Wells 