Yuletide reveal!
So I wrote Textual Poaching for carolinecrane, in John Scalzi's Redshirts. It is THE longest fic I've ever written; at 10k I know it hardly compares to the 100K+ works that I gape at on AO3, but for me--this is the longest fic I have ever successfully completed and posted. By like 7000 words.
I was so thrilled at the prompt, especially the Basically I love ALL the tropey fic part, because a) ME TOO and b) a legit excuse to do research on AO3 AND TVTropes!! I tried to hit as many specific prompts as would make sense for my idea; didn't get around to the crossovers, but maybe someday.
It was both the easiest and most stressful Yuletide I've done. Easy because I knew what I wanted to write and I had the canon to (constantly) refer back to; stressful because I knew what I had to do to finish but didn't actually get it completely done until about 4 hours were left on the last day. (So it was never beta'd...sorry!! I reached out to my usual beta like two weeks prior when I thought it was going to only be 3k and said I'd send it when I finished. Finishing that late with 10k just seemed rude to send.)
I do still have at least one additional thing planned that goes along with this story, and am thinking of playing around with what that series finale might have looked like, so...there's that?
Things I discovered in the course of writing & researching:
-We never actually learn what Jimmy Hanson DOES on the Intrepid! I checked. A bunch of times. I literally still have no idea what his duties consisted of. So I just stuck him by some random corridor panel like O'Brien & Bashir did when I had to give him something to do.
-It is really challenging to stick to the style of an extremely minimal amount of description like in the book. Almost no one ever gets described; Jimmy nearly least of all, I think. I don't even have the slightest bit of headcanon for what Andy or Jimmy actually LOOK like, though based on some stuff I read from Scalzi and commenters on like io9 and Tor.com they're most likely white American guys.
-There are several 100K+ word count Coffee Shop AUs on AO3.
-TVTropes has a super useful "spoilers on/off" function.
And now, the list of Star Trek (and a couple other recursive and meta) references:
1. even the baffling metaphoric language of Shantil III
2. while he was doing some utterly routine sensor calibration on deck eight: see part about Jimmy's lack of a job
3. “It’s not a big deal, really,” Z said. “We’re applying some of the same quantum principles as the matter synthesizer, and just adding spatiotemporal equations, the atomic visualizing scan, and a curvilinear limitation ray.”
4. and that led to thinking about the time he had let himself into Andy’s quarters with champagne after Andy got out of sick bay the first time and they had made out.
pollitt's Andy/Jimmy fic for carolinecrane
5. Which led to thinking about the time he had paid, in full, for all the blowjobs everyone owed Andy for dealing with Kerensky’s drunk ass.
carolinecrane's Andy/Jimmy fic for pollitt. Basically once I realized the path I was headed down with this fic I knew I had to reference their stories somehow. I would have done the whole archive of Redshirts stories but couldn't make them all work since Jimmy's basically trapped himself in an Andy/Jimmy kind of universe. :)
6. Jimmy was ready for this. “It kind of happened on Star Trek-one of the spinoffs. The genius kid came back to the ship and spent the whole episode solving the plot with a completely new character, who was pretty, smart, and good at things. And at the end of the show, they kissed.”
I actually also really love that episode, it just seemed like the sort of thing Jimmy would be like "...eh" about.
7. “And no one’s died in really stupid ways except for that one time with the holorec
8. On the bridge, the captain was taking suggestions for how to get through an area of dense, constantly shifting gravitational anomalies. Q’eeng shot down several illogical options, and then said, “A shuttle could traverse the region just ahead of the ship and send back navigational data as the situation changes.”
9. “As you know, we are en route to Melllvar II to pick up the visiting Dub U ambassador.
"Melllvar has three Ls."
"I think I've done enough conventions to know how to spell Melllvar."
10. Admiral Farnsworth said they workshopped the hell out of that line.
11. Lwaxana accords Hopefully self-explanatory :)
12. Uh, the whole psychic connection thing is its own trope, of course, but “I didn’t know you felt that way,” is specifically from here.
13. The "everything is blue" planet is Avatar :P
14. As he sprinted through the trees, frantically stabbing at his phone to display human life signs, Jimmy suddenly remembered the time he and Andy had been at magical boarding school and gotten lost in the Verboten Vale, with only their wands and Andy’s mastery of animal languages to rescue them- Also hopefully self-explanatory!
15. Abernathy said, “You might recall the self-proclaimed supreme leader of Nistrim V, Martin Sessen?” He tapped his tablet and a nonmoving holo of Sessen appeared in the air next to Hackett.
16. I mentally referred to Jimmy's moments of seeing into the infinite future as his Kwisatz Haderach moments :)
17. And as I noted at the end of the fic, the title comes from Henry Jenkins' book on fandom and participatory culture, which I have admittedly never read in full, but am given to understand that it has a lot on Kirk/Spock :D