My story, The Heirs of English Magic, was written by bobthemole/bob_tales. Thank you bobthemole! I see our prompts for JS&MN actually had reasonable overlap: I just didn’t offer to write it myself. My ambitions do not yet scale to your heights.

And now, behind the curtain

I wrote two Yuletide fics:

Calling to the Wind (AO3)
Earthsea – Ursula K. Le Guin
Tenar, Apple, Ogion, Pippin

After the wall of the dead falls in The Other Wind, names and summoning work differently in Earthsea.

This is slightly different from the fic I originally intended to write: I was originally going to parallel two birth stories, Tenar’s and Pippin’s firsts. It would have been the most birth story fic of all time. It would have been mothering.com in Earthsea. My poor recipient, who mentioned a late December due date in her Dear Author letter (hope all is going well, whetherwoman), and pretty much created the opening scene just by saying that, would have been unable to escape the birthing.

But the interlude with Tenar and Ogion’s conversation about Apple’s name got away from me, and when I got past the conversation about summoning Ged I was a little stuck. So I turned to the obvious plot-generating device: what problems does Tenar still have? Oh yes, Tehanu isn’t there. And that gave me most of the rest. My beta was suitably impressed, that I was willing to write Earthsea metaphysics.

Killing Ged in the background is, well, aggressive? But I’ve felt for a while that there won’t be more Earthsea canon, that he is thus in some sense dead, or truly myth. I wouldn’t mind being wrong though!

Finally, I note that elle_dritch dealt with Tehanu’s future the opposite way this year, by bringing her home in The Morning Wind Upon the Sea. (I didn’t want to discuss Earthsea fics too much in my recs since it might have accidentally revealed my authorship.) So you have some choice for whether Ged and Tenar see Tehanu again, and when.

Out west (AO3)
Saving Francesca – Melina Marchetta
Jim Hailler, Tom Mackee, Siobhan Sullivan, Mia Spinelli

Jim Hailler’s out west, and he doesn’t know what he wants, except to put off thinking about what he wants.

Set after The Piper’s Son, with spoilers for it.

I was really excited when this fandom was nominated for Yuletide, but I didn’t offer to write it because I didn’t think that I could write an unseen prompt in it. (Bill Mackee/Tom Finch/Grace Finch Mackee threesome? OK, probably that could be done! And I am sort of tempted by Siobhan/Tara someday, because Tom/Tara bugs my “you don’t get the same girlfriend back post-redemption” issue. But there’s a lot of pairings in it where I’d just be “yeah, you know, I don’t buy Frankie/Tom. the only person who does is Tom, kinda”.)

Luckily a few people made their Dear Author letters public, including , and what happened to Jim Hailler I figured I could do. It feels too simple, this answer, especially as it’s not a million miles from Tom’s backstory in The Piper’s Son, but as several of my commenters have noted, Melina Marchetta’s characters are in fact almost entirely driven by family concerns (at least, in these two novels and Looking For Alibrandi, which are the three I’ve read). And The Piper’s Son notes that Tom thinks Jim understands him very well, which is easier if they have something like being teenage children of abusive addicted parents in common.

I was a bit worried about the relatively unforgiving narrative point-of-view about addiction, but Jim doesn’t feel it, and the point-of-view is fairly tight.

Now, anyone else tempted by Looking For Alibrandi fic? Josie would be nearly 40 now and I want to know What Happened Next. And I like a bit of modern Australian urbanness! (Setting The Piper’s Son so firmly in 2007 gives the Saving Francesca characters a fairly tight age: it seems they’re born in 1985 or 1986. For Alibrandi I’m just working from the publication date of 1990, which would give her a birthdate of about 1973.)