Before the notes on current stories, here's a brief history of Yuletide stories I've written

2004 - Walsingham's Christmas Carol (Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper)
2005 - Thirteen Ways of Looking At Nero Wolfe (Nero Wolfe - Rex Stout)
2006 - One of These Days (HHGTTG - Douglas Adams); Those Who Stand For Nothing (18th CE RPF)
2007 - Ionic, Doric, Corinthian, Agony (Greek and Roman Mythology); The Crush of Cthulhu (Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft)
2008 - Rare Birds and Strange Beasts (Am Zin/Running Out of Time); Tentpole (Tropic Thunder)
2009 - Syzygy (Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft); No Returns or Exchanges (Evil Dead series); Concerto for Contrabass in Three Movements (Nodame Cantabile TV)
2010 - Peach Blossoms (Liáo zhâi zhì yì/Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio - Pú Sônglíng); The Summer Triangle (Qing Hua Ci)

( Best Brains (MST3K) )
( Riders on the Earth (Broken Saints) )
( Theater of the Deranged (Fate/EXTRA) )

So I haven't written my letter yet (I probably will later today), but a few observations on Yuletide before I get my assignment:

1. After some back and forth with figuring out what I could write, I ended up with 19 possibilities total. Actually 15, since four of them had no requests. Of the 15:

Five are movies, three are literary, two are games, one is an anime, one is a webcomic, one is a tv show, and one is well... hard to explain. Let's just say other. One of the 15 I was the only match on. I ended up dropping Once Upon A Time, because while I'd love to read the stories, I don't really want to write them.

2. My requests match two out of three of my nominations. While I kept Requiem from the Darkness (my perennial request) and Fate/Zero (my new favorite), I swapped out Dantalian no Shoka for Un-go. I suspect I might ask for it next year, but for now, robot bears and ambiguously gendered supernatural beings win out. And joy of joys, I actually had all three of them filled by at least one person - yay for obscurity!

3. So judging from the sign-up stats, the most requested fandoms are: Community, Once Upon A Time, Downton Abbey, Revenge, Parks and Recreation, Warehouse 13, Game of Thrones, Captain America, Vorkosigan Saga, and Discworld. Of those ten, Once Upon A Time will probably be too big to qualify next year (the AO3 archive is still small, but FF.Net has over 100 stories will only 4 episodes aired). And Game of Thrones might get too big as well, as the show dramatizes more of the books (I suspect a number of people requested it when they couldn't get the book fandom).

4. 1877 people signed up. Even with the shorter nomination/sign-up time, that's not too far off from last year's number of 1965 (which may include pinch-hitters, I'm not sure).

I'm going to do things a little differently today...

Since it's not a particularly inspiring day for horror on tv, how about some new DVD releases?

Probably the biggest one is Scream 4, which was the answer to the question: "What did we release a while ago that we can make a sequel of? Preferably something that most people have forgotten." I mean, it's not a horrible movie from what I understand, but was anybody clamoring for it? The basic plot is that a new Ghostface is starting up killings and... come on, I don't care how meta you get in it about its recognition of this, it's not going to change the fact that this was unnecessary. Still, it's on DVD, so if you like your horror self-aware, go for it.

Dead Alive (Braindead), a far superior movie about a young man, his controlling mother, and his delightful love interest - and lots of undead gore, also releases today. Although it's not new to DVD, it is to Blu-Ray, so it's your chance to get high resolution zombie guts in all their glory. Just keep in mind it apparently doesn't have extras beyond some trailers - no Peter Jackson commentary, no behind the scenes footage, no deleted scenes.

The first season of The Walking Dead also hits Blu-Ray today. A more realistic approach to zombies, it's a fairly grim, at times puzzling (some of the character decisions are breathtakingly stupid), but engrossing nonetheless series that airs its second season on Oct 16. There are also a decent number of extras, with featurettes and a 30 minute documentary/cast and crew interview.

Now that's what I'm talking about...

Finally, some decent horror on Turner Classic Movies. At 9 p.m., it's good old Frankenstein from 1931, the one with a twitchy Colin Clive and an awesome Boris Karloff. Then it's Freaks at 10:15 p.m., which teaches you to never be mean to circus people, especially if you have to close your eyes at some point in their vicinity. It continues with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at 12:30 a.m. from 1932. Did you know that there's currently two competing projects on ABC with that premise. One sounds like a buddy comedy, the other a sci-fi romance, and both will probably get cancelled if they make it to pilot (see My Worst Enemy for details).

At 2:15 a.m. it's creepy European vampire action in Mark of the Vampire (1935). Then we start getting real old school horror at 3:30 a.m. with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), and at 4:45 a.m. with Nosferatu (1922). We wrap up with Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) at 6:15 a.m. Sure, you could be sleeping, but with movies like this, why would you?

Other than that, it's the usual umpteen million showings of Twilight movies on Showtime and practically nothing for AMC and Syfy. I've got to say AMC, you're lagging right out of the gate. You can't even give me a Jaws 3 or something?

The usual assortment of cheap SyFy movies kicks off an otherwise unspectacular Sunday. I know they save the really good movies for later in the month, but seriously, AMC and TCM aren't even trying that hard, unless you count a showing of Se7en at 7 p.m. Barring that, it's fairly sad pickings today.

If you're in the mood for bad horror, we have Pinata: Survival Island at 9:30 p.m. on Showtime Beyond. To refresh memory, it's about a killer pinata. Yep. It's followed by something called Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives at 11, which wins for "title I most suspect was an obvious ploy of attention/boycotts."

Basic cable's not much better. TNT's decided to run The Mummy Returns at 8 p.m. and again at 10:30, Lifetime's showing the "Jessica Lange tries to kill Gwyneth Paltrow" thriller Hush at 11 p.m. (in which she fares better than her role in a certain other movie mentioned above), and SyFy takes a break from original B-movies to show Resident Evil at 5 p.m. and Resident Evil: Apocalypse at 7 p.m.

Probably your best bet is going to be only available if you get Starz Cinema. They're showing The Devil's Backbone at 10 p.m., a moodly little ghost story that takes place during the Spanish Civil War at an orphanage. There's ghosts, there's secrets, and it's Guillermo del Toro.

I have to say, this is one of the least inspiring beginnings to Halloween on TV. AMC has practically nothing, TCM is showing professor movies, and we get the twin terror that is Vampires Suck and Eclipse on premium cable. The horror, the horror...

At least good old Syfy is keeping the spirit alive - by showing a bunch of crappy movies. Husk, showing at 1 p.m. EST, seems new to the line-up, though killer scarecrows stalking young people isn't that momentous. And I don't think anyone was screaming for a sequel to Boogeyman, but if you were, they got it here at 3 p.m. And at 5 p.m., a psycho in a pumpkin mask seeks revenge in the aptly named, though irritatingly spelled The Pumpkin Karver, although according to at least one stellar review of it, he "is a very lazy killer." That's just what I look for in my psychopaths: sloth.

Personally, my highlight is Cinemax's 10 p.m. showing of Black Swan, which should always be watched with Suspiria as a double feature of "ballet drives you insane and you should really stay away from anything made of glass."

The Summer Triangle
Qing Hua Ci (Music video)
Tragic-romantic-met-crack with narration by an inanimate object... I was this close to calling it "Vase ex Machina."

So where to start with this one: I was watching the pinch hit list go by on the e-mails and figuring that this year, I probably wouldn't get one. Seriously, they were getting snapped up left and right and I had just about resigned myself to the fact when I noticed one of them had been up. For over 30 minutes. Without someone jumping on it. And it looked fun to write.

So I looked at it and my thought process was something like this: Well, I have seen and enjoyed "The Bride With White Hair." Months ago from Netflix on a DVD I don't own. But there's also the option of a music video. That's a quick canon source - you didn't read Strange Tales before you signed up for that one and that turned out fine. Anyhow, I'm sure someone will snatch it up even if you say you want to write this.

( And then I got the e-mail saying it was mine... )

Peach Blossoms
Liáo zhâi zhì yì | Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio - Pú Sônglíng
"Sometimes, it's better not to give your heart to someone."
Written for Yuletide 2010.

Here's the thing about Yuletide. You may guess what fandom you're likely to get, you may keep obsessively refreshing the sign-up list (and maybe crashing the archive -winces), and you may even keep a yearly spreadsheet where you statistically analyze what you're most likely to get (and it never works), but I have never been able to successfully guess what I'm going to write. Never.

( This year, however, I think I've stumbled onto the key to predicting a Yuletide assignment: )

Little girls, this seems to say
Never stop upon the way
Never trust a stranger friend
No-one knows where it may end
As you're pretty, so be wise
Wolves may lurk in every guise
Now as then, 'tis simple truth
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth.

From The Company of Wolves at 11:30 p.m. speak for itself: "Indian snake worshippers turn an explorer's daughter into a hideous monster." Yeah.

ETA: Decided to use auto-post out of hideous curiosity. It's interesting in that it picked two passages, both of which are strangely complimentary and warn us that travelling only leads to danger. Thanks, LJ. Now I feel glad that I'm not visiting relatives for Christmas.