I owe my amazing remixer another review for 5.  I'm having difficulty processing my delight that someone went back to something that is so old (I now remember I posted Stuff in late 1996-1997) that was so hugely important to me and to the direction my adult life would take.  I was messaging with petra  last night, shocked to learn that here was yet another person I meet a decade or more later who had read that story in the 90s.  And as I looked at my Twitter timeline (another advantage of all my self indulgent squee is that it drove everything else off my TL for a little bit ugh ugh ugh), I realized that the vast majority of my peeps have come from two places -- the pool of folks I met while writing and posting Stuff and in the subsequent development of Club Jade and, and then 10+ years later through writing The Stone Gryphon.  Apart from neighbors and work colleagues the vast majority of my nearest and dearest have all come through communities built around fic.

amidst the haze of last night some thoughts that kept me up too late.
About Stuff-- ( more babbling )

About communities -- I keep seeing those things on Tumblr about OMG what are old people doing in fandom.  Why are you STILL HERE?  I joked to Petra that we're like mildew.  They said it "People with a rich fannish history aren't mildew, we're the mysterious plant-like organism that grows in all caves everywhere and glows with an unearthly light, allowing stories to flourish."  the experience isn't unique.  I'm just blessed to have been able to do it twice, in a different way, different era, with TSG, and again have the privilege of meeting wonderful people through fic, bonding over it, and then the bonds of friendship endure when the fic fades.

I suppose it's fitting.  This year, I finally, finally uploaded all of Stuff to AO3 under rthstewart and on fanfiction.net under the old G2 handle.  I went back and wrote Mara in an xover with River Song in Separated at Birth in 2011 and observed at the time that some 16 years after writing Stuff, I found I was interested in different things, like whether Mara had any friends.  I'd said what I had to say about Luke and Mara in Stuff and that was all there was to say.  However, Stuff certainly assumed lots of backstory and that post Last Command Mara had a very rich life independent of Luke, that she possessed emotional intelligence, that she was loyal, that she could be fun.  What did her life look like without Luke in it? 

There were some really wonderful Mara prompts in yuletide this year.  The one I'm really sorry I didn't get to was one by beatrice_otter  that had me plotting Mara and Karrde on their first caper together.  I'll get to that because damn, that would be fun.  But that left some other stories that I thought I could tell, missing moments between Mara and Karrde that admittedly fill in some of my own head canon, especially abut Mara's ties to the lightsaber Luke gives her (the big tube of lipstick) and the Jade's Fire and the importance of home, belonging, and freedom.    ancarett  and Princess_lirin had great prompts and it was really fun to take them on as treats.

So, I wrote Home Game and Emerald Light Refracted and Dispersed which are both closely related and in fact, if you're inclined to read,  I'd recommend you read the first two parts of Emerald Light (Mara and Karrde just post TLC and just post Jedi Academy), then read Home Game (which is post Jade Solitaire and before the Corellian series) and then conclude with the final bit of Emerald Light, Mara and Karrde post-Vision.  Home Game is where I really set out my head canon on just why the Fire was so important to Mara and why it was Such A Big Deal when she destroyed her ship in Vision. 

so read if you like!  Or not!

One final observation is how really quaint the stories read to me.  They harken back to a different era in a way, heavy on dialogue and SW tech, written as spackle and gap filler in the Bantam Spectra era.  They aren't as plotty as the WEG Adventure Journal stories because that's never been my strength, but the feel, to me, is similar.  They are very old fashioned.  To that end, there are a things in both stories slipped in that harken back to that era--, references to Karrde's hard drinking Corellian stringer and the splicing of the ship transponder, Kyp Durron, Shada, the Jade's Fire beacon call, (heck the emphasis upon the ship at all), the fact that Zahn always thought post-TLC that Mara had a calling as a teacher,  and a few other things.  Certainly, anyone who has read my SW work over the years (and my and Yav's collaborations) knew it was me and I really had some moments of LULZ when Dunc  posted about the yuletide prompts on CJ. 

So, that's all.  Read if you like.  Happy Yuletide!