Yuletide recs: fanfic for people who don't do fanfic

Yuletide is a 'rare fandoms' fanfiction exchange that has taken place every year since 2003. This year there are over 2000 stories in the exchange, exemplifying the sheer variety of fanfiction. No, it is not all about sex. No, it is not all about writing the ending you wanted. No, it is not all unoriginal / smutty / badly-spelt / insulting to the original creators / silly.

Though obviously some of it is. Sturgeon's Law applies.

I'm recommending three works, for the sake of variety. There are quite a few others that I think are masterful: stories based on classics such as Dracula and We Have Always Lived in the Castle; on myths and fairy tales; on Casablanca and Singin' in the Rain; on, literally, hundreds of TV series and films that I have never heard of.

What these three works have in common, for me, is an obvious love of the original text; a sense of playfulness; a creative element that means they're not simple pastiche. Book-based fanfiction is different to fanfiction based on TV / film / music, in that there's an original voice, a canon prose style, to emulate. Not all book-based fanfiction does this: some does it so accurately that the stories read like works by the original author. (I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.) The two text-based works here do imitate the original pretty closely, but not slavishly.

Another thing they have in common: they sent me back to the original sources. As did quite a few others ...

( recommendations: Molesworth, The Lady's Not For Burning, Who Framed Roger Rabbit )

Get a Life, they said ...

... so last night I created a SecondLife account, and spent a few hours playing.

I feel kind of dirty now.

Technologically speaking, it's pretty fab, though there are still rough edges where (like early DOOM) I find myself embedded in walls; where an object doesn't behave as it claims to behave; where even my high-spec laptop struggles with rendering and resolution. (There's a reason I didn't try this before: the system requirements.)

My first impulse was to make my avatar look like me. I suspect quite a lot of the SL population go for wish-fulfilment, but for some reason that route didn't interest me. OK, my avatar's hair is somewhat redder than mine, and the eyeliner is a nicer shade of green: but people who know me in real life would probably be able to recognise me in SL (though I don't think the converse would be true.)

After that, though, I spent a lot of time wandering around. Yay flight. Yay teleport. Yay pretty backdrops and clever effects. I noted:
- I am even shyer in SL than in RL. Every time anyone else got close, I fled.
- When I first ventured online, back in the early 1990s (email) practically the first thing that happened was that I got propositioned. Same here.
- I am, as yet, not interested in doing anything. I just want to sit somewhere quietly, and watch.
- I am not inclined to spend RL money on SL acquisitions: nor am I prepared to do anything in SL (such as getting money by clicking surveys) that will affect anything outside the game.
- Notwithstanding that, there is a certain desire to acquire, a desire to 'build' a house (or, better, a ship) and make my own space and so on. But I think that's probably more to do with the sense of aimlessness, the lack of a game plan.
- It really did feel like being in Gibson's or Stephenson's cyberspace (though some of the avatars reminded me more of Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun)
- I can imagine using it the way I use IM / Jabber: a virtual meeting-place for people I already know, either from RL or from online communities.
- I can imagine using it to explore some of my psychological boundaries, like the shyness.

So, do any of you have SL accounts that you use? What do you do with them? Why? Where?