HLH_Shortcuts is releasing! And the story for me is already available!

hlh_shortcuts began releasing on the Winter Solstice, Duncan's Birthday, as is traditional, and will continue releasing a few stories per day until they're all shared. Many thanks to our new moderator team for all their efforts! Thanks to them, and to everyone who wrote and beta'd! Time to read:

• Check out all the 2024 stories.
• Revisit out all the stories from all the AO3 years (probably not the LJ years)

The story written for my '24 fest match released on Sunday: "Behind the Story" (~2K words, gen). The anonymous creator chose not to use archive warnings and not to supply a rating; with no disrespect to those choices, I'd rate it "G" and No Archive Warnings Apply. If you're an HL fan, you're unlikely to find anything triggering here; this is what the show is about, I've always thought.

"Behind the Story" follows Randi McFarland in the days after Tessa's murder, how and where it touches her work and her conscience and her heart, culminating in a Randi & Richie scene I never knew I needed. There is so much Tessa here, through their eyes, and I love it. The story briskly opened long-shuttered second-season rooms in my imagination, and, in passing, dropped at least two bonus story ideas on the side.

I shared a longer comment on the story itself. You can read that for more on what in it caught my attention. Or ask! And of course there are many other stories to choose from, if this isn't your personal flavor of HL.

I posted my first Zelda fanwork

In the unlikely event that folks don't have enough fanworks to enjoy this week...

I posted my first-ever The Legend of Zelda piece (Twilight Princess/Ocarina of Time), which is a poem, my first in over ten years:
"The Secrets He Holds"
G, gen
192 words
5 stanzas of 5 pentameter lines
The Hero's Shade | Golden Wolf | Hero of Time

I know that the audience for this is excruciatingly tiny. It's okay. ~grin~ I'm voluntarily writing canon-heavy gen poetry about un-ported vintage games because it makes me happy; anything else is gravy. ;-)