Thank you, Yuletide.

As at least half of my friendslist knows, the stories for the Yuletide annual fanfiction challenge appeared this week. Of the 2042 stories in seven-hundred-plus fandoms, I can't claim to have read more than eighty or so*, but there are some mind-bogglingly good stories among those eighty. Go ye and browse the archive. For now, since I'm short on time, I'll only recommend one story which had me staring in jaw-dropped awe for quite a while:

Yule Morning, or Malvolio's Revenge (Shakespeare's Twelfth Night).

This, right here, is the best of the fanfiction world. In five acts of note-perfect Elizabethan verse and prose, Yule Morning explores what comes after Twelfth Night. Toby Belch is still drunk, Malvolio is still furious, and Olivia and Orsino are beginning to realize that neither Sebastian nor Viola adequately substitutes for Cesario. Feste, that irrepressible fount of double entendres, has every opportunity to deliver lines like these (which may be more comprehensible if you know that 'nothing' is Shakespearean slang for 'vagina'):

( Why, it is the fashion for lords to change their coats and be ladyships... )

*No, actually, I haven't been getting much dissertation work done this week. How did you guess?