Dear Yuletide Writer!
Dear Yuletide Writer,
First of all, thank you! Please go ahead and ignore all my suggestions and write whatever you want, if you want! :) Parts of this post are essentially cribbed from previous Dear Author letters I have done, with small changes here and there. As always, I'm going with "too much detail", but please ignore this if you'd like.
General information and stuff:
Things I like: Character studies! Character-driven stuff! Day in the life! People sitting around and talking, with no discernible plot! People disagreeing with each other without one of them being vilified for having a different opinion. I like plot! I like power and exploring power relationships and dynamics. I like queering everything. I like BDSM; my biggest love in BDSM is what I've been calling extra-consensual, when the sub just wants the big bad dom to shut up already and do it. So it probably goes without saying that I also like foreplay! I like "just kiss already!" I like fading to black! I also love gen!
I love alternate universes! I love unreliable narrators and non-linear narratives. I have been conducting a torrid love affair with second person, which uses up a lot of commas and breaks grammar into tiny pitiful pieces, and so it goes without saying that I would love second person! Or first person or third, etc. I like parentheses (like these) and fun with sentence structures and people talking over each other. I love dialogue! If you want to write a story entirely in dialogue, I would love to read a story entirely in dialogue!
I love magical or supernatural fusion stuff. I love crackfic. I love futurefic. I love vampires. I love AUs of all sorts. I love mindfucking and mind control! I love vampires who actually bite people. I love telepathic bonds. (Also, bondage.) (And oral sex.) (And telepathically arguing while having sex.) (I like dialogue is I think my point.)
I love happily ever afters. I love old married couples. I love people who still love each other both despite and because of all their flaws. I love friendships. I love shiny happy people holding hands. I love alliteration! I love stream of consciousness! I love a lot of other things not covered above!
Things I do not want: Non-canonical child abuse. Character bashing. Humiliation. Slavery. Unrelenting angst. Any violence to fingers or eyes. Apocalypse, disaster, or dystopia fic. Zombies. "My way or the highway" coercion in dubcon. If there is going to be sex: no rimming or scat, please. Also, I would prefer that it not be a holiday-themed story. If this is completely against why you're doing Yuletide, I don't mind a holiday-set story that uses the time of the year as the background. But nothing overtly holiday-ish, please.
Please don't consider the length of my blabbing on any indication of me wanting one fandom more than another. It says more about me blathering than about anything else. I would really love any fic in any of these fandoms. ♥
In alphabetical order, my first request is:
Austra Family - Elaine Bergstrom (Character: Laurence Austra)
This book series is about a bunch of blood-sucking aliens who crash-landed on Earth a long time ago and are the reasons for the vampire myths. Whether this is "aliens as vampires" or "vampires as aliens" or something else is probably up for debate. ;)
I originally bought my copies through eBay and used book stores after reading them from the library. If you have a Kindle, you can buy all but one of them from Amazon. The author, who is self-publishing, also has paper versions of some of the books available.
I've read Beyond Sundown and liked it, but I don't need canon compliance with it.
In terms of characters, I nominated four and then went with Laurence. He's an awesome character and I would love anything that has to do with his music or dealing with the aftermaths of Blood Alone or Shattered Glass or his perspective on things in Nocturne.
But I'm not picky about characters. I love these books and I would love there to be any fic whatsoever in this fandom. ♥
Dead Isle - Sam Starbuck (Character: Any)
AKA
copperbadge. This book is available online.
I just finished this a couple days ago, after being inspired to get off my ass and read it already (I had downloaded it and it was just there, mocking me) by seeing it on the nominations list. So I am still in the WANT EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING phase. This will be just splatting my brain on the screen here. This world is fantastic, and there is so much going on there, so much backstory, so much current story. There's a lot to explore.
I requested Any and I really mean that: Any. Prompts and blathering below are predicated on the assumption that "Any" means "Any nominated character", but I am totally open to "any" meaning "any character". I am just not listing them because I don't want it to be a case of "she didn't list it, she doesn't want it", when it would really be "she didn't list it, but still wants it".
So, splattering my head! What if Jack weren't white? What kinds of adventures in spying and/or authoring has Ellis gotten up to? What about some of the other books he's written, or the book he'll write about this, or any book he writes in the future? What was Clare's journey to America like and what was it like when she arrived? What was it like in quarantine? Jack and Clare's first meeting, did they do magic for each other? As an adult, how much and what does Clare remember about Australia? When she was considering how she would track down her parents, what was her thought process like? How did it change as she discovered what current day Australia was like? What were Purva's thoughts on seeing the airship for the first time? Purva's thoughts on anything, actually. What's her childhood like, what kinds of stories does she tell around a campfire? What if Jack and Clare were role-swapped: Clare decides to pursue engineering instead of Creation. After all, it's already taking up so much effort to maintain her glamour, and if she ever needs Creation help, her best friend Jack is a Creationist and is determined to figure out how it all works and so make it make sense, and he'll study, study, study until he can tell you exactly why he's doing and why it works, and then later, he can help Saturday reverse-engineer the plague.
Also, I think it would be hilarious and awesome if you crossed this over with Temeraire. It would also be amazing if you crossed Ellis Graveworthy with any of the other Ellis Graveworthies (is that the plural? I am deciding that's the plural) that Sam's written, although I'm not sure how well that would work in with Yuletide rules or if there'd be a problem. Either way, total win.
Discworld - Terry Pratchett (Character: Carrot Ironfoundersson)
Carrot is one of my favorite characters of all time. Okay, there are a few of my Favorite Characters Of All Time in Discworld, it being that kind of series, but that's beside the point. Carrot is a great parody/subversion character in the Discworld sense: he's the hidden, secret, One True Real King. And in any other world, we know what his story would be. We've seen it a million times. He'd have the usual Hero's Journey and then be crowned king and it's all one true destiny and all that.
But that's not Discworld.
The One True Hero storyline, and the hero's journey in general, can be really problematic in terms of agency and the like, everyone has to be passive and be victims so they can be saved, it divides the world into the allies and the enemies, and everyone but the hero is expendable, and so on. Carrot undercuts those expectations very well. Because Carrot came to Ankh-Morpork to become a cop and he has become one, but he's one cop out of many, not The Cop. (If anyone is The Cop, it's Vimes.) He's changed the Watch, but he's not this perfect being. He has the power to make people obey him and uses it, but has gone out of his way to avoid his One True Destiny, because he's chosen something else. He knows he's the one true king and has decided "no, thanks". He is shown canonically to be fallible and wrong about things and is allowed to be wrong. He works as a member of a team, he has no sidekick or anything like that. It's not his story and the other people are just along for the ride.
In other stories, the One True Hero is the only one who can do anything, who can save people. This is bad for the world, and also bad for that character, because they don't have any choice in the matter, it's their crushing burden of destiny. Whether they're happy about the adventure or not isn't the point, what pushed them out into the adventure isn't the point. Someone died, something happened, whatever it is, it doesn't matter, because it comes down to: only one person can save people. And that one person, and no one else, can do it. Other people can help, but they'll usually die along the way, because Other People's Deaths Are Important For Character Development.
So that's the character arc that the genre establishes for the hidden prince, the one true king who must discover his destiny and reclaim his throne. That is not Carrot at all.
Which is fantastic.
I would love any fic that's about Carrot. Backstory, current story, future fic, AUs, random crack AUs, character studies, getting lost in the trousers of time, etc. His birth, his childhood, what was it like growing up. Carrot As Dwarf fascinates me and I would love to know more about it.
The specific prompt that reminded me that I really should request this was: Carrot's a dwarf. And, as a dwarf, she doesn't see why being a woman is any kind of problem.
But no pressure in that prompt! That was just what kicked my brain, feel totally free to ignore that. :)
Other ideas: Carrot just generally as a dwarf in Anhk-Morpork, Carrot and the Watch, Carrot's relationships to other people in the Watch and/or Vetinari, how he grows and changes over time, what his parents back home think of all of this. I'm always interested in power and power dynamics and I think Carrot is an amazing example when it comes to power, so any exploration of that would be awesome, how he sees power, the kinds he has and the kinds he refuses, how he perceives Vetinari's job. His relationship with Vetinari and Vimes is all bound up in so many different power relationships and I would love to see that explored. Or Carrot's power and charisma in a more humorous way: he knows everyone, which probably leads to hilarity quite often.
Or maybe Carrot encounters a character from another Discworld book! I've read everything but the Tiffany Aching books, which are still unfinished. I loved Monstrous Regiment, so any character from there would be awesome. (And if you went for the above gender prompt, hey, even more of a case where Every Character In This Book Is A Woman!) I also really loved Small Gods and Pyramids. I'd list my other favorite characters, but I don't want it to be a case of any pressure to write a character other than Carrot. Just: I love a lot of other characters! If you love other characters, please write them!
I love the Watch books the best out of Discworld, and second to the Watch is basically anything that takes place in Anhk-Morpork. It's a cliche, I know, but it really is a character in its own right, and I love it. So anything that took place in Anhk-Morpork would be cool. Carrot as a dwarf and the dwarfs in Anhk-Morpork are some of my favorite things, so I'd love to see it.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke (Character: Raven King)
I tend to fall in love with amazing backstory characters, and this book is no different. And then the Raven King turned into a current-story character and I just wanted more and more and more of him, because he's fascinating. Basically, my big frustration with this book was that it was about the Raven King without being about the Raven King. I liked the book, but I have Conflicted Feelings about it. It does seem clear that this is the Raven King's story of how he decides to bring magic back to England and that they really are doing his magic (I imagine this like he wrote a program and everyone's using it, but then he pulls support and it all degrades and eventually becomes useless, and no one knows how to write a different program to do the same thing, but then he comes back and revises everything so the old program works again yay, because I am a nerd), so why do we get so little detail and information about him? We should have more. Please, please, please give me more. Anything about the Raven King. I have read The Ladies Of Grace Adieu and loved it, especially the Charcoal Burner story, so any details from there would be lovely.
Things to explore about the Raven King... okay, first of all, what does he think his name is? Does he consider himself having no One True Real Name, and how does that work magically? Does magic let you name yourself? Does he have multiple Real Names depending on the situation? Does it change over time? I was a little skeeved by the way the narrative dealt with names, that your only real true name is the one your mother gave you, even if she never said it out loud. Is this the fairy ideal of naming, or can you choose your own name? Fairies definitely have an inexact view of human culture ("Christian" as a general term?!!!!!!), and this leads to other awesome questions about the Raven King about him and identity and his relationship to his kingdoms. He's a human raised in Faerie, what are his relationships like with humans raised in England and other humans raised in Faerie? What are his relationships like with the fairies who raised him and his fairy subjects? There's so much there to explore in terms of identity and naming, and I would love if you explored that.
Any time on the timeline would be very awesome. What about his court, what's he doing during Strange/Norrell, where was he right before bringing Vinculus back to life, what's he doing these days?
Other things! Vinculus! I think Vinculus would have been an amazing main character for the book. He's a magician before magic comes back, he has talent but not knowledge, he's basically magic himself, being the King's Book. He has an intriguing backstory and is so wound up in what's going on. Vinculus in relationship to the Raven King would be amazing. In a similar vein, Childermass would be amazing, too. There is so much that could be done there. I'd love to see it.
A word about terminology: I know it's canonical, but I would really rather you did not use Christian as a general term for humans. I would love it if you addressed the problems with it, especially considering that there are canonical non-Christian characters. But no pressure to address it if you don't want. Just... I'm Jewish, and there is so much erasure going on there, it's disturbing. If you wanted to write a fic where either Tom Levy or David Montefiore (from Grace Adieu) met the Raven King, that would be amazing.
But as I said above, please go ahead and ignore all of this and write something you've been wanting to write. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/699060.html.