Yuletide 2014 Letter.
Hello, dear Yuletide Author!
a) I am sorry this letter is so late; RL got in the way and then I got stage fright (this is my first Yuletide) and I finally realised that I should GET THIS WRITTEN.
b) Sorry if this isn’t very helpful, I shall try to be logical and sensible and make sense.
c) I am so grateful for any fic in my fandoms that I will pretty much love anything you create, unless it involves Character A cutting Character B to ribbons and then eating them, which I will probably not like very much, if it’s all the same to you.
General Things.
a) I am totally up for yuleporn for all of my fandoms.
b) I don’t have a lot of triggers, but the ones to tread carefully around/avoid if possible: dead fathers/abusive fathers/extreme daddy issues; anxiety disorders/mental illnesses to do with anxiety; alcoholism (drinking/getting drunk in fics is fine, just not if they’re abusing it); serial killers/lots of death/murder.
c) I prefer happy endings or at least loose-ends-tied-up satisfying/organised endings, if happy isn’t a possibility.
d) I really super hate major character death. Like, even if it’s canonical, feel free to just ignore that and take it out. Unless it’s like really relevant like Batman’s parents or… no, actually, you can take that out too.
e) I like AUs a lot. Like a lot a lot. Even for fandoms that probably don’t need or shouldn’t have AUs. AUs are my favourites. My favourite types are: coffee shop, bakery, college, high school, bookshop, other retail, magic/supernatural, superhero, band, harlequin, historical, noir, detectives, space etc. I’m also okay with canon divergence ones! The only AU I really don’t get on with is A/B/O.
e) i) (okay, this is ridiculous, but: if you want to write a college or high school AU, hooray! I’d like that! Um… but if you do, could you focus more on the social side etc? Too much focus on the academic/trying to graduate with a good degree is very triggery to me at the moment.)
f) IT IS OKAY IF YOU DON’T LIKE AUS OR DON’T WANT TO WRITE ONE. I’m just giving you plenty of options in case you’d like to try!
g) Fics with plots are fun, if you like writing plots, so don’t let me stop you if you do! If you don’t, however, this is FINE. I super like stories that involve people basically faffing around being ridiculous, whether in a gen or romantic fashion. Slice of life, character studies, sets of vignettes, those are all great and lovely.
h) Re: romantic fic. I love het, slash and femslash, so if I give you the option to pick a pairing etc, do what you’d like! Getting together or established is great. As stated above, porn is fine and great, and if you just want to do porn, go for it. Porn with a lot of thinking about characterisation is also fun.
h) i) Porn! I like spanking and riding and rimming and fingering and lots of kissing.
i) Genre-wise, I’m easy too. Angst is great, as long as there is some kind of payoff - I’m not huge on hurt/comfort, but looking after sad people is nice. Fluff is great, whether you want to slip something slightly bitter underneath that or not. Bung in all the tropes you want, give me curtainfic, write something funny or silly or cracky or give everyone wings and adorable pet cats.
j) If you have any questions about stuff, or about the fandom bits below, feel free to message me anonymously on my tumblr: neitherusenorornament. I’m also on twitter perpetually at @shehulking, which I guess is less anonymous than tumblr but… that’s probs where it’s easiest to contact me if you want to/need to.
Fandom Specific.
Jack Reacher books - Lee Child.
I only discovered these fairly recently, but I cannot stop reading them. I love them mostly for the ridiculous and wonderful character that is Jack Reacher: okay, he kills a lot of people and stamps about being uber manly, BUT ALSO he is endearingly righteous and has really weirdly strong opinions on crockery and although claims that he buys new clothes every three days and he doesn’t care what he wears, he will spend the rest of the book bitching about whatever shoes/shirt he had to buy. And I find that charming. Also he is an actual gentleman to women and he isn’t homophobic or racist or any of the other shitty things other masculine heroes do in these kinds of books. So I like that a lot, and would like that awesome charming hulking failboatiness to be in the fic.
Ideas for things:
- Reacher really, really likes coffee. If you just want to write about him drinking coffee and wandering about thinking about coffee and crockery, like Lee Child so often does, I’d be fine with that.
- A character study of whatever aspects/emotions you like, with brooding mumbling ridiculous Reacher.
- This is cracky as all hell, but Reacher spends a lot of time wandering around highways, where America seems to have all those “WORLD’S LARGEST…” things. So if you want Reacher visiting some kind of hilarious museum or weird artefact, that would be fun.
- Lee Child basically wrote the worst sex scene in the world ever. So sex scenes that are not hilariously painful would be good fun. You can make up whatever OC you want or if you’ve read stuff with Frances Neagley in, I love her.
- I have a cosy headcanon where Reacher is bi, so a m/m fic of some kind (or a m/m/f fic of some kind) would be awesome.
-…look, I feel like trash garbage for even asking this, but IT IS YULETIDE, so I’m just going to very quickly whisper: if you have ever thought writing Jack Reacher/Taylor Swift would be fun, now is your moment.
Heist Society series by Ally Carter
Damn, I love these books. Aren’t they wonderful. Isn’t everyone the best. I don’t have a paragraph of feels to go in front of this set of bullet points, I just have EMOTIONS. Please include as many people from the series as you like as cameos and things, just because they’re not in the character list or what I requested. Mention Simon! Mention the Incest Bagshaw Brothers! Mention family! Yay!
Ideas for things:
- AU where Kat is Catwoman and Hale is Batman. Bonus points for other characters as DC people, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
- Kat/Hale/Nick. Relationship fic, gradual falling into an OT3, whatever you like.
- High school AU! Possibly even a boarding school high school AU!
- Future fic! Involving anyone you like! Doing anything you like!
- Kat/Gabrielle! I know they’re cousins, but come on, that would be fun.
- If you like plots, a heist is obviously fun, but I accept that that’s tricky, so don’t worry about it.
- Slice of life fic is fun too. Like, what do they do between heists? How badly does grocery shopping go? Does Gabi like stealing shoes?
- Gabi is perfect, so Gabi-centric anything would always be appreciated, if you’d like to do some not-central characters.
- Made-up backstories for anyone and everyone.
The Lunar Chronicles - Marissa Meyer
I love everyone in these books, so only getting to pick four characters is still a bit of a wrench. Cinder is probs my favourite lady, and I love her relationships with Iko and Thorne (who is useless and charming and OMG). I ship canonically everything in this series, so if you want to do that/refer to those pairings, hooray! Equally, if you wanted to do Cinder/Thorne or Cinder/Iko or Cinder/Scarlet or some other combination of queer ladies and boys and robots in escort bots then that’s fun too! Gen is also good. So you can play with characters in whatever way is best/easiest for you, and I’ll just claw my face with happy delight.
Ideas for things:
- Porn is great; age them up a bit if you like! Or awkward relationships/friendships developing between a couple of characters is great.
- Character studies of anyone you want.
- AUs are super fun; I’d love to keep in the robot/cyborg parts of the characters, even if it is a modern AU or something, but if you have to take them out for easy of plausibility then do that.
- Future fic - do they win? Do they lose? Are people ruling moons and earths now?
- I love the worldbuilding in this world, so if you’d like to explore New Beijing or Paris or any of the other cool locations, obvs with the characters, I’d enjoy that too!
Timothy Wilde Mysteries - Lyndsay Faye
Erm, this is distinctly unhelpful, but I just adore the characters in these stories, so ANYTHING AT ALL that you want to write, shippy or incesty or gen or the brothers being the worst or ot3 or a modern NYPD AU or anything else is FINE. I wish I could be more specific, but I just have a lot of unhelpful feelings. IF THIS IS THE YULETIDE FANDOM FOR ME YOU’VE GOT STUCK WITH, AND YOU HAVE NO IDEAS FROM THE REST OF THIS RIDICULOUS POST, then please hit me up on anon on tumblr and I shall dredge together some helpful hints and things.
Plebs
My attachment to this show has slightly alarmed and surprised me, because I love sitcoms and ancient Rome and things, but WOW, I’M SO ATTACHED. I love everyone, they are ridiculous and terrible. I have no idea how you’re going to write fic for this, if you’ve offered, which: the sign-ups say no one has - fair enough, there’s a reason I didn’t offer this - but just in case you got me with the bucket thing, I AM TRYING TO WRITE THIS.
Ideas:
- Look, I’ll just say, if you wanted to write Marcus/Stylax, that would be very enjoyable for everyone involved, by which I mean mostly me.
- Everyday life fic of them all buggering about is charming and great, like in the show.
- I really loved that episode where they acquired a baby, so more stuff about them failboating around being terrible with Binny/other acquired infants would be fun.
- I love the Ancient Rome aspects of the show, but if you want to do a modern AU or, fuck it, it’s yuletide, a spaceship AU, that would be super fun.
- Cameos from other characters - Water Boy, Landlord, Cynthia, Metella, Flavia - are always good fun.
Nashville
I requested this for one reason, and one reason only: I just want Juliette/Rayna. Please, even if that’s not your ship, even if you’re not a femslash person, please, please make this happen for me. Please. I am begging you. Porn, pre-femslash, fluff, angst, them being mostly mean to each other, them supporting each other through bad shit, anything. Please, please just give me Juliette/Rayna. It can be UST or implied and involve any other characters you’d like in the background/in cameos, any plot or AU or anything you want. Just make it Rayna/Juliette being the wonderful badass women they are.
Thank you for trawling through this, dear Yuletide Author. I am grateful for whatever happens or doesn’t happen, and I hope I’ve been helpful. If I haven’t, then contact me as it says above. Good luck, and I hope you enjoy yourself.
a) I am sorry this letter is so late; RL got in the way and then I got stage fright (this is my first Yuletide) and I finally realised that I should GET THIS WRITTEN.
b) Sorry if this isn’t very helpful, I shall try to be logical and sensible and make sense.
c) I am so grateful for any fic in my fandoms that I will pretty much love anything you create, unless it involves Character A cutting Character B to ribbons and then eating them, which I will probably not like very much, if it’s all the same to you.
General Things.
a) I am totally up for yuleporn for all of my fandoms.
b) I don’t have a lot of triggers, but the ones to tread carefully around/avoid if possible: dead fathers/abusive fathers/extreme daddy issues; anxiety disorders/mental illnesses to do with anxiety; alcoholism (drinking/getting drunk in fics is fine, just not if they’re abusing it); serial killers/lots of death/murder.
c) I prefer happy endings or at least loose-ends-tied-up satisfying/organised endings, if happy isn’t a possibility.
d) I really super hate major character death. Like, even if it’s canonical, feel free to just ignore that and take it out. Unless it’s like really relevant like Batman’s parents or… no, actually, you can take that out too.
e) I like AUs a lot. Like a lot a lot. Even for fandoms that probably don’t need or shouldn’t have AUs. AUs are my favourites. My favourite types are: coffee shop, bakery, college, high school, bookshop, other retail, magic/supernatural, superhero, band, harlequin, historical, noir, detectives, space etc. I’m also okay with canon divergence ones! The only AU I really don’t get on with is A/B/O.
e) i) (okay, this is ridiculous, but: if you want to write a college or high school AU, hooray! I’d like that! Um… but if you do, could you focus more on the social side etc? Too much focus on the academic/trying to graduate with a good degree is very triggery to me at the moment.)
f) IT IS OKAY IF YOU DON’T LIKE AUS OR DON’T WANT TO WRITE ONE. I’m just giving you plenty of options in case you’d like to try!
g) Fics with plots are fun, if you like writing plots, so don’t let me stop you if you do! If you don’t, however, this is FINE. I super like stories that involve people basically faffing around being ridiculous, whether in a gen or romantic fashion. Slice of life, character studies, sets of vignettes, those are all great and lovely.
h) Re: romantic fic. I love het, slash and femslash, so if I give you the option to pick a pairing etc, do what you’d like! Getting together or established is great. As stated above, porn is fine and great, and if you just want to do porn, go for it. Porn with a lot of thinking about characterisation is also fun.
h) i) Porn! I like spanking and riding and rimming and fingering and lots of kissing.
i) Genre-wise, I’m easy too. Angst is great, as long as there is some kind of payoff - I’m not huge on hurt/comfort, but looking after sad people is nice. Fluff is great, whether you want to slip something slightly bitter underneath that or not. Bung in all the tropes you want, give me curtainfic, write something funny or silly or cracky or give everyone wings and adorable pet cats.
j) If you have any questions about stuff, or about the fandom bits below, feel free to message me anonymously on my tumblr: neitherusenorornament. I’m also on twitter perpetually at @shehulking, which I guess is less anonymous than tumblr but… that’s probs where it’s easiest to contact me if you want to/need to.
Fandom Specific.
Jack Reacher books - Lee Child.
I only discovered these fairly recently, but I cannot stop reading them. I love them mostly for the ridiculous and wonderful character that is Jack Reacher: okay, he kills a lot of people and stamps about being uber manly, BUT ALSO he is endearingly righteous and has really weirdly strong opinions on crockery and although claims that he buys new clothes every three days and he doesn’t care what he wears, he will spend the rest of the book bitching about whatever shoes/shirt he had to buy. And I find that charming. Also he is an actual gentleman to women and he isn’t homophobic or racist or any of the other shitty things other masculine heroes do in these kinds of books. So I like that a lot, and would like that awesome charming hulking failboatiness to be in the fic.
Ideas for things:
- Reacher really, really likes coffee. If you just want to write about him drinking coffee and wandering about thinking about coffee and crockery, like Lee Child so often does, I’d be fine with that.
- A character study of whatever aspects/emotions you like, with brooding mumbling ridiculous Reacher.
- This is cracky as all hell, but Reacher spends a lot of time wandering around highways, where America seems to have all those “WORLD’S LARGEST…” things. So if you want Reacher visiting some kind of hilarious museum or weird artefact, that would be fun.
- Lee Child basically wrote the worst sex scene in the world ever. So sex scenes that are not hilariously painful would be good fun. You can make up whatever OC you want or if you’ve read stuff with Frances Neagley in, I love her.
- I have a cosy headcanon where Reacher is bi, so a m/m fic of some kind (or a m/m/f fic of some kind) would be awesome.
-…look, I feel like trash garbage for even asking this, but IT IS YULETIDE, so I’m just going to very quickly whisper: if you have ever thought writing Jack Reacher/Taylor Swift would be fun, now is your moment.
Heist Society series by Ally Carter
Damn, I love these books. Aren’t they wonderful. Isn’t everyone the best. I don’t have a paragraph of feels to go in front of this set of bullet points, I just have EMOTIONS. Please include as many people from the series as you like as cameos and things, just because they’re not in the character list or what I requested. Mention Simon! Mention the Incest Bagshaw Brothers! Mention family! Yay!
Ideas for things:
- AU where Kat is Catwoman and Hale is Batman. Bonus points for other characters as DC people, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
- Kat/Hale/Nick. Relationship fic, gradual falling into an OT3, whatever you like.
- High school AU! Possibly even a boarding school high school AU!
- Future fic! Involving anyone you like! Doing anything you like!
- Kat/Gabrielle! I know they’re cousins, but come on, that would be fun.
- If you like plots, a heist is obviously fun, but I accept that that’s tricky, so don’t worry about it.
- Slice of life fic is fun too. Like, what do they do between heists? How badly does grocery shopping go? Does Gabi like stealing shoes?
- Gabi is perfect, so Gabi-centric anything would always be appreciated, if you’d like to do some not-central characters.
- Made-up backstories for anyone and everyone.
The Lunar Chronicles - Marissa Meyer
I love everyone in these books, so only getting to pick four characters is still a bit of a wrench. Cinder is probs my favourite lady, and I love her relationships with Iko and Thorne (who is useless and charming and OMG). I ship canonically everything in this series, so if you want to do that/refer to those pairings, hooray! Equally, if you wanted to do Cinder/Thorne or Cinder/Iko or Cinder/Scarlet or some other combination of queer ladies and boys and robots in escort bots then that’s fun too! Gen is also good. So you can play with characters in whatever way is best/easiest for you, and I’ll just claw my face with happy delight.
Ideas for things:
- Porn is great; age them up a bit if you like! Or awkward relationships/friendships developing between a couple of characters is great.
- Character studies of anyone you want.
- AUs are super fun; I’d love to keep in the robot/cyborg parts of the characters, even if it is a modern AU or something, but if you have to take them out for easy of plausibility then do that.
- Future fic - do they win? Do they lose? Are people ruling moons and earths now?
- I love the worldbuilding in this world, so if you’d like to explore New Beijing or Paris or any of the other cool locations, obvs with the characters, I’d enjoy that too!
Timothy Wilde Mysteries - Lyndsay Faye
Erm, this is distinctly unhelpful, but I just adore the characters in these stories, so ANYTHING AT ALL that you want to write, shippy or incesty or gen or the brothers being the worst or ot3 or a modern NYPD AU or anything else is FINE. I wish I could be more specific, but I just have a lot of unhelpful feelings. IF THIS IS THE YULETIDE FANDOM FOR ME YOU’VE GOT STUCK WITH, AND YOU HAVE NO IDEAS FROM THE REST OF THIS RIDICULOUS POST, then please hit me up on anon on tumblr and I shall dredge together some helpful hints and things.
Plebs
My attachment to this show has slightly alarmed and surprised me, because I love sitcoms and ancient Rome and things, but WOW, I’M SO ATTACHED. I love everyone, they are ridiculous and terrible. I have no idea how you’re going to write fic for this, if you’ve offered, which: the sign-ups say no one has - fair enough, there’s a reason I didn’t offer this - but just in case you got me with the bucket thing, I AM TRYING TO WRITE THIS.
Ideas:
- Look, I’ll just say, if you wanted to write Marcus/Stylax, that would be very enjoyable for everyone involved, by which I mean mostly me.
- Everyday life fic of them all buggering about is charming and great, like in the show.
- I really loved that episode where they acquired a baby, so more stuff about them failboating around being terrible with Binny/other acquired infants would be fun.
- I love the Ancient Rome aspects of the show, but if you want to do a modern AU or, fuck it, it’s yuletide, a spaceship AU, that would be super fun.
- Cameos from other characters - Water Boy, Landlord, Cynthia, Metella, Flavia - are always good fun.
Nashville
I requested this for one reason, and one reason only: I just want Juliette/Rayna. Please, even if that’s not your ship, even if you’re not a femslash person, please, please make this happen for me. Please. I am begging you. Porn, pre-femslash, fluff, angst, them being mostly mean to each other, them supporting each other through bad shit, anything. Please, please just give me Juliette/Rayna. It can be UST or implied and involve any other characters you’d like in the background/in cameos, any plot or AU or anything you want. Just make it Rayna/Juliette being the wonderful badass women they are.
Thank you for trawling through this, dear Yuletide Author. I am grateful for whatever happens or doesn’t happen, and I hope I’ve been helpful. If I haven’t, then contact me as it says above. Good luck, and I hope you enjoy yourself.