Yuletide Letter 2017
Dear My Amazing Masked Writer,
Hello, there and thank you, thank you, thank you very much for being the writer for my 10th year in Yuletide. You are one of my very most favorite parts of the holiday season. Getting to write a fic, and knowing there will be something shiny and brilliant waiting for me on Christmas morning, made from my rarest loves by someone with gorgeous artisan hands. Thank you. Really. So much.
I want you to have tons fun with this challenge and not feel pigeonholed, thus do not feel locked, chained and bound to any of the details I will place below. I am a fan of all relationships, slash and het and fem and gen with equal squee. So please feel free to go with whatever fits you best in your writing and know that I'll love it regardless.
I do not like: characters who are one-dimensional, characters who sound like they are fourteen or twenty when they aren't, weak underdeveloped villains, nonconsensual anything scenes (unless it actually shows in the canon beforehand), abuse, needless character bashing or setting up of people (character a and b go together in this fic thus c and d and e and f must be together to make a and b have happened), weak women, and really unless it's very well written, and has a solid point to plot, I skim most sex scenes.
Things that should definitely be avoided, because they get me on edgy/uncomfortable/annoyed incredibly quickly. Mpreg, possessiveness/overruling jealousy, embarrassment/humiliation, first-person present-tense, RPF of all kinds, prejudice, racism, misogyny, bigotry, completely breaking something canon already proved, hatesex, hyper-dependence, high school AUs, furies, infantilism, BDSM (in canons or character it doesn't fit in).
Not all of these dislikes are absolutely universal. I've enjoyed several of these that were done amazingly well, by writers I trust, in canon bubbles I trust. I don't have that same kind of safety net in an anonymous exchange though, and so it's easier for me side with caution over reckless abandon.
I like: plots and character development, especially deeper into the canon which we haven't gotten to see. I love relationships; friends, family, lovers (together and unrequited). Prose that is written as poetry. Good spelling and proper grammar. Narrators (though this one is very hard to have pulled off correctly). I like happy and I like dark. Set the right, true depth in a scene and I'll be there whatever you put it. Scenery and setting, and all the people and places this connects to being present is important.
Strong characters, overwhelming emotions, hard truths, hypocritical humanity (or beingness), to be able to feel and touch and hear what is happening, details that fill out the world around my characters makes my heart soar. Emotions, banter, secrets revealed, journals, poetry, literacy. Believable alternate universes, flawed characters, formal wear, bare feet, multiculturalism, twisted endings and what if endings. All sorts of weather, especially windy fall, snowy winter, sunny spring, and rain.
I like case fics, adventure fics, family fics, team fics, mystery fics, snapshot fics, back in the day flashback fics. I like plot, so much that it's hard to have that be three tiny words. I adore, above and beyond everything, actual canon details and historical callbacks/shout-outs to things that happened before. I like worlds that are diverse. I like characters/casts that are diverse. I like varieties of and diversity in everything: women, men, children, race, skin color, multiculturalism, religion, age, disabled, not disabled, gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, gender box figuring out.
I love love stories, too, perhaps, best of all. I don't mean just fluff, but any kind of story even unrequited or parted lovers, deaths, family, friends, etc love stories. If it has love in it somewhere, that is true and beating and not perfect, I will love it.
~*~
I. Sense8
Characters: All Character Request (Riley Blue, Will Gorski, Nomi Marks, Sun Bak)
Sense8 has been my pinnacle top favorite show since the moment it came out and I watched all of season one in the space of one day. I love the idea of the evolution of humans to a new level, the mysterious history behind everything we do and don't know about what is happening (in the pov of the newest baby cluster still making it and figuring out what is happening). It was really hard to pick characters for this one, because of the main characters at 8, but they each have their own arm into their own world, so I pick arms more than sets to give you some ideas about possible inspirations.
For Riley, I would love more on anything of her background. With her father, with her pregnancy, with her music, and, of course, with her and Will's whole story of the last season. For Nomi, I'm dying for so much more. Tell me more about Nomi's transition, and DESPERATELY more about how she and Amanita got together (because Amanita is the coolest, most knowing, most trusting girlfriend ever). For Sun, I would, also, love almost anything. Tell me about her growing up with her brother, mother and father all still together. Tell me how she met her teacher and instilled such loyalty, admiration, and love from him.
Any and all cluster-mates and show extras are welcome at all times and in all ways so feel blessed and welcome to do whatever comes to you.
II. New Mutants
Characters: Illyana Rasputin (Illyana, Kitty, Rahne, Piotr)
Where do I even start? Illyana Rasputin is my favorite character in this whole comic series and has been in this age-block of the X-Men comics since I read Magik as a child. I love everything about her terrible beginning, how it changed her,
and all the people around her: her brother, her team, her friends and those who call her family.
I would love anything touching on any of her time periods. I love her relationships with Kitty & Rahne (and would love anything best friends and/or lovers/girlfriends her), which caveat, too, is welcome to cover the tension with Piotr on the one side and with Rahne's religious problems and slow come around to Illyana not being quote-unquote "evil" because of her powers. I do swing harder to the side with Kitty (which makes it complicated that I hardcore ship Kitty & Piotr as a forever ship, too. Woe to my heart).
I'd love anything you could tell me of her, of her domain, of her growing powers, of where she goes, and how she ends up.
III. The Night Circus
Characters: All Character Request (Celia, Marco, Bailey, Poppet, Widget, Tsukiki, Hinata)
Guh. This is one of my favorite books read in 2015. It was recommended by a friend and once I opened it I was glued like crazy for days on end, swallowed up in the sharp contrasting whites and blacks, presents and futures and pasts, in the magic and fatality. I love this world, incontrovertibly. It's glorious and the prose is beyond the world into a magic of its own. (Because of it, I even wrote Yuletide for it in 2015.)
Again, so much would make me happy here. I would love to know more about how Celia and Marco get on after the events of the book, now that they are together but altogether in another place they never expected to be. I would love to know about how the Circus is taken care of by the twins and Bailey. I would love to know the story of Bailey and Poppet. I would love to know more about the story of the bet, with the people before this one. I would love to hear more about the tents that were made and the people in the circus.
Extra, not offered name tags I would die to hear more about: I would love how the fathers started this game. I would cry for Tsukiko & Hinata's romance, rise and ruin (especially as there are only five works dedicated to this beautiful, painful love story).
IV. The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
Characters: All Character Request (Joe, Jim, Amos, Chrisjen)
I love The Expanse. End Stop. Like entirely. Completely. I love the universe. I love it's growth. I love Miller, and the molecule and I've gotten compelled about and come to care for every single narrator that's ever been in any book or novella extra piece. I have read all of them. I've even reread half of them, in preparation for the show coming at the end of the year.
I would love nearly anything and everything from this. Tell me more about the rag-tag 'found family' crew learning to be a family, or realizing they are one. Tell me more about where any of them came from and what they went through before they got her. Tell me more about the Mao's. Tell me about Bobbi and Chrisjen's working relationship. Or more about Bobbi's family and whole life in general. Or more about Chrisjen's family or background or tell me the story of Chrisjen and The Expanse Events through Arjun's eyes. Tell me anything and everything and I will love it beyond words.
I would cry the happiest tears for more of Proto!Miller. I would deeply, also, love more Amos & Peaches getting along (with background Jime & Peaches still learning now to even people humanly in the same space).
V. Killjoys
Characters: Dutch, Johnny Jaqobis, Lucy, D'avin Jaqobis, Pree, Alvis
This is another of my three favorite finds from the summer. I fell hook, line and sinker for this one. Sci-Fi western, with bounty hunters, mysterious government spies/assigns, political intrigue and back biting, cheeky gay bar tenders along with cheeky talking ships, and monks making religious-civil unrest which is headed to revolution, while people take their mental-emotional breaks reading comics to eahc other? Sign me, the hell, up for all of that. And then it only got better and better. From harem girls, to bombs, to back stories.
I don't have a favorite character that isn't "all of the three of them together," but I'm definitely interested in the backgrounds of D'avin and then Dutch most. I would love pieces on either of them. I'd love anything in-depth about where D'avin ended up and what he did while trying to make himself a better man. I'd love the missing time of D'avin's. I'd love pieces of Dutches childhood. I would love hearing how the Johnny-Lucy bond grew.
I have a massive, unending love for the Dutch-Johnny family bond (from watching each others back to picking Dutch over D'avin and even reading comic books out loud to Dutch) and I'd love to see how that formed. I'd, also, love to see anything about how the Jaqobis Boys grew up together, shadows and all.
VI. The Sunding by Jacqueline Carey
Characters: All Characters / Cereline, Satoris, Aracus, All the Gods
This is my smallest fandom, and then one in ten years that has gotten the very least love or ever moved or changed.
There are *exactly* three fics for this fandom in A03. Two of them are written by me, and one that is now gone was written for me.
I love this series. It's one of the few series to make me cry through the last fifty or sixty pages and I have a special place in my heart for Cerelinde, Satoris, Tanaros, and Ushahin. I love this world and the spin it puts on the notions of 'good,' 'evil,' 'right,' 'wrong,' and assumptions of 'truth.' Tell me a story of what happens afterward. I love to see any number of things. The floor is nearly completely open on this.
How does the Sunderer's death effect these people? How does Cerelinde and Aracus's early marriage go after how much she's been changed by these events? What happened to Ushahin? Tell me more about the many yeared life of Tanaros? Where were the Gods during this whole story or what did they do forever past or forward? What real-life events became the myths the book characters reference? How about more interactions in that dark world between Tanaros, Ushahin, Satoris, and Cerelinde?
I would honestly adore almost anything you could give me of this.
Thank you, thank you, and thank you, again. I am already bowled over with your amazingness just offered to write my story and I hope it wasn't so bad having to wait for me to write up this letter. Have some metaphorical milk and cookies, or dark hot chocolate with marshmallows and mint in them, as I would love to spoil you with everything already in my gratitude.
Also, while I will leave you, I celebrate Yule as a religious day of birth and Christmas as family day, so this does not have to be set near the holiday. (But I do have a soft spot for the rare holiday fic done well, too, so long as they really aren't 'miracle' reliant or religious propaganda. Christmas and Yuletide, the challenge itself in this season, just tends to give me warm fuzzies, too.)
2017 Challenge Sign-Ups
Chromatic Challenge, Crueltide, Femslash Challenge, Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational, Wrapping Paper
[This entry was originally posted at https://wanderlustlover.dreamwidth.org/2324235.html. Comment on either at your leisure.]
Hello, there and thank you, thank you, thank you very much for being the writer for my 10th year in Yuletide. You are one of my very most favorite parts of the holiday season. Getting to write a fic, and knowing there will be something shiny and brilliant waiting for me on Christmas morning, made from my rarest loves by someone with gorgeous artisan hands. Thank you. Really. So much.
I want you to have tons fun with this challenge and not feel pigeonholed, thus do not feel locked, chained and bound to any of the details I will place below. I am a fan of all relationships, slash and het and fem and gen with equal squee. So please feel free to go with whatever fits you best in your writing and know that I'll love it regardless.
I do not like: characters who are one-dimensional, characters who sound like they are fourteen or twenty when they aren't, weak underdeveloped villains, nonconsensual anything scenes (unless it actually shows in the canon beforehand), abuse, needless character bashing or setting up of people (character a and b go together in this fic thus c and d and e and f must be together to make a and b have happened), weak women, and really unless it's very well written, and has a solid point to plot, I skim most sex scenes.
Things that should definitely be avoided, because they get me on edgy/uncomfortable/annoyed incredibly quickly. Mpreg, possessiveness/overruling jealousy, embarrassment/humiliation, first-person present-tense, RPF of all kinds, prejudice, racism, misogyny, bigotry, completely breaking something canon already proved, hatesex, hyper-dependence, high school AUs, furies, infantilism, BDSM (in canons or character it doesn't fit in).
Not all of these dislikes are absolutely universal. I've enjoyed several of these that were done amazingly well, by writers I trust, in canon bubbles I trust. I don't have that same kind of safety net in an anonymous exchange though, and so it's easier for me side with caution over reckless abandon.
I like: plots and character development, especially deeper into the canon which we haven't gotten to see. I love relationships; friends, family, lovers (together and unrequited). Prose that is written as poetry. Good spelling and proper grammar. Narrators (though this one is very hard to have pulled off correctly). I like happy and I like dark. Set the right, true depth in a scene and I'll be there whatever you put it. Scenery and setting, and all the people and places this connects to being present is important.
Strong characters, overwhelming emotions, hard truths, hypocritical humanity (or beingness), to be able to feel and touch and hear what is happening, details that fill out the world around my characters makes my heart soar. Emotions, banter, secrets revealed, journals, poetry, literacy. Believable alternate universes, flawed characters, formal wear, bare feet, multiculturalism, twisted endings and what if endings. All sorts of weather, especially windy fall, snowy winter, sunny spring, and rain.
I like case fics, adventure fics, family fics, team fics, mystery fics, snapshot fics, back in the day flashback fics. I like plot, so much that it's hard to have that be three tiny words. I adore, above and beyond everything, actual canon details and historical callbacks/shout-outs to things that happened before. I like worlds that are diverse. I like characters/casts that are diverse. I like varieties of and diversity in everything: women, men, children, race, skin color, multiculturalism, religion, age, disabled, not disabled, gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, gender box figuring out.
I love love stories, too, perhaps, best of all. I don't mean just fluff, but any kind of story even unrequited or parted lovers, deaths, family, friends, etc love stories. If it has love in it somewhere, that is true and beating and not perfect, I will love it.
~*~
I. Sense8
Characters: All Character Request (Riley Blue, Will Gorski, Nomi Marks, Sun Bak)
Sense8 has been my pinnacle top favorite show since the moment it came out and I watched all of season one in the space of one day. I love the idea of the evolution of humans to a new level, the mysterious history behind everything we do and don't know about what is happening (in the pov of the newest baby cluster still making it and figuring out what is happening). It was really hard to pick characters for this one, because of the main characters at 8, but they each have their own arm into their own world, so I pick arms more than sets to give you some ideas about possible inspirations.
For Riley, I would love more on anything of her background. With her father, with her pregnancy, with her music, and, of course, with her and Will's whole story of the last season. For Nomi, I'm dying for so much more. Tell me more about Nomi's transition, and DESPERATELY more about how she and Amanita got together (because Amanita is the coolest, most knowing, most trusting girlfriend ever). For Sun, I would, also, love almost anything. Tell me about her growing up with her brother, mother and father all still together. Tell me how she met her teacher and instilled such loyalty, admiration, and love from him.
Any and all cluster-mates and show extras are welcome at all times and in all ways so feel blessed and welcome to do whatever comes to you.
II. New Mutants
Characters: Illyana Rasputin (Illyana, Kitty, Rahne, Piotr)
Where do I even start? Illyana Rasputin is my favorite character in this whole comic series and has been in this age-block of the X-Men comics since I read Magik as a child. I love everything about her terrible beginning, how it changed her,
and all the people around her: her brother, her team, her friends and those who call her family.
I would love anything touching on any of her time periods. I love her relationships with Kitty & Rahne (and would love anything best friends and/or lovers/girlfriends her), which caveat, too, is welcome to cover the tension with Piotr on the one side and with Rahne's religious problems and slow come around to Illyana not being quote-unquote "evil" because of her powers. I do swing harder to the side with Kitty (which makes it complicated that I hardcore ship Kitty & Piotr as a forever ship, too. Woe to my heart).
I'd love anything you could tell me of her, of her domain, of her growing powers, of where she goes, and how she ends up.
III. The Night Circus
Characters: All Character Request (Celia, Marco, Bailey, Poppet, Widget, Tsukiki, Hinata)
Guh. This is one of my favorite books read in 2015. It was recommended by a friend and once I opened it I was glued like crazy for days on end, swallowed up in the sharp contrasting whites and blacks, presents and futures and pasts, in the magic and fatality. I love this world, incontrovertibly. It's glorious and the prose is beyond the world into a magic of its own. (Because of it, I even wrote Yuletide for it in 2015.)
Again, so much would make me happy here. I would love to know more about how Celia and Marco get on after the events of the book, now that they are together but altogether in another place they never expected to be. I would love to know about how the Circus is taken care of by the twins and Bailey. I would love to know the story of Bailey and Poppet. I would love to know more about the story of the bet, with the people before this one. I would love to hear more about the tents that were made and the people in the circus.
Extra, not offered name tags I would die to hear more about: I would love how the fathers started this game. I would cry for Tsukiko & Hinata's romance, rise and ruin (especially as there are only five works dedicated to this beautiful, painful love story).
IV. The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
Characters: All Character Request (Joe, Jim, Amos, Chrisjen)
I love The Expanse. End Stop. Like entirely. Completely. I love the universe. I love it's growth. I love Miller, and the molecule and I've gotten compelled about and come to care for every single narrator that's ever been in any book or novella extra piece. I have read all of them. I've even reread half of them, in preparation for the show coming at the end of the year.
I would love nearly anything and everything from this. Tell me more about the rag-tag 'found family' crew learning to be a family, or realizing they are one. Tell me more about where any of them came from and what they went through before they got her. Tell me more about the Mao's. Tell me about Bobbi and Chrisjen's working relationship. Or more about Bobbi's family and whole life in general. Or more about Chrisjen's family or background or tell me the story of Chrisjen and The Expanse Events through Arjun's eyes. Tell me anything and everything and I will love it beyond words.
I would cry the happiest tears for more of Proto!Miller. I would deeply, also, love more Amos & Peaches getting along (with background Jime & Peaches still learning now to even people humanly in the same space).
V. Killjoys
Characters: Dutch, Johnny Jaqobis, Lucy, D'avin Jaqobis, Pree, Alvis
This is another of my three favorite finds from the summer. I fell hook, line and sinker for this one. Sci-Fi western, with bounty hunters, mysterious government spies/assigns, political intrigue and back biting, cheeky gay bar tenders along with cheeky talking ships, and monks making religious-civil unrest which is headed to revolution, while people take their mental-emotional breaks reading comics to eahc other? Sign me, the hell, up for all of that. And then it only got better and better. From harem girls, to bombs, to back stories.
I don't have a favorite character that isn't "all of the three of them together," but I'm definitely interested in the backgrounds of D'avin and then Dutch most. I would love pieces on either of them. I'd love anything in-depth about where D'avin ended up and what he did while trying to make himself a better man. I'd love the missing time of D'avin's. I'd love pieces of Dutches childhood. I would love hearing how the Johnny-Lucy bond grew.
I have a massive, unending love for the Dutch-Johnny family bond (from watching each others back to picking Dutch over D'avin and even reading comic books out loud to Dutch) and I'd love to see how that formed. I'd, also, love to see anything about how the Jaqobis Boys grew up together, shadows and all.
VI. The Sunding by Jacqueline Carey
Characters: All Characters / Cereline, Satoris, Aracus, All the Gods
This is my smallest fandom, and then one in ten years that has gotten the very least love or ever moved or changed.
There are *exactly* three fics for this fandom in A03. Two of them are written by me, and one that is now gone was written for me.
I love this series. It's one of the few series to make me cry through the last fifty or sixty pages and I have a special place in my heart for Cerelinde, Satoris, Tanaros, and Ushahin. I love this world and the spin it puts on the notions of 'good,' 'evil,' 'right,' 'wrong,' and assumptions of 'truth.' Tell me a story of what happens afterward. I love to see any number of things. The floor is nearly completely open on this.
How does the Sunderer's death effect these people? How does Cerelinde and Aracus's early marriage go after how much she's been changed by these events? What happened to Ushahin? Tell me more about the many yeared life of Tanaros? Where were the Gods during this whole story or what did they do forever past or forward? What real-life events became the myths the book characters reference? How about more interactions in that dark world between Tanaros, Ushahin, Satoris, and Cerelinde?
I would honestly adore almost anything you could give me of this.
Thank you, thank you, and thank you, again. I am already bowled over with your amazingness just offered to write my story and I hope it wasn't so bad having to wait for me to write up this letter. Have some metaphorical milk and cookies, or dark hot chocolate with marshmallows and mint in them, as I would love to spoil you with everything already in my gratitude.
Also, while I will leave you, I celebrate Yule as a religious day of birth and Christmas as family day, so this does not have to be set near the holiday. (But I do have a soft spot for the rare holiday fic done well, too, so long as they really aren't 'miracle' reliant or religious propaganda. Christmas and Yuletide, the challenge itself in this season, just tends to give me warm fuzzies, too.)
2017 Challenge Sign-Ups
Chromatic Challenge, Crueltide, Femslash Challenge, Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational, Wrapping Paper
[This entry was originally posted at https://wanderlustlover.dreamwidth.org/2324235.html. Comment on either at your leisure.]