Yuletide Letter 2014

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Dear Writer:

Yuletide! Very exciting! I don't read a lot of fanfiction out of a few specific fandoms for most of the year, so I love the chance to branch out and see something new--and unusual--from a place where I usually don't see anything. I'm going to be happy with a new piece for any of the fandoms listed below; that's why I'm requesting them, after all. And even if it happens not to be to my taste, I'll be glad that more is being written for the fandom.

...but it would be awesome if it were to my taste, so I've tried to give some helpful advice below. My list of "wants" is a grab-bag of things that I tend to like in a lot of different contexts, whereas the "do not want" list is things that I either dislike in general, or only like in such specific contexts that it's not fair to ask someone else to write it exactly to my preferences. In general, I'm hoping that I've provided enough information to give you some ideas to run with, but not so many constraints that you'll feel locked down by it.

The prompts are there if you're looking for specific directions to look in: don't feel constrained by them in any way.

Want:

capers
humor and tongue-in-cheek absurdity
hard-won, but not pyrrhic, victories
stories that would fit seamlessly into canon
vignettes about characters responding to the interesting world-building details of their settings
high concept AUs: (the canon...but during the Napoleonic wars! in space! if they were all bunnies from Watership Down!)
magic realism
characters who have PoV in their source material being seen from another PoV
author tricks involving structure, narration, and so forth

Do Not Want:

non-con
grimdark
primarily porn (some is fine! but please not as the majority of the piece)
public embarrassment
incest


Florence + The Machine - Lungs

About: This is a single album that I happen to love. If you're not familiar with it, you can find the entire album on Spotify, and listen to it in under an hour. It's moody without being depressing, and I particularly like themes of water, aftermath, struggle against the odds, and hard choices made deliberately.

What I want in general: A story that works through a narrative built off of several songs on the album, or an exploration of the implied story of a single song. But please, nothing that's like RPF; I don't know much about the people in the band, and won't catch any references to that sort of thing. It's the fictional world of the songs themselves that I'm into.

Specific ideas:

Rabbit Heart: This is bravery from someone you never would have expected it from, under pressure. When the person who should've been stalwart and brave has collapsed. The knight's little sister, taking charge of the castle. The secretary of the club shoving tables against the door when the werewolves come.

I'm Not Calling You A Liar: ...but clearly they are, or why would it be so important that they not lie now? What did they lie about before, and why are they a ghost now? Is the ghost of that (not quite) liar the one worth kissing now, or someone else entirely?

My Boy Builds Coffins + Blinding: My boy builds coffins, and I know full well the meaning of mortality. Its inevitability, its universality. But I can't stop dreaming of the body in the garden. Something was revealed there that I couldn't have known before, and now I can't stop knowing it.


Imperial Radch Series

About: Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword are the first two books of a scifi trilogy about empire, self, and the complexity of justice. They don't give easy answers, but neither do they take the cynical escape route of "Everything is just terrible." I can't recommend them highly enough.

What I want in general: I love everything about Breq as a character. Her difficulties with standard human interaction. The complexity and unusualness of her background. The ways in which she takes no shit and yet takes stands only when they matter. Her fine sense of justice and her deep grief and her understanding of just how difficult it is to make the right choice, and what happens when you haven't. I want more about her, especially in the spaces the books leave glossed or unwritten. (I would rather not get a focus on her sex life, though, unless you've read the second book and mean to stick to what she said about it there.) I'd especially love to see her from the perspective of other characters, since we're always inside her head, even when she's looking into the heads of other people.

Specific ideas:

What did Breq do, that got her face on that goddess? She was in the throes of grief then, one suspects. Crazed with grief, as another put it. (Only for the first ten years.) Who did she kill, and why, and why did she find it appropriate? Did she shy away from killing less then, or throw herself into it?

Seivarden and Breq spent months together on the way to the palace. I want to know what conversations they had on the way there, and how they interacted with other passengers. Especially given how Seivarden handled that one dinner once she arrived at the palace.

Give me one of Justice of Toren's favorite officers, and her relationship with them. Or maybe one of her least favorite. In that many centuries, she's surely had a few of each that were memorable in their own way, and reasons for why she loved or hated them specifically compared to all the others.


Greek Prose Composition

About: This is a classic, and rather old, textbook for learning how to compose sentences in Ancient Greek. It's still in print, but long out of copyright, and should be easy to find. It's relentlessly focused on the parts of Greek that come up in military histories, plus a bit of mythology, while ignoring anything raunchy, forensic, day-to-day, or otherwise acknowledging that there were an awful lot of people in Athens who weren't soldiers, and clearly written for white male schoolboys from well-off British families.

What I want in general: This is probably the best book for meta tricks; I'd love to see stories built off assignments, where the list of sentences are worked into the narrative or otherwise build the backbone of a story. There's no need to stick to historical Greece, either. (Though if you do, this is the one place to cheerfully ignore my general RPF do-not-want. Use Themistocles and Thucydides freely!) I'd especially love something clever that's clearly based on the source material while being a story in its own right.

Specific ideas:

Take a single list of sentences from one exercise, and work every single one of them into a story, as verbatim as possible.

The metatextual approach: someone trying to translate the sentences into Greek, and how this reflects on their own life and struggles. Bilingual geekery a plus, so this may work best for people who've studied ancient Greek at least a little, though it's not mandatory.

One of the exercises, or a selection of sentences from a small set, deployed as the structure for a story in Greece or elsewhere. Can you use the sentence "After these things, they arrived at dawn at the land of the Cyclops" as the foundation for a story about magic-wielding foxes in space? Quite likely!


Girls at the Kingfisher Club

About: It's the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, but set in Prohibition era NYC. It's also a story about sisterhood, and resistance to oppression, and the way narrative shapes people. I love the book, and you should read it.

What I want in general: Because it's already a recast of a fairy tale, I'm not so interested in AUs of this story. But I'd love to see gaps filled in. More about the sisters who barely got mentions. What happened afterward. Stories that think about narrative while telling their own story. Here in particular I'd love to see stories that stick close to the style of the original. But if that doesn't work for you? Well, telling the story from another perspective would be a great reason to shift styles.

I'm most interested in two separate pairs of sister--Jo and Lou, or Rose and Lily--but I would be happy in any combination of any of the sisters.

Specific ideas:

Jo and Lou have always had their fights. This story is about one before everything changed, when they were still bringing the younger girls in, one by one. About making over each sister into their own image, or whether they were doing that at all.

What did Lily and Rose do, before they came back? I want to know about that suit, how they dealt with each other, the things they had to fight through before they could find their sisters again. How they decided to be found, and how they decided that even on being found they wouldn't be retaken.

A character study for one of the sisters who got very little screen time. They all have a bit of personality, but each of them must have had an inner life as complex as Lou's, even if we didn't see it.