Yuletide Santa Letter

[queenbookwench]

Dear Yuletide Santa,

Odds are that I don't know you, given that yuletide has now reached over 1200 participants (I think that's vaguely frightening--don't you?) but I do know that you are going to write a story for me, in one of four really obscure fandoms that I love, and thus you rock :)

The first thing I want to say is this--if the details I provided feel confining rather than inspiring, please don't hesitate to go in a direction that _does_ inspire you. Like the Pirates' Code from Pirates of the Caribbean, they're really more like guidelines. Sometimes the best story is one that you never could have expected.

For example, when I did yuletide last year, I threw out a pairing idea for Homicide: Life on the Street that was just sort of random ("Oh, there should totally be femslash with this pairing, why isn't there any?"), among a bunch of other loose suggestions. My Yuletide writer took that pairing and ran with it in a direction I wouldn't have thought of, and it was awesome. Give me a good story in any of these fandoms, and I'm going to love it.

I think I included about the right amount of specificity in my details this year, so at first I wasn't quite sure what to put in my Dear Santa letter. So I looked around at what other people were doing, and decided that I'd talk a little bit about what I love in fic in general and what I love about each of the specific fandoms I listed.


What I love and look for in yuletide fic in particular is a story that has something of the style, tone, or spirit of canon, but extends canon, or deepens it, or questions its assumption, or gives voice to a character that doesn't usually get to be center stage, or remakes canon in a way that is unexpected yet utterly believable in the context of the story. To use a recent yuletide example, a fic that can make me believe that "Of course Bertie Wooster served under Lord Peter Wimsey in WWI and his dim-witted manner is a result of shell shock." (That was "Green Ice" by adina_atl or "Yes, that's exactly Jesse and Celine would get together after the end of Before Sunset (that was therealjae). I'm not talking about strict pastiche, although I admire people who have that ability to get inside another writer's style. I like writing that's crisp and quotable at the sentence level, but I'm more interested in the bigger story-picture. I love plot, angst, witty banter, moral complexity, guilt, redemption, a sense of warmth or belonging with family or chosen family, character exploration, what my friend likeadeuce calls "emo-porn", and hurt/comfort when it's not out of character. I also love deep but non-sexual closeness between men and women (think of Mal and Zoe from Firefly). In regards to sex scenes, I like them fine if that's where the story goes, but I'm not interested in PWPs or particularly porny fic; I'm more interested in the context of how they got into the bedroom and what it means in the context of their relationship.


What I love about the Melendy books is the way that they are all about family and have an air of wholesomeness, but if you look at them a little more closely, they are also a gentle celebration of bohemian non-conformity. The Melendys aren't like everybody else, and don't want to be, a rather daring notion when they were published. Particularly in _Then There Were Five_, there are also hints of more serious issues, like death and child abuse. I enjoy the loving but realistically imperfect relationships between the siblings, especially Rush and Randy, the artistic introverts. If you go the slash route, I'd love a story that's realistic about being gay during that period but inspired by the progressive spirit of the books.

In the Obernewtyn books, I love the combination of a richly detailed plot with great character development. In canon, I think the tight first-person focus on Elspeth makes a lot of sense, but I always have the sense that there is so much more of that world to be explored. Carmody is a bit like Rowling in her ability to introduce new cool stuff in each book, while making the reader feel that it was there all along. So anything that gives me deeper insight into a character other than Elspeth, or a broader view of that world, will be great.

With Jeremiah, I could pretty much repeat what I said about Obernewtyn above (minus the bit about first person obviously). I love all of the characters I selected and will be happy with any of them. One thing I do think that I forgot to say in my details though: I have not seen season 2, so if you could try to avoid season 2 spoilers, that would be great.

L'Engleverse: There's so much to say about the L'Engleverse, and I can't quite put some of it into words. This is one of the fandoms of my heart, that have meaning for me on a deep level. I discovered L'Engle in high school and was inspired by her imagination and by her vision of a broader way of being spiritual; I saw a lot of myself in her teenage heroines, especially Vicky Austin. I still do. I haven't requested L'Engle in the past because it's such a popular fandom that I know a few stories will get written anyway, but nobody has written the particular stories that I most want to read, which is why I requested it and suggested the characters I did. That, and L'Engle's recent death, which reminded me again of how much I love her work. So...guilt, redemption, kairos moments, all would be awesome but not required. You can include pairings or not as the spirit moves you. Feel free to incorporate fantasy (especially if you write about Charles Wallace) or stay within the real world as we know it. A couple of other things I love about L'Engle's work: the way she finds mystical truths in history and science, and the way the characters in all her books connect. So, y'know, if you want to have cameos by other L'Engleverse characters than the ones I suggested, I would be totally open to that. :)

Thanks for sticking with me this far. Happy writing!