Yuletide 2023 Dear Author Letter

Treats settings: open to gifts.

DNWs:

• modern AUs/mundane AUs (including coffee shop & high school AUs)
• breakup fic
• characters coming out as trans or transitioning on-screen (as distinct from characters already being trans in a way that is not an extended topic of discussion, which is fine)
• explicit depiction of characters under 16 having sex
• bathroom humor/gross-out humor
• description of vomiting or other excretion/bodily waste
• soulmate AUs
• the cthulu mythos
• MMF triad fic in which the story refers to the men in the triad as “[female character]’s boys”, or there is a dynamic in which the female character is overtly the “mom friend” equivalent in the relationship. (MMF triads, like other poly groupings, are otherwise fine and indeed encouraged.)

Likes:

• pining
• period-typical internalized homophobia, where relevant
• romance
• polyamory
• casefic
• people having gay experiences
• bodyswaps
• strong, distinctive character and/or narrator voices
• epistolary works or interludes
• canon divergence AUs
• eventual reasonably happy endings (but don’t force it if it doesn’t work with your vision)
• creative choices of prose, perspective, or format
• stories that surprise me

I’m open to gen or shipfic in any of my fandoms at any rating, and don’t mind fic breaking up canon relationships.

Fandom: Kate & Cecelia – Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer
Characters: Kate, Cecelia

My favorite thing about this series is Kate and Cecy’s characters and relationship, and how their energy/insistence on Doing Something interacts with everyone else around them. They’re so great: kindred spirits who love investigating and Making Inferences and Getting Involved With Situations and Solving Problems! and hate ever staying out of something for any reason or refraining from things due to social nicety! Icons truly.

I’m a big fan of Regency romance settings in general, & love that these books use the era/setting to give particularity to the characters’ experiences & social problems without dwelling indefinitely on the Grim Restricted Fate of Women. I also love the epistolary format of the books, but you shouldn’t feel restricted to writing something epistolary yourself.

I’m totally happy to see fic involving Thomas and James as well, but I admit my interest in their characters is more about their relationships to Kate & Cecy than in their own right. I’m equally interested in gen or ship fic for whatever ship combination (including canon ships, Kate/Cecy, or Kate/Thomas/Cecy/James).

I’m generally more interested in stories relating to the eras/character relationships from the first two books (Sorcery & Cecelia and The Grand Tour) rather than the third book, which leaned a little hard on adorably precocious little children and backgrounded Kate & Cecy too much for my taste.

Some possible prompts:

• Countryside adventures in Kate & Cecy’s youth. What problems (especially magic-related) did they solve and/or cause to make them so notorious in the neighborhood prior to the first book?
• Kate and Cecy (and their husbands?) return to France for a totally routine reason and immediately get embroiled in yet another Lady Sylvia-related mystery, to the combined fascination and exasperation of various parties
• Kate & Cecy’s ongoing magic training after Grand Tour (Cecy coming into her own as a truly independent magician? Kate totally hating magic lessons/doing magic ever? Both at once to create hilarious contrasts?)

While I don’t want modern AUs or total displacement from the original Regency setting, I’m totally open to crossovers that are even vaguely possible for the setting, or to other kinds of AUs/fusions. I don’t mind getting crossovers with canons I’m not familiar with; as long as they’re googlable and more or less interpretable within the fic without much background, if you’re excited about a crossover, go for it. Some possibilities/illustrative examples:

• Kate and Cecy accidentally summon Jonathan Strange from the infinite darkness and are really judgmental about his choices
• Kate and Cecy get involved in a Georgette Heyer or Jane Austen plot and add magic, and problems, to it

Fandom: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Characters: Nita Callahan, Kit Rodriguez, Carmela Rodriguez

I’ll be happy with fic featuring any subset of my requested characters as well as the whole group. Feel free to also bring in other characters from books 1-8 (SYWTBAW to WaW); after that I dropped off a little on how interesting I find new additions to the cast. I’m most interested in either canon-era or semi-near-future (e.g. timeskip close enough that the characters are old enough to go to college) settings for fic, but that’s not a hard preference.

I unfortunately find Carmela/Ronan kind of boring and would prefer it not be a main focus (but do ship Carmela/Filif or Carmela/Sker’ret, if you really wanted to indulge my Carmela shipping opinions).

Things I like about this series/am interested in in fic:

• alien society/galactic economy worldbuilding; complications of dealing with greater galactic society as a member of a sevarfrith/astahfrith galactic backwater species
• non-wizards working alongside wizards (e.g. Carmela being able to act as an equal to wizards in solving problems)
• the diversity of possible smaller-scale problems wizards are supposed to solve, especially weird/unexpected ones (casefic, basically)
• Kit and Nita as a wizardly team/best friends
• Kit’s dealing with Carmela third-wheeling them while they’re on wizard business
• what wizard stuff must be like from Carmela’s point of view (weird, presumably! her brother was chosen by Wizard God to be able to talk to DVD players!)
• Kit and Nita’s, at this point, very strange relationship to the Lone Power. (Do other wizards think that’s weird?)

Things that frustrate me about the books that I would love for fic to poke at/investigate/complicate:

• the fact that the Catholic god & saints are real and uncomplicatedly good in this setting
• the constant background expectation that these teenagers will sacrifice their lives for literally any problem
• the fact that Kit/Nita is kind of treated like a narratively fated inevitability within the books, rather than clearly portrayed as something the characters are definitely excited about. (If you uncomplicatedly ship Kit/Nita and want to portray it as positive, that’s fine! It’s a cute ship that I’ve written myself, I just find it odd that they never manage to express genuine enthusiasm about getting together in the actual text of the books.) (Alternately, feel free to solve this problem with Kit/Nita/Ronan if you’re thus inspired.)
• the fact that no one ever actually does any science (e.g. solves a problem with research or close observation of natural phenomena) despite this series ostensibly being about Science Magic

Hilary Tamar Mysteries - Sarah Caudwell
Characters: Any

Some of my favorite things about these books:

• Hilary’s incredibly fun, funny narrative voice (obviously)
• The simultaneous constant sniping & genuine affection and friendship among Hilary & the barristers
• Epistolary interludes
• The intense, juuust-barely-not-canonized gay undercurrents in every book from like all the main characters
• These books may technically be about solving murders, but the true enemy of humanity…. is taxes

I love casefic if you want to write that, but I’d also be totally thrilled with Hilary et al. just living life, having misadventures, dealing with recalcitrant clients or the Bursar or someone’s deeply offensive misunderstandings of medieval tax law.

(Also, while I am a big fan of Hilary’s gender- and pronoun-free canonical state, I understand that it’s a bit difficult to write, especially if you choose a different or third-person narrator. My ideal would be to default to “they” pronouns for Hilary if necessary and still refrain from any commentary on Hilary’s gender, but it’s not a strong DNW if you do otherwise, and I defer to your vision on the question if it comes up.)

More possible prompts:

• Hilary and Selena observing the final, inevitable, presumably mishap-ridden coalescence of the Julia/Cantrip/Ragwort triad relationship
• Hilary discovers an Oxford colleague’s obviously fraudulent paper proof, which, incidentally, disagrees with the main thesis of Hilary’s book Causa in the Early Common Law, and determines to investigate this scurrilous case of academic dishonesty to the utmost extent

You can check out my ao3 profile (orthostatics) and bookmarks for even more context on my likes/fandoms/etc if that's useful!
Thank you so much for writing a fic for me! Happy Yuletide!