2022 Yuletide Letter

[fiberglasshorsereplica]

Dear Yuletide Writer,

I’m very excited you matched with me! This is my first year participating in YT after many years as a spectator, and I’m really looking forward to it. I hope the prompts below are helpful, but please do take all of them with a grain of salt if they don’t work for you! Optional details are optional!
Each of my requested fandoms this year is a book series, but you could pick up enough canon for my prompts from a single book for each (Conrad's Fate for Chrestomanci, Sorcery and Cecelia for the Kate and Cecelia series, or Thus Was Adonis Murdered for the Hilary Tamar series).

ao3 username: orthostatics

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 a focal point of the story or a discussion topic, which is fine)
depiction of characters under 16 having sex
bathroom humor/gross-out humor
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 encouraged and indeed are one of my “likes” aside from this.)

Likes:
pining
romance
polyamory
casefic
plot
magic
people having gay experiences
bodyswaps
strong character and/or narrator voices
epistolary works or interludes
canon divergence AUs
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 fine with any rating of fic and either gen or romantic/shipfic for any of my requests, keeping in mind my DNWs above.

Prompts:

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

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.

If you’d rather write about Aunt Elizabeth or Lady Sylvia (or both!) without Kate & Cecy present, that’s totally fine with me— they’re both fun, exciting characters with very interestingly different relationships to both magic and Regency society and I’d love to read more about either of them.

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.

While they weren’t nominated, I am totally happy to see fic with 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 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. Obviously Squire Bryant’s goat is a sacred noodle incident never to be explained or depicted, but what other problems (especially magic-related) did they solve and/or cause to make them so notorious prior to the first book? Feel free to bring in other inhabitants of Essex for them to collude with and/or terrorize
• 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
• A story about Lady Sylvia’s adventures as, essentially, the Scarlet Pimpernel during the French Revolution
• What kind of scandalous shenanigans finally cause their neighbors in Essex to learn about Aunt Elizabeth’s magic?
• 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, if you’re excited about a crossover, go for it. Some possibilities/illustrative examples:

• Kate and Cecy get involved in a Georgette Heyer or Jane Austen plot and add magic, and problems, to it
• Kate and Cecy accidentally summon Jonathan Strange from the infinite darkness and are really judgmental about his choices
• Aunt Elizabeth isn’t just secretly a sorcerer…. she’s also secretly a werewolf

Chronicles of Chrestomanci
Characters: Millie, Christopher, Conrad

As indicated by my character selections, I’d especially love to get Conrad’s Fate fic. It’s probably my favorite of the Chrestomanci books— I love Conrad’s perspective on the ridiculous etiquette and Family drama. I’m a huge fan of his relationships with both Millie and Christopher— his irritation-becoming-sincere-reciprocal-friendship with Christopher, his immediate chemistry and sympathy with Millie as they bond over making fun of Christopher, how all three of them are willing to drop everything and improvise help for each other to deal with disasters both magical and domestic. I also really like the ensemble cast of Family, domestic staff, and eventually actors-posing-as-staff— like most DWJ, the character work is so deft and engaging and I just love seeing people in these books interact.

I love Christopher/Millie/Conrad & would be super excited for a shippy fic about them, but gen plots are great too! Some possible ideas:

• C/M/C get-together fic set during magic training at Chrestomanci Castle
• Missionfic with the three of them investigating a problem in another Series
• Cat’s generation of Chrestomanci Castle trainee kids being scandalized by the unexpected appearance of Chrestomanci and Millie’s out of town boyfriend (landing wherever you like on the scale of “who is this mysterious figure?” to “gross, adults being soppy and romantic”)
• Conrad’s Fate plot divergence of any kind, whatever sounds cool to you and keeps to the relatively upbeat tone of the books— for example, there are so many plot thread collisions right at the end of the book, it would be cool to explore what happens if any of the parallel plots/problems collapse earlier
• Christopher and Conrad, caught sneaking around during their investigations at Stallery, pretend they were having a Romantic Rendezvous, leading to Tension and possibly Millie making fun of them when she hears about it from Fay later.

If you’re not so interested in Conrad’s Fate specifically, any Christopher-centric stories, especially set when he’s younger and hasn’t quite perfected the aloof Chrestomanci act yet, would be delightful; feel free to not include Millie & Conrad if they don’t fit.



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.

Feel free to foreground/focus on just one of the characters I requested if you would prefer!

(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:

• Once again, one or more members of Lincoln’s Inn find themselves in a strangely gay situation! (How odd that Julia should be in a partially undressed embrace in the middle of a lesbian bar again, et cetera.) Feel free to, in a departure from the books, make this actually, textually gay (especially if it’s one of them discovering that gosh, possibly all of their life’s previous inexplicable gay misunderstandings were actually because they are pretty bisexual! what a surprise).
• 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 dishonestly to the utmost extent

Again, thank you so much for writing a story for me for Yuletide!

— glass