Dear Yuletide Writer,

I have had this letter at the top of my to-do list for weeks, but when I finally sat down to write it, I couldn't really think of any reason to do it. You have years and years of this tag and so many previous letters if you're the sort of person who wants to dig really deep, and if you're not, you can stop reading now and go back to just my sign-up.

I could go into great detail about where to find the fandoms I requested and so on, but let's be honest, that would be almost entirely for people who might want to write me treats, not for you.

(Although super-quick: all the links you need for Mr. Trash Wheel are in this entry downtag; Njal's Saga is a medieval Icelandic saga which you could probably get a doctorate in but didn't so all I can suggest is gutenberg or a good modern annotated edition of which there are several in many languages, or if you're really ambitious, you can listen to all 12 Njal's Saga episodes of the SagaThing podcast, which is what motivated me to request it. But also I think of stories as old as Njal's saga as living stories rather than a fixed canon so if you want to just find a good summary and work from that, that would be a-ok with me; Murderbot Diaries is so far just one novella, All Systems Red by Martha Wells that came out this year and is probably available at your local library; Girl With The Silver Eyes is a kids' novel from the '80s that is probably not still at your local library but is definitely on Amazon for cheap, at least in the US; and the Barbara Hambly are both many-volume historical mystery series that are still being published, although I would be ok with side-character fic based on characters that only appear in the first volume of either.)

I could also go into great detail about why I like these canons, but you don't actually need thousands of words of rambling about the fundamental essence of Baltimore and urban solarpunk; or about the parallel roles of Hannibal and Simon in re: the construction of Whiteness and classical monsters as racial metaphors; or the performance of gender and honor in medieval Scandinavia; or about the portrayal of neurodivergence mediated through otherness in SF/F stories; and anyway if I did all that it would be totally misleading because really my reaction to these stories is more GIANT GOOGLY EYES and CHEESE CSI and TALKING CATS and SANCTUARY MOON and I read all the Hambly in a month straight while ill last year so really mostly I just LOVE IT ALL on a very shallow and inarticulate level.

I could go into more about my DNWs but honestly my DNWs are usually more about the spirit of the story than the details so it would be just as likely to make you worry about things you don't need to worry about.

(but real quick: please no environmentalism doomy doom for Trash Wheel- post-apocalyptic would be fine but make it hopeful and optimistic no matter how unrealistic that seems sometimes these days; please no doomy doom for Njal either, like, we all know how it ends, it's in the damn title, but he lived to old age which is pretty much a happy ending given the odds for a saga hero and a lot of other stuff happened before that; for Murderbot I think I covered it pretty well in the letter; Silver Eyes and Hambly I'm pretty much good with whatever as long as it's in the spirit of canon more or less and you're careful with the more sensitive bits of the history in Hambly.)

I could give you more prompts but you read my sign-up; do you actually need more prompts? I mean, let me know, I have plenty, but I kind of suspect you are begging me for fewer prompts at this point.

(Crossovers always good, setting-swap AUs also good, the weirder the better, outsider POVs and background characters always good, worldbuilding and setting always good, basically anything in these canons is fine?)

Anyway here is a link to my previous post of my sign-up just for convenience, it is slightly cleaned up with a few more prompts at this point: Yuletide signup

Most importantly, have fun! I promise nothing you write can ruin yuletide for me.*

--Me

*That's not a dare. But you would have to try pretty hard to manage it. Truly.

Hi yuletide writer! This will be pretty useless to you so far because it's just a repost of my signup but I wanted it here for reference. Hopefully it will turn into a proper letter before you see it, but if not, have no fear. I am super easy to please as long as you write in one of these fandoms! And I believe wholeheartedly in ODAO and Yuletide Is Meant To Be Fun. Also feel free to scroll down this tag for previous years' letters, most of which still apply, and other thoughts of mine on these fandoms.

The Girl with the Silver Eyes - Willo Davis Roberts
Okay so: WHAT DID THEY DECIDE? AND WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THEY DECIDED? I feel like staying home would be the wiser choice, but going would be the better story. And there are so many directions it could go, once they go. Also, it's canon that there are other superpowered kids with all different kinds of superpowers there, so there is a lot of scope for crossovers there... I'd also love more about the lives and personalities of the other three silver-eyed kids - how similar are they to Katie? How different? How do they get along when it's not a crisis situation? I'm also really interested in all the grown-ups from the books! Also I headcanon that Ms. K also has some kind of secret psi powers. And ship her with Mr. C. And/or Monica.

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
I cannot get enough of Murderbot? So mostly I would just like More Of. Here are some ideas: Something set in the Preservation Aux camp (any POV) before canon started when all was calm, or Murderbot dealing with one of its previous more-soap-opera-y past assignments (either before or just after it hacked itself), or something from the secbots on one of the surveys on the planet before everything went terrible - how different are they from each other personality-wise? How do they work together on group assignments?, or there's just a bare possibility that one or more of the other secbots survived - what did they do? maybe they got left behind for dead and learned how to hack themselves and became hobby archeologists; or you could write everyone on the station gossiping about what Murderbot has done this time. I also really loved the glimpses we got of what life is like in the Preservation Alliance, so anything building on what the Survey crew do after Murderbot leaves would be fun!

DNW: Anything where Murderbot just needs to Learn To Make Friends And Talk About Its Feelings or equivalent. Let Murderbot continue to be someone who is happiest sitting in a corner with its shows! That is OK! Also: no Murderbot falling in love with anyone. Other Secbots making other choices is fine though.


James Asher Vampire Series - Barbara Hambly
I OT3 this hard! I just keep waiting for the point where James finally realizes he and Simon are in love with each other too and it's a triangle not a V, and it keeps not happening for me in canon. I really want a story set after Pale Guardian where James slowly comes to the realization that Ysidro has transferred his promise to watch Lydia into a promise to watch over James. I would also love any backstory for any of the three of them, though! I am also getting increasingly intrigued by Grippen and his relationship with James and or/Ysidro. I'd also enjoy anything about the ancient vampires Ysidro remembers from his youth. Also: would be okay with just a series of attempts by Ysidro to convince a cat to be his friend.

I am also okay with crossing over Ysidro into a far-future SF fandom, those are always cool and I'd love to see how Hambly's vampires work in that kind of world (Also see my Benjamin January request.)


Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
I love everything in this fandom? I would be super into anything about Hannibal's relationship(s) with Rose and Benjamin - OT3 if you want, but also just anything about their dynamic. Similar with the Dominique/Henri/Chloe. I would also be SUPER into solo backstory for any of the nominated characters. And of course the Meyerlings are always great. Also: Rose and/or Chloe doing SCIENCE!! (or science) and/or interacting* with any of the Great Men Of Science of the time. *where interaction could = explosion. And anything else in this fandom, really, honestly. Also, if you also know the Ashers books, I would love some of those vampires showing up in January's world - either via Hyacinthe, who almost certainly learned her piano from January, or just stumbling over them in their travels.

Mr. Trash Wheel (Anthropomorfic)
THE TRASH WHEELS ARE SOO GREAT
Stories you could tell about the trash wheels: what things have they found in their rivers? Say, maybe, a ring that shows fiery letters only after it has gotten warm on Mr. Trash Wheel's power supply. Or a magic sword? A cursed pirate coin? A mysterious message in a bottle? A space drive from a damaged UFO that's all ready to be installed? An unidentified body and a murder mystery to solve? A suitcase full of printed-out fanfic from the 1990s? Perhaps the spirits of Baltimore's waters need to appoint champions to fight a great threat! Maybe they get a visit from their future selves and kin who are the centerpieces of a Baltimorean solarpunk utopia! So many possibilities.

Fandom: Brennu-Njáls saga | Njal's Saga
So, I am not, like, a great scholar of the sagas, I just read this once and listened to the SagaThing podcasts on it, so you do not need to be a great scholar of the sagas either, but it is so full of things I would like fanfic of. I really enjoy headcanoning Njal as a trans man, so if you would like to do that, either in canon or in a different-setting AU, that would be awesome (He has powers! He could go to Mr. Cooper's school!) Also, I totally ship Njal and Gunnar and hateship their wives, so anything along those lines would be fun, or really anything exploring wtf was up with those four's relationships in any form. Other things I would love to see include: more CSI:Bergthorshvoll along the line of the famous cheese mold, Njal lawyering like a mofo, Things We Are No Longer Allowed To Do At The Allthing, Icelanders in Space, etc.

So in FMK reading adventures, I finally finished the first Gor book, that was voted K early on but I decided I wanted to read before dumping just so I could say I had.

I should have trusted y'all: it was mostly just incredibly pointlessly bland, occasionally rising to actively annoying. It wasn't even really bad enough to be interestingly bad. There was a lot more flying around on giant soulbonded warbirds than I expected, tbh (somehow I had though that Tarnsman meant "man of the mountain lake country" but I think that was giving him too much credit for having a vocabulary,) but the warbirds are so badly wordbuilt and lacking in individual personality and the flying scenes so lacking in joy that the only time I actually cared about them was when the abused half-starved ones were about to eat the MC and I roused enough to cheer them on. The plot is built on bad characterization and improbable coincidences; the language aspires to basic competence; you can very easy disassemble it into its component stereotypes; and all sense-of-wonder or hints that the MC is not a sociopath are missing. Also amused that the author refuses to comment on whether it's John Carter of Mars fanfic (it's really badly done John Carter of Mars fanfic, omg.) I understand the series gets far more batshit later, but I don't think I need to read far enough to find out.

Also, thank you all for your help with picking a yuletide nomination! I shall be ignoring the clear preference of the poll, and nominating Mr. Trash Wheel RPF. He didn't win, but he did win the vote of everybody I know who has taken a selfie with him, and their votes count 10x, sorry.

(this is Mr. Trash Wheel: )

I will also be nominating Professor Trash Wheel and a five foot long West African Ball Python as characters, of course. I am stuck on who should be my fourth nom, though. A modular robotic eel that hunts for water pollution? Lynyrd Skymmer? Some other celebrity of the waters that I don't yet know about?


Clearly there's a market for Always Coming Home, though. Someone else should nominate it. (If I requested it, it'd just be as "tell me a story of the Valley", so I don't care about characters.)


Meanwhile, I re-read The Girl With The Silver Eyes to prepare to nominate. That one does hold up very well! Things I had forgotten about this book: the muumuu wearing old fat lady who lives alone with her cats and her books and gives no fucks and is #rolemodel. The fact that Katie can TALK TO CATS. The constant references to other YA fantasy/sf novels by the same imprint that she is reading. How much this book distrusts all adult men. How much this book also distrusts all non-readers. How yes they have psi powers and are super-smart, but they're also explicitly non-neurotypical in a way that read a lot more Autism Spectrum than any of the books about supposedly autistic kids that I was reading at the time, and that's more of an issue for them than the psi powers.

The book really needs an active fandom if only so we can have epic fanwars about whether they ( spoilers )

Anyway I am stuck for character noms there too, because I want all the kid characters but I also want Mr. C, Mrs. M, Miss K and Jackson Jones.

hi yuletide writer! I did not expect assignments to go out That Fast.

I am at a convention and will probably not be able to get my letter up until Wednesday evening at the earliest.

This is the good thing about linking to a tag instead of a placeholder, right, you can keep coming to the tag and finding my increasingly desperate excuses for not having the letter done yet. It also means when you accidentally link the wrong tag in the sign-up you can just edit the tag instead of the sign-up.

Anyway for generalities you can scroll down the fandom:yuletide tag to previous years' letters, pretty much everything still applies. And feel free to just go by what's in the actual requests, as always, they were complete and accurate.

If you matched on Ashers or Paleontologists, there are requests in previous letters down-tag. If you matched on Saxons vs. Vikings (+ Emma is her own faction by herself), I am pretty sure you are monksandbones and were actually the first person ever to write for me in an exchange so you know what's up. (If you are somebody else and matched on that I LOVE YOU and don't worry I don't know much about the period so you can get away with anything.) If you matched on Imperial Radch or Rivers of London, check recent posts in the fandom:sf lit tag for my various ramblings on those at the time I read them. I don't think anybody offered Barnaby, but if you did, you know what you're doing, and if you didn't, it's not really an easy-access fandom alas, so don't worry about it.

I will still try for an actual letter once I'm home but this should hold you in the meantime.