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Dear Yuletide Writer
11/11/08 - Letter is forthcoming. Letter is uh, verbose. Watch this post for updates.
11/13/08 - Um, hi, I'm running a stage production right now. It'll be over on Saturday. I promise I'll get something up by Sunday?
11/17/08--Hi, I suck at getting this out in a timely fashion! Uh, it's only a week late?
Here we go:
Dear Yuletide Writer,
I've essentially done my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide requests back to front from how I usually do them. You see, I love writing for yuletide but in past years I've been stumped for what to ask for, in a "wait, someone writes me things in this challenge?" way. So in the past I've requested fandoms not for their rarity or obscurity, but for their track record. I figured these fandoms (things like Bujold's Vorkosigan novels or Diane Duane's Young Wizards) had turned out good stories in previous years of yuletide, so someone could write a good story in the fandom again, and fandom would be better for it.
This year I, uh, decided to break the obscurity factor.
Of the three fandoms I've selected, two had never previously even been nominated foryuletide, and the third has, so far as I know, one story written for it, and I know because I wrote it for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
niqaeli in a previous yuletide. (After stacking my offer list to try to pull her requests, because I'm a dorkface.)
You should probably know that about me, if you're going to write me. Hi, I'm Juls. I'm a dorkface.
Anyway, this year, I'm requesting things that hardly anyone else has ever thought to request, because I want them and am unlikely to get them any other way--the original purpose ofyuletide, so I hear, before people turned it into a ballbuster challenge of "spin the random request, acquire and write in a new fandom!" Because there is no track record for these fandoms, nor, one could say, fandoms for these sources, I'm instead trusting that if you have the good taste to have enjoyed the fine literature for which I've requested stories, then certainly you are up to the task.
I think I should here quote from a previousyuletide letter I wrote: in someone's commentary on the Etiquette of Yuletide, there was mention of the struggle some authors have between fulfilling exactly a detailed request, and writing a good story. It is my feeling that this should never be an issue. If you are struggling between writing a crappy story to my specifications and writing a good story that throws them out the window, for God's sake, write me a good story.
You can do it, Yuletide Writer. I believe in you.
The other thing I did backwards from how I've previously done requests is that I made the official sign-up a bit vaguer than usual, to give you, the writer, creative space. I figured if you wanted more detail you'd end up here, and I could provide. If you would like a list of stuff I like that is not fandom-specific, try this yuletide letter. Aside from the examples from that year's fandoms, it should still be accurate to my tastes. The most key line from it is things that pass Bechdel, because that was totally the theme of my requests this year. Self, I said last year, self, it is unreasonable in the extreme to ask for something that passes the DTWOF test when the canons for the fandoms you requested do not, and by and large you asked for stuff about male characters. So this year I rectified that, and something that passes Bechdel would be awesome.
If you would like to hear what I think about the fandoms I requested this year, pray, continue to read below the cut. (Oh, and everyone else who's not my writer: please feel free to get pimped into my tiny non-existent fandoms, so that when my totally awesomeyuletide story gets posted, you will be able to read it and know what it's all about!)
Margaret Wander Bonanno - The Others novels
Dweneth/Lingri
I want something about Lingri and Dweneth's friendship (femslash optional). I'm hoping for a happy story--Lingri's chronicle skips over many peaceful decades in favor of the sturm und drang, and I feel that there must be some cheerful adventures in there. I like Lingri's irony, her snark within the confines of Discipline. I like Dweneth understanding her through that and calling her on her crap. I love that they call each other Dearheart.
Let me summarize these novels: What if, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he discovered not the Americas but an archipelago full of Vulcans? The Columbus part of that is shorthand; the Vulcan part is not. The Others are green-blooded, pointy-eared, Discipline-obsessed, occasionally telepathic, hearts-where-their-livers-ought-to-be, sex-or-die-once-every-decade-or-so transplants on this world. (The two ways they've adapted themselves in the millennia they've been on there only make them more awesome: they swim and speak to the bRi, a dolphin-like species, and a small percentage of them choose to turn from males into females, and have figured out how to do so by force of will. Hi, I love this conceit. By the way, the narrator's grandfather was a Changer, one of the few not to divorce his wife first. Loriel + Liiki FOREVER.) These Vulcan Others even come up with a version of the Prime Directive, which they then spend a few centuries trying to figure out how to enforce when they live on the same planet as the People they fear are not yet mature enough to handle their technology.
And indeed, many of the People don't handle it well. Over the course of about sixty years from the their first landing on Other shores to the present period of the narration, their technology leaps and bounds from roughly the Middle Ages to, oh, World War II. The People try to implement a final solution on the Others and the handful of Intermixes, and by the time the first novel starts, the Others are all but wiped out.
Lingri the poet has been asked to chronicle the Others, that there should be some record of them when they are all gone. She tells the story of her own life, how, when she was young, she was assigned to be a Monitor on the People's continent and observe them; befriended a theatrical player maid named Dweneth; sang songs of an Elven Otherwhere in her troupe; saved Dweneth's life; told Dweneth what she really was before the People had discovered the Other islands, and nearly broke their friendship there with the unbelievableness of her tale; how, when People's ships did sail to Otherwhere, Dweneth was the first who stayed and studied there; and how Lingri and Dweneth formed a soul-thread between them, the first ever such bond between People and Other.
Lingri and Dweneth were legends. Everyone in the world had heard of them. In the third book, there's mention of the televised version of Lingri and Dweneth's adventures, Forever Friends. They had a TV show about them! I always pictured it as sort of the Xena-esque version, Warrior Princess and Poetess Companion, and, though it kind of shames me to admit, I think it would be hilarious to get a Xenafied story like that--a little cheesy and silly and full of historical inaccuracy. Perhaps with commentary from one of the characters? No one ever showed the show to Lingri until after the holocaust, but it could be a source of a terrific conversation between Dweneth and her daughter, Dwiri. Or poor wee Joreth, Lingri's Intermix son, asking Daddy about Mommy and Auntie Dweneth. Or if somehow a copy got back to Otherwhere, and Lingri's mother Jeijinn kept wondering was this really how her daughter behaved in People's lands?
I believe I mentioned early on that I'm a dorkface. Okay, I love these books on a serious level: the world-building expended on a well-developed alien race (no less so for being visibly borrowed) with a truly alien mindset, told from inside that Other point of view; the culture clash; the strong, smart, damaged-but-overcoming-it leading women--but even so, I am a dorkface, and one of the things that brings me the most pleasure about these books is that in Lingri and Dweneth's own world, they have a fandom.
---
Matt Ruff - Sewer, Gas and Electric
Joan Fine/Lexa Thatcher
I want to see more of Joan and Lexa's friendship through the years (again, femslash optional). Things like, the story of where they were during the Pandemic was fairly glossed over compared to some of the other characters', or what Lexa thought of Joan's mom, or when Joan married Harry Gant (was she disappointed? ambivalent? did she try to recruit Harry to the harem?). I like the wackiness and absurdity of this book and would love to see that reflected in this story.
Matt Ruff does something different in every one of his books, which can occasionally make it frustrating to guess whether you'll like other stuff he's written if you like one. The first book of his I read was Fool on the Hill, which I will always have a special place for in my heart because it's set in my home town of Ithaca, New York and is so damn geographically recognizable, for all it's also full of faeries.
But my favorite book of his is Sewer, Gas and Electric. It's a self-proclaimed parody of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I suspect he wrote it just to be able to argue with her: she is, in fact, a character in the book, in Electric form. It's also a 1990s vision of the 2020s, and as such is occasionally shockingly prescient (a 747 crashed into the Empire State Building), intentionally ridiculous (marvels of modern science have produced a submarine with enough room for an arboretum), and laughably mistaken (home computers are Crays with a petabyte of RAM, yet still use dial-up).
I could try to explain the plot of Sewer, Gas and Electric to you but I'm not sure it would make any sense. It involves a plague, Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, a large number of androids, Ayn Rand as a genie in a lamp, and a great white mutant shark living in the sewers. The sheer absurdity of the plot is part of what's awesome about the book, but what I love more than that are the characters.
All of the characters are lovingly and ridiculously detailed. Joan Fine's mother, Sister Ellen Fine, wanted the Pope to allow women into the priesthood, allow priests to get married, and furthermore, gay married, with turkey baster babies to boot. After spending her life harassing the Pope, she went on to reorganize things in Heaven. Philo Dusfresne captains a polka-dotted submarine called the Yabba-Dabba-Doo, whose mission is to prevent environmental travesties like oil drilling in the Antarctic with methods that sound like they come from the Mythbusters (hey, kids, what happens when we shoot a kosher salami out of a cannon?). Kite Edmonds is a 180-year-old Civil War veteran who earned her nickname when she was strapped to a giant kite to fly over and spy on the enemy. Lexa Thatcher has a Volkswagon Beetle named Betsy Ross whose secret vice is a combustion engine.
And that's just a handful of them.
I love how the book wanders off on tangential minutiae of historical events (that may or may not be real history or fake history or invented post-90s history, and slip seamlessly between). In a way, it reminds me of Douglas Adams--a sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to Americana. Absurdism on the other side of the pond. I strongly suspect that when you find an historical oddity to be a hook, you'll have a story.
And that just about anything set in the Betsy Ross Saloon would be a winner.
---
James Schmitz - The Witches of Karres
Goth/Maleen/the Leewit
I'm curious about what it's like to grow up on Karres, and how the sisters ended up where Pausert found them. I like the matter-of-factness about the oddities of this world and the vocabulary--things just are, with no particular explanation.
Sorry if that prompt was a little on the vague end, I will admit it was the last one I penned, and I was running up against the submission deadline. The no explanation business--I like it as a quirk of the style, how things we don't need to know get named without further bother. Like, Pausert was transporting miffels. What's a miffel? Will we ever know? Will we ever need to? And there's a certain tongue-in-cheekiness about it too, a sense of whimsy. Strange things are happening: please go about your business as normally as you are able.
(This, by the way, is the fandom I wrote ayuletide story for: Seven Stories. It contains some of my theories about the universe, to which I do not expect you to adhere. Unless you find them useful.)
For all and sundry, a brief plot rundown of Witches of Karres--Captain Pausert, our hero, is, ah, selling miffels and generally trying to turn enough of a profit to prove himself to his fiancée back on Nikkeldepain when he gets into a fight with someone about how nastily this guy is treating his slave. The fight turns into assault charges in court, which rapidly turns into "Well, you can pay an exorbitant fine or you can buy the slave." Slavery is illegal on Pausert's home world, but he buys the girl, Maleen, with the hopes that he can take her back to her planet without anyone from his planet finding out.
Then she says how her sisters, Goth and the Leewit, are also enslaved and can Pausert buy them, too? So he does. Their masters, are, er, unhappy people, because as it turns out all of the sisters are witches and have been making their lives miserable. How they didn't manage to escape under their own powers is a question for the ages, but since Maleen premoted Pausert's arrival, perhaps they were just waiting around for someone who would cheerfully let them confuse the shit out of him.
So Pausert takes them to Karres, their home world--somewhat eventfully; there are space pirates and unexpected witchiness and also Goth keeps teleporting in cargo from her former master and nearby ships. Pausert determinedly gives it all back to its rightful owners so the witches continues to try to find ways to pay him back, none of which are entirely welcome. On Karres, they load up his ship with stuff they actually own, as opposed to having cleverly stolen from other people, but it's all furs and things--stuff that will be hard for Pausert to sell, because of the illegality of transporting biologicals between worlds. Pausert, being a good sport and a hopeful sort, merely thanks them and tries to convince the folks back home that a fortune's still a fortune on the black market.
Only it turns out that, unbeknownst to Pausert, Karres is a prohibited planet and by visiting the place he's essentially barred himself from ever going home. Serendipitously, his insipid fiancée married someone else when he was like, a week out of port on this trading run, so he hasn't even that much to go back to. Goth stowed away when Pausert left Karres, and she gets his ship to the other side of the galaxy, where people from Pausert's world haven't been in over a century. See also: unexpected witchiness. Apparently this is the sort of thing the witches do to the entire planet of Karres all the time. Oh, and Goth tells him he's also a witch. And by the way, her dad, who he met but briefly on Karres, is his great-uncle Threbus. Oh, and also, they talked it over, the sisters, and decided that Goth will marry Pausert. In, you know, two years, when she's legal.
Pausert takes this all fairly in stride, and they go about starting a new life with new identities on Uldune, a planet where piracy is a way of life and black market cargo is no problemo. Goth teaches Pausert bits of witchiness, they get sucked into interstellar politics and telepathic alien worm issues, and all sorts of spies buy passage on their ship to try to steal the Super Secret Galaxy Crossing Space Drive! that they were hoping no one would know they had now that they were disguised as Captain Aron and his niece, Dani.
Right, so, I'm at about the halfway mark... but this is long enough, so how about I stop there? It is very much a story of weird ship happens, and you make the best of your circumstances and carry on. Maintain good humor and all is well.
I asked for a story about how Maleen, Goth and the Leewit grew up because everything mentioned about life on Karres leads me to think it would be an odd sort of upbringing. Klatha, the force you manipulate as a witch--well, you can't be told more about it than you can handle. Clearly learning witchcraft is a process of discovery rather than of formal instruction, but my, the chaos that would cause. And apparently the younglings routinely do things formerly thought impossibly because they don't know any better, which might be part of why the teaching philosophy is as it is. Oh, and also, young witches are encouraged to strike out on their own and see the galaxyand become slaves. So you see why I think these girls had interesting childhoods.
Adventuresome little rascals.
---
So, you know, I think that's all I have to say. I hope somewhere in the teal;deer was a gem of inspiration for you. I am excited aboutyuletide! I can't wait to read what you write me.
Love and kisses,
Juls
ETA: 12/2/08 I just saw my request list go by on the pinch-hit list... and go begging, because lo, my fandoms are tiny... I just want to say to whomever took the pinch-hit, thank you, thank you brave adventuresome person, I love you extra lots for taking my request on.
11/13/08 - Um, hi, I'm running a stage production right now. It'll be over on Saturday. I promise I'll get something up by Sunday?
11/17/08--Hi, I suck at getting this out in a timely fashion! Uh, it's only a week late?
Here we go:
Dear Yuletide Writer,
I've essentially done my
yuletide requests back to front from how I usually do them. You see, I love writing for yuletide but in past years I've been stumped for what to ask for, in a "wait, someone writes me things in this challenge?" way. So in the past I've requested fandoms not for their rarity or obscurity, but for their track record. I figured these fandoms (things like Bujold's Vorkosigan novels or Diane Duane's Young Wizards) had turned out good stories in previous years of yuletide, so someone could write a good story in the fandom again, and fandom would be better for it. This year I, uh, decided to break the obscurity factor.
Of the three fandoms I've selected, two had never previously even been nominated for
yuletide, and the third has, so far as I know, one story written for it, and I know because I wrote it for niqaeli in a previous yuletide. (After stacking my offer list to try to pull her requests, because I'm a dorkface.) You should probably know that about me, if you're going to write me. Hi, I'm Juls. I'm a dorkface.
Anyway, this year, I'm requesting things that hardly anyone else has ever thought to request, because I want them and am unlikely to get them any other way--the original purpose of
yuletide, so I hear, before people turned it into a ballbuster challenge of "spin the random request, acquire and write in a new fandom!" Because there is no track record for these fandoms, nor, one could say, fandoms for these sources, I'm instead trusting that if you have the good taste to have enjoyed the fine literature for which I've requested stories, then certainly you are up to the task. I think I should here quote from a previous
yuletide letter I wrote: in someone's commentary on the Etiquette of Yuletide, there was mention of the struggle some authors have between fulfilling exactly a detailed request, and writing a good story. It is my feeling that this should never be an issue. If you are struggling between writing a crappy story to my specifications and writing a good story that throws them out the window, for God's sake, write me a good story.You can do it, Yuletide Writer. I believe in you.
The other thing I did backwards from how I've previously done requests is that I made the official sign-up a bit vaguer than usual, to give you, the writer, creative space. I figured if you wanted more detail you'd end up here, and I could provide. If you would like a list of stuff I like that is not fandom-specific, try this yuletide letter. Aside from the examples from that year's fandoms, it should still be accurate to my tastes. The most key line from it is things that pass Bechdel, because that was totally the theme of my requests this year. Self, I said last year, self, it is unreasonable in the extreme to ask for something that passes the DTWOF test when the canons for the fandoms you requested do not, and by and large you asked for stuff about male characters. So this year I rectified that, and something that passes Bechdel would be awesome.
If you would like to hear what I think about the fandoms I requested this year, pray, continue to read below the cut. (Oh, and everyone else who's not my writer: please feel free to get pimped into my tiny non-existent fandoms, so that when my totally awesome
yuletide story gets posted, you will be able to read it and know what it's all about!)Margaret Wander Bonanno - The Others novels
Dweneth/Lingri
I want something about Lingri and Dweneth's friendship (femslash optional). I'm hoping for a happy story--Lingri's chronicle skips over many peaceful decades in favor of the sturm und drang, and I feel that there must be some cheerful adventures in there. I like Lingri's irony, her snark within the confines of Discipline. I like Dweneth understanding her through that and calling her on her crap. I love that they call each other Dearheart.
Let me summarize these novels: What if, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he discovered not the Americas but an archipelago full of Vulcans? The Columbus part of that is shorthand; the Vulcan part is not. The Others are green-blooded, pointy-eared, Discipline-obsessed, occasionally telepathic, hearts-where-their-livers-ought-to-be, sex-or-die-once-every-decade-or-so transplants on this world. (The two ways they've adapted themselves in the millennia they've been on there only make them more awesome: they swim and speak to the bRi, a dolphin-like species, and a small percentage of them choose to turn from males into females, and have figured out how to do so by force of will. Hi, I love this conceit. By the way, the narrator's grandfather was a Changer, one of the few not to divorce his wife first. Loriel + Liiki FOREVER.) These Vulcan Others even come up with a version of the Prime Directive, which they then spend a few centuries trying to figure out how to enforce when they live on the same planet as the People they fear are not yet mature enough to handle their technology.
And indeed, many of the People don't handle it well. Over the course of about sixty years from the their first landing on Other shores to the present period of the narration, their technology leaps and bounds from roughly the Middle Ages to, oh, World War II. The People try to implement a final solution on the Others and the handful of Intermixes, and by the time the first novel starts, the Others are all but wiped out.
Lingri the poet has been asked to chronicle the Others, that there should be some record of them when they are all gone. She tells the story of her own life, how, when she was young, she was assigned to be a Monitor on the People's continent and observe them; befriended a theatrical player maid named Dweneth; sang songs of an Elven Otherwhere in her troupe; saved Dweneth's life; told Dweneth what she really was before the People had discovered the Other islands, and nearly broke their friendship there with the unbelievableness of her tale; how, when People's ships did sail to Otherwhere, Dweneth was the first who stayed and studied there; and how Lingri and Dweneth formed a soul-thread between them, the first ever such bond between People and Other.
Lingri and Dweneth were legends. Everyone in the world had heard of them. In the third book, there's mention of the televised version of Lingri and Dweneth's adventures, Forever Friends. They had a TV show about them! I always pictured it as sort of the Xena-esque version, Warrior Princess and Poetess Companion, and, though it kind of shames me to admit, I think it would be hilarious to get a Xenafied story like that--a little cheesy and silly and full of historical inaccuracy. Perhaps with commentary from one of the characters? No one ever showed the show to Lingri until after the holocaust, but it could be a source of a terrific conversation between Dweneth and her daughter, Dwiri. Or poor wee Joreth, Lingri's Intermix son, asking Daddy about Mommy and Auntie Dweneth. Or if somehow a copy got back to Otherwhere, and Lingri's mother Jeijinn kept wondering was this really how her daughter behaved in People's lands?
I believe I mentioned early on that I'm a dorkface. Okay, I love these books on a serious level: the world-building expended on a well-developed alien race (no less so for being visibly borrowed) with a truly alien mindset, told from inside that Other point of view; the culture clash; the strong, smart, damaged-but-overcoming-it leading women--but even so, I am a dorkface, and one of the things that brings me the most pleasure about these books is that in Lingri and Dweneth's own world, they have a fandom.
---
Matt Ruff - Sewer, Gas and Electric
Joan Fine/Lexa Thatcher
I want to see more of Joan and Lexa's friendship through the years (again, femslash optional). Things like, the story of where they were during the Pandemic was fairly glossed over compared to some of the other characters', or what Lexa thought of Joan's mom, or when Joan married Harry Gant (was she disappointed? ambivalent? did she try to recruit Harry to the harem?). I like the wackiness and absurdity of this book and would love to see that reflected in this story.
Matt Ruff does something different in every one of his books, which can occasionally make it frustrating to guess whether you'll like other stuff he's written if you like one. The first book of his I read was Fool on the Hill, which I will always have a special place for in my heart because it's set in my home town of Ithaca, New York and is so damn geographically recognizable, for all it's also full of faeries.
But my favorite book of his is Sewer, Gas and Electric. It's a self-proclaimed parody of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I suspect he wrote it just to be able to argue with her: she is, in fact, a character in the book, in Electric form. It's also a 1990s vision of the 2020s, and as such is occasionally shockingly prescient (a 747 crashed into the Empire State Building), intentionally ridiculous (marvels of modern science have produced a submarine with enough room for an arboretum), and laughably mistaken (home computers are Crays with a petabyte of RAM, yet still use dial-up).
I could try to explain the plot of Sewer, Gas and Electric to you but I'm not sure it would make any sense. It involves a plague, Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, a large number of androids, Ayn Rand as a genie in a lamp, and a great white mutant shark living in the sewers. The sheer absurdity of the plot is part of what's awesome about the book, but what I love more than that are the characters.
All of the characters are lovingly and ridiculously detailed. Joan Fine's mother, Sister Ellen Fine, wanted the Pope to allow women into the priesthood, allow priests to get married, and furthermore, gay married, with turkey baster babies to boot. After spending her life harassing the Pope, she went on to reorganize things in Heaven. Philo Dusfresne captains a polka-dotted submarine called the Yabba-Dabba-Doo, whose mission is to prevent environmental travesties like oil drilling in the Antarctic with methods that sound like they come from the Mythbusters (hey, kids, what happens when we shoot a kosher salami out of a cannon?). Kite Edmonds is a 180-year-old Civil War veteran who earned her nickname when she was strapped to a giant kite to fly over and spy on the enemy. Lexa Thatcher has a Volkswagon Beetle named Betsy Ross whose secret vice is a combustion engine.
And that's just a handful of them.
I love how the book wanders off on tangential minutiae of historical events (that may or may not be real history or fake history or invented post-90s history, and slip seamlessly between). In a way, it reminds me of Douglas Adams--a sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to Americana. Absurdism on the other side of the pond. I strongly suspect that when you find an historical oddity to be a hook, you'll have a story.
And that just about anything set in the Betsy Ross Saloon would be a winner.
---
James Schmitz - The Witches of Karres
Goth/Maleen/the Leewit
I'm curious about what it's like to grow up on Karres, and how the sisters ended up where Pausert found them. I like the matter-of-factness about the oddities of this world and the vocabulary--things just are, with no particular explanation.
Sorry if that prompt was a little on the vague end, I will admit it was the last one I penned, and I was running up against the submission deadline. The no explanation business--I like it as a quirk of the style, how things we don't need to know get named without further bother. Like, Pausert was transporting miffels. What's a miffel? Will we ever know? Will we ever need to? And there's a certain tongue-in-cheekiness about it too, a sense of whimsy. Strange things are happening: please go about your business as normally as you are able.
(This, by the way, is the fandom I wrote a
yuletide story for: Seven Stories. It contains some of my theories about the universe, to which I do not expect you to adhere. Unless you find them useful.)For all and sundry, a brief plot rundown of Witches of Karres--Captain Pausert, our hero, is, ah, selling miffels and generally trying to turn enough of a profit to prove himself to his fiancée back on Nikkeldepain when he gets into a fight with someone about how nastily this guy is treating his slave. The fight turns into assault charges in court, which rapidly turns into "Well, you can pay an exorbitant fine or you can buy the slave." Slavery is illegal on Pausert's home world, but he buys the girl, Maleen, with the hopes that he can take her back to her planet without anyone from his planet finding out.
Then she says how her sisters, Goth and the Leewit, are also enslaved and can Pausert buy them, too? So he does. Their masters, are, er, unhappy people, because as it turns out all of the sisters are witches and have been making their lives miserable. How they didn't manage to escape under their own powers is a question for the ages, but since Maleen premoted Pausert's arrival, perhaps they were just waiting around for someone who would cheerfully let them confuse the shit out of him.
So Pausert takes them to Karres, their home world--somewhat eventfully; there are space pirates and unexpected witchiness and also Goth keeps teleporting in cargo from her former master and nearby ships. Pausert determinedly gives it all back to its rightful owners so the witches continues to try to find ways to pay him back, none of which are entirely welcome. On Karres, they load up his ship with stuff they actually own, as opposed to having cleverly stolen from other people, but it's all furs and things--stuff that will be hard for Pausert to sell, because of the illegality of transporting biologicals between worlds. Pausert, being a good sport and a hopeful sort, merely thanks them and tries to convince the folks back home that a fortune's still a fortune on the black market.
Only it turns out that, unbeknownst to Pausert, Karres is a prohibited planet and by visiting the place he's essentially barred himself from ever going home. Serendipitously, his insipid fiancée married someone else when he was like, a week out of port on this trading run, so he hasn't even that much to go back to. Goth stowed away when Pausert left Karres, and she gets his ship to the other side of the galaxy, where people from Pausert's world haven't been in over a century. See also: unexpected witchiness. Apparently this is the sort of thing the witches do to the entire planet of Karres all the time. Oh, and Goth tells him he's also a witch. And by the way, her dad, who he met but briefly on Karres, is his great-uncle Threbus. Oh, and also, they talked it over, the sisters, and decided that Goth will marry Pausert. In, you know, two years, when she's legal.
Pausert takes this all fairly in stride, and they go about starting a new life with new identities on Uldune, a planet where piracy is a way of life and black market cargo is no problemo. Goth teaches Pausert bits of witchiness, they get sucked into interstellar politics and telepathic alien worm issues, and all sorts of spies buy passage on their ship to try to steal the Super Secret Galaxy Crossing Space Drive! that they were hoping no one would know they had now that they were disguised as Captain Aron and his niece, Dani.
Right, so, I'm at about the halfway mark... but this is long enough, so how about I stop there? It is very much a story of weird ship happens, and you make the best of your circumstances and carry on. Maintain good humor and all is well.
I asked for a story about how Maleen, Goth and the Leewit grew up because everything mentioned about life on Karres leads me to think it would be an odd sort of upbringing. Klatha, the force you manipulate as a witch--well, you can't be told more about it than you can handle. Clearly learning witchcraft is a process of discovery rather than of formal instruction, but my, the chaos that would cause. And apparently the younglings routinely do things formerly thought impossibly because they don't know any better, which might be part of why the teaching philosophy is as it is. Oh, and also, young witches are encouraged to strike out on their own and see the galaxy
Adventuresome little rascals.
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So, you know, I think that's all I have to say. I hope somewhere in the teal;deer was a gem of inspiration for you. I am excited about
yuletide! I can't wait to read what you write me.Love and kisses,
Juls
ETA: 12/2/08 I just saw my request list go by on the pinch-hit list... and go begging, because lo, my fandoms are tiny... I just want to say to whomever took the pinch-hit, thank you, thank you brave adventuresome person, I love you extra lots for taking my request on.