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Dear yulegoat,
Hey, it's a yuletide letter. Let's start with my requests. I figure you probably only matched me on one of these, since they are all pretty damn rare (two of them aren't in the archive at all), so in case for whatever reason my prompt for what you matched me on doesn't fill you with joy, I will tell you about the other ones so you can contemplate picking up a new fandom (they're all book fandoms--reading a couple of novels shouldn't be too time-consuming should it?)
Dancing Meteorite and Stolen Law - Anne Mason
Kira Warden
Kira's awesome, and it's sort of adorable how she only occasionally realizes how awesome her life is. She gets to go to all these other planets and meet lots of aliens and has all these interstellar friends and woe, does not fit in with her human peers. SUCH teenage problems, I tell you. I would be interested in hearing about any of her interstellar adventures, but I would also be interested in hearing more detail on that time the senior class "kidnapped" her to help on their planet survival final. I like the problem-solving, multiple cultural viewpoints and sometimes misunderstandings issues in these books. (I am not interested in evil dude on his evil planet is evil. Somehow he makes interstellar politics boring, I do not even know.) Feel free to elaborate on existing cultures or invent new ones!
Dancing Meteorite and Stolen Law would probably be the most difficult books of these to find; they're out-of-print YA from the 1980s. (Though no one has told the current amazon sellers how rare they are; they're both going for a couple of bucks apiece for old library-binding copies.)
I read Stolen Law when I was in middle school. I picked it up off the shelf because one of the author's names is the same as one of mine (my legal name, that is), and I had/have a fantasy of being a published author. That and because I spent a lot of time in my middle school library and read a lot of everything. I was on accelerated tracks for a lot of classes, which left me not in sync with the rest of my classmates and taking a study hall alone in the library instead of in a group with other kids in my grade. So you know. I was actually a lot like Kira Warden, who is singled out of all the kids because she's on linguist/diplomacy training, and never spends any time on station, in regular classes with other human kids. As an adult, I mock her tiny angstmoppet pain at being all different and gifted, but you have to understand, I mock with the mockery of someone who's been there, who got isolated that way, and who was reading about her when I was her. Although I really wish my trips to other places had been to other planets and not just to the high school for math every morning.
As I say, I read Stolen Law back then, repeatedly, but I didn't actually find a copy of Dancing Meteorite for many years, not until I was all grown up with a credit card and could hunt it down on the internet. At which point I discovered that many incidents in Kira's life which are mentioned, like, oh, say, the senior class kidnapping her to help with their final, which I had always assumed were references to the events of the first book, were actually not. There are so many noodle incidents in these books, damn it. I feel like you could just pick one and run with it! Although to be in the tone of the books you'd practically have to invent new noodle incidents to refer to, and cause me to gnash my teeth in frustration and glee.
There's even a noodle character, in a way. I always thought I'd get to meet Kira's mom when I read Dancing Meteorite, considering her history was so integral to the plot of Stolen Law. But no, Dancing Meteorite opens with Kira's mom already dead. I'd really like to know more about her. We know she's paraplegic and not Kira's biological mother, and an E-comm herself, and it's possible she only meant to foster/apprentice Kira and ended up wanting to adopt her. If you're going to write about her I would definitely want her physical disability handled with dignity and grace; there's no indication in the text that it ever presented a bar for her in her work as a translator.
I like that the different aliens have different cultures, and that knowing about those different cultures--or being aware of difference enough to know there's things she doesn't know--is how Kira solves problems. If you want to write stuff that happens beyond the books rather than going back before, I will note, I really like Tex and Dalterk, and the whole concept of the Vallusian bond, and the interesting notion that they now consider Kira part of theirs (teenage interspecies threesomes ahoy? and never mind that she's a tiny human, she's a GIRL, and sure, they know most species with differentiated sexes do heterosexual sex, but for them it's all WEIRD). I think one of my favorite scenes in both books is at the end of Stolen Law when Ertrex gives her the commendation in tones of dressing-down, because Vallusians are committed to seeming like hard-asses.
Affection through insult and commendation via dressing-down are tropes I find I like across multiple fandoms. This reminds me of a bit in the Alanna books by Tamora Pierce, where Duke Gareth gives Alanna a long lecture about not getting into fistfights while being proud of her for taking down a bully. Or also how (in the tv films, I don't know if it's as true in the books) Horatio Hornblower's commander, Pellew, tends to tease him about how terrible a lieutenant he is before affirming him. Hornblower is at heart an emo angstmoppet, so he tends to take it to heart and his FACE, oh my god, the emo certainty he's to blame for everything and then the relief. I realize I've gotten off on a tangent but to tie back in: Kira, I think, also tends to take it to heart and not realize she's being teased until they tell her outright they're proud of her, and it is such an ingrained Vallusian thing to bark orders and act stand-offish and put-upon that it would be an interesting ongoing character thing to see her slowly coming to realize that even when Ertrex (or Tex and Dalterk, though she had that realization some through the book) is being an ass, he's still fond of her. Maybe even moreso, that they express affection through insult and complaint, so the more they kvetch and moan, the more they're saying they're fond of her.
---
Perilous Gard - Elizabeth Marie Pope
Gwenhyfara, Kate Sutton, Cecily Heron
I'm kind of craving Gwenhyfara/Kate slash. If that's not your thing, I'm mostly interested in any story about Gwenhyfara's life under the hill, how she's interacted with humans, people from the village or the Gard or if Kate is the first she's ever respected or if she's had any compassion for any before. I would be interested in a story about her being Cecily's caretaker, since Cecily couldn't really be brainwashed for sacrifice the same way Christopher was, and feeling some kind of deep down doubt about sacrificing a child, and trying to give her as much comfort as she could.
Perilous Gard is a Tam Lin retelling set in Elizabethan England. There's question about whether there's magic at all; the fae could just be drugging people, could just beordinary human-sacrificing pagans. The protagonist, Kate, is trying to save Christopher because it's the right thing to do, not because he's her lover--they end up falling in love over the course of their shared captivity, but it's actually really important to me that in this version of the story, they aren't lovers in the first place, that's not what motivates Kate. (I found this one in the same middle school library as Stolen Law, and young me was deeply enamoured of a heroine who wasn't just automatically in love with a dude. By the way I am a lesbian, though I hadn't totally figured that one out at the time.)
So this version of the fae are very much the creepy fuckers, certain of their superiority; they keep humans either drugged or magicked into submission as chattel, and they brainwash their human sacrifices into agreeing to give up their lives. Gwenhyfara is the fae who looks after Kate in her captivity, and the other humans, who have been drugged into an animal-like state. Gwenhyfara is very much a product of her creepy fucker fae culture, but she has some small kindnesses for Kate, teaches her to move and live as the fae do, so I want to see that explored more, I want to see a Gwenhyfara who is conflicted about how they treat humans. As I said, I'm kind of craving some Gwenhyfara/Kate, though I'm not totally sure how you would do it without going AU. I am okay with AUs! Even dark AUs like Kate can't save Christopher or something. But I do want to keep the creepy fucker fae vibe, the part of Gwenhyfara's superiority she can't shrug off, and Kate's stubbornness, that's key to her character; I don't want rape, forced nor drugged, but I don't expect this to be sweet and nice, if you do write slash for them. It's a fucked-up situation!
---
Harbinger Trilogy - Diane Duane
Delde Sota
Delde Sota is my FAVORITE. She curious and unflappable and so wry. I love her format jokes. I think Diane Duane did so much more interesting things with the mechalus than anyone else writing Star*Drive, although if you wanted to run with that and suggest that Delde Sota is not much like the rest of her people, and maybe that's what she's doing wandering off on her own, that might make for an interesting story. As for the other characters in the books--I like Enda, I will admit I kind of ship Enda/Gabriel even though they're different species because apparently I have no shame, which extends everywhere as I also kind of ship Angela/Grawl, I like Gabriel most of the time but I tend to eyeroll at his DESTINY, I might possibly be interested in reading Delde Sota/Enda or Delde Sota/Gabriel or threesome. Or just Delde Sota being awesome on her own. I picture her being a character of color, by the way, I think the only adjective applied to her skin color is olive. I mean, you know, that means whatever you want it to mean in interstellar colonial post-Silence multiple alien races society, but it might be an interesting tack to explore historically, who exactly decided to upgrade themselves to become mechalus?
The three books in this series are Starrise at Corrivale, Storm at Eldala, and Nightfall at Algemron. They are out-of-print tie-in novels for a short-lived RPG called Star*Drive, but you can find copies for as cheap as a cent apiece on amazon, and I sometimes see them at my local used bookstore, so they're definitely still floating around.
The protagonist of the series is Gabriel Connor, who was a space marine and gets kicked out over espionage/political shenanigans. He starts off trying to figure out what happened to clear his name, but the deeper he gets in the political shenanigans, the more it complicated it gets, as he learns there are evil zombie alien forces running around the rim worlds that no one wants to admit to, and also the lost race of ancient whatevers are influencing his life, I, okay, I ignore most of the plot of the third book because interstellar politics: interesting; legendary fated epic conflicts of good and evil: um, but why do you need that when you have interesting interstellar politics? Enda is his primary companion through all of this, a fraal (friendly alien) Wanderer who picks him up when he's down on his luck because, more or less, the universe told her to. (As a philosophical life choice, I am pretty down with mysticism; I am having a hard time explaining how this differs from the destiny bs, but I feel it does.)
The character I requested is a secondary character who helps them out because they have such interesting problems. They meet Delde Sota when they are kitting out their ship with medical gear, and come back to see her when they get ahold of one of the zombie alien corpses and need someone to examine it and tell them exactly what the hell it is. Delde Sota is a mechalus, part organic, part technology, though the technology is sufficiently bred into the species that it's hard to say it's exactly artificial anymore. She has a braid that moves around on its own and plugs into things. There's no data she can't get it. She's gorgeous and smart and curious about everything, and I think I might have mentioned, I really dig her sense of humor. Mechalus speech patterns put a defining sentence type at the front of every thought, like statement or query or conjecture or suggestion. Delde Sota frequently uses these type indicators as parts of jokes. Maybe I am a giant geek that what's essentially grammar humor cracks me up, but it really does. Even when they're not specifically jokes, I am always interested in what sentence type indicators Delde Sota uses, because she sometimes uses uncommon ones I wouldn't have expected--like, before she autopsies the body they bring her, she says, "Invocation: here death rejoices to teach the living." That's one of my favorite lines in the books, I think. Invocation. Like, you might not expect a spiritual background for a character so grounded in technology, but it really, really works for me.
---
About my requests in general:
You may have noticed, all of my requests are for female characters. I like male characters from these stories, but I don't want to see them central, I want stories about my favorite girls. I think it would be awesome if you wrote me a story that passed Bechdel, though of course that depends on who you choose to have my gals interact with--Kira on a Vallusian explorer ship is going to have a hard time passing Bechdel, I know!
Cultural differences are relevant to all of these stories--with more awareness in the science fiction, more darkness in the historical fantasy. I like the world-building of each, the development of the different cultures, and I think in any story you write me from any of these books, the culture each character comes from and how it shapes her is going to be an important part of the story. There's a richness of cultural context, of characters that come from societies, that I treasure here. Even if you end up writing a PWP for a pairing or threesome I pitched, write me the characters coming together in a way that shows who they are, how they're shaped by their backgrounds. That stuff's sexy! (Cultural baggage is sexy. Hang on, where is my twitter...)(That's... yes. I tweet to mock myself. You should know that about me.![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
decontextual, if you want to watch me mock myself in real time.)
While I like a variety of genres, I really feel like which fandom you write for me is going to dictate genre, so I hesitate to just be like "I like crack!" or whatever. Like, I feel like a Perilous Gard story about Gwenhyfara is necessarily going to be at least a little dark. A Dancing Meteorite/Stolen Law story... well, depending on what story, I suppose it could range! But I'd think it would be more light-hearted. And with a Harbinger story about Delde Sota, I'd want it to be funny, I'd want her sense of humor to color it, whether it's light or dark humor.
Thank you very much for writing me a story! I'm looking forward to Yuletide.
~Juls
Dancing Meteorite and Stolen Law - Anne Mason
Kira Warden
Kira's awesome, and it's sort of adorable how she only occasionally realizes how awesome her life is. She gets to go to all these other planets and meet lots of aliens and has all these interstellar friends and woe, does not fit in with her human peers. SUCH teenage problems, I tell you. I would be interested in hearing about any of her interstellar adventures, but I would also be interested in hearing more detail on that time the senior class "kidnapped" her to help on their planet survival final. I like the problem-solving, multiple cultural viewpoints and sometimes misunderstandings issues in these books. (I am not interested in evil dude on his evil planet is evil. Somehow he makes interstellar politics boring, I do not even know.) Feel free to elaborate on existing cultures or invent new ones!
Dancing Meteorite and Stolen Law would probably be the most difficult books of these to find; they're out-of-print YA from the 1980s. (Though no one has told the current amazon sellers how rare they are; they're both going for a couple of bucks apiece for old library-binding copies.)
I read Stolen Law when I was in middle school. I picked it up off the shelf because one of the author's names is the same as one of mine (my legal name, that is), and I had/have a fantasy of being a published author. That and because I spent a lot of time in my middle school library and read a lot of everything. I was on accelerated tracks for a lot of classes, which left me not in sync with the rest of my classmates and taking a study hall alone in the library instead of in a group with other kids in my grade. So you know. I was actually a lot like Kira Warden, who is singled out of all the kids because she's on linguist/diplomacy training, and never spends any time on station, in regular classes with other human kids. As an adult, I mock her tiny angstmoppet pain at being all different and gifted, but you have to understand, I mock with the mockery of someone who's been there, who got isolated that way, and who was reading about her when I was her. Although I really wish my trips to other places had been to other planets and not just to the high school for math every morning.
As I say, I read Stolen Law back then, repeatedly, but I didn't actually find a copy of Dancing Meteorite for many years, not until I was all grown up with a credit card and could hunt it down on the internet. At which point I discovered that many incidents in Kira's life which are mentioned, like, oh, say, the senior class kidnapping her to help with their final, which I had always assumed were references to the events of the first book, were actually not. There are so many noodle incidents in these books, damn it. I feel like you could just pick one and run with it! Although to be in the tone of the books you'd practically have to invent new noodle incidents to refer to, and cause me to gnash my teeth in frustration and glee.
There's even a noodle character, in a way. I always thought I'd get to meet Kira's mom when I read Dancing Meteorite, considering her history was so integral to the plot of Stolen Law. But no, Dancing Meteorite opens with Kira's mom already dead. I'd really like to know more about her. We know she's paraplegic and not Kira's biological mother, and an E-comm herself, and it's possible she only meant to foster/apprentice Kira and ended up wanting to adopt her. If you're going to write about her I would definitely want her physical disability handled with dignity and grace; there's no indication in the text that it ever presented a bar for her in her work as a translator.
I like that the different aliens have different cultures, and that knowing about those different cultures--or being aware of difference enough to know there's things she doesn't know--is how Kira solves problems. If you want to write stuff that happens beyond the books rather than going back before, I will note, I really like Tex and Dalterk, and the whole concept of the Vallusian bond, and the interesting notion that they now consider Kira part of theirs (teenage interspecies threesomes ahoy? and never mind that she's a tiny human, she's a GIRL, and sure, they know most species with differentiated sexes do heterosexual sex, but for them it's all WEIRD). I think one of my favorite scenes in both books is at the end of Stolen Law when Ertrex gives her the commendation in tones of dressing-down, because Vallusians are committed to seeming like hard-asses.
Affection through insult and commendation via dressing-down are tropes I find I like across multiple fandoms. This reminds me of a bit in the Alanna books by Tamora Pierce, where Duke Gareth gives Alanna a long lecture about not getting into fistfights while being proud of her for taking down a bully. Or also how (in the tv films, I don't know if it's as true in the books) Horatio Hornblower's commander, Pellew, tends to tease him about how terrible a lieutenant he is before affirming him. Hornblower is at heart an emo angstmoppet, so he tends to take it to heart and his FACE, oh my god, the emo certainty he's to blame for everything and then the relief. I realize I've gotten off on a tangent but to tie back in: Kira, I think, also tends to take it to heart and not realize she's being teased until they tell her outright they're proud of her, and it is such an ingrained Vallusian thing to bark orders and act stand-offish and put-upon that it would be an interesting ongoing character thing to see her slowly coming to realize that even when Ertrex (or Tex and Dalterk, though she had that realization some through the book) is being an ass, he's still fond of her. Maybe even moreso, that they express affection through insult and complaint, so the more they kvetch and moan, the more they're saying they're fond of her.
---
Perilous Gard - Elizabeth Marie Pope
Gwenhyfara, Kate Sutton, Cecily Heron
I'm kind of craving Gwenhyfara/Kate slash. If that's not your thing, I'm mostly interested in any story about Gwenhyfara's life under the hill, how she's interacted with humans, people from the village or the Gard or if Kate is the first she's ever respected or if she's had any compassion for any before. I would be interested in a story about her being Cecily's caretaker, since Cecily couldn't really be brainwashed for sacrifice the same way Christopher was, and feeling some kind of deep down doubt about sacrificing a child, and trying to give her as much comfort as she could.
Perilous Gard is a Tam Lin retelling set in Elizabethan England. There's question about whether there's magic at all; the fae could just be drugging people, could just be
So this version of the fae are very much the creepy fuckers, certain of their superiority; they keep humans either drugged or magicked into submission as chattel, and they brainwash their human sacrifices into agreeing to give up their lives. Gwenhyfara is the fae who looks after Kate in her captivity, and the other humans, who have been drugged into an animal-like state. Gwenhyfara is very much a product of her creepy fucker fae culture, but she has some small kindnesses for Kate, teaches her to move and live as the fae do, so I want to see that explored more, I want to see a Gwenhyfara who is conflicted about how they treat humans. As I said, I'm kind of craving some Gwenhyfara/Kate, though I'm not totally sure how you would do it without going AU. I am okay with AUs! Even dark AUs like Kate can't save Christopher or something. But I do want to keep the creepy fucker fae vibe, the part of Gwenhyfara's superiority she can't shrug off, and Kate's stubbornness, that's key to her character; I don't want rape, forced nor drugged, but I don't expect this to be sweet and nice, if you do write slash for them. It's a fucked-up situation!
---
Harbinger Trilogy - Diane Duane
Delde Sota
Delde Sota is my FAVORITE. She curious and unflappable and so wry. I love her format jokes. I think Diane Duane did so much more interesting things with the mechalus than anyone else writing Star*Drive, although if you wanted to run with that and suggest that Delde Sota is not much like the rest of her people, and maybe that's what she's doing wandering off on her own, that might make for an interesting story. As for the other characters in the books--I like Enda, I will admit I kind of ship Enda/Gabriel even though they're different species because apparently I have no shame, which extends everywhere as I also kind of ship Angela/Grawl, I like Gabriel most of the time but I tend to eyeroll at his DESTINY, I might possibly be interested in reading Delde Sota/Enda or Delde Sota/Gabriel or threesome. Or just Delde Sota being awesome on her own. I picture her being a character of color, by the way, I think the only adjective applied to her skin color is olive. I mean, you know, that means whatever you want it to mean in interstellar colonial post-Silence multiple alien races society, but it might be an interesting tack to explore historically, who exactly decided to upgrade themselves to become mechalus?
The three books in this series are Starrise at Corrivale, Storm at Eldala, and Nightfall at Algemron. They are out-of-print tie-in novels for a short-lived RPG called Star*Drive, but you can find copies for as cheap as a cent apiece on amazon, and I sometimes see them at my local used bookstore, so they're definitely still floating around.
The protagonist of the series is Gabriel Connor, who was a space marine and gets kicked out over espionage/political shenanigans. He starts off trying to figure out what happened to clear his name, but the deeper he gets in the political shenanigans, the more it complicated it gets, as he learns there are evil zombie alien forces running around the rim worlds that no one wants to admit to, and also the lost race of ancient whatevers are influencing his life, I, okay, I ignore most of the plot of the third book because interstellar politics: interesting; legendary fated epic conflicts of good and evil: um, but why do you need that when you have interesting interstellar politics? Enda is his primary companion through all of this, a fraal (friendly alien) Wanderer who picks him up when he's down on his luck because, more or less, the universe told her to. (As a philosophical life choice, I am pretty down with mysticism; I am having a hard time explaining how this differs from the destiny bs, but I feel it does.)
The character I requested is a secondary character who helps them out because they have such interesting problems. They meet Delde Sota when they are kitting out their ship with medical gear, and come back to see her when they get ahold of one of the zombie alien corpses and need someone to examine it and tell them exactly what the hell it is. Delde Sota is a mechalus, part organic, part technology, though the technology is sufficiently bred into the species that it's hard to say it's exactly artificial anymore. She has a braid that moves around on its own and plugs into things. There's no data she can't get it. She's gorgeous and smart and curious about everything, and I think I might have mentioned, I really dig her sense of humor. Mechalus speech patterns put a defining sentence type at the front of every thought, like statement or query or conjecture or suggestion. Delde Sota frequently uses these type indicators as parts of jokes. Maybe I am a giant geek that what's essentially grammar humor cracks me up, but it really does. Even when they're not specifically jokes, I am always interested in what sentence type indicators Delde Sota uses, because she sometimes uses uncommon ones I wouldn't have expected--like, before she autopsies the body they bring her, she says, "Invocation: here death rejoices to teach the living." That's one of my favorite lines in the books, I think. Invocation. Like, you might not expect a spiritual background for a character so grounded in technology, but it really, really works for me.
---
About my requests in general:
You may have noticed, all of my requests are for female characters. I like male characters from these stories, but I don't want to see them central, I want stories about my favorite girls. I think it would be awesome if you wrote me a story that passed Bechdel, though of course that depends on who you choose to have my gals interact with--Kira on a Vallusian explorer ship is going to have a hard time passing Bechdel, I know!
Cultural differences are relevant to all of these stories--with more awareness in the science fiction, more darkness in the historical fantasy. I like the world-building of each, the development of the different cultures, and I think in any story you write me from any of these books, the culture each character comes from and how it shapes her is going to be an important part of the story. There's a richness of cultural context, of characters that come from societies, that I treasure here. Even if you end up writing a PWP for a pairing or threesome I pitched, write me the characters coming together in a way that shows who they are, how they're shaped by their backgrounds. That stuff's sexy! (Cultural baggage is sexy. Hang on, where is my twitter...)(That's... yes. I tweet to mock myself. You should know that about me.
While I like a variety of genres, I really feel like which fandom you write for me is going to dictate genre, so I hesitate to just be like "I like crack!" or whatever. Like, I feel like a Perilous Gard story about Gwenhyfara is necessarily going to be at least a little dark. A Dancing Meteorite/Stolen Law story... well, depending on what story, I suppose it could range! But I'd think it would be more light-hearted. And with a Harbinger story about Delde Sota, I'd want it to be funny, I'd want her sense of humor to color it, whether it's light or dark humor.
Thank you very much for writing me a story! I'm looking forward to Yuletide.
~Juls