cyphomandra

Dear Yuletide writer,

I love Yuletide, as a challenge, a community and a tradition. I am thrilled to see what you come up with and I hope you enjoy creating it.

What I like hasn't changed much from previous years (including this sentence, its time come round again, slouching towards AO3 etc). I like humour that cares about the characters. I like characters who are outsiders in some way, but (sometimes even despite themselves!) become part of something larger - a relationship, a cause, a community. I like food as a way of showing character or worldbuilding (and for eating!). I like bittersweet endings. I like justified angst, pining, weirdness, and invention. I like pretty much any style of writing - epistolary, experimental, Dickensian - and even second person, if it works for the story. In a previous year I got IF for one story and that was fantastic. Artwise, I like quiet moments, possibly with tea or food, and prefer stylised to photorealistic. I love treats.

I have no problem with sexual content as long as it fits with the characters. I like stories that make me remember why I love the original inspiration as well as stories that make me think about it differently (and both! both is great). And I do like the canons themselves. I like these characters being part of their worlds, even when they struggle against them.

With my noms this year I am happy with crossovers (with other noms or any fandoms I've written). For AUs see specific fandoms. If you’re looking for short fandoms, either Dogsbody (one short book) or Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (one average movie) would suit.

DNWs: child or animal harm &/or death as a major plot point (outside of canon). If you’re looking back through old letters I have previously excluded earthquakes but it’s been over ten years and now I’m okay with them but would like them tagged. No noncanonical trans characters, please (exception for Jumanji - see below).

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Sheldon ("Shelly") Oberon
Jefferson (“Seaplane”) McDonough

I loved this so much, and it was so unexpected - I loved the van Allsburg book, really liked the Robin Williams film while being a bit disoriented about the undoing of the past, and went into this expecting it to be a bit of a let-down, and it was great. Everybody really leaned into the gaming aspects, NPC briefings, strengths/weaknesses, limited lives, and all, and this time the undoing of the past is actually heartbreaking in its consequence for Bethany as Shelly, and her/his relationship with Jefferson (I ship them in game but not in real life).

I've nominated the real world and game versions, but I'm much more interested in the experience in-game than in the real world. For this request I'd like to ignore The Next Level (although references to it welcome!), but apart from that, anything and everything goes. A sidequest within canon? AU where they don't make it past one of the challenges and have to find another way out? Another trip back into the game, just the two of them? Go wild.

I've put no non-canonical trans characters in my DNWs but for this fandom I am happy to have either/both (or anyone else) as trans.

Worrals series - WE Johns

Betty "Frecks" Lovell (Worrals Series - W. E. Johns)
Joan "Worrals" Worralson (Worrals Series - W. E. Johns)

So fantastic! So action-filled, with so many sudden reversals - and Worrals & Frecks are great, competent and brave, but never over-confident or perfect. I would love more adventures and I would also love femslash, h/c, spies, plane dogfights/crashes, coping with being in some form of wilderness after a plane crash, space AUs, or even just a quiet moment between the two of them in-between adventures. I like spies and betrayal and working with the Resistance, if you're looking for WWII themes, I would prefer the Nazis to not be massively emphasised and obviously I know that horrible things happened to British agents in reality but would prefer the narrow escapes and last-minute dashes of these books. I also love the plane bits and know almost nothing about planes so feel free to invent things.

I’ve read the first few non WWII ones (which unfortunately do have some terrible racial bits). I do have a slight preference for keeping the war setting BUT I am also totally up for leaping forward 10 years or more to see what the two of them are like. More spying? Test piloting? Involvement in the space program? Go for it. AUs of any kind fine as long as it's still them and there's danger and determination in bucketloads.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl)
Katia Grim
Princess Donut (Dungeon Crawler Carl)


I totally love this series, the world and the characters (I have read all seven books as well as listening to the audiobooks). Such a great concept, carried through with ruthless elan and with unexpected depths of feeling and insight. I love Carl, who is trying so hard despite everything being so stacked against him, and how he teeters between his goals and their costs. I love Princess Donut, who is very much a cat despite everything, and Katia, who has grown so much (ha!) during her time in the dungeon. I love the gamelit/RPG tropes (loot boxes! stat increases!) and the horror tropes and the pokes at reality TV. I love that everyone has their own agenda (look at Donut, running a revolution in her spare time) and I really, really love the way that Carl, even as he blows everything up and gets increasingly unstable, can listen to others, respect their opinions, and give them chances to make their own paths.

Prompts - go wild. Carl or Katia’s past, before they go into the dungeon? (Or Donut’s - what was she like as a kitten? What was her take on Carl when he first showed up?) A bit from Mordecai’s crawl? An outsider pov from a fan, an NPC, or another top ten crawler? Another convention appearance? An AU - feel free to design your own floor!! - or an outtake? What if, when they’d ended up in the Ghosts of Earth section, they’d been in a different area, or they’d lost their memories and thought they were back? What if they find themselves (apparently) outside the dungeon?

I do not ship any of the nominated characters - one of the things I like about DCC is that Carl hasn't had any sexual relationships since entering the dungeon. Canonical relationships (Katia/Bautista and I SUPPOSE Donut/Gravy Boat) are fine but I don't really want them to be the focus.

Feel free to play with formats. Please don't permanently kill any of the requested characters but otherwise darkness consistent with canon is fine. I am fine with gore. AUs - tbh you could probably do a terrifying coffee shop AU with this group and I would love it, as long as I still recognise the characters, but no American high school AUs, please.

Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones

Kathleen O’Brien
Sirius (Dogsbody)
Sol (Dogsbody)

I recently re-read this and it’s so good and so heart-breaking - DWJ is just the best at devastating endings, and this one, where Sirius hasn’t quite realised what his victory means, even while Kathleen struggles with yet another horrific loss, is still reverberating through me. I would love to read more. Does Kathleen meet Sirius again, or even end up becoming his companion - how, and what does that mean for her ties to Earth? What about Sol, who has previously avoided politics, and how do he and Earth feel about the loss of the Hunter? And Sirius, who has changed so much and come so far - what does he do now? And does he miss being a dog? I would be fine with canon AUs (perhaps a different bargain with the Wild Hunt) but am not looking for major setting/theme AUs, and it doesn’t have to end happily - but I do want more.


The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R Donaldson

Linden Avery

Linden Avery was hugely important to me in my teens, when there weren't a lot of adult females in sf/fantasy I could see myself in. I still love her as well as what the Second Chronicles do with portal fantasy, which was fascinating and heart-breaking all in one, while Thomas himself is much more of an ambivalent reading experience. I have read only the first two of the third and am not yet convinced by them.

I would like; more Linden! On Earth or visiting the Land, and I'm happy to ignore the third series or go AU from the second if you have a better idea. What if she’d gone to the Land first, instead of Covenant? What if someone from the Land comes to visit her world? I do like the third chronicles' idea of time-travelling within the Land's history, if you wanted to do that, and would love exploring more of the Land anyway. I also wonder how Linden reconciles her experiences with her everyday life on returning to our world, especially her healthsense given her job, and I'd like to see her finding some peace or happiness there, having healed from her past. I would also be interested to see Linden crossing into other fantasy worlds (for the Yuletide eligible, anything from Diana Wynne Jones or Piranesi).

I understand Covenant himself isn't everyone's cup of tea, and I haven't nominated him. I don't have strong feelings about him showing up or not; he is important to Linden, but not essential. I don’t mind either of the other nominated characters showing up; if you don't mind non-nominated, I have a weakness for Nom the Sandgorgon.


England series - KJ Charles

Archie Curtis (England series)
Daniel da Silva (England Series - KJC)
Fenella Carruth
Patricia Merton

My favourite KJC, and the one I am most likely to accidentally end up re-reading after just looking up one thing. I love everyone in these books (well, certainly all the nominated characters) - I love Archie’s reliability and Daniel’s spark, and Fenella’s well-concealed practical ruthlessness and Patricia’s determination. They’re all fantastic! I would be equally happy with slice of life or case fic, isolated country houses or London city life, supernatural AUs or inexplicably having everyone in space. I don’t want anyone to break up and I also don’t want any weddings, but otherwise I would be delighted by any and everything you can come up with.

Thanks so much!!

Sliding in pretty much on reveals....


This Yuletide I received Quiet in Kakariko, a charming piece with Link & Zelda, post-canon, with Zelda showing Link something of her journey and their world (also cats!)

Quiet in Kakariko (1195 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Link & Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Characters: Zelda (Legend of Zelda), Link (Legend of Zelda)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Slice of Life, Cats
Summary:

Zelda likes Kakariko a lot. It is, perhaps, the simplest and quietest place her long adventure took her to, but it’s one she’s been excited to introduce to Link.

I have also been through a selected chunk of the archive and will keep going, but these are stories I've particularly enjoyed so far:

Scrape Our Shoe on the Stars (2238 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Ray Garraty/Peter McVries
Characters: Ray Garraty, Peter McVries
Additional Tags: Fix-It of Sorts, Post-Canon, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Internalized Homophobia, surreality, Ambiguous/Open Ending
Summary:

You just won the Long Walk, Ray Garraty. What will you do now?

Lovely, dreamy, post-canon story, with the two of them in their own world, still on the road.

A Meeting of Minds (2440 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Mervyn Bunter & Peter Wimsey
Characters: Mervyn Bunter, Peter Wimsey, Bruce Bairnsfather (historical person)
Additional Tags: First Meetings, World War I
Summary:

Corporal Bunter is on temporary duty with the intelligence division when he truly meets Captain Wimsey in 1916.

Yuletide always has good Wimsey fic and I particularly liked this one, with Bunter and Peter meeting for the first time in the middle of the war - Bunter pov.

Picked or Pickled Shrimp (9260 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jane Marple, Dolly Bantry
Summary:

All is not well at Gossington Hall. Dolly Bantry has a house full of guests and no explanation for her growing sense of unease. Convinced that something terrible is about to happen, she enlists the help of an old friend. Can Miss Marple get to the bottom of the mystery simply by telling a story about shrimp?

Lucy Eyelesbarrow and the Olympian Task (12820 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jane Marple, Lucy Eyelesbarrow, Alexander Eastley (Miss Marple)
Additional Tags: casefic, Olympics, British public schools, period-typical extractive industries, Hoarding, Country House Mystery
Summary:

Lucy Eyelesbarrow is engaged to clean out the house of an old woman who has never thrown anything away--but muddy footprints and a mysterious prowler suggest someone believes there's treasure among the trash.

Both the Marple fics are great case-fic, true to canon, and both featuring some of my favourite detective story tropes (unfortunately to disclose which would involve spoilers!)

The dance of nature forward far (8221 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Mask of Apollo - Mary Renault
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Nikeratos/Thettalos (Mask of Apollo)
Characters: Nikeratos (Mask of Apollo), Thettalos (Mask of Apollo)
Additional Tags: Ancient Greece, Theatre, Established Relationship, Catharsis, Acting, Gods
Summary:

No one drew attention to my increasing efforts and difficulties—not at performing Aigeus or Athene, which weren't going badly, but in the role of Nikeratos, son of Artemidoros. Perhaps I had them all fooled...or perhaps they were kind.

A layered fic, with grief and roles and gods all woven together.

The Ship Sails On (6650 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Wind Will Rove - Sarah Pinsker
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: CW: contains canon-typical descriptions of child neglect in the various re-tellings of Cinderella.
Summary:

A series of different cultural artifacts illustrating some of the ways culture changes aboard ship over the course of the first 100 years or so.

Found documents fic tracing the evolution of life on a generation ship, themed around Cinderella; thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Memories of Glow (2311 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: I Was a Teenage Exocolonist (Video Game)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dys & Sol (I Was a Teenage Exocolonist), Sol & Sym (I Was a Teenage Exocolonist), Sol/Tangent (I Was a Teenage Exocolonist)
Additional Tags: Male Sol (I Was a Teenage Exocolonist), Post-Canon, Introspection, Pondering the void, Surveyor!Sol, Glow Month, references to the Transcended ending
Summary:

Many years later, the Chief Surveyor finds himself outside the colony walls during what used to be the most dangerous month.

Gets across the magic and wonder (and danger) of Glow, and shows Sol, older and possibly wiser.

Also I cannot get the link to work right now, but Monster Manual, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, is Xenk/Edgin timeloops & monster fucking, in which Edgin is cursed. Curséd. Very funny and oddlly hot.

Happy Yuletide!

This year I received two fantastic gifts:

our mouths with cinnamon (2145 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sons & Daughters - The Decemberists (Song)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Summary:

The world hasn’t ended.

I’ve always loved this Decembrists’ song, which is haunting and evocative and falls squarely into that “songs about some odd possible future” that I always enjoy (see Queen’s ’39 and the final chunk of Neil Young’s After the Goldrush) *and* is also sung as a round. This story tells one person’s story in that possible future, after the catastrophe, and what sort of life they can make for themselves - and with others.

A Christmas Mystery (3876 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jane Marple, Lucy Eyelesbarrow, Jason Rafiel
Summary:

At Christmas Miss Marple generally goes to her nephew, Raymond. This year things will be different.

In the last few years I’ve gained a massive appreciation for Miss Marple and her fluffy-haired razor-sharp efficiency. I really love her relationship with Jason Rafiel, and this story brings the two of them together again - as well as Lucy Eyelesbarrow, who is my other favourite Marple character (and honestly, who I would point to for anyone going on about how Christie’s characters are all stereotypes). Great to see them all together on another case, although the ending is bittersweet.

I am still working through the archive and will try to have a more general recs post soon.

Dear Yuletide writer,

I love Yuletide, and in many ways it's my favourite yearly tradition. I am thrilled to see what you come up with, and I hope you enjoy creating it.

What I like hasn't changed much from previous years (including this sentence, its time come round again, slouching towards AO3 etc). I like humour that cares about the characters. I like characters who are outsiders in some way, but (even despite themselves!) become part of something larger - a relationship, a cause, a community. I like food as a way of showing character or worldbuilding (and for eating!). I like bittersweet endings. I like justified angst, pining, weirdness, and invention. I like pretty much any style of writing - epistolary, experimental, Dickensian - and even second person, if it works for the story. In a previous year I got IF for one story and that was fantastic. Artwise, I like quiet moments, possibly with tea or food, and prefer stylised to photorealistic. I am definitely open to treats.

I have no problem with sexual content as long as it fits with the characters, although pages of explicit anatomical detail are unlikely to be my thing. I like stories that make me remember why I love the original inspiration as well as stories that make me think about it differently (and both! both is great). And I do like the canons themselves. I like these characters being part of their worlds, even when they struggle against them.

With my noms this year I am happy with crossovers (with other noms or any fandoms I've written). For AUs see specific fandoms. If you are picking this up, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the shortest canon - it's one movie.

DNWs: child or animal harm &/or death as a major plot point. If you’re looking back through old letters I have previously excluded earthquakes but it’s been over ten years and now I’m okay with them but would like them tagged. No A/B/O or noncanonical trans characters, please.

Stray (video game)

Worldbuilding
Orange Cat
B-12

This was such a fun game and I would love to revisit the world. I loved being a cat and doing cattish things, as well as getting to explore this fantastic bittersweet world that the robots had created. I loved the relationship with B-12. I loved the music and the culture and the undergroundness of everything, with all those lurking dangers (those horrible Zurks!).

You could do anything with this - robot point of view? Return of the humans? How has the cat protagonist been changed by their experiences, and what do they do next? (I don't have any firm views on cat gender/name - feel free to pick). I would love to see them finding their fellow cats again and either bringing them back to the city or meeting the robots who emerge. And I know I've picked B-12 and yes, I would not object at all to a slightly tweaked ending (the other robots fix B-12? There's a back up or a prototype somewhere?) or if you'd rather not, an unseen moment from within the game would be great, particularly if the two of them are exploring something new. Within canon AUs fine.

Dungeon Crawler Carl series - Matt Dinniman.

Carl
Princess Donut
Mongo

I totally love this series, the world and the characters (full disclosure; I have started but not finished book 5, but will have finished it by Yuletide). Such a great concept, carried through with ruthless elan and with unexpected depths of feeling and insight. I love Carl, who is trying so hard despite everything being so stacked against him, and how he teeters between his goals and their costs. I love Princess Donut, who is very much a cat despite everything, and of course I can't forget Mongo. I love the gamelit/RPG tropes (loot boxes! stat increases!) and the horror tropes and the pokes at reality TV.

Prompts - go wild. Carl's past, before he goes into the dungeon? An outtake from where we've been? A different level, a side quest, or something totally outside the dungeon - Carl & Donut & Mongo end up on an alien world? What if they're suddenly back in the (apparent) real world, still in their gaming personas? Game in-jokes - my gaming this year has been the Horizon series, Genshin Impact, Stray (as above), and I was a Teenage Exocolonist, if that helps. Feel free to play with formats as well. Please don't kill any of the requested characters but otherwise darkness consistent with canon is fine. I think you could do some interesting stuff with AUs here if you wanted.

Worrals series - WE Johns

Joan "Worrals" Worralson
Becky "Frecks" Lovell

I have only read three of these so far but they're fantastic - so action-filled! So many sudden reversals! - and Worrals & Frecks are great, competent and brave, but never over-confident or perfect. I would love more adventures and I would also love femslash, h/c, spies, plane dogfights/crashes, coping with being in some form of wilderness after a plane crash, space AUs, or even just a quiet moment between the two of them in-between adventures. Although I'd like to keep the WWII setting (unless you want to write a space AU) I would prefer not too much attention on the Nazis.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Evelyn Wang
Deirdre Beaubeirdre

Such an amazing movie - funny and heart-breaking and totally unexpected. Michelle Yeoh is fantastic, but so are all the cast - I've picked my two favourites, but only because otherwise I was listing everybody. I love Waymond and his steadfast kindness, even while he is finally drawing a boundary line around his relationship; I love Joy's determination, and how even as Jobu Tupaki she still isn't entirely lost. But Evelyn and her failures, and Deirdre and her savage nit-picking rule-following, (and how these are both their weaknesses and their strengths) had the most effect on me. Anything between the two of them would be great. Do they stay friends after the movie? How did they meet in the hot-dog finger universe? Are there other universes in which they meet, and what is their relationship there? Obviously no limitation on AUs or on story format, go wild.

I hope this is helpful! Basically these are all worlds & characters I love, and I would love to see more of.

Dear Yuletide writer,

I love Yuletide; it's such a crucial part of the the whole season for me. I am thrilled to see what you come up with, and I hope you enjoy creating it.

What I like hasn't changed much from previous years (including this sentence, its time come round again, slouching towards AO3 etc). I like humour that cares about the characters. I like characters who are outsiders in some way, but (even despite themselves!) become part of something larger - a relationship, a cause, a community. I like food as a way of showing character or worldbuilding. I like bittersweet endings. I like justified angst, pining, weirdness, and invention. I like pretty much any style of writing - epistolary, experimental, Dickensian - and even second person, if it works for the story. In a previous year I got IF for one story and that was fantastic. Artwise, I like quiet moments, possibly with tea or food, and prefer stylised to photorealistic.

I have no problem with sexual content as long as it fits with the characters, although pages of explicit anatomical detail are unlikely to be my thing. I like stories that make me remember why I love the original inspiration as well as stories that make me think about it differently (and both! both is great). And I do like the canons themselves. I like these characters being part of their worlds, even when they struggle against them.

DNWs: child or animal harm &/or death as a major plot point. If you’re looking back through old letters I have previously excluded earthquakes but it’s been ten years and now I’m okay with them but would like them tagged. No A/B/O or noncanonical trans characters, please.


銀の匙 | Silver Spoon

Hachiken Yuugo

This is a slice-of-life coming-of-age manga about Hachiken Yuugo, who burned out on the academic track his father insisted on and instead ends up at an agricultural high school in Hokkaido, and it's by Arakawa Hiromu and it's fantastic. Sweet, funny, touching, educational, and with a deep-down love of food that encompasses exactly how hard (and heart-breaking) it can be to bring that food to the table. It's a fantastic story and it ends in just the right place BUT Yuletide obviously exists to meet my need for still more from Hachiken and his classmates (and families).

Basically anything in this would be great. A look at Hachiken 5 or 10 years later, possibly with him returning to the school (in achievement? disgrace? (unjustified and/or remediable, obviously) as a guest or a teacher?)? Another incredible food and togetherness story ? Farming anecdotes? High school pranks? I would also be happy with non mundane AUs (farming IN SPACE, the school is suddenly catapulted 300 years back in time, the animals are mythological creatures). Basically more of them, whenever and wherever. I don't really ship Hachiken with anybody - I do like Mikage, but I don't feel that they're destined for each other. Any of the gang showing up is fine, right down to Dot Brows the horse.

(For reference I have not seen the anime, just in case it differs)

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Sheldon ("Shelly") Oberon
Ruby Roundhouse
Bethany Walker
Martha Kaply

I loved this so much, and it was so unexpected - I loved the van Allsburg book, really liked the Robin Williams film while being a bit disoriented about the undoing of the past, and went into this expecting it to be a bit of a let-down, and it was great. Everybody really leaned into the gaming aspects, NPC briefings, strengths/weaknesses, limited lives, and all, and this time the undoing of the past is actually heartbreaking in its consequence for Bethany/Shelly.

I've nominated the real world and game versions, but I'm much more interested in the experience in-game than in the real world. For this request I'd like to ignore The Next Level (although references to it welcome!), but apart from that, anything and everything goes. A sidequest within canon, where the two of them get to develop their uneasy friendship (I am, in fact, totally up for f/f (well, sort of, if we're in game, definitely queer though) if you wanted to go for more than friends)? AU where they don't make it past one of the challenges and have to find another way out? Another trip back into the game, just the two of them? And I said more in-game than real world, but having the game intrude into the real world with the two of them trying to balance their game knowledge with their real world lives would be great.


Armitage Family Stories | The Serial Garden - Joan Aiken

Harriet Armitage
Mark Armitage
Worldbuilding

The ending of The Serial Garden has haunted me for over 40 years and I just want someone to fix it.

(oh all right, possibly you need more prompts. I love the matter-of-factness and fantasticality of these stories, all neatly intertwined and tucked into short construction of impeccable dream logic. Myth, fairytales, ghosts, witches, all uncanny and oddly comforting, like a ghost governess who wakes you up each night to drill you in Latin conjunctions. And yes, the story The Serial Garden absolutely broke me as a child. So unfair, so inevitable; the childhood trauma of your parents throwing away something that to them was totally unimportant but that meant the world to someone else. I know there are hints in her later stories that all was not lost, and I also know that Aiken didn't fix it (and for very good reasons), but for Yuletide, I'd like it mended. It can be bittersweet, hard-earned, fragile and possibly transient, but- somehow - get the princess and her faithful dog out of that garden.)

But yes!! Optional details are optional. If you don’t want to or can’t do that, any other Armitage hijinks would be very welcome. I particularly like intersections with myth or transformations (animals? Wings? Winged animals? ), the odd villagers that live nearby or visit, and hints of horror. What are Mark and Harriet like as adults? Do they acquire another extraordinary pet? I’d particularly like to know about Harriet’s ongoing witchy education, and how this develops (and her interactions with other practitioners)

Thank you so much, and have an amazing Yuletide!

(and happy new year!)

For Yuletide I got two fantastic gifts, one in the main collection and one in Madness.

the trees were almost budding, the sun was almost bright (1575 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Leah (Stardew Valley), Penny (Stardew Valley), Maru (Stardew Valley), Abigail (Stardew Valley), Haley (Stardew Valley), Emily (Stardew Valley)
Additional Tags: Slice of Life, Bittersweet, Flower Dance, Platonic Relationships, POV Leah, Yuletide 2019
Summary:

Leah invites the bachelorettes of Stardew Valley to get ready for the Flower Dance at her cabin, and wonders if they're as happy in the valley as she is.

I spent most of July happily playing Stardew Valley, which has an impressive amount of depth for what looks to be on the surface a simple farming game. Disappointed with your life and work at a souless megacorporation, you (a 32 bit art character) inherit a small farm, but in addition to clearing ground, tending crops, and attempting to fish via a ludicrously difficult gaming mechanic, you meet and get to know the villagers, who all have their own stories, and over time you can develop relationships. Each season of the game there’s a town event, and the summer one - where migrating, luminescent jellyfish come up to the surface of the sea before departing - made me cry the first time I played it.

My gift is about the Flower Dance, the Spring event, and shows the game’s female single characters getting ready, from the point of view of Leah, who is also an outsider to the village. It’s sweet and touching, and again there’s a lot more under the surface.

Not a gift, but also great, is this epistolary/found documents story that attempts to explain some of the characters’ backstories and get (at least) two of them together:

Roman à Clef (7138 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Elliott/Harvey (Stardew Valley)
Characters: Harvey (Stardew Valley), Elliott (Stardew Valley), Leah (Stardew Valley), Abigail (Stardew Valley), Wizard | M. Rasmodius, Female Player (Stardew Valley)
Additional Tags: epistolatory, Fictional Media, Sculpture, Pining, Worldbuilding, Oral History
Summary:

Elliott takes a sculpting class and writes a novel.

and how she gave me life (645 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Some Velvet Morning- Lee Hazelwood & Nancy Sinatra
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Phaedra, Nameless narrator
Additional Tags: Snakes, Western, Embeing somewhat traumatise bedded Images


My second gift is for the determinedly weird song by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood, and gives an explanation for it that is suitably strange and atmospheric - and it comes with a haunting selection of photographs!

( Other recs: )

This year I wrote casefic for Robin Stevens' Murder Most Unladylike series. These are a fabulous series set in the 1930s with two teenage girls, Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong, who are detectives - there are eight books out so far (one is short stories and additional material), covering various traditional crime settings such as a country house, the Orient Express, the theatre, a boarding school, and Cambridge. They are very much Golden Age crime in style and detective format, but with a modern sensibility about some of the pitfalls works of that era fell into; there are numerous sympathetic queer characters (Death in the Spotlight spoiler removed, as I can't get spoiler text to work) and Hazel is Hong Kong Chinese (one of the recent books is set in Hong Kong, and it's fascinating seeing Daisy deal with an environment where she is out of place and ignored.

Anyway. I wanted to write casefic, but I did have to dampen down my original Between Silk and Cyanide-related urge to write WWII spy fic (which is so obviously where the series is heading - we're currently in 1936 and Hazel is starting to work on codes) because I could tell this would spiral rapidly out of control. So I cast round for shorter ideas, and one of the things that stuck was the fact that these books were set in a death-penalty era UK. Dorothy Sayers' books do grapple with this (obviously Strong Poison, but I think it's the end of Busman's Honeymoon where Peter is really wrestling with his role in the execution of the guilty party). Stevens has alluded to this but not put a lot on stage (entirely reasonably for books aimed at 10-12 year olds!). I also re-read my collection of Poirot's Early Cases to try and keep things short and ended up pinching the cigarette clue.

As usual I ended up finishing right on deadline (apologies again to my betas!) and there are still a few loose ends I would have liked to tweak, but it's mostly there. Detective stories were one of my earliest reading interests (after fantasy but before SF, comics, fandom etc) and it was great fun to write one.

The Case of the Suspicious Suicide (6307 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Daisy Wells, Hazel Wong, Inspector Priestly, Lavinia Temple
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Boarding School, Detectives, Misses Clause Challenge, Female Friendship
Summary:

'Half a term!' said Daisy to me. 'What could possibly happen in half a term? It's just exams and Speech Day!'

Death in the Spotlight, Robin Stevens (2018).

I wrote If You See Her, Say Hello for the book Carrie by Stephen King. It was pretty successful as far as my fic goes - double figures for comments! I guess this is what happens when I do not write crossovers between tiny or nonexistent fandoms :D

Carrie is the first Stephen King book I read, as well as his first published novel; I read it standing up in a department store, racing through to finish before my mother came and found me and insisted we go home. Some parts are too on-the-nose and the found documents format doesn't always work, but it holds up; a key part of this is Carrie herself, who is deliberately average in many ways - yes, she's bullied and she's a target, but part of the tragedy is that this was never inevitable. She is average and a victim and a monster all at once, which is a lot more than most horror protagonists get. I've never watched the film of The Shining because one of the things I like most about the book is that Jack is also a loving father and a monster simultaneously, inextricable, and from what I've heard the film makes it an either/or; I hadn't realised until re-reading this time how much of that is in Carrie as well.

I had trouble tracking down the book. I found - with some difficulty - my own copy, got about 70 pages into it and then lost it completely. I then borrowed the library's copy, got about 100 pages in and lost it as well. I was about to grudgingly buy an ebook version when I finally located the library copy wrapped in a duvet in the boot of my car, and was at last able to finish it.

I then started writing Carrie pov with multiple AUs and got totally stuck. I had a lot of ideas but nothing was working at all, so I went back through all the Sue bits of the book, many of which are extracts from her book My Name is Susan Snell, and that knocked something free. Reworking the Carrie pov stuff from Sue's perspective worked a lot better, but I'd still like to try giving Carrie herself a better ending.

I also need to fix the summary (my bête noir). The book has two Dylan songs quoted in it, Just Like a Woman and Tombstone Blues (I think. Definitely the latter, and I still haven't found my copy of the book to check). When this was in draft I was using a later Dylan song as a placeholder title, Changing of the Guard, a song I still feel has at least one story for me in there, but it wasn't right for this one; I went looking at what he had out in 1975/76, the time Carrie is set, and found the title song in Blood on the Tracks.

For Chocolate Box I wrote Once a Shield Maiden in Rohan... a Narnia/Lord of the Rings crossover. This was the last pairing I added to my sign-up and the one I felt least sure of, mainly because I've never written in Lord of the Rings and it's such a epic fandom in all senses, as well as being a book I've loved for years. Naturally I matched on it.

Initially I wanted to do something set during the years that Lucy is Queen in Narnia, and I wrote a few openings trying to work out what she would be like; I also wanted to do something with Éowyn's ability to fight, and contrast that with the Narnian approach ("Battles are ugly when women fight," Father Christmas tells Lucy when he gives her her present; but although it's the healing cordial that has pride of place in the book, she also gets a dagger - and Susan a bow & arrows). I hadn't really worked out what I wanted to say, though, and setting events in Rohan made me anxious about getting something wrong - I've always been more a fan of the hobbits than the humans - and I was also trying to put in references to Tolkien and Lewis in real life, and it was all feeling far too forced. So I wrote this instead.

Apparently Rohan is based linguistically on Mercia, but when I looked up their word for sheep it was shep. With a long e. So I went for Old English instead, with the help of my beta who'd conveniently studied it...

For Yuletide this year I received Backpack about Will and his friends on their journey towards the White Mountains; although the mood of the piece is bleak, there are moments of kindness and connection that are very true to canon. I know my request went out to pinch-hit and am very grateful it was picked up!

Backpack (2708 words) by spiderfire
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Tripods - John Christopher
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Will Parker (The Tripods), Beanpole (The Tripods), Henry (The Tripods), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Missing Scene, Vagrants, Original Character Death(s), Canon Compliant
Summary:

Some encounters Will, Henry and Beanpole had on their way to the White Mountains.

I wrote End in Fire, a crossover between two of my recipient's requested fandoms, Stephen King's Firestarter and Daryl Gregory's We Are All Completely Fine. I matched on the former and had not actually read the latter; I had, however, read the prequel-written-later, Harrison Squared, which is YA horror and had some great characters and a nicely dry sense of humour, while completely failing at any sort of satisfying conclusion, which is just the sort of thing that nags at me and meant that when I reserved Firestarter through the local library I also reserved We Are All Completely Fine, just to check.

I re-read Firestarter and found some interesting hanging threads (other survivors of Lot 6, the hints that Charlie's power will somehow lead her to do something with/to the sun), and started a few ideas which went nowhere (also, inexplicably, research on climate change does not indicate whether it is possible to fix it by accelerating the life cycle of the sun, although it looks as though Charlie would have to cause core hydrogen exhaustion to get anywhere, which has other disadvantages!). While thinking about this I read We Are All Completely Fine - cool set-up, interesting characters, ending not as cliff-hangery as Harrison Squared but still not as good as the set-up - and discovered it had Greta, a girl raised in an all-female cult to be the bride/vessel of an unearthly destructive spirit of fire. I wavered for a bit (another Yuletide where I write a crossover between two tiny fandoms? at least there were a tiny handful of fics out there for Firestarter) but the idea was too compelling to let go, and at rather a late stage I emailed the mods to ask if my recipient would be okay with a crossover.

The story itself was easier after that - I wanted to get Greta out of being a containment device, and I wanted to show a possible future for Charlie, and I wanted a happy(ish) ending for both of them.

End in Fire (4990 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: KING Stephen - Works, Firestarter - All Media Types, We Are All Completely Fine - Daryl Gregory
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Charlie McGee, Harrison Harrison
Additional Tags: Crossover, Psychic Abilities, secret government agencies, Unlikely meetings, Cthulhu Mythos
Summary:

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

I did mean to post a recs post, but I did a lot of reading instead (and still have a dozen or so windows open on long stories). The Wimsey and Wodehouse (Psmith and Jeeves & Wooster) fics were all good this year, and I also liked Mission Impeccable (GBBO spoof), The Fragile Skiff Attains the Shore (Master and Commander, Jack and Stephen endanger and rescue each other), and Many Havens, a Mercedes Lackey Vanyel fix-it fic.

Dear Yuletide writer,

Thank you for writing for me! Really, I'll be happy just seeing what you do with whichever one of these fandoms you've signed up for, but feel free to read through these notes as well.

( Onwards. )