Yuletide 2023 Letter

Dear Yuletider,

Thanks for writing for me! I am requesting three fandoms this year: nad and Dan adn Quaffy - Diana Wynne Jones (ANY), The Game Beyond - Melissa Scott (ANY), and Dragaera - Steven Brust (Khaavren, Tazendra, Aerich, Pel - ALL). Per Yuletide tradition, I think, the first part of this letter has general notes about what I like and don't like, and then sections on each fandom.

General Likes

Here are some things that I like in general, and would be overjoyed to see in any fic for any canon:
-Loyalty/fealty relationships
-unequal power dynamics
-Close relationships intersecting with unequal power dynamics
-Intense friendships
-Platonic life partners
-Comedies of manners
-Court-culture,
-Social intrigue
-Mirrors for princes/panegyric/shitty court rhetoric/bad court poetry
-In-universe art, literature, music, rhetoric,pop-culture, food, ritual, folklore and so on.
-Difficult decisions about whether to do what is right or what is expedient/conducive to survival, having to compromise your principles, and finding ways to live with the consequences.
-Unreliable narrators; protagonists with imperfect information.
-Linguistic games and code-switching, puns, allusions to other works of literature, whether in-universe or extra-universe, pastiche
-letters & in-universe documents/literature. (I'm completely, enthusiastically on board with epistolary fic, journal-entry fic, archive fic, far-future-historian-looks-back-on-these-events fic, ridiculous in-universe fictionalization of the character fic--- any weird experiments with genre and form are ok.)

General DNWs

(starred* DNWs = mentions of canon plotlines that deal with these things are ok): death of canon characters beyond canon deaths; mass death & genocide*; apocalypse and large-scale destruction*; blowing up planets or cities*; violence & gore beyond what is in canon; psychological torture or/and breakdown beyond what is in canon*; dehumanization*; noncon*; unremittingly bleak endings; non-canon incest; mundane and/or modern AUs; unrequested crossovers or fusions; kidfic; fic centered on the struggles of a character in a real-world marginalized identity*; Christianity and Christian-conversion narratives.

nad and Dan adn Quaffy - Diana Wynne Jones

(Internet Archive 1-hour check-out link here or here)

Characters Requested: ANY (Worldbuilding, F.C. Stone, Candida I, Danny)
What I love about this story is how it sends up so many things so deftly and affectionately: vintage SF tropes; typos; silly made-up names for mundane things; the utter blinding confidence of SFF writers (and readers) in their own cleverness re: the political worlds they make up. If you also enjoy this story, I’ll probably love anything you choose to write, from any angle! Here are some prompts/ideas, but go wild!

Possible prompts:

+ Just more of the tropey 70s era nudist matriarchal space opera F.C. Stone stumbles into. How does Candida I crush Adny's rebellion and restore the Matriarchy? How did she come to power in the first place?

+ F.C. Stone turning it all into another novel.

+ Meta-fic about F. C. Stone's oeuvre, e.g. reviews of her novels as her style/focus changes over time, fanfic or fan-essays about the Starship Candida books or the Candida I universe book, if she ever writes it.

+ Worldbuilding about the Candida I universe (leaning into the tropey 70s-80s SF of it all the better!): how do people interact with their conscious-class computer doubles? What is life like on Nad? Some random civilian’s memoirs of what it was like during Adny’s rebellion?

+ I welcome crossovers with any other Diana Wynne Jones novel or story or series EXCEPT the Howl/Ingary books, Power of Three, and Islands of Chaldea. (F.C. Stone is another guest of honor at the convention in Deep Secret and drags Danny along? The Bounds land Jamie in Ladn on Nad? Candida I has to deal with a visit from the Reigners? The computers in the basement of Stallery Castle somehow get tangled up with the Ship’s Computer or/and F.C. Stone’s?)

Canon-specific DNWs: Adny victorious/the Matriarchy being defeated; earnest deconstruction of the gender politics of the scifi universe.

The Game Beyond - Melissa Scott

(Internet Archive 1-hour checkout link here)

Characters Requested: ANY (Keira Renault, Desolin Hamm'tt, Oriana I, Worldbuilding)

I just thought this novel and the world it was set in was really neat, and I'd love any fic about it! Here are some possible prompts/ideas, but please don't feel constrained to them, or even to the nominated characters: if you have an idea about Lasca FitzMary pulled out of her career as a naval officer to be an imperial hostage or the history of the Order and its anchorites or a Miss Manner's style column about the niceties of Convention or the later career of Overlord Ojeda, go for it!

Possible Prompts

+ I'm fascinated by the hints we get about Keira's relationship with Oriana–his mixture of pity and contempt and regret for who she could have been is so suggestive; we know that she regularly (!) made him afraid for his life and enjoyed having that power over him, but he also did persuade her to let him dictate policy and make decisions and even speeches essentially on her behalf. How did he prove himself to her? How did they develop that bond of trust/mutual reliance/??? ? What convinced Oriana to make Keira her heir?

+ Keira’s young adulthood seems fascinating! What does it mean to grow up as the heir of a ruling family that officially doesn’t exist? How did Keira learn to wield power and authority, and what is his personal history with the Castellars?

+ Desolin Hamm’tt was another character I wish we had seen more of. She seems so isolated, even among the Maiores and even within her own household. How did things end up that way for her? I’d also love to see Desolin in her element as Prime Minister or as Grand Duke. I’m not particularly interested in romantic Desolin/Keira, but seeing them as allies and partners would be excellent, especially, say, in a moment of disagreement where their agreements are tested.

+ Worldbuilding: more about any of the Imperial history that gets tossed around in short references! The backstory of the Renaults on Hellmouth!3 How Convention actually works when Majores (mostly) play the rules (or at least, more than they do in the novel): what happens when a powerful Majore is successfully “assassinated”, for example? The monastic and psychic side of the Order, and how it intersects with the religious (?) faith of the Church? One of my private delights was that they are still using dot-matrix printers where you have to tear the sheets apart, and I’d love to see more exploration/playing around with 80s-extrapolated tech that now seems quaintly outdated.

The only things I'm not so interested in for this fandom are: Eduard de Terranin , stories set mostly within a VR game (about gaming is fine!), stories set after Keira's eventual death, stories mostly focused on the Terran diplomatic delegation (Denisov-Graham and other Terrans as side-characters is fine!).

Dragaera - Steven Brust

Characters Requested: Khaavren, Tazendra, Pel, Aerich (ALL)

I’ve read all the existing Vlad books, all the Paarfi books, Brokedown Palace, so any references to any part of canon are fair game! That said, my favorites are the Khaavren novels (and especially the first two). Adventure-romance is one of my favorite genres, and I love how joyfully the swashes are buckled, how enthusiastically (but honorably) violent our four heroes are, how vibrant the world of the Dragaearan "ancien régime” is, and how light the tone is (although not without some very moving moments of friendship and loyalty). (Also, although it’s controversial, I am a big fan of Paarfi of Roundwood). So basically, I’ll be overjoyed with anything that gives me more of our friends Khaavren, Aerich, Tazendra, and Pel and their colorful world. Here are some prompts/ideas, but please don’t feel limited to them.

I don’t have very good prompts for this, because I really just want to see more of our friends Khaavren, Tazendra, Pel, and Aerich in any era, whether the 500 years between Phoenix Guards and 500 Years After or during the 250-odd years of the Interregnum before Paths of the Dead. Or fudging the the timeline so all 4 of them are in the Guards longer. (Or anything else, really–Paarfi isn't consistent with himself or with Vlad (who also isn’t entirely consistent with himself), so why should we be finicky about exact details? If you want to have Khaavren, Pel, Tazendra, and Aerich hanging out at Aliera's 200th birthday party, when she's been living at Court for a couple decades already, go for it! Everyone Lives into the era of the Vlad books and/or No Adron’s Disaster AUs are also welcome.)

Possible Prompts

+ There's some intricate Intrigue afoot and our heroes end up entangled in it but (with the possible exception of Pel) never actually figure out what was going on.

+ something completely trivial: Aerich loses his crochet hook and the gang all have to go try to procure a new one?

+ Any sort of adventure or non-adventure: a mission for the Emperor? A duel (or multiple)? One of Pel’s or Tazendra’s love affairs gets too tangled and they have to call in their friends?

+ Other POVs are fine, e.g. an everyone-lives universe where Tazendra is a regular guest at Castle Black and Vlad has to deal with four comrades.
+If you want to write in the style of Paarfi, I'm completely here for it! If you have no desire to write like Paarfi, I'm also completely here for it! If you have an idea about another ridiculous genre/style that you want to play with (or several), I'm here for that as well!

+ I did not request “Worldbuilding” because I’m most interested in Paarfi-verse worldbuilding for Dragaeara and that didn’t seem like something I could fairly limit a writer to. But if you want to write something focused on pre-Interregnum/early Zerika IV politics/society/history, or about the literature and literary circles Paarfi runs in, please feel free, even if the characters I requested play smaller roles! (E.g. what kinds of novels did Tazendra and Khaavren grow up reading? What’s on the shelves of Aerich’s library? What kinds of seditious poetry has Khaavren had to arrest people over, and was some of it written by Pel under a deeply buried nom-de-plume? What does a court masque look like in Tortaalik’s court?)

Canon-specific DNWs: explicit romantic relationship or pining between Tazendra and Aerich; death of any requested characters; if you are writing a story set during the Interregnum or later, please don’t focus on Adron’s Disaster and its associated traumas, but references to it are fine (e.g. mention of a character having lost relatives in the disaster, or a nostalgic aside about something in Dragaeara city) and the more extended effects of the collapse of the empire are of course fine!