Yuletide Dear Author Letter 2019

Hi! Thank you so much for writing me a story! I love Yuletide and I hope that you're getting to write something you'll have fun writing. :)

In general, I like a wide variety of stories: funny, fluffy, angsty, thinky, sexy, it's all good. I like small character moments and big tropey scenarios and stories that read like a middle chapter from something bigger that doesn't exist.

I don't have any triggers to avoid. There are a few common-ish story elements I dislike: pets and pet ownership, the giving of lavish or costly gifts, women having to dress up more feminine-ly to advance their romantic plots. Just not my thing.

The Avant Guards
Charlie Bravo

This comic is adorable and it needs to have fic about it! In the "college sports/gay romance" genre where the sport is basketball, the college is an art school, and the cast is full of queer people of color (which is more or less what I've said about it before). I asked for Charlie Bravo but I love the entire cast so anyone you want to focus on is great. I definitely ship Charlie/Liv and would be very into something romantic or pre-romantic about them but it could also be fun to find out more about the academic side of life at O'Keeffe or just some general college/team hijinks. I will admit I know basically nothing about basketball; if you *do* know things about basketball, feel free to write some basketball and dazzle me, otherwise feel free to totally leave out or gloss over any basketball content. Maybe there's a dance and some sexually-charged dancing! Maybe nobody can make it home for Thanksgiving and the team puts together a team Dorm Thanksgiving! Maybe Tiffany accidentally casts a truth spell or love spell or something (or the team wants to convince her she did?)! Daemon AU! Someone is nude modeling for someone else's life drawing class! Bad blind date! There are like a thousand classic plots that could apply here and they would all be beautiful.

Octo-Heist In Progress
Pico

This was my favorite science fiction short story from 2018. It's only 7470 words long and you can read it online here. I fell in love with Pico immediately and would love a glimpse into his continuing adventures. Does he cross paths with Etta again? Get recaptured by someone and have to Great Escape/Shawshank Redemption his way out of new trouble? Is he liberating captive sea life from a lab or aquarium, leading a massive human prison breakout, taking down the global ID system? (Larson doesn't specify too much about the future so feel free to make it as weird/boring/utopian/dystopian as you'd like.) I like Pico as a fundamentally alien character who can't communicate with human characters except through his actions, but I would also love a Pico who has, for instance, stolen an AAC alternative communication device and is now trying to plan a billion-dollar heist with his human henchmen while limited to a few dozen pre-programmed phrases like "I'm hungry" and "I need the toilet". Maybe the newest recruit to the gang/revolutionary cell is surprised to find out their boss is an octopus? Or maybe Pico explores life in the ocean (and decides to stay? or return to the human world?). Or goes to space! I love space and I bet Pico could cause or solve all kinds of trouble there. Or maybe he just crashes Etta's blind date or something. Anything could happen, big or small. :) Pico is an exception to all of my fic preferences and if he wants to have an (aquatic!) pet or give extravagant presents, good for him. I don't mind if Pico takes damage in the course of a story but I do feel that any good Pico story ends with Pico triumphant and justice prevailing. (Justice in the chaotic, moral, anti-institutional sense...)

Chronin
Hatsu

I love everyone in this comic but am requesting Hatsu because I feel like I had less insight into her head than into Mirai's or Gilbert's and I just want *more* of her. I talked about Chronin volume 1 here and volume 2 here. I would love to see Hatsu's POV from any point during the story - when does she first realize she's interested in Mirai, and at what points does she consider acting on that? What's something that surprises her about the future, once she gets out of quarantine? How are her reactions to the future different than her mom's reactions? What is it like for Hatsu and Mirai to be beginning a relationship while Hatsu is going through three weeks of debriefing? How does Hatsu feel about seeing Gilbert again at the end? I do have a fondness for Hatsu/Mirai/Gilbert as the final ship situation, but I'll be just as happy either way if you'd prefer to write Hatsu and Mirai as an exclusive couple or Hatsu/Mirai/Gilbert as having a poly arrangement of some kind. Just please don't break up Hatsu and Mirai if you're writing post-canon. I also think there could be some very interesting canon divergence AUs here to explore - what if Mirai's beacon *does* work, at the start of volume 2? Does she ever come back? And where is Hatsu when she does? What if Azai is persuaded, and gives Gilbert back the backpack, but doesn't give them the three spare beacons? Does Mirai still go back to the future? And does she ever come back after *that*? And where is Hatsu when she does? (While we're here, let me admit to some minor confusion about names: Mirai addresses her as Hatsu while Hatsu calls her Mirai, but Hatsu's brother calls her Kako at one point, as does the professor at the end, which doesn't help clarify whether this is more or less familiar address. I think we-the-Chronin-fandom should just call her Hatsu since that's what Mirai calls her.)

Thank you so much! Yay Yuletide!

Wayward Son

A key thing you might want to know, which I didn't, is that Wayward Son isn't exactly a sequel to Rainbow Rowell's Carry On (which I talked about here), it's the second book of a trilogy of which Carry On is now retroactively the first book. The third book, Any Way the Wind Blows, doesn't have a date announced yet, but is supposed to be "soon", but I think she's still writing it, so, we'll see. Anyways, as you might infer from my emphasis of its middle-book status, Wayward Son stirs up various issues and then ends without resolving anything but the very most immediate situations. As you might also have guessed, I found it a lot less fun than Carry On. Rowell is working with some really interesting themes that I would claim are things I'm deeply interested in - what happens Afterwards, how do you go on and create a new life and new identity for yourself after something happens that makes you lose or give up the way you identified yourself previously - and maybe in the next book it will turn out she has something satisfying to say about all that, having set it up in this one. This book, sort of paradoxically, felt like it had too much going on and yet nothing really happened? The emotional beats didn't quite connect and line up, it was just a little too all over the place. (And one key bit of how the end worked out didn't make sense to me at all.)

I do think it's interesting as what I would describe as very clearly a New Adult work rather than Young Adult, although I think New Adult really only caught on as a term in romance novels. They're 20, they're living and traveling independently, etc. There are a couple of things I like about New Adult as a category - I've seen concerns that the older end of YA is crowding out the younger end of YA, and I don't think that's entirely wrong, and I also like the idea of having a handy label for "college age stories" for people looking for those. I guess if I believe in this label I can start using it myself... and yet I'm probably still going to tag this YA too... hm.