Dear Yuletide Author

[christycorr]

Hi, mystery author!

I'm so happy we share one of these tiny fandoms! I did my best to come up with helpful suggestions, but please feel free to go 100% Optional Details Are Optional regarding anything and everything in the prompts below. If these canons inspire you to write something completely different, I’ll be delighted to read it. Please share with me what you like about them.

General likes/dislikes • Big Bad Wolf • The Kingdoms • Terra Ignota

general likes/dislikes

Things/tropes I love: UST, banter, angsty and/or fucked-up characters and interactions, clever characters actually being clever, court intrigue, found families, crime/heist fic, unusual world-building, time travel/time loops, outsider POV, poly relationships, sex magic of any kind, dubcon, infidelity (A/B with either already in a relationship), kidfic, domesticity, post-break-up second chances, fake relationship, enemies- or fuck-buddies-to-lovers, hatesex, denial/delay, voyeurism, pining, and soulbonds.

I love short PWPs and long plotty fics alike; go for any tense, rating and genre you prefer. I’m equally happy with gen and shippy fic. Feel free to go full-on AU if you wish, or to stick closely to canon; I’ll never mind either way. Also, regarding ships: I’m a multishipper at heart and will never be unhappy about your shipping choices, no matter what you go for.

Things I dislike: daddy kink, the word ‘cum,’ watersports, scat, graphic rape as plot device to lead to h/c.

In case you happen to want to poke around my accounts for any reason, your best bets are Pinboard (christycorr), AO3 (christycorr) and Storygraph (christycorr).

Big Bad Wolf series - Charlie Adhara

Cooper Dayton, Oliver Park, Eli Smith

Okay, so, here’s my thing with this series. I love Cooper and Oliver together. I love how nothing comes easy to them but they are still ambling vaguely onwards. They’re complete idiots about each other, and watching their relationship grow is legitimately such a delight. I really appreciatehow Adhara creates obstacles that feel like real emotional struggles, and that you get a real sense of the ways in which Cooper and Oliver’s personal issues can both get in the way and help sometimes. Everything is “one step forward, one step back, two steps vaguely to the side, another step forward”. I want to slap them a solid 90% of the time, a fundamental part of most of my favourite ship dynamics. Brilliant, flawless, no notes.

AND THEN THERE’S ELI. And I enjoyed Eli’s book, I really did, I’m glad he’s getting a messy love story of his own. But goddamn, I really wanted to see Park and Cooper take care of him. I really want to see what adding him to the mix does to their dynamic. I just want to see more of the three of them together! He’s such a prickly asshole and it’s all so great for me.

Here are some prompts, but again, feel free to ignore and go for whatever else you want if inspiration strikes:

• If you offered this fandom hoping to write the main ship, PLEASE do that and do not feel at all obligated to even mention Eli. I will be so delighted! Literally anything from Cooper and Oliver just exchanging banter about nothing at all in a car to full-on exploration of the two of them navigating an Awkward Couple Transition would be brilliant. You’re very welcome to do that via casefic or pwp or fluff or, seriously, whatever you like. We didn’t get to see nearly enough of Oliver first moving in, for example, or how they must’ve had to change their domestic or professional habits to account for each other.
  
• Something I’d find fascinating in this fandom: outsider pov. We don’t get nearly enough of other people’s perspectives of their dynamics, and I’m always all over that when it happens. (That entire couples retreat plot! so silly! so great!) Tell me how someone sees them, be it Oliver and Cooper interacting or Cooper, Oliver and Eli together. Maybe someone new to the area sees things and makes some mistaken assumptions, or maybe they turn out to be right after all?
  
• If you’re into the idea of adding Eli to the mix, I’d really love to see that in some configuration, either temporary or long-term. He brings out a really different side of Oliver’s and I love seeing Cooper trying to deal with all that. Plus he is really into ~belonging to them in some capacity and it would be very nice to see them providing that to him more directly :D (Julien can come too if you like!)
  

The Kingdoms - Natasha Pulley

Missouri Kite, Joe Tournier

This ship, omg, it destroyed me so much. As soon as I finished this book I just wanted to grab everyone I've ever met and tell them about these two. I love ships that hinge on the conflict between duty/loyalty and emotion, and I love repressed disaster assholes with a heart of gold; Missouri Kite delivers in spades. He is so amazingly incompetent regarding any part of dealing with Joe's everything. It's a trainwreck you can't look away from. Couple that with Joe's unfathomable genius — between taking the whole book to read a goddamn important letter and being entirely unable to put two and two together at any point whatsoever, jesus christ — well, they sure do deserve each other.

I feel like the book ultimately handwaved away the personal complications that might've kept them apart with overly conveniently-timed deus ex interventions, and I would be happy to see them explored in any kind of AU setting: say, Missouri with Joe's children, or Missouri-Joe-Agatha negotiations, or anything else you like.

Here are some prompts in case that's helpful (but please feel free to go in a different direction if you prefer!):

• What if Joe borrowed Kite's lone brain cell to have a full pair for once figured things out earlier? Maybe he comes up with a brilliant plan that backfires, maybe he confronts Kite, maybe they fuck about it?
  
• The flashback glimpses into their lives in London fascinated me, and I feel cheated that we didn't get to see them struggle through Society Life all that much. What shenanigans did they get up to? I'm all for hearing more about Kite's Stoic Sacrificial Pining and Joe's utter lack of chill.
  
• I feel like there was an unnecessary level of angst on Kite's part about Joe's wedding given that the latter had said directly that he loved both of them. If you'd be up for exploring what their arrangement could've been like, either in past!timeline or AUing her survival, go for it! (I'm happy with any kind of poly configuration there, with or without direct incest.)
  
• I would also greatly enjoy POV shifts of any kind: we seem to often get the most oblivious character's perspective of any scene, and it could be interesting to have anyone else's perspective of what was going on.
  

Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer

Worldbuilding

I love this series like burning. The intricate, geeky worldbuilding fills me with delight at every turn, and I keep coming across morsels of story hinted at in throwaway passages that I would love to hear more about. I reckon the experience of reading Terra Ignota is in all likelihood rather unique, so above all, author, tell me what about this world interests or intrigues you. Whether it's kitchen trees or religion as kink, Romanovan senatorial procedures or the Anonymous' succession—was there anything that made you go 'ooh,' go back to reread a paragraph or a page, and then it just kept bouncing around in your brain?

Here are some prompts in case that's helpful—fair warning, it's a long list of random possibilities, but you are very VERY welcome to choose something of your own that has nothing whatsoever to do with the items below.

• Literally everything about the Mardi bash' and their war fascinates me to no end. What were the discussions like? What were their priorities? What did they consider acceptable losses, and how did they decide? What games did they play together? What exactly was Mycroft's relationship with each person in the bash'? How did each of the bash' members contribute to the war planning?
  
• I love how much the narration is entwined, in-universe, with a sense of fictionality. Mycroft is all kinds of unreliable; Achilles is part fiction and part fanfiction (badfic writer Apollo!); Bridger's existence itself is hazy at best; and who even knows what's going on with JEDD at any point in time. If you want to explore this and show an alternate POV for a scene, talk about in-universe art trends based on Mycroft and the Mardis or other characters, or even explore in-universe RPF fanfiction, which I'm sure would have responded brilliantly to the news about Madame's, have at it! Alternately: what other stories/characters did Bridger hear about from Mycroft and how might they have come to life?
  
• I find Masonic institutional storytelling and their playacting when it comes to longstanding tradition and stability amazing (so dramatic!). If you want to explore more about how this or any other Hive self-mythologises through narrative, institution, stereotypes and more, I'd be thrilled to read it. Also, it would be very interesting to see what different Hives/factions make of Mycroft's book—how the tale gets interpreted and retold and used for propaganda for different POVs.
  
• Related: the restrictions and stereotypes connected to language usage in this world are also really interesting to me. It's hard to tell how much of it is Mycroft being Mycroft, but we also get glimpses of these complicated language feelings from Ancelet, Martin, and others, plus JEDD's whole...thing. Less clear is how widespread less popular languages are, and whether their survival is reliant on specific nation-strats, like Mycroft and Papa's Greek. If this is your cup of tea, you could tell the story of a language and who treasures it, for example; or who most definitely isn't allowed to do so. (Or how/why Mycroft learned so many of them.)
  

(Disclaimer in case it's relevant: I don't care which pronouns you decide to use for anyone in this series in English or otherwise. Take your pick!)

General likes/dislikes • Big Bad Wolf • The Kingdoms • Terra Ignota

Thank you so much, mystery author!