Dear Rarewomen Author 2014
Feb. 20th, 2014 06:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
minutia_rDear rarewomen author,
Hello and thank you for offering to write a story about one or more of my beloved fictional ladies! You may have noticed that I take the “rare” part of rare women quite seriously--none of these characters have more than a handful of stories written about them, if that. What this means is that I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be thrilled with whatever you write. It’s not like I’m going to be able to compare it unfavorably to the dozens of other stories about these characters, right?
But, seeing as how “anything” is a terrible prompt, have some optional details. Also, have a brief description of the canons I’m requesting, in case you don’t want to write for the fandom we matched on, or I’ve made it to the pinch hit list, or you’re idly curious, or you want to write me a treat. Or just on the off-chance that anyone reading this letter wants to consume some excellent (but obscure) media.
Fandom: Alliance-Union - C. J. Cherryh
Character: Elene Quen
About the canon: The Alliance-Union universe is C.J. Cherryh’s sprawling science fiction epic--and by sprawling I mean that it consists of at least thirty books including half-a-dozen sub-series which don’t share any locations or characters and may be set millions of years apart. If you like complex politics and societies, alien aliens, hypercompetent and emotionally guarded and often sexually predatory women, people being stressed out and short on sleep 100% of the time, strange worlds, ethical dilemmas, the occasional lengthy infodump, and going, “Wait, what just happened?” when you finish a book, you might like some or all of these--but you don’t need to have read all of them in order to read or write fanfic in the ‘verse. God knows I haven’t. In this case, the relevant book is Downbelow Station, which tells the story of the human and alien residents of Pell caught in the conflict between Earth Company and the insurgent Union.
Optional details: Elene Quen isn’t the typical hypercompetent, emotionally guarded, sexually predatory C.J. Cherryh heroine--but she is the woman who single-handedly created the Merchanter’s Alliance while waddling around pregnant. I’d love to see more details of how she did it than we get in the book. I’d also like to read about her working with Signy Mallory, or against her, if and when their purposes don’t coincide. Post-canon, do her loyalties and duties to Pell and the Merchanters ever come into conflict, and how does she deal with it when they do? How does she raise her child or children with the legacy of the Estelle as well as Pell? Pre-canon, I’d like to see her youth and early adulthood on the Estelle, her courtship with Damon, her decision to stay on Pell.
I ship Elene with Damon, obviously, and I ship both of them with Josh Talley. I would be delighted to get an OT3 fic. Or else, something with Elene and Josh, either shippy or gen as you prefer; that’s the least developed side of the relationship in canon, so I’d be happy to see it more fleshed out.
Fandom : Chronicles of Chrestomanci
Characters: Rosa Montana, Corinna Montana, Lucia Montana
About the canon: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci is a series of six novels and one short story collection by Diana Wynne Jones, featuring magical adventures in alternate worlds, a dashing enchanter in fabulous dressing gowns, awful families, that sickening feeling when you find out that someone you have always trusted is not worthy of that trust, and a whole bunch of cats. The Montana sisters appear in The Magicians of Caprona, which is not actually a Romeo and Juliet retelling.
Optional details: If you’re the eldest of three, everyone knows that you will fail first, and worst, when the three of you go out to seek your fortunes, right? There are three Montana girls—did they ever go out to seek their fortunes? Maybe they did it before Paolo was born, and they were the only three Montana children; maybe they did it after Rosa was married, because who says being married should stop you from seeking your fortune. Maybe each of them did on a different occasion. In any case, I'd like to read about what happened when they did. Or anything else with the Montana sisters and their sister feelings would make me very happy.
Fandom: Chronicles of the Kencyrath - PC Hodgell
Characters: Lyra Lack-Wit Caineron, Nightshade
About the canon: Six books (and counting) chronicle the adventures of Jame--an avatar of the destructive face of god and definitely someone you don’t want to go on a camping trip with--as she struggles to find a place for herself among the people who cast her out when she was a child and on the world that would rather her people hadn’t arrived there in the first place. It's got everything fans like: magical adventures, kung fu, secret princesses, incest, thieves' guilds, HONOR!, incest, psychic unicorns, incest, kitties, and incest.
Optional details: Lyra and Shade are two of my favorite characters in the series, and ones that I wish got more page time, but I certainly don’t expect you to get both of them into a single story. A story about either of them would be lovely, though.
How much do I love Lyra Lack-Wit? Despite the name, I don't think she's actually stupid—but she has been deliberately kept ignorant, and away from any access to power, both in the secret corridors of the women's world and in the wider sphere. Her father actually contracted her for a marriage outside the Kencyrath; he couldn't have said, "You are an entirely disposable pawn" much plainer. And yet Lyra remains relentlessly cheerful, which is part of why I find her so appealing. Also—and this is another thing that leads to her being seen as stupid—she has basically no impulse control. But the flipside of never taking time to think about things is being a quick thinker, and Lyra has several times demonstrated her ability to act before anyone else gets a chance to. She can be terribly, thoughtlessly cruel. And she has a for-serious-canonical crush on Jame (at one point she says in her internal narration that Jame is the sister of her choice, and we all know what sister-friend means to a Highborn lady) which I'd love to see explored.
I find Shade a really fascinating, complex, prickly character, and there are lots of angles to her that I’d love to see explored. What was her childhood like, in Wilden or wherever it was; who is/was her mother, and did her influence serve to counteract Rawneth and Kenan’s and help Shade become the independent actor that we see in the books? I’d love to read about her relationship with Addy, or see the events of the books she was in from her point of view, especially her growing knowledge of her own darkling nature. I also find her loyalty-crush on Randiroc to be absolutely adorable and would adore anything with the two of them. Also, I’m just saying--she’s a shapeshifter and he shares his consciousness with a swarm of carnivorous insects, the sex would be incredibly weird and hopefully awesome.
Fandom: Fallen Angels (Marvel Comics)
Characters: Chance, Ariel
About the canon: Roberto Da Costa runs away from his school and superhero team due to ~teen angst, and falls in with a group of petty mutant criminals, including Chance, a Korean-American street kid with a switchblade and the ability to cancel or boost other people's powers, and Ariel, a glam alien with mind-control and spatial manipulation powers. But some of Roberto's old friends are searching for him, and Ariel has a mysterious agenda of her own. Wackiness ensues! The prose is purple, the teen angst is over-the-top, the worldbuilding is gonzo even by the standards of superhero comics, and it is so delicious.
Optional details: When I read this as a kid I shipped Chance/Roberto so hard. Then I reread it as an adult and wondered how I'd missed all the Chance/Ariel. I would love anything for either of these pairings, and Ariel/Chance/Roberto would lead to dangerous levels of squee.
I'm not that familiar with current doings in the Marvel Universe--I understand Ariel was briefly an X-Man, and is currently dead? As if that's ever stopped characters in the Marvel Universe. The further adventures of the Fallen Angels post-series would be awesome. I've always wanted to see Chance bring down Reverend Park, and I'd be intrigued to read about Ariel learning to interact with people, and trying to figure out the whole empathy thing when she can basically make people do whatever she wants without realizing she's doing it much of the time.
Fandom: Lawyers Guns and Money - Warren Zevon (Song)
Character: The Waitress Who is Also a Russian Agent
About the canon: Once upon a time, there was an overprivileged young idiot who went traveling abroad and got in trouble way over their head. “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” is the young idiot’s plea to their wealthy and influential father to extricate them from this trouble using any means at his disposal. It’s also a rollicking song, only three and a half minutes long, and you can listen to it (and read the lyrics) here.
Optional details: I want the story of the waitress who is also a Russian agent! What’s her mission? Is the narrator really as innocent a dupe as they claim? (Yes is a perfectly acceptable answer.) Does she manage to make her escape and leave the narrator in the soup; does she also wind up in trouble that she needs her ingenuity to get out of; or does she come back to rescue the narrator when their dad’s lawyers, guns, and money can’t? Or some other possibility I haven’t thought of?
Please note that although Warren Zevon was a man I don’t insist on the narrator of this song being one. Not that I object to it--go with whatever you think makes the most interesting story.
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Characters: Lilly Durona Junior, Maree
About the canon: Why haven’t you read these books yet? You will like them! Miles Vorkosigan is the most fast-talking, cunning-scheme-having, poor-decision-making, daring-rescue-arranging hunchbacked dwarf space mercenary bullshit artist in the Galactic Nexus (and his mother Cordelia, the hero of the first two books, is a kind, practical, ruthless starship captain/planetary ruler/armchair psychologist who you definitely do not want to go shopping with.) There are space adventures! Emotional trauma! Really funny bits! Maree and Lilly Junior are from Mirror Dance, which is possibly the worst book you could start the series with.
Optional details: Okay, but what if instead of being what it was, Mirror Dance had been the Young Adult adventures of Lilly Junior and Maree, with Mark and Miles and the Dendarii playing the roles of the occasionally helpful but ultimately unreliable adults, and it’s the preteen girls who have to save the day? Obviously I don’t expect you to write me a book, but a scene from that book, or something in the spirit of that book, would be great. I really just want Lilly and Maree being BFFs, whether they’re growing up together in the gilded cage of Bharaputra’s clone-creche, or encountering each other again in the years after Mirror Dance. (Lilly/Maree would be peachy keen too.)
In general, I like all kinds of fic, from gen to shippy (I am a dedicated multishipper and will happily read any rating, any number/gender of participants), from warm-and-fluffy to dark (kill my favorite characters, please!), from plotty and action-packed to intense conversations on the Formless Plane of Dialogue (I don't tend to like extremely introspective stories where there's no interaction, however). I'm not terribly fond of AUs of the coffee-shop/university/whatever variety, but I like canon-divergence AUs and fusions and crossovers when they're clever.
If for some reason you want to stalk me, I am dead easy to stalk; I'm minutia_r (or occasionally minutia-r) all over the internet: LJ/DW, AO3, tumblr, deviantart, ff.net, and probably one or two other places I don't recall off-hand.
Thank you once again, mystery writer! I am really looking forward to reading what you write for me, and I hope you get an awesome story too!
(If you are reading this because you read my journal/tumblr, and were not previously aware of rarewomen--you guys, do this fic exchange with me! It has all these excellent ladies and more available to write and request! I have gotten truly awesome stories for it in the past! You can find the details here. And if you have not done a yuletide-style fic exchange before, don’t be fooled--writing a letter to your assigned author is completely optional, and writing a letter more than twice the required length of the story is . . . well, let’s go with optional again. Optional is a polite word.)
Hello and thank you for offering to write a story about one or more of my beloved fictional ladies! You may have noticed that I take the “rare” part of rare women quite seriously--none of these characters have more than a handful of stories written about them, if that. What this means is that I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be thrilled with whatever you write. It’s not like I’m going to be able to compare it unfavorably to the dozens of other stories about these characters, right?
But, seeing as how “anything” is a terrible prompt, have some optional details. Also, have a brief description of the canons I’m requesting, in case you don’t want to write for the fandom we matched on, or I’ve made it to the pinch hit list, or you’re idly curious, or you want to write me a treat. Or just on the off-chance that anyone reading this letter wants to consume some excellent (but obscure) media.
Fandom: Alliance-Union - C. J. Cherryh
Character: Elene Quen
About the canon: The Alliance-Union universe is C.J. Cherryh’s sprawling science fiction epic--and by sprawling I mean that it consists of at least thirty books including half-a-dozen sub-series which don’t share any locations or characters and may be set millions of years apart. If you like complex politics and societies, alien aliens, hypercompetent and emotionally guarded and often sexually predatory women, people being stressed out and short on sleep 100% of the time, strange worlds, ethical dilemmas, the occasional lengthy infodump, and going, “Wait, what just happened?” when you finish a book, you might like some or all of these--but you don’t need to have read all of them in order to read or write fanfic in the ‘verse. God knows I haven’t. In this case, the relevant book is Downbelow Station, which tells the story of the human and alien residents of Pell caught in the conflict between Earth Company and the insurgent Union.
Optional details: Elene Quen isn’t the typical hypercompetent, emotionally guarded, sexually predatory C.J. Cherryh heroine--but she is the woman who single-handedly created the Merchanter’s Alliance while waddling around pregnant. I’d love to see more details of how she did it than we get in the book. I’d also like to read about her working with Signy Mallory, or against her, if and when their purposes don’t coincide. Post-canon, do her loyalties and duties to Pell and the Merchanters ever come into conflict, and how does she deal with it when they do? How does she raise her child or children with the legacy of the Estelle as well as Pell? Pre-canon, I’d like to see her youth and early adulthood on the Estelle, her courtship with Damon, her decision to stay on Pell.
I ship Elene with Damon, obviously, and I ship both of them with Josh Talley. I would be delighted to get an OT3 fic. Or else, something with Elene and Josh, either shippy or gen as you prefer; that’s the least developed side of the relationship in canon, so I’d be happy to see it more fleshed out.
Fandom : Chronicles of Chrestomanci
Characters: Rosa Montana, Corinna Montana, Lucia Montana
About the canon: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci is a series of six novels and one short story collection by Diana Wynne Jones, featuring magical adventures in alternate worlds, a dashing enchanter in fabulous dressing gowns, awful families, that sickening feeling when you find out that someone you have always trusted is not worthy of that trust, and a whole bunch of cats. The Montana sisters appear in The Magicians of Caprona, which is not actually a Romeo and Juliet retelling.
Optional details: If you’re the eldest of three, everyone knows that you will fail first, and worst, when the three of you go out to seek your fortunes, right? There are three Montana girls—did they ever go out to seek their fortunes? Maybe they did it before Paolo was born, and they were the only three Montana children; maybe they did it after Rosa was married, because who says being married should stop you from seeking your fortune. Maybe each of them did on a different occasion. In any case, I'd like to read about what happened when they did. Or anything else with the Montana sisters and their sister feelings would make me very happy.
Fandom: Chronicles of the Kencyrath - PC Hodgell
Characters: Lyra Lack-Wit Caineron, Nightshade
About the canon: Six books (and counting) chronicle the adventures of Jame--an avatar of the destructive face of god and definitely someone you don’t want to go on a camping trip with--as she struggles to find a place for herself among the people who cast her out when she was a child and on the world that would rather her people hadn’t arrived there in the first place. It's got everything fans like: magical adventures, kung fu, secret princesses, incest, thieves' guilds, HONOR!, incest, psychic unicorns, incest, kitties, and incest.
Optional details: Lyra and Shade are two of my favorite characters in the series, and ones that I wish got more page time, but I certainly don’t expect you to get both of them into a single story. A story about either of them would be lovely, though.
How much do I love Lyra Lack-Wit? Despite the name, I don't think she's actually stupid—but she has been deliberately kept ignorant, and away from any access to power, both in the secret corridors of the women's world and in the wider sphere. Her father actually contracted her for a marriage outside the Kencyrath; he couldn't have said, "You are an entirely disposable pawn" much plainer. And yet Lyra remains relentlessly cheerful, which is part of why I find her so appealing. Also—and this is another thing that leads to her being seen as stupid—she has basically no impulse control. But the flipside of never taking time to think about things is being a quick thinker, and Lyra has several times demonstrated her ability to act before anyone else gets a chance to. She can be terribly, thoughtlessly cruel. And she has a for-serious-canonical crush on Jame (at one point she says in her internal narration that Jame is the sister of her choice, and we all know what sister-friend means to a Highborn lady) which I'd love to see explored.
I find Shade a really fascinating, complex, prickly character, and there are lots of angles to her that I’d love to see explored. What was her childhood like, in Wilden or wherever it was; who is/was her mother, and did her influence serve to counteract Rawneth and Kenan’s and help Shade become the independent actor that we see in the books? I’d love to read about her relationship with Addy, or see the events of the books she was in from her point of view, especially her growing knowledge of her own darkling nature. I also find her loyalty-crush on Randiroc to be absolutely adorable and would adore anything with the two of them. Also, I’m just saying--she’s a shapeshifter and he shares his consciousness with a swarm of carnivorous insects, the sex would be incredibly weird and hopefully awesome.
Fandom: Fallen Angels (Marvel Comics)
Characters: Chance, Ariel
About the canon: Roberto Da Costa runs away from his school and superhero team due to ~teen angst, and falls in with a group of petty mutant criminals, including Chance, a Korean-American street kid with a switchblade and the ability to cancel or boost other people's powers, and Ariel, a glam alien with mind-control and spatial manipulation powers. But some of Roberto's old friends are searching for him, and Ariel has a mysterious agenda of her own. Wackiness ensues! The prose is purple, the teen angst is over-the-top, the worldbuilding is gonzo even by the standards of superhero comics, and it is so delicious.
Optional details: When I read this as a kid I shipped Chance/Roberto so hard. Then I reread it as an adult and wondered how I'd missed all the Chance/Ariel. I would love anything for either of these pairings, and Ariel/Chance/Roberto would lead to dangerous levels of squee.
I'm not that familiar with current doings in the Marvel Universe--I understand Ariel was briefly an X-Man, and is currently dead? As if that's ever stopped characters in the Marvel Universe. The further adventures of the Fallen Angels post-series would be awesome. I've always wanted to see Chance bring down Reverend Park, and I'd be intrigued to read about Ariel learning to interact with people, and trying to figure out the whole empathy thing when she can basically make people do whatever she wants without realizing she's doing it much of the time.
Fandom: Lawyers Guns and Money - Warren Zevon (Song)
Character: The Waitress Who is Also a Russian Agent
About the canon: Once upon a time, there was an overprivileged young idiot who went traveling abroad and got in trouble way over their head. “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” is the young idiot’s plea to their wealthy and influential father to extricate them from this trouble using any means at his disposal. It’s also a rollicking song, only three and a half minutes long, and you can listen to it (and read the lyrics) here.
Optional details: I want the story of the waitress who is also a Russian agent! What’s her mission? Is the narrator really as innocent a dupe as they claim? (Yes is a perfectly acceptable answer.) Does she manage to make her escape and leave the narrator in the soup; does she also wind up in trouble that she needs her ingenuity to get out of; or does she come back to rescue the narrator when their dad’s lawyers, guns, and money can’t? Or some other possibility I haven’t thought of?
Please note that although Warren Zevon was a man I don’t insist on the narrator of this song being one. Not that I object to it--go with whatever you think makes the most interesting story.
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Characters: Lilly Durona Junior, Maree
About the canon: Why haven’t you read these books yet? You will like them! Miles Vorkosigan is the most fast-talking, cunning-scheme-having, poor-decision-making, daring-rescue-arranging hunchbacked dwarf space mercenary bullshit artist in the Galactic Nexus (and his mother Cordelia, the hero of the first two books, is a kind, practical, ruthless starship captain/planetary ruler/armchair psychologist who you definitely do not want to go shopping with.) There are space adventures! Emotional trauma! Really funny bits! Maree and Lilly Junior are from Mirror Dance, which is possibly the worst book you could start the series with.
Optional details: Okay, but what if instead of being what it was, Mirror Dance had been the Young Adult adventures of Lilly Junior and Maree, with Mark and Miles and the Dendarii playing the roles of the occasionally helpful but ultimately unreliable adults, and it’s the preteen girls who have to save the day? Obviously I don’t expect you to write me a book, but a scene from that book, or something in the spirit of that book, would be great. I really just want Lilly and Maree being BFFs, whether they’re growing up together in the gilded cage of Bharaputra’s clone-creche, or encountering each other again in the years after Mirror Dance. (Lilly/Maree would be peachy keen too.)
In general, I like all kinds of fic, from gen to shippy (I am a dedicated multishipper and will happily read any rating, any number/gender of participants), from warm-and-fluffy to dark (kill my favorite characters, please!), from plotty and action-packed to intense conversations on the Formless Plane of Dialogue (I don't tend to like extremely introspective stories where there's no interaction, however). I'm not terribly fond of AUs of the coffee-shop/university/whatever variety, but I like canon-divergence AUs and fusions and crossovers when they're clever.
If for some reason you want to stalk me, I am dead easy to stalk; I'm minutia_r (or occasionally minutia-r) all over the internet: LJ/DW, AO3, tumblr, deviantart, ff.net, and probably one or two other places I don't recall off-hand.
Thank you once again, mystery writer! I am really looking forward to reading what you write for me, and I hope you get an awesome story too!
(If you are reading this because you read my journal/tumblr, and were not previously aware of rarewomen--you guys, do this fic exchange with me! It has all these excellent ladies and more available to write and request! I have gotten truly awesome stories for it in the past! You can find the details here. And if you have not done a yuletide-style fic exchange before, don’t be fooled--writing a letter to your assigned author is completely optional, and writing a letter more than twice the required length of the story is . . . well, let’s go with optional again. Optional is a polite word.)
