Dear Yuletide Writer 2025

[machiavellijr]

Dear Yuletide writer,

It’s that time of year again…

Thank you for doing this. I still can’t quite believe Yuletide happens and works every year, it feels like it’s wandered over from a more agreeably cooperative world where *flails* all of all this isn’t happening.

I tend to chuck in a few potential plot bunnies by way of potential inspiration and to give you a sense of what sort of things interest me about the fandom and characters - use or ignore entirely as you will.

General likes:

Plot. Worldbuilding. Casefic. Melodrama. Keeping your head whilst all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Competence porn. Costume porn. Actual porn. Humour. Farce. Epistolary. Wordplay. Swordplay.

General Do Not Want:

Non-con

Tight focus on babies/pregnancy

Addiction plots front and center - like I know there are addicts in I think all of these canons, and that's fine, but I don't want a whole story about it.

RL contemporary politics - I know I’ve got a couple of fandoms here that are quite ‘political’ and I don’t think the characters deserve to have to deal with Trump, Farage, various Le Pens etc., much less the horrors in the Middle East.

Hilary Tamar Mysteries

One or more of:

Hilary Tamar

Julia Larwood
Selena Jardin

This is one of those canons where what I really want is more-of. I love Hilary’s narrative voice, I love the knots our heroes tie themselves with the red herrings and wrong genre savviness, and particularly any and all appearances by Julia where she gets to be her gloriously chaotic and occasionally surprisingly competent self (perish the thought that I might have a Julia in my own life, love ya T., never change).

Plot bunnies:

Hilary’s gender is never overtly specified, though I think it’s a bit difficult to read them as female given the setting, period, and the way they relate to the boys. That said, difficult is not impossible and I’ve never seen anyone write an explicitly female / nonbinary Hilary that I can recall.

Julia and Cantrip’s serial thriller being published. The reactions of the publisher’s legal reader, who of course would be someone who has daydreams about achieving the professional eminence these two clowns take totally for granted?

We very seldom see these barristers in court; some courtroom antics (especially if for sadistic reasons they’re way out of their professional comfort zone) would be fun.

Hilary being forced to do some actual work?

Selena has always reminded me of Douglas’ line from Cabin Pressure:

“Tell me, is there anything you’re not very good at”
“Well, there’s some things I’ve never tried, I suppose it’s possible I’m not very good at some of them”

Whilst Selena being unflappable is a delight, I’d be interested in her finding her limits, always assuming they exist - or maybe just the rest of the gang assuming she’s found them?

House of Cards (UK)

Oh for those more innocent days when if the PM’s family were caught insider-trading he would be expected to resign, the suggestion the government had connived at starting a small war would destroy the PM’s reputation, and blackmailing closeted politicians was portrayed as wrong even if they had awful politics. Really it only seems to be FU preventing the BBC version of 1990s England being a utopia [/s]. Though he’s a pretty big obstacle.

I think there’s a bit of a contradiction in what FU wants to do in power in S2-3; he wants to preserve everything in aspic the way it was in his youth, but on another level he gets bored and makes things happen almost for the hell of it, he can’t help keeping poking away when he could just leave well enough alone and stay peacefully on top. But then there wouldn’t be a plot, would there? And it’s very Richard III. Stamper has a bit of the same bug, I think - he wants so much to be FU (even more, I think, than he wants to fuck him, though probably that too) and he’s probably not quite sure why, or what he’d do if he ever became the dog that caught the car.

Come to think of it, there’s a plotbunny - the FU version of the Richard III Society. After all his misdeeds are public knowledge, some people will still argue that he was completely and totally in the right or at worst the lesser evil, not just his politics but personally… how, and why, and what do the survivors (including the ex-King) make of it? FU’s England will have avoided some of the real-life catastrophes of his chronologically-impossible reign (he serves 12 years as PM between 1991/2 and about 1998) and had some other, probably worse ones instead.

It’s noticeable that whilst FU tells us all the thinly-veiled caricatures of the potential Thatcher successors in S1 are bad people (except Collingridge who’s just weak), they don’t really do anything onscreen to justify that interpretation - we’re supposed to just supply that from their models’ general IRL unpopularity. Woolton’s having an affair with a much younger woman but that’s about the worst of it, and it’s Roger, not him, who makes skeevy remarks about her race. I don’t think FU sees anything particularly evil about racism, or xenophobia, or exhibitionism, he just thinks it’s déclassé to show them publicly.

Or give me a day in the life of the Urquhart administration when there’s no earth-shaking constitutional shenanigans going on.

Or throw an outside-context crossover at them - they can deal with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, wizards, first contact, etc.

Laundry Files

Honestly, this is easy. Write Laundry fic. I will love it. Case-fic, world-building, romance, horror, anything at all.

Just to be clear, I won’t have read Regicide Report by reveals time, I know that on past form there will be a few ARCs floating about by then, so *no spoilers please* though I reckon we can all guess what the broad strokes are going to be.

For the first time in the series I found Quantum of Nightmares genuinely off-puttingly bleak, some of the Chickentown scenes made me feel physically ill, if the body horror could not go quite that far I’d be grateful.

One of the things I enjoyed about the earlier instalments was the sense of the world being a very big place where there’s a lot of room behind the Masquerade and none of our protagonists have a good sense of all the possibilities. I think that got a bit lost in the actual collapse as Stross wanted to tell a story about the grimness of modern Britain which, well, I live in that already and I’m not sure Actually Existing Case Nightmare Green bears close examination anyway. So I’d be interested in any of Bob’s (or Mo’s, or even Iris’) adventures firefighting around the world, meeting interesting local mythology.

Or, slightly more seriously, Bob’s relationship with his own family and friends. Perhaps the conversation where he explains CNG to Mo, or his attempts to take vacations (played as serious or not as you like).

Crossovers here would be fine and shiny, if that's where your ideas are going. The Laundry seems to fit pretty naturally into any number of thriller-ish fandoms and quite a lot of near-future SF. I like how unreliable Bob's getting as a narrator, and how scary we occasionally realise he is when seen from anyone else's perspective; maybe a fic or crossover where the Laundry are the villains, or even the Big Bad? I can see that happening in any kind of police procedural or military thriller, for example.

Lord Peter Wimsey

I’ve requested Harriet, the Dowager Duchess and Gerry and I’d like something with any two of them, but I’m making a specific exception for Honoria Lucasta back-story even though by the linear nature of time it’s unlikely to have room for the other two.

Otherwise, anything with the Wimsey family dynamics would be lovely.

As would someone other than Peter doing some detecting - I do love a good case-fic, though I know they’re hard to write, and someone else trying their hands at playing Robert Templeton would be fun - I imagine they’d be very reluctant to go scurrying to Peter for advice (well, maybe not Gerry but certainly the other Wimseys) and would find Harriet a less alarming source.

Slings & Arrows

Any of Geoffrey and Ellen’s backstory pre-series would be delightful, as would adventures in Théatre Sans Argent v2. Backstage shenanigans of all kinds are very pleasing to this recovering stage manager, as is the grubby business of actually trying to make a living from theater - I’ve always felt fairly sympathetic towards Richard, for example.

I do find the writers being so much on Geoffrey’s side about theatre a little bit annoying, and I wonder if Ellen actually shares his very actor-first approach to directing, I can see there being tension between them if he suspects her of Darren- or even worse Richard-like tendencies when she’s in charge - obviously as an actor she’s not keen on regietheater being done to her but she’d not be the first to change her mind once she’s in charge, and she does seem a lot more attached than Geoffrey to the finer things in life, like food and hot water.

Again I’m quite keen on crossovers for this one, there are a lot of highly compatible backstage dramas - to take a few at random, Charles Paris turning up at New Burbage (with or without murder) or indeed changing his name to Cyril after some disastrous incident in the 1980s, Geoffrey’s stint on Extras, a very young Geoffrey or Ellen touring in Nothing On or a Franklin Sheppard production… endless possibilities and even if I don’t know the canon I’ll probably be delighted to go explore it.