(SFF Bingo): War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull

One of the bingo squares is "bards," which includes musicians, poets, storytellers, etc. I saw this book recced for that square because it's about a rock-and-roll singer in 1980s Minneapolis; I was intrigued because I grew up outside the Twin Cities and had never heard of it, and wasn't running across anything else that would fit for the square, so sought it out.

 

Does it deliver on the local flavor? Yes, it does! This setting is a little before my time, but if names like Byerly's, Dayton's, Nicollet Mall, First Avenue, City Pages, the Metrodome ("not bad...for a glow-in-the-dark fungus"), and, of course, Prince mean anything to you, you'll appreciate it.

 

Okay, so what about everything else?

 

In "Neverwhere," Richard Mayhew shows compassion to a homeless person, and that's the kiss of death--he gets dragged into an urban fantasy with a bunch of quipsters, and can't go back to his normal life no matter how hard he tries. Here, Eddi McCandry doesn't even have an inciting incident to blame; she gets forcibly dragged into a faerie war because she has...the power of rock and roll?...and spends the rest of the book with a shapeshifting dog "phouka" keeping watch, being an insufferable quipster, calling her pet names every other sentence, and generally being annoying until it turns into Stockholm syndrome.

 

The contrived premise is that the Seelie Court (monarchist fae) are at war with the Unseelie (commoners?) but both sides are by default immortal; in order for their wars to have real stakes and for people to die, they have to have a mortal human in their midst. Eddi points out, very reasonably and frequently, that she didn't ask for this and there are lots of humans they could pick on, but oh well, she's stuck with it.

 

One of the things the book does well is that, when Eddi's bandmates are reasonably skeptical of the supernatural goings-on, the phouka reluctantly decides "okay, you're part of this too" and demonstrates his shapeshifting abilities. Music is a group activity; it's not just for the chosen one.

Eddi's friend Carla, the percussionist, is very Minnesotan; she says things like "you betcha" and "come with." Also, she recognizes the word "phouka" because it was used in an old movie--this is the same place where Harvey from Farscape got his name! (And in both cases, it's like, I can sort of see how a 1950 movie might still have barely been a cultural allusion for the target audience, but it's very much not for me.)

 

There's a running theme of "women have to be assertive to make it in the rock world; there's no shortage of self-centered male musicians who will try to flirt with you, and if you're strong enough to stand up to them, a faerie queen is nothing." And some of the foreshadowing will be familiar if you're genre-savvy, although I formed the wrong impression early on about "hmm, is this character actually the bad guys also trying to get to Eddi."

 

The fae have questions like: "Do your people ever write songs about anything besides love and death?" This could have gone in a more heavy-handed direction, like, "only the humans have good art because they appreciate the Transience of Life, us immortals don't really get it," which would have been annoying, so I'm glad they didn't. On the other hand, as someone who gets easily sick of those genres, I would have liked to hear more, weirder, faerie music.

 

The Seelie are set in their ways because they're 1. immortal and 2. monarchists, but the Unseelie are worse because...they're evil???

 

"It's not just for you, it's for the entire seven-county metro area. Couldn't we just let them have St. Paul?"

...

"This city is alive with the best magic of mortal folk. The very light off the skyscrapers and the lakes vibrates with it. If the Unseelie Court takes up residence here, this will be a place where people fear their neighbors, where life drains the living until art and wit are luxuries, where any pleasant thing must be imported and soon loses its savor."

 

I think Bull would agree that for her, Minneapolis is a magical place because she loves it; for someone else, any city could be that place, but they also have the potential to be lifeless, unmagical places.

 

At the end of the 2001 edition, there's an appendix--a note saying that the author and her husband have since adapted it to a screenplay, including a few scenes that aren't in the novel. This allows for POV characters, and corresponding settings, besides Eddi: her loser ex-boyfriend gets more of a character arc, and long-lost nightclubs in the caves above the Mississippi River make an appearance. I think this could be a change for the better (there were a lot of descriptions of clothing that weren't super engaging to me), but also, you do know books are allowed to have more than one POV character, right?

 

When Eddi and her friends are at a Midsummer gathering with the faeries, one of the songs they play is "Safety Dance." I can't tell if that was as silly/memetic in 1987 as it lands today. Either way, I think it's a useful warning that "giving shoutouts to the musicians you like" can't be your only reason for a creative project. And, like musical tastes, some of the "my primrose"/"my sweet"/"but thou must" flirting hasn't aged well.

 

Bingo: using it for Bards; would also count for Dreams, Prologues (introducing the magical elements, which is kind of superfluous because Eddi meets them in chapter two), Reference Materials (for the appendix). Borderline for romance-as-a-genre; I think the book might be better without the romantic plotlines, but it would also be a lot shorter.

Dear Yuletide Writer (2024)

Dear Yuletide Writer,

 

Optional details are optional! Please feel free to write anything about these fandoms/characters, this is just to provide some suggestions if you're interested. I have treats enabled on my Ao3 account.

 

I'm also primeideal on Ao3 (and Tumblr), and Ember Nickel on FFN. I have many previous dear author letters from which much of this is copied, pasted, and endlessly rewritten. I've written/blogged more heavily about several of these fandoms than others at times, but I would be equally delighted with fic for any one of them.

 

For the fandoms where it's relevant (Anathem, Debrief, False Doctrine), I'm checking the box for "one or more chosen tags," ie, if you want to focus on one character/worldbuilding tag and not include the others, that is very welcome! (That's also the case for The Celebrant.")

 

General Likes:

-canon-divergence AUs

-five things

-worldbuilding

-dialogue

-wit and wordplay

-nonstandard formats (documentation, epistolary, etc.)

-interactive fiction--I prefer formats like Twine to open-ended parsers.

-happy endings

-sad endings (character death, melodrama, heartbreak!)

 

General DNWs: (see fandom-specific notes for further details)

-explicit on-screen sex (fade-to-black or innuendo is fine)

-underage characters having sex

-rape/noncon

-moralizing/didactic stories (characters Learning An Important Lesson about the value of tolerance, etc.)

-non-canonical allegories of current events and/or contemporary politics (Alderidge has hot takes about Winston Churchhill, fine; Alderidge has hot takes about a Rishi Sunak stand-in, no thanks.)

-character bashing

Anathem

Erasmas, Jad, Orolo, Worldbuilding

Erasmas: What does his life look like in the post-canon era? Is he a mentor to future fids? What changes with the Second Reconstitution? More of his friendships with Sammann or Jules, or his family relationship with Cord?

Jad: What did a "normal" day in the life of a Millenarian look like, pre-canon? Is he bouncing around nearby "alternate universes," or moving farther up the Wick? Jad mentions that if it hadn't been for the Daban Urnud's arrival, Orolo would likely have become a Centenarian and then a Millenarian himself someday--what would their relationship have been like?

Orolo: How did he react when the Ita picked him to secretly spy on the Daban Urnud? What was actually going through his head in the early chapters that he couldn't tell Raz? Or during his death scene?

Worldbuilding: I'm primarily interested in the world of the concents pre-canon. Weird bell patterns! Giant clock towers! Math and science! Bizarre dictionary definitions! Whatever it is the Ita are up to! But if there's something you have ideas for in terms of the Daban Urnud or polycosmic travel, go for it.

For this request: DNW discussion of allswell or other mind-altering drugs.

The Celebrant

Any (Jackie|Yakov, Mathewson) nominated

My self-indulgent request: I want them to be friends and be happy! To me the tension of the book doesn't come from the baseball, which is "already" established history, but the difficulty of communicating their mutual respect when one is a national celebrity and the other has Jackie's shyness issues. Even if it ends in tragedy, I'd like to see a little more of them acknowledging each other's idealism.

-AU where Jackie never hurts his arm, he becomes a professional baseball player too, and they meet as teammates or rivals?
-Clara lives and Mathewson has to come up with some other conversational starter, because come on.
-More about Jackie and Edith's relationship, which is mostly offscreen. What does she see in him? Is she drawn to his creativity and intensity too?
-A very silly idea: Jackie and Mathewson somehow wind up in the 21st century, Mathewson is scandalized by FanDuel/legalized gambling/etc. and keeps railing about how this is going to cause problems, Jackie has to run interference somehow...?
-I love baseball so if you want to throw in any RL baseball history that didn't make it into the book, that would be wonderful but is absolutely not expected!

Debrief

 

George Russell, Robert Alderidge, Worldbuilding

 

So on the one hand, RPGs can be kind of difficult to prompt for, in that everyone's playthroughs are different and will result in slightly different characterizations; on the other hand, I have so many feelings about these guys and would absolutely love any version. A retelling of your playthrough, what happened next, more backstory, fix-it, "fix-it" that makes it worse...

 

-I love the dramatic irony of seeing the same incidents from different POVs in the character sheets, and then trying to talk about it just makes it worse. (The Catholic Underground in Spain, Courtenay's investigation.) Anything expanding on those or another memory that they technically share but actually remember differently.

-From Alderidge's sheet: "Bykov has the distinction of being the only human on Earth, apart from George Russell, who has ever known you in any meaningful sense." What's going on with these two? How much does Bykov know about the OUC? Is there hatesex?

-Does any of this ever get declassified? How much do Dora or Jean, or the kids, ever figure out, correctly or incorrectly?

-Worldbuilding! What kind of research is the OUC (or the Soviets) doing into ghost technology? What are spirit mediums doing in other parts of the world? At rates of ~one in ten thousand, it's unlikely you'd ever run across another unless there was some effort--but there are also more people who acknowledge ghosts and auras even if they can't directly witness them.

 

For me, the disruptor was an important focal point of the playthrough--my version of Russell is increasingly horrified at the thought of using it on Alderidge, meanwhile, Alderidge is insisting that it's this great tool of mercy and it's not clear whether he's talking about himself. Then once my Russell admits to himself that getting Alderidge to cross over and get closure is more important to him than anything else, he gets his act together in kind of a ruthless Pascal's Wager-y way. The sense they both have of "okay well here's when I draw the line, it's different when it's you at risk" is part of what I love about this dynamic, so anything touching on that (or the disruptor in general) would be great, but obviously everyone's characterization will be different!

 

Feel free to lean into the shippy aspects, or not, as you prefer; I don't really want anything too anachronistic or setting-changey, but Alderidge's level of candor (or Russell's level of having-a-clue) can be anywhere on the scale, it's all good.

 

Note: some of the DNWs I've listed for other exchanges do not apply to this request. For instance, I think the use of second-person POV works very well in the character sheets, so I enthusiastically opt in to second-person POV fic here! (As well as first or third.) Also, go as dark as you want in terms of "possible outcomes include ghosts being destroyed forever with the disruptor, or haunting the world until they decay and lose all coherence."

False Doctrine series

Evvie, Sara

So maybe this was an osmosis failure, but I'm not sure I completely understood Evvie's plotline. At first, her conviction that she's called to the monastic life could have been a case of "I know what I'm called to do in life, other people [and their heteronormative stereotypes] might not understand, but that's okay." But then she meets "Fee," who "fills the void in her life," and Charlie and Hal, who maybe open her mind to different vocations and ways of serving God in the world. And there's Sara's whole thing about "I can't marry George, I think I'm the handsome rake," and the demon pointing out that Evvie finds people like Daphne attractive. It sort of seemed to be setting up an Evvie/Sara endgame? Then in the the last chapter, there's the quick swerve from "not exactly a yes" (about going back to Patmos) to "actually, talking to Charlie made me decide I want to be a nun after all..."?

So with that:
-I would be interested in an Evvie/Sara AU where Evvie realizes that maybe her vision isn't really telling her what to do anymore, and considers other alternatives for what to do next.
-Alternatively, something canon-compliant, where Evvie talks more with Sara and/or Kit on the voyage back to Patmos. Kit and Evvie comparing notes about their relationships with their half-siblings? Or Sara and Evvie staying friends and pen pals, post-canon? (I'll admit I don't know a great deal about Greek Orthodoxy, I'm assuming nuns aren't so cloistered that they can't have friends and pen pals in the outside world?)
-More about Sara's relationships with any of the "From All False Doctrine" characters. Does her love for fabricating completely unnecessary details come from Uncle Peachy? What does Elsa make of the events of "Neither Have I Wings," once she's all caught up? Was there more going on with "Hal's" appearance to young Sara than we knew? Does Uncle Sven have advice on living with a disability?

Quatrevingt-treize

Gauvain

I have a lot of feelings about doomed moral-victor idealists and he definitely qualifies!

 

Pre-canon fic showing how he became the kind of leader he is? Interactions with Cimourdain or Lantenac? What do Radoub and the other soldiers think of him?

 

An AU where things diverge from canon much earlier? What if he'd been deployed to Paris rather than the Vendée? What if his aristocratic background had disqualified him from service?

 

For this fandom, I think there could be some humor from having Gauvain interact with characters from other canons of the same era, and/or putting him in a different setting, and seeing what form his principles take. Gauvain meets the Conventionist from Les Misérables, and/or survives until the events of that novel? He interacts with the "Hamilton" versions of Lafayette or Jefferson as they argue what path to take with regards to the revolution? 21st-century Gauvain's struggles to keep his idealism intact on Twitter? (Again, I don't want a serious focus on modern real-world issues or people, but if it's done for humor, then feel free.) The Reign of Terror in space?

---

 

Again, this is all optional, feel free to use as much or as little as is helpful. I look forward to reading your story!