Flight into Fantasy

To my regular readers: This is not exactly a book-related post. You can feel free to skip it if you like.

For the curious, Yuletide is a huge fanfiction exchange in which participants write stories about obscure fandoms for one another. I participated last year, and the experience was awesome. I promise not to flood my blog with yuletide posts, and, probably, this will be the only one I post. So, if the idea of fanfiction doesn’t appeal to you or you want to argue about its legality, feel free to skip.

That being said…

To my Yuletide Author:

First of all, you are awesome for taking on this challoenge. The fact that you write anything for me at all will make me ecstatic. However, I realize I wasn’t very verbose on my official sign-up sheet, (I had this problem last year, sadly), so I figured I’d go into more detail.

First of all: Flowers in the Attic. If this is the one fandom we have in common, I apologize. I enjoy reading really bad books for the sheer hilarity of torturing other people with them, which is how I came to read FITA. I realize asking someone to write me crackfic for a series I love to hate isn’t exactly fair, and if these are your favorite books of all time, you probably shouldn’t read further on my blog lest my snark about them make you sad. That’s why I’m looking for something funny and cracky. I’m flexible about pairings, and I can handle smut, but I mostly just want someone to reach for the full potential of crack that these books provide. I have read Flowers in the Attic and Petals on the Wind, but have no intention to read any of the others. I hope that gives you a bit of a frame of reference to go on.

For the Madeleine L’Engle canon, I’m flexible. I really love Meg/Calvin, and would love to see something featuring them as young people, first discovering their romance. Then again, something with a Zachary and Polly post- An Acceptable Time would be fun, too. Basically, you can’t go wrong with any of the characters in this series, because I love them all.

Lastly, the Millennium Trilogy. Oh, Lisbeth. She is probably my favorite character in all of the books I’ve read this year. She is such a well-rounded character, with her brilliant mind but horrible past, her single-minded determinedness and her inability to quite cope with the softer emotions. I’d love to see someone do her justice. Again, I’m flexible, so if you feel inspired toward fluff or angst or smut or het or slash or whatever, just go for it. I will love it regardless.

Overall, I enjoy strong characterization–particularly of female characters. I like getting inside the heads of the characters I’m reading about and seeing how they tick. I love schmoopiness, and I love fluff, especially if they make sense in the context of the story. Obviously, I enjoy humor and a bit of crack as well, provided, of course, that it makes sense in context.

As for dislikes, I’d prefer not to read about graphic violence, or lovingly detailed torture scenes. I’m also not a huge fan of rape as a dramatic element, and prefer not to read it. Other than that, and the obvious desire to read a story that’s gramatically correct, I’m pretty flexible.

I hope this gives you enough to work with.

Thanks once again!

Shannon