Yuletide letter 2024

[regshoe]

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Thank you for writing me a fic in one of these lovely small fandoms! I've said a bit below about why I love each of them, and given some prompts, but if you have a completely different idea you'd love to write then go ahead—I'll look forward to seeing whatever you come up with.

Some things I like:

• A strong sense of place; relationships between characters and places
• Descriptions of nature and wildlife, especially birds
• Historical detail; how the characters fit into historical settings and events
• Comfortable connectedness and 'fitting together' between the characters in a (romantic or platonic) ship; a sense that they're 'each other's people'; characters finding comfort and rest in each other amidst a hostile world or plot-related struggles
• Quietly significant physical intimacy: handholding, long hugs, cuddling, hair-stroking, etc.
• Hurt/comfort! Characters seeing the person they love get hurt and realising how much they care about them, or revealing their feelings in their reaction; characters receiving comfort and realising how much they're loved
• Loyalty: characters who are unfailingly loyal to each other; characters facing conflicting loyalties, or caught between their existing loyalties and their feelings for another character
• Magic and the supernatural, especially otherworldly fairy-folklorish stuff, ghosts and hauntings, and magic specific to particular places
• Seasonal holiday fic! Any of my requested characters might celebrate Christmas, and for the Scottish ones there's also Hogmanay—I'd love to see what their holidays are like, whether warm and cosy or folklorically weird and ominous.

Do Not Wants:

• Graphic violence, body horror
• Explicit sex (implied/fade-to-black is fine)
• Rape, noncon, dubcon
• AUs that place the characters in a different setting (canon divergence is fine, as is adding supernatural/fantasy elements to a mundane canon setting)
• Dogs, wolves, werewolves
• Roman Catholicism (references/mentions are fine in Sir Patrick Spens fic)
• Fandom-specific DNW for Witching Hill: Uvo and Gilly paired romantically with anyone but each other

I'm regshoe on AO3. I have gifts enabled and am open to treats. All requests are 'gift must feature all my chosen character tags'.


A Glass of Blessings - Barbara Pym
Piers Longridge

This is my favourite Barbara Pym book. I love the social detail, the whimsical humour, Wilmet's kind of self-absorbed yet charming narration, the emotional subtlety—but most of all I love Piers. I love his quiet sense of humour and the something vaguely unsatisfactory which Wilmet fails to read aright for most of the book, and how much Pym manages to convey of its significance, despite her narrator; but I think it was the car number plates that really endeared him to me. I would very much like to know more about him! While some of my prompts here are pretty fluffy, and fluff would be great, I'm not averse to heavier subject matter in fic, including period-typical homophobia; if you go that way, I'd prefer a story that's ultimately hopeful and optimistic.

Piers's relationship with Keith is lovely—as this article from the Barbara Pym Society sums it up, "Poor Piers" has found a steady anchor in his life, and Keith a purpose—and I'd love to see more of them together. A conversation between them after the scene where Wilmet first meets Keith (I imagine he is a bit less judgemental about her than she is about him)? The story of how Keith persuaded Piers to start making/drinking tea after 'he hadn't even got a teapot' when they met? Keith trying to find some of Piers's number plates for him? Piers's remark that he likes Keith because he's so different from him in social background, personality and interests—"It's much more agreeable to come home to some different remarks from the ones one's been hearing all day"—is interesting; does Keith feel the same way about their class difference/cultural non-overlap?

I like stories about religion and the social and personal meanings it has in characters' lives—it's something I like about the book, and I'd enjoy an exploration in fic of Piers's relationship with religion and church. He clearly knows a bit about church in general, and he's certainly in a position to have an interesting perspective on it. I'm intrigued by his statement that he goes 'where it suits me, and when' in London—I imagine him rather like these people, going round to all sorts of different churches and comparing the worship styles, congregations and so on. So where else does he go, besides St Luke's, and what does he make of it all? The links the book makes between different worlds, as Wilmet puts it—La Cenerentola, the retreat garden, the coffee house—are intriguing, as are the implications about the place of queer people in the Church: what does Piers make of Wilmet's view that the Church should be the place where all worlds could meet... if people remained outside it was our—even my—duty to bring them in.? Or do Piers and Keith, who doesn't believe in God, ever talk about religion?—their disagreements and different perspectives could be interesting.


Sir Patrick Spens (Traditional Ballad)
Sir Patrick Spens

I love this ballad for its atmosphere, the terrible sense of inevitability, the drama of the shipwreck, the awful poignancy of the final verses.... and I'm also intrigued by the suggestions of the personal and political setting in which all this is playing out. The combination of a rich, compelling story and the lack of context inevitable in a relatively short ballad of course makes for lots of opportunity to expand on things in fic, and I'd love to see anything that explores Sir Patrick's character and backstory in more depth. Be as tragic as you like—it's a good fandom for doom-laden angst!—or give the characters a moment of brightness amid the tragedy.

What was the eldern knight (or noble lord, etc. depending on the version) who first mentions Sir Patrick's name to the king thinking? Perhaps he's a genuine, guileless friend or admirer of Sir Patrick, and naturally thinks of him first when the king asks for a guid sailor—or perhaps he's a politically savvy enemy of Sir Patrick who mentions him knowing exactly what it might lead to. If it is deliberate, then what's his motive—is he jealous of Sir Patrick, a rival in love or politics, or perhaps they had a bad breakup twenty years ago and this is his revenge? In any case, what would Sir Patrick think if he found out the answer to his question, 'wha is this has tauld the king?'

You could explore Sir Patrick's backstory as a sailor and his relationship with the sea throughout his life, before it all ends in terrible tragedy. Why does he decide to become a sailor (or does he not get a choice in it), and how does he gain his reputation as the best sailor that ever sailed the sea? Has he thought before about the likelihood that he might eventually die at sea; does his end seem as tragically inevitable to him as the ballad makes it sound?

What about Sir Patrick's relationship with the king—what sort of history do they have together, if any? Sir Patrick never thinks of disobeying the king's orders, or even of suggesting that what he's asking might not be a good idea: is that all because, well, you can't just tell the king he's wrong, or is there a personal loyalty there too? (Or isn't there—either could be fascinating to explore!) What might happen if Sir Patrick did try to tell the king how foolish he's being?

My favourite recordings of the ballad are June Tabor's (for the choice of lyrics, the arrangement and Tabor's gorgeous, expressive voice) and Wendy Weatherby's (for the language and that weird, lovely melody); do of course feel free to base your fic on any version(s) you like!


Witching Hill - E. W. Hornung
"Gilly" Gillon, Uvo Delavoye

I love this book for Hornung's ever-beautiful prose, the weird time-and-place relationship between the humdrum 1890s present and the dramatic 18th-century past of Witching Hill—by turns comic, disturbing and significant—and most of all for Uvo and Gilly—from the opening page, when Gilly tells us how Uvo Delavoye dropped into the office... and life began again. ♥ I love how different they are, and how they sometimes argue and clash over interpreting the supernatural events of the book, while caring about each other deeply and coming to understand and rely on each other. Either slash or friendship-centric gen for them would be great; and while I'd love something cute and fluffy, there's a lot of weirdness, depth and darkness in the book too, and I'd also enjoy a fic exploring that side of things (besides the supernatural stuff, Uvo's canonical mental illness and struggles with suicidal thoughts—Lord Mulcaster-induced or otherwise—could be an interesting thing to develop in a fic).

I adore how the book's happy ending is Uvo and Gilly running off to Scotland together! I'd love to see more of their future, soon after canon or years later. Whereabouts is Gilly from (I don't think the book is more specific than 'the Lowlands'), and what sort of things might he and Uvo get up to there, while visiting or perhaps settling there later on? Surely the events at Witching Hill are not the only supernatural happenings in the book's world: perhaps they encounter some other such weirdness in Scotland and deal with it together. Uvo evidently becomes a professional writer, and I'd enjoy hearing more about his literary career—but also, I like that the character who's canonically a writer isn't the one who writes the book itself in-universe, and there's surely a story in that! Does Uvo, now an established writer, encourage Gilly to take up the pen himself and tell the story of Witching Hill? Uvo's love for an apt literary quotation is very cute, and Gilly not getting all his references is even cuter; perhaps, in the future, Uvo introduces Gilly to some more of his favourites and they read them together, or read to each other?

Or you could do something set within canon: perhaps a casefic about some instance of Witching Hill's supernatural time-weirdness that we didn't hear about in the book? The aftermath of 'The Locked Room' is surely a good opportunity for some hurt/comfort! I like outsider POV stories, and seeing Uvo and Gilly's relationship from another character's perspective could be fun. Perhaps from Amy (who seems rather more conventional than her brother, though they apparently get along all right; what's their relationship like?), or perhaps Sarah?

Fandom-specific DNW: Uvo and Gilly paired romantically with anyone but each other (brief references to the canonical Uvo/Mrs Ricardo as a thing of the past are fine, but please don't focus on it).

If you would like/find it useful to give Gilly a first name, please do! I have no strong feelings on what it might be.