Dear Yuletide Writer,
Thank you. I'm excited to find out what you decide to write.
I like adventure and romance. I love the trappings of the turn-of-the-century historical novel: masquerades, swordfights, balls, people disguised as one another, fans, dance cards, poisoned books.... you get the idea. I also love the tropes of pulp fantasy novels: kidnappings, tommy guns, secret societies, poisons unknown to science, chloroformed handkerchiefs ... although they're tricky to do in the modern era. I love reading social history, and tiny worldbuilding hints make me squee. I am perfectly happy with the usual fandom dub-con conventions like sex pollen, forced marriage, heat, and so on, as long as they're founded on "we always secretly wanted each other anyway". Full-on rape is Right Out. I love humor and wit (not always the same thing). Character death is fine, porn is fine, gen is fine. My hard squicks are embarrassment humor, detailed descriptions of gore, and excreta; I'm skeptical about A/B/O. Other than that, I'll read just about anything once.
I like being surprised at Yuletide. I'll have more fun if you write that fic you've been dying to write but never allowed yourself. Go wild. Surprise yourself. Surprise me. Do something you love doing (with the few exceptions noted above), and we'll both be happy. As ever, optional details are optional.
This year's requests:
Alfred Noyes,
The Highwayman "And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat." Hellooooo, my id. This is one of the great "and then they all died beautifully" myths. It's fun to read out loud. It's fun to imagine yourself into at 13. It's fun to hear sung; there's a
superb rendition by Loreena McKennitt.
You could write fix-it fic. You could move the whole thing into an AU: Prohibition, wings, spaceships, cephalopods. You could write Bess's trysts with the Highwayman before the whole thing dissolved into blood, lace, and regret. You could -- and I mean this -- write a much better idea that has just occurred to you.
Agatha Christie,
The Secret Adversary, Tuppence (Prudence) Cowley Beresford, Thomas Beresford, Mr Carter, Jane Finn, Marguerite Vandemeyer, Julius Hersheimer. Tuppence and Tommy in their Bright Young Thing era. Christie didn't write a lot about the young Tuppence and Tommy; the short-story collection was a series of parodies of little-remembered writers. Then there's
The Secret Adversary, where Tuppence and Tommy infiltrate the absolutely perfect Organization of Sinister People With Sinister Goals. I want more of those years of their lives. I love Secret Organizations (do you love Chesterton's
The Man Who Would Be Thursday? Like that.) If you feel like writing secret plans hidden behind velvet curtains, oh, please, do.
What could you write? Casefic, if that's your bag. Kidnappings of either of them. Cocktail parties where they banter for their lives. Crossovers with the request below. Or anything else that draws on your love for this canon, and brings out what you think of as its essential self. I think the fads, frenzies, and fears of the inter-war period are essential to the young Tuppence and Tommy, so if you go AU, please pick a universe that is equally tense. Please draw from the book version, not any of the TV adaptations.
Emily Post,
Etiquette: Mrs Richard Worldly, Mrs Robert Gilding junior (Lucy), Mrs Oldname, Mr Clubwin Doe, Mrs James Town (Caroline Robinson Town)
The pre-WWII Emily Posts describe a world that was already vanishing at the time of the first edition. Consider:
"If [the chauffeur] drives in the country in winter in an open car he should have a coonskin coat and cap. Should a footman sit beside the chauffeur (unusual in this day) he wears a uniform to match the chauffeur." "'Petting' is not a practise in Best Society." And, my absolute favorite etiquette example of all time, "At dinner once, Mrs. Toplofty, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, "I shall not talk to you—because I don't care to. But for the sake of my hostess I shall say my multiplication tables. Twice one are two, twice two are four——" and she continued on through the tables, making him alternate them with her. As soon as she politely could she turned again to her other companion."
Emily Post was an aspirational book; although Emily herself lived in the society she described, most of her readers -- the book was a bestseller -- could never hope to sit down to a 14-course Service à la Russe dinner. They could dream, though.
Mrs. Post did something that, to my knowledge, was a first. She wrote a cast of characters who appeared over and over in the etiquette vignettes. When somebody introduces herself, "Mrs. Worldly, looking rather freezingly, politely says "Yes" and waits." Mr Clubwin Doe is a young man-about-town. Mr and Mrs Kindhart, although wealthy, are always kind to people who are unfamiliar with high-society ways, and prefer to rough it at their parties and their woodland cabin. The characters I listed above, plus others, wind in and out of the book living their high-society or social-climbing lives. "A "brilliant opera night," which one often hears spoken of (meaning merely that all the boxes are occupied, and that the ladies are more elaborately dressed than usual) is generally a night when a leader of fashion such as Mrs. Worldly, Mrs. Gilding, or Mrs. Toplofty, is giving a ball; and most of the holders of the parterre boxes are in ball dresses, with an unusual display of jewels." "Mr. Doe takes his guests to the theater in taxis. The Normans, if only the Lovejoys are dining with them, go in Mrs. Norman's little town car, but if there are to be six or eight, the ladies go in her car and the gentlemen follow in a taxi. (Unless Mrs. Worldly or Mrs. Gilding are in the party and order their cars back.)" "Mrs. Oldname might perhaps, in order to assist conversation for an interesting but reticent person, tell a lady just before going in to dinner, "Mr. Traveler who is sitting next to you at the table, has just come back from two years alone with the cannibals." This is not to exploit her "Traveled Lion" but to give his neighbor a starting point for conversation at table."
Tell me a story about those people! What is Mrs Oldname's Dark Secret? Was Bobo (Robert Gilding junior) having an affair with Mr Clubwin Doe? Did Mrs Oldname's daughter elope with the chauffeur? Perhaps you would prefer to chronicle one of Mrs [social climbing]'s dreadful dinner parties. Stuff in as much period detail as you want. Feel free to incorporate lurid tropes, turning the chaste and correct world of Post into something better suited to Gorey. Feel free to add characters from any pre-WWII edition, and to set the fic any time in that period. (The first edition was published during Prohibition and was quite grumpy about it, too.)
Feel free to do strange AUs -- I can imagine a werefish Emily Post being hilarious. Please preserve the 1920s/1930s flavor of Emily Post, wherever you choose to set the fic. I enjoy the surviving Victorianisms, the prudishness about the appearance of sex, and the overall bygone-era flavor. If you want to do a space AU or similar, go ahead and refer to customs that are old-fashioned by that era's standards.
Have fun! If you love any of these canons as much as I do, you really can't go wrong. I tend to write very short prompts because I am genuinely enthusiastic about receiving an idea that never occurred to me. If these prompts are too short or sketchy for you, ping the mods and I'll flesh them out.
I'm
MadameHardy on AO3 and
MadameHardy on Tumblr.
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