To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Dear Yuletide Writer,

THANK YOU for writing for me in my first Yuletide! I love all these fandoms and characters dearly, and I know I'll love whatever you come up with for them. I'm offering specific prompts for each fandom if you're the kind of writer who prefers them, but please don't feel constrained by them if you're not.

General likes: I love shippy fluff. I love slice of life stories. I really love humor, especially witty dialogue. I also enjoy the odd madcap antic, snarky narration, and just reading about characters who enjoy being with each other. As long as it's not relentlessly bleak, I can dig angst, especially if it's bittersweet or wistful. Holiday stories of any tradition that would work for the characters are fine if you're so inclined. I'm familiar with the entire canons for all my requests, so spoilers are not an issue.

General dislikes: The big one is explicit sex. I do love shippy fluff, and I laugh like a loon at double entendres and innuendo, but when clothes start coming off and we hit R-rated territory, I very much want things to fade to black. I would also prefer no character death for any of my requested characters and no gender-bending.



Shall We Dance (1937)
Peter Peters (Petrov) and Linda Keene

Shall We Dance is my favorite of the Astaire/Rogers films. Marriage of convenience is my bulletproof narrative kink, and I just really like these characters as well. Linda is so wonderfully independent, yet she also seems to long for companionship in her rather guarded way. Peter is so adorable when he susses his way past her defenses, and I like how he's definitely cocky, but also has a vulnerability that lies pretty close to the surface.

I would love to know what happens after the movie ends. Do Peter and Linda start their own dance company in New York? Go off to Hollywood to star in dance musicals? Go back to Paris to dance there? Something else I haven't even thought of?

I'm also keen on missing scenes. Besides dancing on roller skates, what else did they do in the park when they were evading reporters? What happened between the scene where they decided to get married and the scene in the judge's office?



Northern Exposure
Maggie O'Connell and Joel Fleischman

I don't know if this show was tailor-made for me or if I just discovered it at an impressionable-enough age that I tailored myself to it, but either way, it's wonderful. I love that the writers weren't afraid to tackle complex intellectual topics and incorporate philosophy, literature, religion, and other academic fields. I also love the benign magical realism, and the feeling the show gives me that there's so much wonder out in the world, if we can just open our eyes to it. I did a fandom pitch for smallfandomfest several months ago where I talked a lot more about what I like about this show in general.

What I really like about Maggie and Joel is their verbal back and forth. The more banter they get, the happier I am. I definitely ship them (though if you don't, that's cool, as I would love gen where they interact as well!), and I find them fascinating both when they're burning up the screen with UST and after they settle into a relationship later in the series. I've always found it interesting how the universe appears to push them together and indicate to the audience that they're meant to connect, from natural events such as the ice melt in "Spring Break" causing them to make out, to their significant dreams (like the Clue-inspired one in "What I Did for Love"), to their alter egos in "Cicely" and "Zarya" getting together.

Some specific prompts if you need them:

• What made Joel finally ask Maggie on a date in "Mite Makes Right"? It's always bothered me that there was no defining event that led him to that decision (other than that the episode aired during sweeps month).


• "Fish Story" is one of my favorite episodes, so it would be cool to see how they handle another holiday as an interfaith couple, or as friends/enemies/whatever you want them to be if you're going for gen.


• How does being forced to work together on something, a la the election in "Democracy in America," bring out their differences and/or similarities? I always wanted to see them attempt a home improvement project of some sort together, for example.


• Future fic is always good—after "The Quest," do they ever meet again or get back together? Do they get married, or do they make like Mary and Kafka and just stay together without the formality? Do they have kids? (P.S. If you just want to pretend the show ended a few episodes into season six and the whole Joel goes upriver/returns to NYC thing never happened, I will not mind at all. ;))

Robson Arms
Sault Ste. Marie

This show won my heart because it manages to walk the line between wacky/zany/blackly hilarious and oddly affecting without ever going too far in either direction. I also like the multiplicity of relationships portrayed, from parent/child to roommate to friend to enemy to etc., and the way that alliances and relationships change over the years.

And oh my god, I love Sault. She is such a snarky, insecure, utterly wacky trainwreck. I think the actress once said that Sault voices the things that we'd all like to say at one time or another and bears the consequences of it, and that is so true. She makes me want to laugh, groan, and hug her all at the same time.

I would love to see more of her painful adjustment to Vancouver or her awkward attempts to make friends even though she basically hates everyone. Perhaps she can give a party (that turns into a disaster)? Or be shanghaied into babysitting little Robbie Briggs (and it ends disastrously)? Or hey, she could pull a Nancy Drew and investigate why the hell these mysterious Troubadours keep lounging around the apartment complex and singing all the time (and probably it ends disastrously)!

As long as the focus remains on Sault, feel free to include whoever else from the cast you want. FWIW, my other favorites are Geoff, Stanley, Toni, Grandma Tan, Nick, and Hal, but I can imagine a great fic being written that features Sault and any other character(s).



Corner Gas
Karen Pelly and Davis Quinton

Karen and Davis are such buddies, and it warms the very cockles of my heart when they tease/insult/exasperate each other and yet still stick up for each other when push comes to shove. I always enjoy Karen being uber-serious about random not-serious things and Davis being oblivious and weird in his special Davis way.

Also, I ship it. I ship it like FedEx. I will not complain at all if you write something where they're more than just friends, or where they become so. :D

I really like the sense of community that comes through on the show, so while Karen and Davis are my favorites, I'm happy to see the other characters wander in and out.

Specific prompts are hard, because one of the real strengths of this show was the writers' ability to make a funny story out of any old mundane thing, as well as the way they could inject weirdness into those stories. So I really think you could go anywhere with this request, and I'll adore it. But if you're totally stumped, it would be fun to see the other characters read some innocuous interaction between Karen and Davis as romantic (like the earrings in "Census Sensibility"), and then because K&D don't want the real reason behind whatever they were doing to get out, they have to pretend to be together. Depending on whether you ship them or not, this could lead to actual romance. :)