Deart Yuletide Writer.....
Greetings and imaginations, writer!
First, a few generalities...
I'm partial to stories that take place between the scenes, or after the credits roll. My mind tends to keep spinning and wondering what could happen next.
I'm also partial to apocalyptic scenarios. My favorites are the Zombie Apocalypse, the Technopocalypse (my term for any of various scenarios that render our high-energy technology inoperative), and the Biblical apocalypse. Turn anything into an apocalypse, and I'll be happy, just so long as there's still a glimmer of hope that the surviving characters make it through the tunnel, as it were.
I love world building. I can't get enough of it. There's not always a lot of room for it in many fandoms, but it's still loads of fun.
A word about crossovers: I've had a great deal of fun with these, so please feel free to go there. Some of the most entertaining stories and scenarios arise from well-conceived crossovers. Of course, it works best if I'm familiar with the other fandom you're crossing. Even if I'm not, I should still be able to pick out the salient points--and, well, it's an excuse to explore a new fandom. When in doubt, if you have a favorite fandom that you're just dying to cross with one or more of what I've enumerated below, by all means, ask our Moderator to ask me.
I prefer my relationships to remain canonical.
There's really not a lot that turns me off.
Non-con and slash make me twitch spasmodically. Otherwise, go nuts!
Oh, one more thing--and it's something that some people might regard as nit-picky: sloppy grammar and syntax bug me. My main pet peeves are pronoun and apostrophe misuse--it screams that the writer just isn't paying attention.
Now, down to details...
Aurora - Kim Stanley Robinson
I loved this novel. While its message was not-so-veiled, that didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the story. While the deep space exploration aspect isn't really the story's central message, it's still the part that most fascinates me. There are so many places we could zig or zag, as it were.
Maybe they decide to move on past Tau Ceti. What do they find out there? Is it better, worse, or about the same?
If there were no contagion on Aurora, would the colonists still have a hope of long-term success, or would Badim's reversion to the mean still catch up with them?
Maybe Devi doesn't die of cancer.
What if the ship returns to Sol to find that an apocalyptic event has occurred on Earth?
Fast-forward a long, long time. Does human genetic material merge with the "fast prion" of Aurora and alter the sorts of life that might otherwise had arisen on that moon?
I do like the Freya character and found her, and her relationship with her father, endearing.
The Martian - Andy Weir
What's not to love about anything related to Mars? I thoroughly enjoyed everything about Weir's novel, especially Watney's snarky attitude. Does he ever return to Mars? Or maybe write something in which Mars itself is a character and it reacts to having the novel's events rolling all over its surface.
Jurassic Park (Movies 1993-2001)
First of all, we all know the movies, and the novels on which they're based, aren't really about dinosaurs, but about human hubris. But, come on, dinosaurs!
Secondly, I'm an Allan-Ellie shipper, even though they break up sometime between the first movie and the third. But maybe they wind up working together after that, even if their relationship remains so much water under the bridge.
Maybe someone decides to start ranching dinosaurs. Where? Texas, maybe? Because we all know they grow big stuff in Texas, right? And there have to be some dinos no more temperamental than bison, and we ranch those. Part of the fun is that we don't really know how dinosaurs behaved.
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
I'll confess that the Sleeping Beauty story, and most other fairy tales come to think of it, grew on me.
In SB, the motivation of the Maleficent character always had me scratching my head. A couple of years ago, ephemeralblossom wrote me an excellent, interesting, and quite satisfying story addressing this. Go read it! So for this year, let's fast-forward. How far? It's up to you! Just explore Aurora's future, that of her children, grandchildren, etc. Do the effects of her magical gifts persist and if so, does she pass them on to her offspring? Do they every learn how to use magic? Is Maleficent really gone, or just banished for a time? And what if all of this comes to a head in the modern day?
I sometimes do some pretty tough things to my characters. So last summer, I suggested that Aurora wakes up a vampire--and GreenPhoenix wrote a nicely bittersweet story, one that inspired last year's NaNo project in which I turned Sleeping Beauty into a vampire, though I took the story in a different direction. So...maybe she wakes up as a different kind of undead?
Or maybe the sleep lasts far longer than one hundred years. What if one of the fairies goofs and accidentally adds a zero? To use one of my own jokes: "If you mow your ivy and find a castle, you might be a Welsh redneck."
Ghostbusters (2016)
The original was great. The remake was even better. There was just so much going for it, especially the good, clean humor. Through all the laughs, I kept thinking, "What if Kevin is actually Thor in disguise?" So why would the Norse God of Thunder be posing as an incompetent receptionist? Does the paranormal activity in New York have something to do with the coming of Ragnarok? Or it could just as easily be something really silly.
Zombieland
What happens with the characters after the Amusement Park Incident? Do they stay together or split up? If they split up, who stays with whom? Who couples up with whom? Do they encounter other survivors? And most importantly, do they ever find a Twinkie?
First, a few generalities...
I'm partial to stories that take place between the scenes, or after the credits roll. My mind tends to keep spinning and wondering what could happen next.
I'm also partial to apocalyptic scenarios. My favorites are the Zombie Apocalypse, the Technopocalypse (my term for any of various scenarios that render our high-energy technology inoperative), and the Biblical apocalypse. Turn anything into an apocalypse, and I'll be happy, just so long as there's still a glimmer of hope that the surviving characters make it through the tunnel, as it were.
I love world building. I can't get enough of it. There's not always a lot of room for it in many fandoms, but it's still loads of fun.
A word about crossovers: I've had a great deal of fun with these, so please feel free to go there. Some of the most entertaining stories and scenarios arise from well-conceived crossovers. Of course, it works best if I'm familiar with the other fandom you're crossing. Even if I'm not, I should still be able to pick out the salient points--and, well, it's an excuse to explore a new fandom. When in doubt, if you have a favorite fandom that you're just dying to cross with one or more of what I've enumerated below, by all means, ask our Moderator to ask me.
I prefer my relationships to remain canonical.
There's really not a lot that turns me off.
Non-con and slash make me twitch spasmodically. Otherwise, go nuts!
Oh, one more thing--and it's something that some people might regard as nit-picky: sloppy grammar and syntax bug me. My main pet peeves are pronoun and apostrophe misuse--it screams that the writer just isn't paying attention.
Now, down to details...
Aurora - Kim Stanley Robinson
I loved this novel. While its message was not-so-veiled, that didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the story. While the deep space exploration aspect isn't really the story's central message, it's still the part that most fascinates me. There are so many places we could zig or zag, as it were.
Maybe they decide to move on past Tau Ceti. What do they find out there? Is it better, worse, or about the same?
If there were no contagion on Aurora, would the colonists still have a hope of long-term success, or would Badim's reversion to the mean still catch up with them?
Maybe Devi doesn't die of cancer.
What if the ship returns to Sol to find that an apocalyptic event has occurred on Earth?
Fast-forward a long, long time. Does human genetic material merge with the "fast prion" of Aurora and alter the sorts of life that might otherwise had arisen on that moon?
I do like the Freya character and found her, and her relationship with her father, endearing.
The Martian - Andy Weir
What's not to love about anything related to Mars? I thoroughly enjoyed everything about Weir's novel, especially Watney's snarky attitude. Does he ever return to Mars? Or maybe write something in which Mars itself is a character and it reacts to having the novel's events rolling all over its surface.
Jurassic Park (Movies 1993-2001)
First of all, we all know the movies, and the novels on which they're based, aren't really about dinosaurs, but about human hubris. But, come on, dinosaurs!
Secondly, I'm an Allan-Ellie shipper, even though they break up sometime between the first movie and the third. But maybe they wind up working together after that, even if their relationship remains so much water under the bridge.
Maybe someone decides to start ranching dinosaurs. Where? Texas, maybe? Because we all know they grow big stuff in Texas, right? And there have to be some dinos no more temperamental than bison, and we ranch those. Part of the fun is that we don't really know how dinosaurs behaved.
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
I'll confess that the Sleeping Beauty story, and most other fairy tales come to think of it, grew on me.
In SB, the motivation of the Maleficent character always had me scratching my head. A couple of years ago, ephemeralblossom wrote me an excellent, interesting, and quite satisfying story addressing this. Go read it! So for this year, let's fast-forward. How far? It's up to you! Just explore Aurora's future, that of her children, grandchildren, etc. Do the effects of her magical gifts persist and if so, does she pass them on to her offspring? Do they every learn how to use magic? Is Maleficent really gone, or just banished for a time? And what if all of this comes to a head in the modern day?
I sometimes do some pretty tough things to my characters. So last summer, I suggested that Aurora wakes up a vampire--and GreenPhoenix wrote a nicely bittersweet story, one that inspired last year's NaNo project in which I turned Sleeping Beauty into a vampire, though I took the story in a different direction. So...maybe she wakes up as a different kind of undead?
Or maybe the sleep lasts far longer than one hundred years. What if one of the fairies goofs and accidentally adds a zero? To use one of my own jokes: "If you mow your ivy and find a castle, you might be a Welsh redneck."
Ghostbusters (2016)
The original was great. The remake was even better. There was just so much going for it, especially the good, clean humor. Through all the laughs, I kept thinking, "What if Kevin is actually Thor in disguise?" So why would the Norse God of Thunder be posing as an incompetent receptionist? Does the paranormal activity in New York have something to do with the coming of Ragnarok? Or it could just as easily be something really silly.
Zombieland
What happens with the characters after the Amusement Park Incident? Do they stay together or split up? If they split up, who stays with whom? Who couples up with whom? Do they encounter other survivors? And most importantly, do they ever find a Twinkie?
