lareinenoire | Reading

Dear Yuletide Author,

First of all, thank you so much. If you've ended up with my prompts, I either bow to your applause or apologize for your trouble.

A few general things before I get into specific requests.

I am happy with gen, het, or slash (M/M and F/F both). Whatever best fits the story you want to tell.

Things I love: Complicated, nuanced relationships; siblings and friends bothering one another; clever characters being clever; clever characters being idiots (in-character idiots, of course); longing; UST; emphasizin ur wimminz (see icon); Gothic undertones; classical allusions/references; musical references; historical references; Grand Epic Moments; genfic with just a bit of romance; snark; period detail (I am an absolute sucker for it); moral ambiguity; unreliable narrators; gut-punch endings.

Things I do not love so much: PWP; explicit kink (unless it's required by the plot); dubious or coerced consent (unless it's genuinely in-character); characters behaving unrealistically for the time period (whether canon or AU); invisible wimminz; using magic to explain things away (I'm looking at you, Philippa Gregory); using romance to explain things away; gratuitous violence.

And now, requests!

( Requests & Details below )
Again, thank you so much in advance for this gift, and I have no doubt I'll love whatever you write.

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Desk
Current Music: Dario Marinelli - Jane Eyre

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

iberiandoctor

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

ellen_fremedon

Dear Yuletide Author:

Thank you for writing a story for me! I love it already!

If you have a story in mind in any of the fandoms I requested, go for it--I will love pretty much anything for these sources. I love worldbuilding, I love character-focused fic, I love smut of all stripes, and I love gen. I want to read what you want to write.

In all of these fandoms, I am especially interested in any or all of the following:

--Nontraditional relationship dynamics and the way people find or build a niche for themselves in a world with strict rules--about gender and relationships and everything else.

--Seeing the characters deal with actual historical figures and events and inventions--ones offstage or coming up post-canon, or more detail on events during canon.

--Material culture: how they decorate their rooms, what they have for dinner, how they dress. These fandoms are all made for lavish descriptions of fashion--the men's no less than the women's!

If you are here as a pinch hitter: I'm so sorry. I have all historical fandoms this year. Fortunately they are all fairly short: two stand-alone novels, one film, and one TV series of 6 30-minute episodes. The one that will probably need the least amount of historical research is Mademoiselle de Maupin, which is extremely vague about what year or even what century it's set in.

One general DNW: Animal cruelty. I can handle non-graphic descriptions of hunting, butchery, or veterinary work, but please, nothing with an element of punishment or betrayal--no deliberate harm to animals by people they trust.

( Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier )

( Horace - George Sand )

( Quacks (TV) )

( Impromptu (1991) )

likeadeuce

I wrote yuletide promo posts (or just recommendations for two movies I love):

2024's Babygirl (office romance with age gaps and adultery, but in a tender way) and

2013's Inside Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac! The Coen Brothers! Mid-century American folk music! A cat! Llewyn Davis walking so Patrick Zweig could run!)

landofnowhere

The Barbarous Babes: being the Memoirs of Molly by Edith Ayrton Zangwill is now freely available on Project Gutenberg! Thanks to

kurowasan for scanning the book and the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders for all their work m

This is Edith Ayrton Zangwill's first published book from 1904, an episodic children's book that reminds me of E. Nesbit's non-fantastic fiction. Molly is a relatable protagonist with an engaging narrative voice that sucked me in instantly. I reviewed it in a bit more detail here.

juushika

Title: The Promised Neverland
Author: Kaiu Shirai
Illustrator: Posuka Demizu
Translator: Satsuki Yamashita
Published: Viz Media, 2017-2021 (2016-2020)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 4000 (189+189+200+192+200+200+192+192+207+200+200+200+192+200+192+208+192+200+216+240)
Total Page Count: 549,255
Text Number: 2027-46
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebooks borrowed from the Multnomah County Library and Timberland Regional Library
Review: The three oldest and most gifted children in an orphanage endeavor to escape when they discover the real purpose of the institution. This is frequently an overdrawn thriller: the number of twists and but-actuallys and evil reaction faces could be toned down significantly without sacrificing the plot. It also reads ridiculously fast, and the twists are easy to track even to the point of over-explanation. The premise is the hook; the staying factor is the central characters, whose intense friendship and OT3 vibes are built around the various absences of or hidden natures of its members, an intimate psychological focus to ground the antics of the plot.

I read this immediately after Made In Abyss, which isn't a frame of reference useful to anyone else but which is, for me, inseparable. Two stories about children in peril, discovering the world is larger and stranger than they knew; utterly unalike in tone. Imperilment here is straightforward and nearly unembodied; there's gore, but it doesn't touch the protagonists (Emma's hidden ear comes to mind) or, by consequence, the reader; in no small coincidence, the world lacks any real sense of wonder, even as it increases in scope. It's all fun and games until you get invested in the characters, whose strained, tropey dynamics and arcs suddenly blossom under the preexisting propensity to explain every plot twist to death, allowing sincere and moving nuanced internal perspectives. Such similar building blocks so differently used, with weirdly similar results despite the wildly different reader experiences; fascinating!

Anyway. This isn't high art, and isn't meant to be; but I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

juushika

Title: Bright Young Women
Author: Jessica Knoll
Narrator: Sutton Foster, Imani Jade Powers, Corey Brill, Chris Henry Coffey
Published: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2023
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 390
Total Page Count: 545,255
Text Number: 2026
Read Because: what happens when you need an audiobook right now to make chores bearable, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A fictionalization of Ted Bundy's 1978 Florida sorority attack and the consequences for a friend of one of the victims; and how strange, to write a pointedly victim-first novel entirely as a fictional account & deconstruction of an identifiable serial killer and his specific offenses. This is making some Statements, the effectiveness of which would be improved if the emphasis were scaled back. There are details that I appreciate: the dissociative narration in the early chapters; the minute details of specific period social/gender roles. And I agree, on the whole, that Bundy was less mastermind than simply exploiting the opportunities that systemic misogyny and cultural conditioning gave him. But—

Look, this is stupid, but Pacific Northwest natives don't think it's beautiful here, if you can survive the nine-month suffering season. We generally like the temperate weather. That's petty, but the regularity with which a precious, emphatic detail feels wrongly used comes to matter rather a lot. Take Ruth's acne, which is a tediously obsessive character trait that becomes a sort of metaphor for the bright young woman whose tragic prospective value is secured when she becomes clear-skinned and beautiful. That's weird! So is the flawed read of the current state of true crime, so is the thriller pacing of the tripartite narrative; this feels like a first novel but isn't, overlong and clunky, often losing and undermining its strong titular argument.

landofnowhere

For the last two weeks I've been in a state of "I really need to work on these paper revisions", which, being who I am, means that I have been coming up with all sorts of ways to procrastinate. Which is not a very good excuse for not posting last week, when I should have told you about the awesomeness of Una Silberrad, and in the past week I have been procrastinating by other means than reading; so I should still write up these books even though they are less fresh in my mind.

Una Silberrad was a popular early 20th century British novelist; like many popular women writers of the time, her books, though in the public domain, are hard to find electronic copies of. I first heard of her from Jo Walton's reading posts on Reactor. A friend of mine is involved with the process of getting her books into project Gutenberg -- in fact we became friends after I messaged her and said "hey, it would be great if someone did this for Edith Ayrton Zangwill, too", and she volunteered to do this, without having read anything of Edith's, just on a Discord friend-of-a-friend's suggestion!

Princess Puck, Una Silberrad. This book just made it to Project Gutenberg, thanks to my friend's efforts. This is a really charming coming-of-age story, with a girl who comes of age and ultimately gets to save the day with her interest in family/local history and her strength of purpose to do what is right. (I think the protagonist maybe could be read as having autistic spectrum traits, in particular her talent for mimicry, but it's unclear.) There is a romance, but this is the sort of story where you feel like the protagonist would have had a meaningful life even if the plot contrivances hadn't arranged to make the romance work out in the end. Reminded me a bit of The Secret Garden, with its combination of romantic tropes and groundedness in everyday work. Of the supporting characters, I particularly liked the protagonist's business-minded older cousin, and how the relationship between the two develops over time.

The Good Comrade, Una Silberrad. This is the only other fiction book of Silberrad's on Gutenberg so far (but this will change soon!) -- it was Silberrad's mos popular novel, and I can see why. This fits the conventional structure of a romance novel much better than Princess Puck, but it goes some really interesting places (Holland, and horticulture) first. Julia is a very resourceful heroine; she has the key Una Silberrad heroine traits of valuing hard work and not caring too much for social norms and class distinctions, but is also very much herself, and shaped by her family circumstances (her father is an alcoholic and gambler, her mother is a professional at keeping up appearances).

Desire, Una Silberrad. This one is not yet on Gutenberg, but was particularly recommended to me. This one has two protagonists; the titular Desire, a wealthy and alluring young socialite, and Peter, an aspiring young writer from a middle-class background. Again the ending is conventional, but the way it gets there is not. (Early in the plot there's some fake dating, but it's not at all used in a tropey way.) Desire starts out being not entirely likeable as a character, but I liked her arc.

juushika

Title: Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition
Author: Owen Beattie and John Geiger
Narrator: Liam Gerrard
Published: Tantor Media, 2019 (1987)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 544,865
Text Number: 2025
Read Because: Franklin's boys too got very cold, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Beattie lead modern excavations and research into the lost Franklin expedition, and pioneered lead poisoning as an explanation particularly for the poor decision-making that occurred when the ships were abandoned; I understand that theory has since been devalued, but his underlying argument holds: the expedition's loss, like all historical polar exploration tragedies, had an inherently complex cause, in which food, its quality and deficiencies as much as its availability, was an important factor with a cascading effect on decision-making and health.

...Which doesn't mean I'm particularly enamored of this book. The mix of historical context and third-person memoir (what a baffling choice! was it more common at the time of publication?) leads to uneven pacing, skimming the approximate details of the expedition and preceding attempts on the Northwest Passage and then grinding to a halt to land in the specificities of Beattie's research, concluding with a finality that's no longer satisfying. I wouldn't make this my only book on the subject; but I'm not, so!

juushika

A trio of graphic novels! All actually pretty great; isn't that refreshing. I'm back and forth on my unusually intimate relationship ruling for The Smell of Starving Boys which means, hey, might as well add it.

Title: All Princesses Die Before Dawn (Toutes les princesses meurent après minuit)
Author: Quentin Zuttion
Published: Europe Comics, 2022
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 150
Total Page Count: 541,190
Text Number: 2002
Read Because: title and cover obvs., hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: A French family's domestic life pivots on the day of Princess Diana's death. The rough-edged colors and the flimsy brightness of summer, childhood imagination set against world events, and the small and crucial scale of life changes and social awakening: this has a measured scale and atmosphere, and keeps within its constraints to great effect. A very readable, tender work.

Title: Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting
Author: Kindra Neely
Published: Little, Brown Ink, 2022
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 305
Total Page Count: 541,495
Text Number: 2003
Read Because: spotted this at my local comics shop and then borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: A graphic memoir of a survivor of the 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting and her post-traumatic stress in the years following. As a memoir, this roots itself in the sincere, limited, and often petty aspects of the author's experience. I appreciate that honesty; it also fails to center or even characterize other victims, including the dead, or to offer a conclusion beyond that private scale. But what could she say?

Near the end of the book, the author mentions the 2018 Thousand Oaks shooting in passing: "But shootings just kept happening. Thousand Oaks was every survivor's worst nightmare, because a survivor from the Las Vegas shooting was killed in another." Survivors of gun violence are also victims, and retraumatizing events continue to be ubiquitous; so ubiquitous that this coincidence can occur but also so that they become relevant only in passing, divorced from detail, statistics and sound bites even here. The author can't solve that crisis, least of all in a debut graphic novel. I wish this could do more, regret its raw edges (panels feel pretty samey), but find it easy to extend grace to memoirs and feel that the blend of a readable format, small scale, and devastating content works to make the topic accessible.

Title: The Smell of Starving Boys (L'Odeur des garçons affamés)
Author: Loo Hui Phang
Illustrator: Frederik Peeters
Translator: Edward Gauvin
Published: SelfMadeHero, 2017 (2016)
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 110
Total Page Count: 544,455
Text Number: 2023
Read Because: title grabbed me when browsing the graphic novels, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: A disgraced photographer and unusual farm boy meet on an American West survey expedition. This is racially and politically aware with mixed success, making Statements while still landing face-first in magical Native American tropes; so, caveats on the statement: I freaking loved it. This is my catnip, atmosphere-rich, surreal, evocative, and character-/relationship-focused in a way that echoes fanfic, the speculative taking second seat to an amorphously queer, horny little story about social control and defiant desire. The font choice is super distracting; the art, phenomenal. This is going right onto my reread list.

nineveh_uk

I have got a headache
I do not know the reason.
A headache is annoying
And always out of season.
I have got a headache,
It will not go away,
I wish it would and never ever
Come another day.

likeadeuce

These are my requests: Kink, tennis, and the cinematic folk music extended universe.

1. ( Babygirl(2024) )

2. ( Challengers (2024) )

3.( Women's Tennis RPF )

4. ( History of Sound (2025) (This prompt could be considered a spoiler) )

5. ( Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) )

6. ( A Complete Unknown (2024) )

nineweaving

I have a sweet hope of getting all three Cloudish books into print and pixels and audio. Somewhere must want them.

Having prepared three manuscripts for submission, I 've amused myself with making wordclouds. Aside from proper names and stop words, the commonest words in Moonwise are elemental, Anglo-Saxon:

light
dark
leaves
thought
stone
wood
cold
child
moon
turned
saw
still
wind
hand
face
cloud
earth
looked
witch
stones
stars

with green, air, fire, water coming just a shade behind.

Looking at the figures, I see I used light and dark, cloud and earth, stones and stars exactly equally. There's even a triplet: air, fire, water. I think the strangeness of the book, the spell of it, lies partly in this concentration, this unconscious balance. The lexicon is like a tarot deck: a very narrow set of symbols, but each card is iconic.

Nine

selenak

Dear Yuletide Writer,

we share at least one fandom, which is great, and I'm really grateful you take the time and trouble to write a story for me. All the prompts are just suggestions; if you have very different ideas featuring the same central characters, go for them. Also, I enjoy a broad range from fluff to angst, so whatever suits you best works fine with me.

DNW:

- bashing of canon pairings or characters in general. By which I don't mean the characters have to like each and everyone - a great number of those I've nominated can be described as prickly jerks, among other things, and it would be entirely ic for them to say something negative about people they canonically can't stand - but there's a difference between that and the narrative giving me the impression to go along with said opinions.

- Alpha/Beta/Omega scenarios, watersports, infantilisation. Really not my thing, sorry.

Likes:

- competence, competent people appreciating each other

- deep loyalty and not blindly accepting orders

- flirting/seduction via wordplay and banter (if it works for you with the characters in question)

- for the darker push/pull dynamics: moments of tenderness and understanding in between the fighting/one upman shipping (without abandoning the anger)

- for the relationships, both non-romantic and if you like romantic, that are gentler and harmonious by nature: making it clear each has their own life and agenda as well

- some humor amidst the angst (especially if the character in question displays it in canon)

The question of AUs: depends. "What if this key canon event did not happen?" can lead to great character and dynamics exploration, some of which made it into my specific prompts, but I do want to recognize the characters. Half of those I nominated are from historical canons, and the history is part of the fascination the canon has for me. ) However, if you feel inspired to, say, write Cecily Neville, space captain, and manage to do it in a way that gives me gripping analogues to the historical situations: be my guest!

How much or how little sex: I'm cool with anything you feel comfortable with, from detailed sex to the proverbial fade out after a kiss. Or no sex at all (given that most of my prompts are non-romantic in nature), as long as the story explores the emotional dynamics in an intense way.

( Cecily Duology - Annie Garthwaite )

( Foundation (TV) )

( Alien: Earth )

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Location: Munich

Profile

lareinenoire

October 2025

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Page Summary

lareinenoire - Dear Yuletide Author Letter (2025)
alierak in dw_maintenance - AWS outage
iberiandoctor - Yuletide 2025
ellen_fremedon - Yuletide 2025 Dear Author letter
likeadeuce - Yuletide promo posts (or just some movies I like)
landofnowhere - Hot off the Project Gutenberg Presses: The Barbarous Babes!
juushika - Manga Review: The Promised Neverland by Kaiu Shirai, illustrated by Posuka Demizu
juushika - Book Review: Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll, narr. Sutton Foster et al.
landofnowhere - wednesday books procrastinate
juushika - Book Review: Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, narr. Liam Gerrard
juushika - BRs: All Princesses Die Before Dawn, Zuttion; Numb to This, Neely; The Smell of Starving Boys, Phang
nineveh_uk - A poem for today
likeadeuce - Dear Yuletide writer:
nineweaving - Cloudwords
selenak - Yuletide Letter

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The Mirror in my Mind

Reading

Dear Yuletide Author Letter (2025)

AWS outage

Yuletide 2025

Yuletide 2025 Dear Author letter

Yuletide promo posts (or just some movies I like)

Hot off the Project Gutenberg Presses: The Barbarous Babes!

Manga Review: The Promised Neverland by Kaiu Shirai, illustrated by Posuka Demizu

Book Review: Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll, narr. Sutton Foster et al.

wednesday books procrastinate

Book Review: Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, narr. Liam Gerrard

BRs: All Princesses Die Before Dawn, Zuttion; Numb to This, Neely; The Smell of Starving Boys, Phang

A poem for today

Dear Yuletide writer:

Cloudwords

Yuletide Letter

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October 2025

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