Lewis Powell

Dear Yuletide Letter Writer,

This is my first time participating in Yuletide (and in any fic exchange, actually)!

I am very excited, and I don't have a lot of specific expectations!  I am providing information to be helpful, because I've read advice on this process and I've seen that it is often helpful to be given some indications of who you are writing for and what that person would want to read, but I also know that ODAD, and that takes pressure off of me!

I had trouble formulating DNWs at first because I feel like most things I could put in a DNW could work in the right story, done in the right way, etc. etc.  Also, the fandoms I was requesting do not have an abundance of fic written for them, so it is not like there are certain tropes or tendencies that I felt like are specifically overdone for those fandoms.  I did settle on some clear DNWs for each one, though (listed at the start of each fandom-specific section, below).

About Me:

I am a philosophy professor. I like to play roleplaying games and board games.  I have a dog named Scully (but I am not as intense of an X-files fan as her name might suggest).  I am a huge fan of the band the mountain goats. In my spare time I also like to do online puzzle hunts, and I cook/bake. I'm a big reader, and I like to watch tv (sci-fi/fantasy/spec fic, but also other stuff, for example, I have endless thoughts about the gilmore girls).  I recently read the Steerswoman series and have become entirely obsessed with it. I cannot do more justice in recommending/describing its virtues than Sumana Harihareswara did here.  These books are just so fantastic.


The Zhuangzi — Zhuang Zhou

DNW: Explicit sexual content

Expanded discussion: I recently discovered the Zhuangzi, after mostly being familiar only with the story of Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, and proceeded to do a reading group with some folks where we worked through reading the inner chapters and selected outer/miscellaneous chapters. The people involved were reading different translations (I have the Brook Ziporyn translation, which, while obviously a "maximalist" translator, rather than a conservative/literalist translation, is very engaging, and I am a fan of the particular way Ziporyn tried to capture the flavor of the writing; it really comes alive on the page, due to those choices). My original interest in the text is because I am a philosophy professor and I am expanding my familiarity with works outside the western canon. At the same time, the depth of characterization and richly developed parables that come across, even in just a paragraph or so made it an instantly appealing work of literature, not just philosophically, but also from the perspective of me wanting to entertain more stories about the rotating cast of characters that come through in the pages of this book.

It was genuinely hard to choose characters to nominate for the fandom, so I chose Confucius and Huizi whose characterization in the text is part of what makes the text so appealing (they are often foils for Zhuangzi but not simply treated as buffoons) and they appear a number of times in the text, as well as nominating a couple of characters who appear to have been invented for the text (Gnawgap, Kingly Crowbait), and seemed to have some compelling story that could be expanded on (though that applies to virtually every character in the book). In writing up a prompt, I was somewhat tempted to allow a prospective writer the capacity to "wander free and unfettered" and just leave the optional details blank, here, and just see what happened, but I wanted to balance the interests of making the writer's life easier against that Zhuangist approach to submitting the request. As a concession to Zhuangzi, though, I didn't want to restrict the writer's choice of which of the nominated characters to feature, so I left that to your discretion.

Honestly, in retrospect, I almost wish I had chosen the "worldbuilding" tag, but I think that still feels like not quite the right fit for a book that mixes caricatures of real historical figures, figures from legend, and wholly invented characters, to express Taoist philosophy.  Regardless, I would be very excited to see whatever someone else has taken away from the work, and is inspired to write.  The book, is after all, about embracing the breadth and variety of perspective, and about abandoning one's attachment to purpose (both things I am not always the best at).

Maze — Christopher Manson

DNW: Gore (creepy is good but I don't want the kind of blood and violence you see in PG-13 or R horror film)

Optional Details: I was very surprised that there was not already AO3 fanfic about Maze. It has such an intense and devoted community of fans/adherents, I was surprised that there wasn't already some fic written.  There are so many hints and suggestions of further story/detail, so much to allow people to develop their own robust head-canon, I was just almost expecting people to have developed it already, but when I didn't find any, I thought that I'd just love to see that. So I would absolutely love to see something that looks at what happens "off-screen" where we aren't reading, or perhaps on a path-not-taken when guests get stuck in the maze. What do you think is going on with the time shifting that seems to be happening in the book? Maybe you've imagined additional rooms that we didn't get to see? And new avenues to traverse? A different riddle and labyrinth to haunt the a similar cluster of guests on another visit?  The same guests return or slip away from the group, maybe.  So many possibilities, and I'd love to go down any of the paths (just like when I first read the book and was torn about which paths to go down). The book is full of mysteries, and I'd mostly just love to read what someone thinks is going on behind some/any of those mysteries!  The main things I want preserved are the haunting, taunting, eerie atmosphere, and the sense that something is not quite right with the house that we are exploring.  The explorations and theories at this site are largely not the direction I suspect for what is going on, in my opinion, but they do provide some interesting avenues/jumping off points of thought and speculation.

Constellation Games — Leonard Richardson

DNW: Character Death

This is a book about first contact, and it is centered on an unlikely human to be at the center of these events.  So the narrative is very focused on that human.  And don't get me wrong, I love the book!  It is one of my favorites, I've read it more than 15 times, and I've bought it for like, 7 or more people. BUT, insofar as I am giving a prompt here, the thing that is great to me about the book is the humor and fun of thinking about the really alien aliens! And I'd like to see and think more about how they interact with each other, in a way that is less filtered-through-a-human-intermediary.  Tetsuo is my favorite character in the stories, both his speech patterns and his sense of humor generally, and Curic is also a fantastic character (a sharp, no-nonsense personality who is warm-in-their-own-way, but absolutely not up for hugs), and while most of our exposure to the two of them comes from how they have to deal with Ariel, they are great personalities in and of themselves, and have stories worth telling just in terms of their lives as members of a first contact mission.  In the prompt I said "Ideas that I would be especially interested in: life on Ring City during the early events of the book, before they really know what they are dealing with, vis-a-vis humans. Life on or off Ring city, after the events of the book, exploring culture shock (or perhaps lack of it, in Tetsuo's case) of Alien/Farang adjustment to the new situation they find themselves in. Wacky hi-jinks due to anarchist post-scarcity aliens with a disdain for authority having to deal with human bureaucracies! And so on."  My point isn't that I don't want humans to be in the story or anything (it would be hard to leave them out entirely!) But I don't necessarily want a fic that is about the drama of Ariel's life or where the main focus of these great extra-terrestrial characters is about how they feature in Ariel's story, as much as a story of their own.  Wherever/however that story gets told; if it is on earth, among humans, or on ring city, dealing with humans, or approaching earth; whatever makes sense to you.  And I could only nominate four characters, and I went with Tetsuo and Curic, and Ashley and Her, but now that I am formulating the request, I want to be clear that the AI Smoke is also a great inclusion, if you are feeling it, and exploring any of the other alien races included in the story would also be fantastic. I just didn't want to nominate a specific Gaijin character like "He Sees The Map He Throws The Dart" because I didn't have any particular attachment to a story about that character over some other members of the species, etc.

In Conclusion

I hope this is a helpful addition to the prompt for letting you know more about me, and my interests for the fics.  I appreciate that you are willing to participate in this exchange, and I can't wait to see what our shared love of one of these works produces!

Thanks!

JS_Thrill