find your way into the light

It was 31°C here yesterday. It's 31°C again today. It's too much! I have a rotten barometric-pressure headache hanging around and next to no appetite for actual food. Argh. Rain predicted Sunday afternoon, I hope it'll break the heatwave a little. I don't tolerate these well at all, I'm fed up of people in the media always insisting on how "gorgeous" it is when the weather is this hot. It is not! (And my friend got sunburned when they spent less than 10 minutes outside, a couple of days ago! SMH)

Dear Yuletide Writer,

First, thank you for signing up, and for choosing to read my letter, whether I'm your assigned recipient or you just like the look of one of my chosen fandoms and/or prompts! I enjoy a lot of things about this annual exchange, which is why I've stuck with it for over a decade now, and it couldn't happen without everybody who signs up and all the people who put in so much hard work to make it run as smoothly as possible, which is much appreciated.

I sincerely hope that I haven't prompted you with anything that you might find stressful or distasteful, and that you enjoy writing whatever request you decide to write for me as much as I enjoy writing for others, or more.

If you're not my assigned author, and you're looking for prompts you might like to write as treats - thank you for reading my post, and I hope you find inspiration, whether here or elsewhere!

In case you need to check anything, I'll be more than willing to answer any clarification queries forwarded to me.

My triggers, squicks, dislikes, likes, and prompts are all below. :) I really don't think it's my place to judge what other people may or may not want or like in their fiction, fanfiction and/or offline life, so I hope you won't feel anything in the following sections to be meant as criticism or implied criticism of anyone else's likes, dislikes or other interests - nothing here is meant that way. Any exceptions to the DNW list will be listed with the request in question.

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Do Not Want / Triggers and Squicks

Please apply to all fandoms unless otherwise stated. If a character has a canon backstory including one of my DNWs, I don't ask you to rewrite history, just not to make it a focal point of the story, please, and to warn for it.

—References to weight and diet, specifically numbers, weight manipulation and/or eating-disordered behaviour. (Just talking about food, or cooking, is mostly fine.)
—Domestic violence & familial abuse
—Sexual and/or physical abuse
—Sexual intercourse with impaired or no consent
—Gore and/or body horror
—Forced/unwilling medication/medical treatment
—Incest (where the characters know they're being incestuous)
—Dubiously consensual or non-consensual kissing and/or groping
—BDSM and/or any kink not listed as OK in my likes list
—Rimming
—A/B/O fic, including heat and/or knotting
—Sex during pregnancy
—Sex where one or more participants are under 16 years old (my country's age of consent)
—Romantic relationships with an age difference of more than 3 years between characters younger than 21
—Character- and/or actor-bashing
—Horror, torture, or canon-atypical violence (including to animals)
—Non-canonical irreversible death of requested characters
—Non-consensual infidelity
—Ableist or otherwise discriminatory language (unless canonically appropriate)

Please warn where you can: trigger warnings allow me to read stories I might otherwise avoid just in case. I also tend to prefer to escape from physical pain in my reading material.

I celebrate Yule, but if holidays from other faiths work for your plot bunnies, that's okay.

Please note that I'm happy reading from any viewpoint or perspective - first-person, third, omniscient, shifting, anything. Any tense setting is fine, too. I have absolutely no distinct preference in such matters: it's all good!

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Favourite Things:

—Alternate-action AU ("what if someone did something differently", rather than "what if they were born into a different situation entirely", for the most part. Canon divergence is also very welcome, though that's not something I'd usually consider as AU.

—Soulbonding

—Fix-its for unhappy endings

—Shifted focus from, or a different POV on, canon events.

—Time travel, loops, reliving events till the characters get it right... no need to go into the science, as I love time fantasy most, but you can if you like. I've a special fondness for narratives where one character is stuck in a loop and nobody else remembers, or where other folk begin to remember little bits over time, or big events.

—Gen, if it's comedic, or very plotty.

—In order of preference for pairings: femmeslash, het, the occasional slash pairing; QPP relationships are great too, and I also love poly, threesomes and moresomes, though preferably more romantic than sexual.

If you're writing for the Yuleporn challenge, which is fine, I have a preference for focus on XX-type chromosomal bodies, whatever the gender of the person in the body. I also like hair-pulling and semi-public sex tropes, and I'm OK with mild dom/sub dynamics, aftercare, mild bondage and/or mild bloodplay kink, but please try to avoid anything else.

Anything that falls under the TransTide, Queering the Canon, Three Turtle Doves, Chromatic Yuletide and/or the Yuleporn mini-challenges would all be more than welcome for any of my fandoms. Where MultiLingYule is concerned, I'd rather stick to English for my main gift, but I can read French, German and Spanish and I used to love creating conlang material, so any of those would also be welcomed, if you fancy going that route.

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( Requests )

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Contacts

Email: trialia at mail dot com
Archive of Our Own: trialia
Discord: Trialia#5231
Fanfiction.net: Trialia
GoodReads: Tria
Messenger: via facebook.com/trialia
Telegram: via the email above
Twitter/X: trialia

Thanks again for reading my letter. I hope you have a pleasant winter (or summer, if you're in the southern hemisphere), a blessed Yule (or Midsummer), and a very happy time with this year's exchange(s)!

~ Tria

Well, Alan is improving, which is great. He's well enough now that he's no longer delirious (at first he couldn't tell people apart) - he has two nasty ongoing infections that needed stronger antibiotics than the GP at his nursing home could give him, but now he's getting them he's doing much better. So much so that my stepmum, Liz, felt able to head home to Scotland and leave her best friend, Kass, to keep visiting him in hospital for the time being, until they let him return to his nursing home (he actually loves it there! He hates hospitals too, so I do hope he can get out of there soon). I'm really relieved about that. He's not as frail as most of his age would be, and I hope that'll stand him in good stead for a while longer yet!

The concert was a lot of fun, and Yasmin Williams, who played support, is super talented - at one point she was playing her acoustic guitar and marimba at the same time - and makes beautiful music. I got her autograph, and I'll be following her from now on! I also got to meet - and get autographs from - both Amy and Emily, which I hadn't managed to do on any of the 4 or 5 precious occasions I'd been lucky enough to see them play (being USian, they don't tour over here as much as they do in North America). They played with an excellent group, mainly locals, and I want to find out more about all their co-performers. Most of us sang along with most of the set, and they dedicated "Go" to Sinéad O'Connor, which felt very fitting (# Grandma was a suffragette # blacklisted for her publications # blacklisted for her generation...).

The gig itself was all fun. Unfortunately, I've been recovering ever since - 5 days and counting, now!

The gig itself wasn't so much the issue as the events that preceded it. Nikki, my main carer, accidentally left my tea call with my phone as well as her own (she has two, and one of them is the same model as mine - she has no case for it and my case is clear, and she didn't have her glasses on!). During the visit, she'd helped me get my black and silver corset on as best she could with no prior experience of them, but it was a bit tight under my chest, and I ended up having to chase her to the bus stop, on foot with my cane, with it in that state. If I'd gone for my chair, I wouldn't have caught her, because the front door of the building was stuck shut, so I'd have had to go all round the block, which would have meant the bus would've come before I reached her, and I really needed my phone back! Instead, I managed to get to the open fence of the communal garden area and yell across the street to her, so she came running back and returned my phone.

Unfortunately, that did me in - I had to take off the corset as soon as I got indoors, and put on something else to go out. If not for that, I think I'd have managed okay - I did when I saw Delain and Xandria at the Academy, in April. I'm not going to be asking for corset help from anybody who's inexperienced with them ever again, I think! 😋

On top of all that, I had to stay outside for nearly an hour when I did get home, at about half past midnight, because they hadn't fixed the damn door yet - this despite it being considered an emergency repair, which should have been handled within 3 hours, and I know another of my neighbours had reported it at 5pm! - and the gate to the car park, which had been stuck open when I left to attend the concert, had somehow been closed in the interim. I tried ringing a couple of my neighbours to let me in, even the ones I know are mainly active at night, but nobody answered. I had to use the last 10% of my phone battery to call the council out-of-hours repair line and get them to send somebody out!

On the up side of things, I had picked up a pizza on my way home (I sometimes do when I've been to concerts, as it's easier, and keeps me warm on a late and chilly journey home), so I at least had warm food - and on top of that, little Mulan, the pretty grey-and-white longhaired girlcat from two streets over, who likes to visit my back door at night to ask for petting and treats, saw me at the front door, and came running up to me to demand pets! She spent a full half-hour nuzzling up against me and rubbing along my hands and feet to get as much love and attention as she could - such a sweetie. She didn't quite back off when the repairman turned up either, just grew a little shy of the noises, as she often does. Once the door was fixed and I was back in my own apartment, she came to my patio-balcony for the treats I hadn't had on hand! I had to laugh.

Unfortunately, as I said, by then my ribs were aching badly, and they have been every day for the rest of the week! Not fun. I'd have liked to be part of our Unitarian group for Manchester Pride this weekend, but I just can't do it. I'll have to keep resting up. Ah well. Sigh.

Oh, for those of you who like urban fantasy, and/or Seanan McGuire's works, the first 13 of the October Daye and InCryptid books are available on Humble Bundle until September 15th, for less than £15 for all 26 books, or just 78p for the first book of both series! It's absolutely a deal worth snatching up, because none of the Toby books beyond the 7th are available on Kindle in the UK at all, and neither are most of the InCryptid works, so this may be the best way to get hold of them legally short of trying to accumulate them via the Hugo Awards voter packets. Here's the link: Humble Bundle - Seanan McGuire. Enjoy!

I have permission from Cats Protection to do their September fundraising 9 Mile Roam in my wheelchair - this will be fun! If you'd like to take a look or think about sponsoring me, my JustGiving page for it is over here (CP chose the site they use for this). I promise not to go above 18 miles, just in case anybody wants to sponsor per mile.

Thanks for reading!

http://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/tria-hall

Hope you're all doing well? Magnus and I are very tired, thanks to the heatwaves that seem to be hitting us a lot, but... still here, and still getting by. Be safe, my dears.

If I don't know you and you don't comment, you won't be added back. If you're adding me solely or mainly for my fanfiction and icons, those are set to public anyway; I hope you enjoy yourself.