lin·gua·phile

paradise lost [8.618-629] | john milton (via jimmynovaks)

OH GOD THIS IS LIKE THE BEST THING EVER TO COME OUT OF MILTON AND I AM REALLY HAPPY IT SHOWED UP ON MY DASH BECAUSE ANGEL SEX

DID YOU HEAR ME

ANGEL SEX

(but like seriously Milton’s thoughts on bodies are like 95% of why I find him so damn fascinating as a writer and as a person and I have totally written a paper on this passage and I love the paper almost as much as I love this passage so I get a little flaily when it shows up)

(via riddlerose)

Remember that time when I used to not want any tattoos, ever?

Yeah, me neither.

I am seriously considering the Wizard’s Oath one (“in Life’s name” on the inside of my left wrist, with the potential for a companion tattoo of “for Life’s sake” on the inside of my right wrist), but due to a conversation about lines of early modern poetry that would make the best tattoos, I also now really weirdly want “But not the praise,” from Milton’s poem “Lycidas,” on my right insole (because that bit of “Lycidas” is all about being humble rather than prideful, and is there a more humble part of the body than the foot?).

Yep. I’m a dork. 

Actually what surprises me the most about this is that the Milton tattoo is not from Paradise Lost. This makes no sense. Though perhaps the problem is that I love too much of Paradise Lost to pick just a few words or phrases, or that I sort of want to be discreet about tattoos if I do get them, and can’t think of anywhere discreet to “hide” the last two lines of Milton’s grand epic…

In which I very belatedly respond to a meme.

1 Sometimes I’m afraid of how much of me is shaped by the literature I have read and loved, but I am (and will always be) even more afraid of the person who’d be left behind if you took all of the books away. I wouldn’t want to know her and I’m not sure anyone worth knowing would want to know her either.

2 At least half of the reason why I’m so happy to be in New York (and already feel sort of comfortable here) is because so many of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards books are partially set there. 

3 I regularly read through things I wrote when I was younger — mostly not fiction, which makes me cringe a little, but journal entries, freewriting, old LJ posts, etc. Not sure why, or if it’s just a time-wasting strategy, but sometimes it’s interesting to watch the way my brain worked a year ago vs. how it works now.

4 I might not actively participate in services for any specific religion or denomination, but I consider myself a fairly spiritual person…albeit one with a lot of questions and not enough answers.*

5 Several years ago, I read an interview with Diane Duane where she differentiated between people who want to be writers, and people who want to write. And while I know that I want to write, I’m not sure this is enough to make me a writer.

6 It’s been over three years since I’ve been in a relationship, and almost three since I last went on something that could be construed as a date. Sometimes this bothers me probably more than it should, but I don’t know what exactly I’m doing wrong. I have high self-esteem: I think I’m worth a shot.

7 When it comes to music, my tastes are wide and varied and I feel like I would appreciate a lot of what’s out there, but I just have no real desire to go looking for anything beyond what my friends recommend. Finding the songs that speak to me is hard and I’d rather put that effort into finding the right books/authors, because in my world, those matter more.

8 I want to be the professor that all the students gossip about, in a good way: “Did you know she writes novels?” “I heard she got her first fiction and non-fiction books published in the same year.” “I heard she wasn’t even thirty when she did that.” “Also have you seen her shoes? Fabulous!”**

9 Some words and phrases are like talismans to me; I learn them by heart and recite them when I feel the need. Everything from the closing lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost to Jane’s feminist rantings in Jane Eyre to the Wizard’s Oath from Diane Duane’s Young Wizards books. I sometimes think that if you could see the part of me that isn’t physical, it would be made up of swirling clouds of text, these words that matter repeating themselves over and over again, circling like blood through nonexistent veins.

10 I am far more honest in writing (be it fiction or nonfiction) than I ever dare to be in person.

*I’m at the point where I don’t know what bothers me more: people who bash Christianity because of the minority of people who do reprehensible things in the name of God, or the minority doing those things and making me feel ashamed to admit that I was raised Christian.

**This might seem crazy, but I have had professors who have been gossiped about in this manner — the shoes comment is actually an exact quote.

A few months ago, something I can no longer remember prompted me to attempt to make a list of my fifteen favorite books. The list got to about twelve, but trying to figure out the last three was hell.

What follows is something like my list: more than five (but less than fifteen) books that keep me coming back for more.

It is difficult, to be a woman and to write.

This is something we have been told for years. Really, it is two somethings. 1) It is difficult to be a woman, and 2) it is difficult to write. Both of these, I would suggest, have equal claims to truth. But the problem is in not realizing that a great deal of other things in this world are also difficult. It is difficult to fly an aeroplane. It is difficult to perform surgery. Perhaps it is even difficult to be a man. I would not know; I have never been one. Neither have I flown an aeroplane or performed a surgery.

Perhaps it is not that we forget that these things are difficult. Perhaps it is that they are so difficult we have not achieved them. We are left writing about the difficulties of womanhood and authorship because they are the most grievous difficulties we have yet to experience.

I should be clear now that I am not Virginia Woolf. I am not Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë. But these women are as much in my blood and brains sometimes as I am, and whether I want them to be there or not, and whether or not it is a good thing.

I should also be clear with this ‘we’. I am not addressing myself to some imaginary lecture hall at a prestigious women’s college (I am not even sure that there is such thing as a prestigious women’s college any more, if there ever was). I am not addressing an audience composed only of those who identify with the same sex or gender as myself, although as the opening sentence must make clear, I am a woman and I am a writer. By ‘we’, I suppose I address others who have felt at one point or another like myself, alternately indebted to and fettered by a wealth of textual history on the subject of my life, and alternately incapable or unwilling to detach myself from it.

The collective ‘you’ of my audience may be unclear, but only to the extent to which the ‘I’ is similarly uncertain. Who am I? That is a question that I, having grown up with myself for the past twenty years and seven months, cannot answer. I have been there through all of my self-formation but I am not certain of the product. Perhaps ‘I’ depend upon ‘you’ just as much as you depend upon me. Perhaps as a woman, and as a writer, and perhaps even as a woman writer, it is only by writing about women and thinking as a woman about writing that I can discover anything even asymptotically approaching my identity or yours.

As a woman, and as a writer, I feel slightly more qualified than most to adopt such shifting and inaccurate barriers. My father, proud possessor of a Bachelor’s Degree in the esteemed art of Rhetoric, would tell me that this essay is off to a poor start because it fails to define its audience. If he read it not knowing it to be mine, he would speak of the ‘implied author’ and the ‘implied audience’, the speaker always referred to as ‘he’ unless explicitly gendered female, and ‘you’ called ‘the reader’ (not even ‘the readers’ though I would hope for more than one of you), never addressed in a more personal form. This is a problem. The language of literary criticism and rhetorical thought has been invented by men, and although they were writers, they were not writers in the sense that I proclaim ‘I am a writer’: they wrote not primarily of people, but of ideas.

I say again, as a woman and as a writer, I feel I have some claim to inaccuracy. As a woman, and as a writer, boundaries between people seem more fluid and shifting to me than they might to most. Women, we are told, are different from men in that they experience even selfhood and individuality primarily through connections to and associations with others. They (I should perhaps say ‘we’ but would hate to offend a male reader—see, Daddy, I did learn something from your talk of audiences after all) create identity through relationship. We all begin life inside the body of another—crucially, inside the body of a woman—but men, we are told, must develop identity against this figure of the mother, must deny the nine months spent in her womb if they are ever to be men, whereas for women, there is nothing more natural or more right than this primal sense of connectedness, not just to their mothers and their children, but to everyone, who have, after all, shared the same experience of being one part of a larger living whole.

Writers, I would argue—at least the kind of writers I mean when I say ‘writers’—have a similar experience. Male or female, they do not forget the mother’s womb. They may ignore her in their writings, but it is a loud and intentional ignorance. For writers, the tension between individuals has at its root the remembrance of this previous state, in which coexistence was not only possible, but was all, in which sympathy belongs as an attribute of the tabula rasa rather than as a characteristic that must later be learned.

I suppose it would be foolish to speak for people other than myself (I have done foolish things before, though, so I do not see how this should be any different), but as far as my own experience is concerned, the best of writing is about empathy and connection. The impulse to write is at its root an impulse against entropy, an attempt to order the chaos and allay the coming of the inevitable night. Naturally, the result is a literature that values human connectedness—that believes that such connections are possible, and worthwhile, and good. Another sort of literature exists, I know, but I have never seen utility in it. I go to books for things that the world as experienced through my senses cannot teach me. I have the raw data, but perhaps I go to books for the synthesis. To write, to compose—to draw together disparate elements into a whole—to re-member the singular body of a dispersed humanity—the goals are (perhaps naively) similar.

But this is not what I meant to write about: at least, not quite. I meant to write about why, to me, it seems quite difficult to be a woman and to write. At first the explanation seems simple, even to me: To write is assert the self. To be a woman is to find a way to be ‘self’ and not ‘other’. Here, the struggle begins.

Or does it? I take a step back and examine the pleasing simplicity of the statements I have made, and find them at fault—or if not at fault, then at least representative of the very fault they define. My very idea of woman as ‘other’ has been defined as much by literature on the subject as it has by my own experience. If I had never read a single book—or if I had never read a book after the age of eleven or twelve, post-puberty—it is possible that I should never have seen the kind of prejudice to which my sex is admittedly condemned.

I never disliked being a girl. I disliked the common tropes of girlhood at times—the pink, the frills, the make-up and the fragility—but this was more a dislike for uniformity than a dislike for femininity. I didn’t want to be ‘like everyone else’; I wanted to be different; and if different meant wearing dresses with tennis shoes and playing soccer with the boys for a while, than that is what it meant.

I do not think I encountered that bogey known as ‘feminism’ until the ninth grade, when my first high school English teacher, herself of a decidedly feminist bent, introduced me to a reading list that revolved subtly but surely around the ills of being woman. And still, this is something easier for me to realise in retrospect, after having been inscribed by my culture to expect certain things of that label, than it was for me then. Everyone at the school spoke of how she was such a ‘feminist’, though, and I suppose I believed them, though I was a little saddened by the idea that being a feminist involved so much anger. It was then that I began to wonder if you could be a woman and not be angry. Until then, I had always thought that you could.

Perhaps if I had never entered a writers’ workshop, also, I would be able to write as a woman without finding it difficult. When I wrote only for myself, I wrote as I wrote, whether it was as a woman wrote or not. I didn’t worry about my audience. It seemed strange to me that J. K. Rowling should have to use her initials instead of her first name out of fear that boys wouldn’t read a book written by a woman. I wondered why someone with a first name as lovely as ‘Joanne’ would hide it with a simple ‘J’. It seemed just as easy to adopt a male perspective as it was to inhabit the female. I wrote men, when I was younger, and still they seem real to me in a way that the men I have written since then do not. Perhaps because I was once told that I could not—perhaps even that I should not, for certainly men did not go about bothering to plumb the inner depths of women (at least not with any success)—and that has lived in my mind ever since. Perhaps this is why I do not write leading men anymore, when I can help it.

I cannot, of course, leave off writing men entirely, just as I cannot leave off reading them. It is strange, to be a woman and a student of English literature. Every day I am impressed by the opinion that there are two different histories of this literature existing side by side without ever seeming to touch. To one belong Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth; to another, Austen and the Brontës and Woolf. I cannot help it that Paradise Lost moves me to awe, that Twelfth Night and Hamlet are my favourite plays. But neither can I help the realization that a semester composed of Milton and the Romantic poets, though it says much to who I am, says little about who I am. To understand myself in relation to the world, I must supplement my reading; I must have Persuasion, I must have Jane Eyre, and most recently, I must have A Room of One’s Own.

Incidentally, I do have a room of my own this year. For the first time in my life, I live as an autonomous member of a social grouping to whom I am in no particular way beholden, and although a knock might come at my door, if I choose I can ignore it, and lock the portal shut. And yet, I find that I do none of my best writing there. To write, I must be out in the world, in a library or a cafe, in some kind of social space where I am surrounded by people even if they are strangers.

But back to the subject of men, and women who write about them. To write is to assert power—we have touched upon this already—to assert the great ‘I am’ in the face of the universe’s ultimate ‘thou shalt not persist’—and to write a man, if one is a woman, means something. Doesn’t it?

Perhaps it is simply that to be a woman, and to write, means something. I have yet to meet a male writer as concerned with the impact of his sex and upbringing upon his writing as I am preoccupied with the impact of mine. A man can write what he chooses: the field is there, ploughed for him by previous generations. A woman does not have the same advantage. The field is smaller, rougher, the soil not as rich. But God help the woman who ventures across the fence and attempts to impinge upon male territory! Better to have stayed on her side and fought tooth and nail for the little she can produce on her own than to be accused of dependence upon a heritage that fundamentally does not claim her as its descendent.

And none of this is right, either—the metaphor is wrong—there are not two fields, there is one field, and we work side by side; the great female writers learned all their tricks from men at first; the great genius of Austen is in adapting what men had done to what women might learn to do, not in doing something that never existed before. We none of us create out of nothing (although we are still somehow so convinced that God is a man).

I would not be writing this here and now, in a university library, to whose collections I have full access, were it not for the small volume of A Room of One’s Own (borrowed without hassle from this same library) sitting completed inside my purse. I have not been created out of nothing. I was allowed to continue reading after puberty, and this has been my blessing and my curse; I have seen what men and women have to say on both the subject of being a woman, and of writing, and I am no longer certain if I can create any idea of my own. I am left scraping together the sentences of others that appeal to me the most, and hoping that my agency in collecting these fragments is enough to assert myself as author.

I was not angry before Jane Eyre. I could not write this without A Room of One’s Own. But neither do I feel comfortable calling myself a ‘feminist’. The term immediately alienates all men (who seem to have an irrational anger against their not being allowed to be ‘masculinists’) and two-thirds of the female population: both those who think that I am too radical in my tastes and assertions, and those who think I have not gone far enough.

To the men, I have the least to say. They cannot understand my experiences, nor can I understand theirs, in the way that I would wish to. Writing is the thing that is most likely to bring us together, what with its draw toward unity and sympathy, but even writing cannot accomplish everything, and to put such a burden upon literature would be to see it falter and shake under the strain. So for men I will simply say that I will read any two works of literature by any male authors that you like, if you will in turn agree to read Jane Eyre and A Room of One’s Own, and then talk with me about them afterwards. I will drop my defensiveness if you will drop yours.

To the women, I have more to say, but more reticence to say it. There is always the desire to shy away from criticism levelled at one’s own sex. If we are the ‘other’ at least we are all ‘others’ together, and the true battle, we are led to believe, ought to be against the ‘selves’ of this world who have kept us down. It is not our place to divide and fight each other. To this criticism I say only that I do not intend to fight. I only intend to speak—something I think we can all agree upon as perhaps more dangerous, but ultimately more necessary. So I will speak: but since I am a woman, and a writer, it seems necessary that I enlist the aid of another woman and writer.

When I try to explain what I mean if I say ‘I am a feminist’ I turn most frequently to Jane Eyre, which I read for the first time when I was on the edge of being able to call myself a woman. Before, the term had seemed to imply a kind of grown-up-ness that I was certain I did not possess; but after hearing Jane at eighteen, not so distantly removed from myself at seventeen, assert her sex in a way I had not known possible, I found myself more and more capable of saying, ‘I am a woman’, and believing it. For me, the fiction that is womanhood is intricately connected to the fiction that is Jane Eyre. At times Jane owns nothing but her own ‘I’—but what else do women ever possess? For women, the first person is revolutionary. In this light, even ‘Reader, I married him’ becomes radical.

Feminists like my first high school English teacher might take offense at this reading. The woman of their generation, they would tell me, fought so that the women of my generation would not have to define themselves in terms of men, so that our stories would not have to end with marriage, our adventures confined to the short time we spend in this world unattached to men. They would talk of how my reading of Jane Eyre leaves out Bertha Mason, the ultimate ‘other’, and sanctifies her mistreatment at the hands of the masculine establishment. They would tell me Charlotte Brontë was no feminist, just another angry woman searching desperately for a happy ending in a world in which the only happy ending for a woman is to be unfettered by emotional attachment and dependence upon others.

Women of other generations, my own included, who have never spoken to me, but whose voices I hear in whispered asides, whose opinions I feel in sideways glances, and whose opinion I know exists, although I have taken great pains to keep from hearing it voiced, lest I should condemn my entire sex forever, have conceivably had an opposite reaction. For them, the suggestion of Jane’s outspokenness becomes something like a mutiny. Bertha is a figure who deserves to die, condemned by suggestions of transgressive sexuality and cultural otherness. There is nothing wrong with Jane’s happy ending. They do not think it an injustice for Jane Eyre to become Jane Rochester and therefore give up half of herself. Besides, that was the past, they say, and things have changed. That is the worst part of it: the idea that the past does not inform the present, that Austen and Brontë and Woolf merely wrote stories for their times instead of for all times. To say such a thing of Shakespeare would be considered insulting; but in regards to female writing, it goes dangerously without saying that women need to be read in terms of their cultural context (a context not so surprisingly composed by men).

I stand in the middle of all of these voices, hear them echoing around me, and wonder what is left for me to call my own. I cannot write a romance without feeling the weight of generations of women saying, ‘We spent our lives writing through romances so that you, our daughter, could pick a new form that would once and for all prove us on par with men—that would provide the justification we have always yearned for—that we are not Other’. I cannot write of ‘the reader’ or ‘the speaker’ without wanting to say ‘her’ instead of ‘his’, just once, just to trip someone up. I cannot think of becoming a university professor without wondering if the men in my courses will respect me as I deserve; I cannot help thinking that even if I gain this respect, it will be because I am very good, and that many women as good as the men who become my colleagues will be denied this same respect because of their gender. I cannot love Milton without feeling an apprehension at the fact that Paradise Lost is largely a world of men without women.

But I cannot say that I will spend the rest of my career reading primarily female authors, engaging with female concerns, and analysing with an unintentionally but decidedly female (if not feminist) bent, without feeling like half a person, someone incomplete. I cannot spend my life thinking that the world is about women versus men. It would be too easy, I think, on some days, to do just that. But I can also never do what is easy.

Forgive me, feminists, for the following clause, but I want to fall in love. I understand the love that exists between women—the friendship that nothing can touch—but I want to love men as well as women. I want to be married, and to be happy, although I do not necessarily consider one as a prerequisite for the other. Nonetheless, I want commitment. I want my own triumphant declaration: ‘Reader, I married him’.

Ultimately, I do not want to be alone. I would be a poor writer if I were. Love is a symptom of being in the world, I think; and as I cannot write without being in the world, so I cannot write without loving.

I cannot write without the voices of those I have read, men and women alike, clamouring to be reborn through my voice. I cannot be a woman writer without a deep knowledge of what my sex has written before, and what our writing has the power to become—I cannot suppress the reality of past injustice—but I can write a future in which my daughters, both biological and intellectual, will have more freedom, and will not feel as though they are being subversive when they assert the truth that ‘women feel as men do’. I can write a future in which my sons, without receiving any scorn from their sex, can assert the same.

A new feminism is starting, at least in me. I learned this when I tried to read The Madwoman in the Attic and had to put it down, lest I allow the views of others to tarnish the male authors I love and slant the writings of female authors to new purpose. I mentioned this to my seminar tutor, and her response seems like the wisest thing I have ever heard on this subject: ‘Things were worse then, and they had cause to be angry. Things are better now because of it. I don’t know if they meant to do this, but it feels as though they took that anger upon themselves so that their daughters wouldn’t have to.’

It is difficult to be a woman, and to write. But it is becoming easier, and the more I do it—and the more people do it with me—the easier it becomes. I am a woman. I do write. And in these things, though I may be different, I am not alone.

Dear Yuletide Writer,

First, thank you for agreeing to write me a story! Whoever you are, the fact that you agreed to do this already means you’re awesome, and I can’t wait to read whatever you’re willing to write for me. I’m going to talk a lot about specifics in the letter that follows, but the only thing that really matters is that we both appreciate the same obscure fandom. We’re friends already!

In general, I like fic that follows the canon pretty closely, or that works to develop ideas underrepresented/underdeveloped within the canon. I like it when fics mirror closely the narrative voice of the original text, but I also like reading fic in somewhat experimental forms, provided thought has been put into the reason for narrative experiment. I don’t like OCs who serve no purpose, but I love it when the right well-written OC manages to bring about a deeper understanding or level of involvement between two or more canon characters.

I love romance, but I love sexual tension almost as much as (if not occasionally more than) the fulfillment, and I think that stories can be perfectly romantic if they contain no sex whatsoever (especially when we’re talking about younger protagonists). I’m a big fan of small gestures that carry large meanings, and of tension that changes by the end of the story if it’s not actually resolved, not to mention a few awkward moments along the way! When it comes to sex, if the moments before the bedroom scene sizzle enough, I don’t mind at all if the camera pans away from the act itself. However, I’m not averse to well-written sex, provided it’s not overly explicit. I won’t say I’m easily squicked, but I’m not okay with rape, abuse, violence, etc., nor with character-bashing.

As much as I love romance, I also love plot. Said plot does not have to turn on major revelations in the cosmos, and can be something as small as a character working toward a personal realization or revelation, but I do like it when it’s there. Conflict is a must, but I’m usually more interested in interpersonal conflict (two people sorting out issues they have with each other) than in galactic, world-is-ending conflict. The latter is perfectly okay as a backdrop to the former — end-of-the-world situations can produce really great character conflicts — but it’s certainly not necessary. I’m not a big fan of main character death (although there are times when it’s necessary) and in general I like “happy endings,” but I want to feel like they’ve been earned.

A random list of other, unconnected things that I love: watching characters negotiate the beginnings of relationships, John Milton (and in particular Paradise Lost), Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, any and all variations on “Beauty and the Beast,” trips to the moon, politics and politicking (anytime someone says one thing and means another, it’s a great opportunity for fiction), the limits of magic, quests, worldbuilding, literary allusions (I am the stereotypical geeky English major, except with even more geek), soul-deep friendships, snark and banter, legitimate obstacles to romantic fulfillment (none of these silly little reasons why they can’t be together, give me something meaty!), genuine awkwardness, the importance of names and naming, the intersection(s) of science, magic, and religion…I’m sure I could think of more, but for now this is probably a good list to start with. If you want more details, browse my livejournal and this tumblr (I’m a pretty obsessive tagger, so you’ll probably find things quickly), and feel free to check out the fanfic I’ve posted online.

I know some my prompts are specific. I have a hard time not being specific. But I by no means expect you to listen to me, certainly not entirely. The best stories are written by people excited about what they’re writing. If an idea doesn’t totally fit my request but is something you’re excited about, by all means take it and run with it. Be creative! This is as much your story as it is mine.

That said, onto the fandoms and prompts!

Diane Duane - Young Wizards series: Carl Romeo/Tom Swale

In Deep Wizardry, Carl tells Nita there’s only one price greater than a lifeprice. What is that price? Why does Carl know about it? And what does it have to do with his partnership with Tom? Tom/Carl slash and/or when Tom met Carl and/or college-years Tom and Carl friendship and bonding much appreciated but not required.

Basically, if you’re not comfortable with writing slash, don’t, but I would love you forever if you did, even if it’s just implied. I also love seeing interpretations of what Tom and Carl were up to before they became everyone’s favorite advisories, including how they became partners in wizardry (or even how they came into their wizardry to begin with).

Garth Nix - The Abhorsen series: Sabriel/Touchstone

Sabriel/Touchstone het, immediately after the first book ends. Teenagers in love attempting to restore the Old Kingdom agree (for some specific reason) to “take it slowly” — which is much harder than it looks. (Please, revel in the grammatical ambiguity of this sentence. I promise you, it is intentional.) Drama and comedy equally appreciated. Really, I just want some time to enjoy Sabriel and Touchstone being slightly awkward but also adorable around each other, because it makes me go awwwwwww and that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t mind some politicking about the rebuilding of the Old Kingdom, either.

Jim Butcher - The Dresden Files: Harry Dresden/Karrin Murphy/Michael Carpenter/Thomas Raith

Bookverse! Some case Harry picks up through the Paranet gets out of his hands and he has to call for some assistance. Drama and comedy appreciated in equal measure, Harry/Murphy banter and sexual tension a plus. Characters (not necessarily just Harry and Murphy) trapped in a confined space is also a plus. Really, anything with snark and banter between two or more of the listed characters is beautiful. Other characters I love include Molly, Charity, Mouse, Mister, and Bob, but feel free to pull in whoever you like to make it work.

Diane Duane - Young Wizards series: Christopher Rodriguez aka Kit/Dairine Callahan/Juanita Callahan aka Nita/Roshaun ke Nelaid

Budding romantic tensions (Kit/Nita and/or Dairine/Roshaun) + stuck in an alternate universe or historical time period (or genre?). Let the fun ensue!

This prompt was inspired by araine’s post about a Young Wizards/Pride and Prejudice crossover, which got me thinking about how great it would be to throw our favorites into new and different worlds (literally) and see how they managed. But please, throw our favorites wherever you like and see how they handle it—especially because in Young Wizards, it’s not always AU to have characters who wind up in alternate universes… Futurefic is okay, but I’d prefer to see them college-aged or younger.

Thank you, Yuletide Santa!

Cheers,

Reading Redhead