Seeking Ferret

Dear fic_corner Writer

Thank you for writing me a story! My childhood favorites are not sacred and I'm interested in seeing however you see fit to explore them.

Here were my prompts:


Cyber.kdz - Bruce Balan
Fandom tl;dr: Teenage adventures with dial-up modems!

I love this fandom so much. The idea of the Net as this unregulated frontier where kids could make a difference because only their actions, not their appearances, mattered. And the found family, who bickered with each other endlessly but ultimately stood up for each other when someone needed it.

The Grounding of Group Six - Julian F. Thompson
Fandom tl;dr: Just an ordinary story about ordinary kids at an alternative school involving lots of camping


My usual request for this fandom is pure trollfic: Write a fluffy school story with none of the darkness of the original canon and act like that's all that's there. To see if you can lure unsuspecting people into the ridiculousness that is this book. Basically write a fic as if the cover story from the end of the book, where Group Six was just overlooked and nobody remembered to recall them, were true.

I realize this is a deeply specific request and I am fine if you disregard it and write something that actually engages with the story as it actually exists.

Westing Game - Ellen Raskin
Fandom tl;dr: Chess and mystery and money and wordplay and family, complicated family

I love everything about the Westing Game and its twisty, emotionally complicated payoff, and would love to see more about any character.

I also have this theory... let me dig it up.

Sam Westing is involved in a car accident leading up to his disappearance which is an extremely mysterious event. It is apparently real- Sykes's limp is real, not faked, per Chris, and the only limp in the book not the result of a Turtle kick. And it results in facial disfiguration for Sam, but of a sort that is dramatic enough to render him unrecognizable to his ex-wife when he is Sandy, but not enough that he cannot mask it (presumably with makeup?) when he is in his Northrup or Eastman guise. I do not understand the import of the accident. If the accident is what changed his outlook on life, why wait 20 years after for his revenge/game/reparations?

...For Turtle to be Sam's rightful heir, she has to ultimately 'win' the game, which most straightforwardly means either a)finding the fourth or b)beating Sam at chess, which JJ and Theo never managed and nobody else in the game ever attempted. But Sam is not the kind of person who happily loses games. Sam's game is set up so that neither Turtle nor JJ nor anyone else has to win, but... what happens to Eastman's money in that scenario, if Turtle loses? Does he have to set up another Westing game with new heirs to manipulate? Is there the possiblity that this is not the first Westing game he has run? Is the quest for heirs the thing which has occupied the twenty years since Westing's disappearance?

So basically I would love to see a take on a different Westing Game, a different grasping and overly manipulative attempt for redemption from Sam Westing.

Sizzle & Splat Series - Ronald Kidder
Fandom tl;dr: Youth orchestra members, clarinetist and tubist, team up to fight crime.

Hans Kleiman is my favorite character in the series but I'll take anything with Sizzle and/or Splat. I love Kleiman's fusion of games and music, as a passionate enthusiast of both myself. I wish there were more of him, I wish he didn't have to die to impel the story's action, because his chemistry with Sizzle is wonderful.

Star Voyager Academy - William Forstchen
Fandom tl;dr: Book 1: Harry Potter at Starfleet Academy. Book 2: Harry Potter on his first mission for Starfleet. Book 3: Harry Potter is an alcoholic former Starfleet officer enlisted to make first contact with aliens

I think I'd like to actually see the war, you know? The part bizarrely skipped between books 2 and 3, where everything went to shit in utterly predictable but no less tragic ways.

i ship Matt/Justin, I ship Tanya/Justin, I ship Thor/Jason, I ship Tanya/Madison... Not so interested in Justin/Brian or Matt/Brian, I think. And I'd also love gen. Falcon fighting gen! Complicated morally ambiguous battle gen! Academy hijinks gen!

Dear Fic Corner Author,

Thank you for writing for me! I think I will just talk about the fandoms a bit.

1. Tom Clancy's Net Force Explorers - Various Authors
Characters: Mark Gridley, Jay Gridley

Weirdly, I think I read the grownup Net Force books before I read the YA ones. I know they're all kind of terrible, adult and YA, but I love veeyar so much. The imagination invested into the veeyar spaces is so much richer than you usually see in mediocre SF.

I'm fascinated by the evolution of Jay Gridley from king of the nerds to king of the nerd dads, and I think Mark is a really fun character. But though I would love a story just about the two of them directly interacting, I think I'd like even more a story about Mark and his friends where Jay's presence casts an indirect shadow.

2. Two Minute Mysteries - Donald J. Sobol
Characters: Dr. Haledjian

Oh, man, these are the worst. I binged through a bunch of them last year, embarrassed at how stupid the answers to the puzzles were and how dependent they were on incorrect assumptions of human behavior. I think you have two roads to go here, mystery writer. Either

a) Somehow rewrite one of Sobol's terrible nonsense mysteries so it makes emotional and logical sense or

b) Up the ante and write a mashup of all of the terrible tropes Sobol uses. Tell a story about what life is like in a world where everyone always brushes their teeth with the same hand they use to tie their shoes.

3. Cyber.kdz - Bruce Balan
Characters: Tereza (Cyber.kdz) Sanjeev (Cyber.kdz)

I love the Cyber.kdz' optimism and commitment to making the Internet a friendly place. The actual internet we live on today is a place that is probably closer to Net Force's vision of it, but I have been blessed from time to time to be a part of communities like the Kids, and I treasure those communities while they last. I particularly love the Tz/Sanj friendship, which is built so much on their appreciation from the way their differences complement each other.

I'd like to see what grown up versions of the Kids look like, and I'd like to see what the Kids look like on our modern internet. How would Tereza cope with Facebook? Would Sanj be involved with bitcoin, or with Anonymous? Becky as a Wikimedian? Paul at PAX? Loren on Minecraft?

4. The Grounding of Group Six - Julian F. Thompson
Characters: Any

My usual request? I would like Trollfic that has nothing to do with the book, but is nice and fluffy and nostalgic. So that people who don't know the fandom will read the story, be charmed, and decide to read the book. But seriously, I'd love anything for this fandom.

Dear fic_corner Author,

Thanks for writing a story for me. I am not a very demanding recipient, since if I were, my demands would be ridiculous and impossible. Have fun, write a story you enjoy, and we'll all be fine. Here's some prompts as suggestions in case you want them, feel free to disregard entirely.

Cyber.kdz - Bruce Balan

Tereza (Cyber.kdz)
Sanjeev (Cyber.kdz)

I love Sanj and Tz's friendship, how Tereza is sort of Sanjeev's better self, and how Tereza admires Sanjeev for his integrity and casual brilliance. But really, there's a lot I love about the Cyber.kdz series and not a lot that I dislike. Fundamentally the series is about tech as this great equalizer of culture and class and credo, as well as about the way the internet was carving out a new culture and the cyber.kdz determination that that new culture play by appropriate rules of openness and respect and fairness- netiquette, in a word.

We live in the world now of wikileaks and Aaron Swartz, of internet gambling and Stuxnet and Anonymous, and Cyber.kdz kind of quietly anticipated all of it, and vowed to work toward a different future anyway, united by the power of friendship.


The Grounding of Group Six - Julian F. Thompson

Ha... This story is great on so many levels. What I would really love, I think, is something super-fluffy and sentimental that we would then point people to and say "I love this story, and you don't need to know canon to get it." And they would read it and have the horribly distorted idea that Grounding is just a book about teenagers who went to private school together. That would make me laugh. Even better, if you come up with some fakeout idea about what 'grounding' is.

But that's mostly me being silly. I would also like non-trolly stories about the characters and their relationships and how they continue to be beautiful and broken together.


Kid-TV series - Barbara Adams

Minnie O'Reilly

I think so much of what makes Minnie interesting in these books is that she is not quite a teenager, which gives her perspective on teenage life a lot of its underlying dramatic irony. I would like to see Minnie as a teenager, struggling with stupid crushes and rivalries with friends and AP bio homework, and still rocking out Kid-TV.


The View from Saturday - E. L. Konigsburg

I am a quiz bowl nerd. If you are, too, I would greatly enjoy a VFS fic that replaced Konigsberg's whimsical version of quiz bowl with something more realistic. The Souls at NAQT! The Souls vs. the Great Auk (Oh man, Noah discovering Great Auk jokes is the best idea I've ever had)! The Souls bomb a TRASH tournament!

If you are not a quiz bowl nerd, just tell me another story about the Souls and the way they support each other against life. I would particularly enjoy a story that plays on the religious backgrounds of the characters.