I have faith in your good manners for more than one reason.

[mrissa]

I have seen this elsewhere, but phrased in terms of force, and you are all, I feel sure, too inherently polite and too cognizant of your own bodily safety to ever want to force me to do anything. So I will ask it more politely:

If you could urge, persuade, or ask me to write any particular thing, what would it be?

(This can be as specific as "Carter Hall and the Motley Lions" or as general as "ummm...something SF," or as random as "short story with bears and the French Revolution in.")

Comments

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

Something grand and sweeping with lots of myth and legends, maybe a prince being rescued by an unlikely woman, set in a story that makes you happy.

Or, you know, a hockey story. I'm not picky. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Prince...being rescued...by unlikely women's hockey team. Got it.

[bob54449.livejournal.com]

This is so easy! Of course you should write about rabies, Campanella, Savonarola, Saint-Simon and the lost recipe for ... but, that is he trouble, WHAT was the recipe for? And why or how does it connect the creatures named in beginnin of the request?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Whew; glad there was room left for questions.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

More LJ entries like your first paragraph? Sorry - that phrasing has always bothered me for exactly that reason, so this made me grin a lot.

Hrm. I like your writing, and the things you choose to write about. I don't see anything immediately to change. And the last time I went through and binged on everything of yours freely available online was long enough ago that I can vaguely remember thinking something like, "I like this kind of story she tends to do a little more than this other kind she tends to do," but I don't remember what they were.

Hrm, hm, hm.

Here:

Mrissa, though I would never dream of urging - let alone attempting you to coerce - you to do anything that was not appealing to you, I would love to see you write something completely new (not using worlds or characters you've used before), of middling length (a longish short story, say, or a novelette), for adults and mostly-adults, involving subtle speculative fiction elements but not large-scale science fiction, which in some way involved hyenas. If it also included an older woman who was something of an authorial insert when it came to how properly to behave with courtesy to others, I wouldn't mind.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

You want her to write Digger?

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Is that what those are called? "Authorial insert"? I was just wondering. I've just been reading E. Nesbit's The Incomplete Amorist, in which Aunt Julia exactly fits that description. I strongly suspect she's meant to be Nesbit herself (or herself as she'd like to be), but I wouldn't call her a Mary Sue.

No hyenas though.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

A picaresque novel about a Lady Adventurer(s) (as distinct from Adventuress(es), which is/are A Different Thing Entirely), set during the era of the great steamships and possibly involving Disguises.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I actually think picaresque might be a stretch for me. Not necessarily a bad stretch. Hmm.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

Ista-ry: how her first days went, where you got her, how she's changed over the years ... best and worst things about her, and dog ownership in general ... how she's changed your family, your relationships, your routine. Compare personality with other family dogs you've had if you have had any.

Dog obsessive much? MOI?!!

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

P.S. Do I get to ask you what you'd want me to write? :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you want the links to the posts I wrote at the time, or do you want new stuff?

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

Please may I have a story involving a fake "antique" copy of The Prince, a Parisian hostel, three giggling children and a fir tree.

In other words, look at my desk. Except for the hostel. That's just in my dreams.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You have three giggling children and a fir tree on your desk? I mean, I suppose it'd be less distracting than fifteen birds and four additional fir trees, but my golly.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Short story with bears and the *Russian* revolution? And a shape-changing water sprite with an allergy to snow as a minor character. Please. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do not need to do the bears and the Russian Revolution as "Snow White and Rose Red" gone horribly wrong. Unless I do. We'll see.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you have any interest in it at all, but I would utterly love to see you do a classical screwball comedy, of the sort where Bringing Up Baby is the uber-example-- last-minute meet-ups, confused suitcases, possible pie-fights. Because I am sure that the ways you would twist it to make it intelligent and three-dimensional and not anti-feminist would be utterly fascinating to me, while preserving the funny.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That would be a thing to construct. They're sort of Rube Goldbergy, aren't they? And setting matters a lot; you can't start screwballing just anywhere.

Hmmmm.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Magical Minneapolis.

Or, and I'm sure this is utterly way off, or totally repellent, but it's occurred to me more than once that if Narnia were to be reborn with a new story arc, but echoes of the old, you would be the one to write it.

[akitrom.livejournal.com]

It should include scenes at the Caponi Art Park...

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Cruelty-free soap opera set in physics grad school.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Cruelty-free soap opera.

Cruelty-free. Soap opera.

I know the meaning of these words separately, but....

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Iron Chef-style, I would like a story in which the secret ingredient is lussekatter.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Lussekatter bread pudding!

Wait, you said story. Never mind.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thermionic Night is as written as it's going to get unless some nice editorbeing has Theories she/he would like me to put into Practice. It is on an editor's desk even now.

It's Bletchley Park, not Los Alamos, though. I should probably work my way around to doing something with Los Alamos, but I'm not sure I can. I think it may still be too emotionally close for me. I was reading Klages's latest today, and it was so weird to have a dead friend showing up as an historical figure in someone else's historical fiction. (Phil Morrison. He was exactly the right person. But still, uff da, weird.)

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Something written from the POV of a manic-depressive character. You're very restrained in your emoting; it would be interesting to see how it stretches.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

Well, now I want talking bears in the French Revolution.

Actually, what I really kind of desperately want to read someday is the story of the hockey game with the Queen of Air and Darkness that gets referenced in some of your Cater Hall stuff. That whole series concept appeals to me tremendously and I want *piles* of it. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You want The True Tale of Carter Hall? I'm sorry. I still have thirteen chapters left to write in that.

But four of them are on the to-do list for the week. (Don't know that I'll hit all four, though.)

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Yours is the first string of comments I've read for this, mostly because what I want people to write is either, 'here is a list of what I do not like, now fix it' or, 'more more more'. You are in the latter category by quite a lot.

And it turns out I was right to avoid the comments, though I did cave; now I want to read what you would write for many of the ideas.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's interesting (and thanks!). Phrasing it as active (what I would want someone to write) would have to hit a pretty bad writer before it would trigger the "Here is a list of what I do not like, now fix it" response in me. And it's certainly not that there's nothing I don't like! (Errg. Negatives. But you know what I mean.) It's just that we're talking about John Norman levels of bad before I would think, "What do I want you to write? Oh, I don't know, you could write something without the HEINOUS SEXISM, for example...."

[careswen.livejournal.com]

Physics haiku.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I left it for life
but the falling snow is still
tracing equations.

You would write ...

[freelikebeer.livejournal.com]

a short blurb telling me who is qualified to finish Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series [or who is going to, if you know]

You might also write a short blurb explaining to me what a literary Cycle is.

At some point in the future, I will have recreational time to read, at which point I may ask for something more inspiring.

finish Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time

[eileenlufkin.livejournal.com]

Using Firefox's useful highlight and google feature, I get:
Robert Jordan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[11] On December 7, 2007 Tor Books announced that Brandon Sanderson had been chosen to finish the Wheel of Time series. Jordan's widow chose him after ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jordan - 52k - Cached - Similar pages

[brooksmoses]

I would like something that has ... the smell of machining oil on fresh-cut steel, I think is what I'm thinking of. And of spruce trees when one's brushing up against them and breaking the needles, and of cold snow when it's well below freezing. And travel to the stars, and a sense of quiet practical wonder about it.

If there's room in it for the smell of the exhaust from the smallish John Deere tractor my father used (which is not really any different from any other diesel exhaust, but it's where the smell goes for me), that would be good too.

(Hmm. Now that I think about it, I wonder if what I'm describing is what I had hoped The Starship and The Canoe was when I saw the cover.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Before you got to the stars part, I was thinking I might be able to help.