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two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom

Well, I was enthusing about The Count of Monte Cristo the other day, so I shall expand on that a bit. (Also see 2019 post here.

It's a French novel (original title: Le Comte de Monte Cristo) by Alexandre Dumas (père), first published in serial form from 1844-46 and then as a complete novel in 1846. (There were two Alexandre Dumas, father and son. The father is most famous for The Three Musketeers and the son is most famous for The Lady of the Camellias.)

The first part of the book stars too-good-to-be-true sailor Edmond Dantès, who is framed for a crime of which he is, obviously, innocent, and imprisoned in an island prison just outside Marseille. There he encounters the Abbé Faria, who knows where to find some hidden treasure on another island, tiny Monte Cristo, if only he could get free... Well, he can't, but Edmond is younger and stronger and has a much better chance.

The rest of the book follows the consequences - for Edmond (who has restyled himself as Count of Monte Cristo), and for the three men who stitched him up, and for their nearest and dearest. (Edmond has been in prison for a while, and they've all done rather well for themselves - implausibly so, in some cases.) They take a while to work themselves out, but they're very satisfying even as they're somewhat horrifying. It's revenge with an unlimited budget, and then having to come to terms with what that does to a person. (If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then unlimited revenge... erm. Anyway.)

I love the melodrama. I love the Gothic vibe. I love the canon lesbians (Eugénie, the daughter of one of the three villains and an impoverished friend who sings opera with her) who get a happy ending under their own author's nose. I love the background detail, Parisian society, the faint odour of decadence.

Warnings: the dodgy opinions you'd expect for 1846. Alexandre Dumas was in fact Black, but this doesn't stop him going unfortunately Orientalist in places.

Also note that it's very long - about 1200 pages in my edition. This is a plus for me: I read it in difficult times and by the time I get to the end something will have changed somewhere. It's worth being careful about the translation, as some of the older ones are also bowdlerisations and lose vital Eugénie bits. Which is a travesty.

kaffy_r

Yep, I Tested Positive

I thought I was coming down with the same bad cold that Bob was slowly recovering from. I don't get colds all that often, and I'd thought this one would pass me by, but nope, it appeared eager to settle in my head. Well, dang ... I headed for bed, hoping it wouldn't be too bad in the morning.

Around 3 a.m. Saturday I woke up with aches that signaled a potential temperature. And indeed I had one; 100.7, significantly higher than the 97.9 I usually run. I knew that colds don't feature fevers so I tested myself for COVID.

I didn't even have to wait the requisite 15 minutes, both lines were there in bright red within 30 seconds.

Welp.

I've felt like I've been hit by a truck ever since. I keep telling myself it's a smaller truck than it might have been, thanks to the booster shot I got last year (of course, I can't recall exactly when I got it, but I think it was in mid-summer.) but it's still a truck. I ran a lower temp on Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday, today, I haven't had a temperature since then and today I retook a test. At first, the only reaction was the control line. Huzzah! I was certain I'd gotten the first of the two negative tests I'd need to declare myself COVID free. As I said, Huzzah--

--except at the end of the 15 minute wait time, there it was, a faint but definite second line.

Welp. Again.

And it's still like being hit by a small truck.

Ah well, I'm getting some work done on my NTBP* novel, escaping a corner I'd painted myself into. And I'm also making some bread. That always comforts me.

And here, have something I wrote about cold decades ago. Since we're still in single digit temperatures with subzero windchills, it feels the same to me, although this was written after a relatively rare ice storm during a cold snap.

.

Glass City

The city is glass and I am cold.

When cold aches out of bone

into fingertips,

and back again;

into the back of my throat and under the sleeves of my coat

and back again;

why then I can't see the glass.

My own breath blocks my sight. Painfully.

Cold holds my body for ransom.

It slaps my face and makes my toes snap,

it steps on my feet and punches the small of my back.

Traitor body, to let it in.

Did it really start in the bone?

I am so tired of my bones doing that.

All about me, the glass trees rustle.

Splinters of blue light and silver at the top,

in the middle a puzzle and madness of glitter in the bright, faded sky.

Winter sun does that.

It's almost worth

the cold.

March, 1995

* not to be published

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: the kitchen
Current Music: Jackson Wang "Blow"

tellshannon815

Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

I have gone with one of my top three shows, Dark, and song lyrics that fit particular characters.

( Read more... )

shewhostaples

Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

Dear friends (mostly, but not all, on Dreamwidth) who...

... are really enjoying that ice hockey series
... are really enjoying playing ice hockey themselves
... are really looking forward to the Winter Olympics
... are reading that book that everyone is reading
... are reading that book that everyone read three years ago
... are reading books that nobody's read for a hundred years
... are reading things I wrote when I could string more than ten minutes together at a time
... are knee-deep in an obscure spin-off of something I saw once
... are singing or playing
... are listening to other people sing or play
... are going out and eating delicious things
... are cooking delicious things for other people to eat
... are going to interesting places and seeing interesting wildlife and sharing pictures
... are doing small things (or big things) in pursuit of a better world

... I am really enjoying reading about your enjoyment and activity, though I never manage to comment as often as I'd like. Thank you for keeping me in touch with the fandom world!

TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.

Having talked mostly about Dreamwidth above, I'm going to go super literal here and talk about the bandstand in my home town. It's set at the centre of a park next the river, and every summer Sunday afternoon a different brass band from one of the surrounding towns and villages turns up to give a free concert. Programme-wise, you always know more or less what kind of thing you're going to get: a march or two, some film music, an arrangement of some classic rock, and so on, but since it's never advertised in advance you don't know the specifics. There's always a mixed audience: people who know it's happening and have turned up deliberately; friends of the band; people who were just wandering past and stop to listen; kids playing on the slides. Some people stop for a few minutes and then move on; some stay for the whole thing.

I love the energy of live music, and it's so good to have something that's so very relaxed, so very - literally - open.

scifirenegade

Except not really, because I need to write this somewhere and don't want to double post.

Once a Lady (1931). What a bore. Woman marries wet cardboard Tory who hates her. Has a child. Basically the whole family forces the woman away. Ivor Novello is there and he's absolutely wasted on this (but very charming, glad to finally hear him without a fake accent). There's a pic of him with Joan Crawford for what is worth. Can't escape that woman lately.

Alright, Tih Minh shenanigans under the cut.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: sniffly

kaffy_r

Having Fun Yet?

Not really. Not with the latest murder in Minneapolis, a city I have connections with and memories of. I flinched when I heard the gun shots that killed Alex Pretti yesterday. So very loud.

Only a couple of weeks earlier, again in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good, was killed by ICE. Her last words were "I'm not mad at you guys." After - after - she was shot, one of the ICE agents called her a "fucking bitch." Professional attitude there, buddy.

But let's not forget others who were shot, either killed or injured, across the country.

Last September, undocumented immigrant Silverio Villegas González, a 20-year resident of Franklin Park, was killed by ICE thugs in that Chicago suburb, after dropping off his children at school. The narrative from ICE was one we're very familiar with now: he "severely injured" an ICE agent, and dragged the agent with his car.

That agent told his buddies at the scene of González' murder that his own injury was "nothing major." Oops.

American citizen Marimar Martinez was shot five times by CBP agent Charles Exum, who later boasted about it in texts to friends. She survived, and charges against her were dropped. It turns out that she didn't ram any agent's car. Someone rammed her car. Quel surprise.

There have been at least eight other shootings by ICE or CBP agents across the country since last September, of U.S. citizens,and non-citizens. They were lucky enough not to be killed, but some of them are still in ICE custody.

They were all domestic terrorists who used their vehicles to ruthlessly hunt down blameless ICE and CPB agents. At least, that's the message that ICE Barbie and her Trumpian buddies like Greg Bovino have repeatedly given out at press conferences. Not only are they lying, they're not even creatively lying.

Can we have the midterms next week, please, before That Man and his criminal team figure out how to shut elections down?

No?

Well then, we'd best be on our guard.

Current Mood: enraged
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: Cortis "Joyride"

shewhostaples

Grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

I answered a couple of requests for recommendations, and am copying my answers here for reference.

1. for someone who wanted to hear from people forty and up about shopping for clothes:

I hit forty last year, and what I've done is to keep on experimenting until I find something that works - whether that's a shape, a colour, a manufacturer - and then keep on experimenting with that. What that looks like depends very much on circumstances - at the moment I have quite a lot of unscheduled time and my small town has a lot of charity shops, so I'm mostly buying things second-hand and donating them back if they don't end up working. But when I was working full-time I did a lot more internet shopping. (Svaha and Joanie were what worked for me then, for what it's worth.)

I had a most illuminating conversation recently with a group of friends, most of whom like Seasalt. I said that Seasalt ought to work for me but never quite does, but that Fat Face is pretty reliable. Interestingly, most of the Seasalt fans said that Fat Face never quite works for them. I take from this the lesson that even makes that appear very similar at first glance will be more or less suited to different groups of people, so it's worth keeping on looking.

I also like the Who Wears Who blog for thoughtful prompts on style and experimentation with same.

2. replying to someone who wanted to talk about femslash

Femslash! Here are three of my favourite books with canon femslash ships:

- my oldest - The Count of Monte Cristo, a rambling but enjoyable French doorstopper tale of revenge, appeared from 1844 to 1846 and has canon femslash. And no bury your gays! (Obvious warning: it is, of course, very much Of Its Time.)
- my newest - I've just finished The Priory of the Orange Tree. Will it be one of my favourites of all time? Probably not, but it was a lot of fun - an ambitious fantasy novel that attempts to put a valiant number of belief systems and all the dragon lore on the page. And yes, canon femslash.
- the one that feels like it was written just for me - the Alpennia series by Heather Rose Jones. It includes many of my favourite tropes (fictional European country, swashbuckling, complicated power dynamics) and weaves religious practice into the way the magic works in a way that I've rarely seen done so effectively. And, for a third time, canon femslash.

thisbluespirit

Some things that I have had stashed away for a little while:

1.

sovay very kindly sent me a copy of Exit Through the Fireplace by Kate Dunn, which was waiting for me at the new house when I got here. It is about repertory theatre with lots of accounts on every aspect from actors and others involved, including a lot of people I have watched in old telly, so I enjoyed it a lot.

But having only recently before tried to make a post explaining what I loved about Terence Rattigan's plays, including floundering about trying to say how effective his dialogue is, I was v pleased to find this quote:

John Moffatt: (On being in rep, and the difficulty of remembering the lines, doing a new play every week): "You got to know who the good writers were. With Rattigan you barely had to learn it at all, even after just blocking it you almost knew it because it is so beautifully written. The only way to reply to something that has just been said is what he's written."

2. Talking of people being kind,

swordznsorcery wrote me a lovely Sapphire & Steel story with a new Element and a stealth crossover very RTMI here, and if you also like S&S, I recommend taking a look, as it's great! <3

3. The book I was reading introduced me to the utterly untrue but very S&S like urban myth/ghost story of the Zanetti Train. Sounds like an Assignment to me, or a film I would watch, anyway. (It seems to have been taken from a Ukrainian work of fiction, most likely - certainly not one detail of it has any truth in it).

4. Making personalised bingo cards proved to be exactly in my wheelhouse right now, so I had fun with that. If anyone missed it the other day and would like one, feel free to still ask! (Here or there, whatever).

5. Random AO3 tag found while wrangling that is currently amusing me: It is literally just Twelfth Night but with Moomins.

Otherwise still slowly progressing and all that etc etc etc.

scifirenegade

This is the second spam comment I get on AO3. Logged-in account. The bots are getting accounts! Both affected fics were from teeny-tiny fandoms (one was Denouement, which has been there for a year, so it's not like they're only targetting new fics).

It's also really funny they want me to "commission them". Most of my stuff IS art. If I want to "bring my stories to life" I can just go and do it without getting scammed :)

I'm lucky I haven't gotten the nasty ones who insult me or whatever.

Current Mood: grumpy

shewhostaples

Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

I've never done a digital moodboard (have done physical collages, back in the day) and this sounded fun, if a little challenging to manage with limited laptop time. As I've been burbling about The Prisoner of Zenda quite a bit recently, I thought I'd stick with that. All the images came from Wikimedia Commons.

I can never make DW images play nicely, so I'm just sticking this under a cut and hoping for the best. I hope it doesn't come out too huge!

( Read more... )

scifirenegade

Caved in. Oops.

Can already tell it's gonna be one of Those (TM): exoticism and the racism edition.

I'll say it, the intros that go "Actor So-and-So is Character Such-and-Such" and then there's a little scene of the character are awesome.

The Grand Vampire actor is Count Merlin of The Charlatan! Not really.

No idea what Jacques (René Cresté) shtick is, but Placide is very Passepartout.

Of course, the Vietnamese woman is too primitive and needs good ol' western reeducation! Bah! "It was of its time" my arse, we never left the Dark Ages, our eyes have just grown accustomed to the darkness.

Placide and Rosette (his fiancé) are wild! Great match, they're ride or die for one another.

I know it's because they're both played by white actors (and asian women are often stereotyped into being demure and therefore "perfect wife material") but I'm impressed that Jacques and Tih Minh are an item.

The soundtrack is pretty good, even when it goes all musique concréte (think Delia Derbyshire). Usually it's out-of-place, but not here. Feuillade's serials are wild.

I wrote "Severe lack of Musidora" and yeah. Where are you, darling, we miss you.

The whole sequence of Rih Minh being kidnapped + the aftermath were very well shot.

Dolores (who works for the baddies, a doctor and an Indian guy, because of course 🙄) is a mind reader?? And can compell people to do whatever she wants?? I don't think she's into it tbh

I also wrote "René Cresté fine as hell". He isn't that much in the ep, and his character at the mo is a nothing-burger, but yes.

Pretty sure Venenos (Les Vampires) mucked aeound in this lab.

There was a guy in the beginning called Stone that was found with no memory and no ability to speak and the baddies were using him??

So Jacques is brooding, and it's all very reminiscent of Jud— what the hell ghostly figures on the beach?? Is this The Seventh Seal??

Blackmail! Another very well done sequence. That zoom on the date. The acting. And the photo is gone!

So, Jacques is one of those white guys who go places and take stuff. Granted, what he got was a copy of a book with a note that may be useful if Europe goes to war (WW1 reference), but still. The baddies crave it for their unknown nefarious deeds.

Placide, no! That's an historical artifact!

Placide, no! I know Kistna (the evil Indian guy) is evil, but no need to basically call him a slur!

So, they left Tih Minh at the gate like a stray kitten, and she's acting oddly, because the baddies gave her the ~~blue rose~~ potion of forgetfulness. So she can't even speak. Just like Stone!

Jacques, no! Don't yell at her!

It's less of a cliffhanger, and more of a gothic version of a Yevgeni Bauer movie.

So far, pretty standard Feuillade.

Current Mood: anxious

thisbluespirit

Hello, I am still recovering, etc. Quite nicely as these things go, but still not up to doing all my usual little things.

Anyway, thought of something fannish and fun I could do if anyone wanted it - I made a personalised bingo card for

theseatheseatheopensea once, which was fun, and I do always love doing that kind of thing. So...

... if anyone else would find a custom-made bingo card (for writing/creating prompts) fun/useful/inspiring, comment here and I will have a go at making you one!

(I'll use the Bingo Generator, so it's very easy, and if I fail and include some rubbish prompts, a new card without such prompts can magically be re-generated with no trouble. Will do any size from 2x2 to 5x5.)

So just comment here if you'd like one & say what size card you'd prefer. You can also point me to/away from any fandoms/prompt types etc if you'd like, but no need. (If I'm really stuck for some reason, I'll just ask you for some pointers!)

kaffy_r

He Had More Than a Dream

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had grit and determination, and strength and righteous anger that he controlled in the name of peaceful progress, and pride that he wanted Black Americans to recognize and adopt for themselves. He believed in this country - god knows why, given how much hell America put Black people through, all the way from 1615 to the then-current day - and he worked like hell to make it a better one.

He risked himself and his family, with constant death threats and a firebombing at his home in 1958. He almost died after being stabbed in the same year. He risked his reputation and his legacy, surviving several arrests and jailings. He risked those who believed in him and in what he had to say, because he knew those who hated him would hate those who believed in him.

He fought for what he shouldn't have had to fight for; true understanding of what Black Americans deserve, and what White America has resolutely refused to admit was required.

He fought against nasty, petty, and powerful men like J. Edgar Hoover, who spread filth and lies about Dr. King. Why? Because he was afraid of Dr. King. He hated what Dr. King stood for, so he tried to erase the man. He wasn't the only one.

After his stabbing, Dr. King had one more decade to shake the foundations of this country, to start the Poor People's Campaign and to oppose the Vietnam War. And then White America killed him.

Who called for the assassination? Did someone pay James Earl Ray? All of that kind of misses the point. Ultimately, the real conspiracy is what people in this country have insisted on doing ever since that April morning at the Lorraine Motel.

For more than 57 years America has worked tirelessly to erase his truth. America wants everyone to remember him only as he spoke during the March on Washington, choosing to turn those powerful words into an anodyne formula they want to speed the erasure of real history. Some of them manage to listen to Dr. King's "I've Been to the Mountain Top" speech and cry tears about his unnervingly prophetic commentary.

But they don't like reading his letter from a Birmingham jail. They can't stand his anti-war stance. They loathe his pro-union beliefs, his support of poor people of all colors.

It's still White America that fears him the most; rich white Americans, anti-union white Americans, pro-capitalism white Americans, the people who understand that he had grown so much larger and more dangerous to their power than they'd thought he would be.

Let's remember him for what he was. A warrior.

And I'll try not to be part of the problem, but part of the solution, as difficult as that will be.

Current Mood: pessimistic
Current Location: the living room
Current Music: Ambient jazz

tellshannon815

Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.

Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Honestly, trope doesn't entirely resonate. I can remember years ago, seeing something about tropes and just not relating to any of all that forced to share a bed/enemies to lovers/coffee shop AU stuff. But I do have a theme, which is alternate timelines. What if So and so never died? What if the villain made the obvious choice that the original writers seem to have somehow totally missed? What if Character X was the one to move from his cancelled spinoff to the main show? I have done them all.

The first series I ever saw to completion was Once Upon a Time, where Jafar was the one to move across from the Wonderland spinoff to the main show (imagine his lamp ending up in Gold's shop and Zelena accidentally letting him out). Another one was The Flash, where Eobard manipulated Nora into giving Barry the metahuman cure and the finale showed a dystopian 2049 that resulted from this (at the time I started that, I was convinced that was the route canon was going to take; to this day, I still don't get why the writers wasted time on Cicada rather than pursuing this route and just letting Eobard be the bad guy). I've saved Sun, Jin and Sayid on Lost several times over (and after a prompt in last year's three sentence ficathon, I was even tempted to expand on my attempt at Smokey McSmokeFace going back to the classical Roman era to get off the island while he was still human).

And yes, I have a few ongoing such works which I'm determined to finish. The School Spirits one where Mr Martin chooses to possess Emilio instead and the impact this has on Charley and Yuri is barely started (the upcoming new season may help with that), and I am determined I will push past my mental block on a) the Lost series where Sun joined the others in 1977 (I lost heart after the decision in canon to kill her off, which I still strongly disagree with 15 years on) and b) the Dark series where Ulrich successfully rescues Mikkel from 1986 (at this rate, I think I'm actually going to end up going down the Choose Your Own Adventure route, one where Ulrich and Mikkel get their happy ending and the minimum of characters are erased from existence, and one where Claudia gets hers.)

shewhostaples

Talk about your favourite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Where to start? Let's start with swashbuckling. That's a nice easy one. Really, I think my fannish id was formed by The Prisoner of Zenda at an early age (I am still very fond of The Prisoner of Zenda).

See also: Ruritania. I love a good fictional society, and the deeper we go into the government departments and the transport infrastructure, the happier I am.

And love and duty. I don't necessarily mind which triumphs, so long as both are taken seriously. I also love it when one of the arts - or sports, or whatever - is the third party in a relationship, particularly when the partners are both very enthusiastic about that. Not to mention the creator. (This was why I enjoyed Yuri!!! on Ice so much: it was very much about the skating.)

I like relationships between women, romantic or otherwise. And friendships between men and women where it's never going to become romantic.

And then I always enjoy a good description:
Food. Chalet School breakfasts. The Marseille chapter in Madam Will You Talk.
Clothes. Annoyingly, I can't think of a good example at this moment. Probably Eva Ibbotson.
Landscape. A John Buchan evening. Can't beat an apple-green twilight.

Finally, something that I write more often than I read is the situation where you will never be able either to clean up Dodge or to get out of Dodge, you have to live in Dodge, but nevertheless you can find a way to carve out a happy and/or meaningful life there. And maybe you find you've made it slightly less grubby.

shewhostaples

Talk about your creative process.

Five years ago I'd have talked about volcanic islands rising out of the sea, and building causeways between them. A good premise or prompt would spark a snappy exchange between two characters, or a vivid little snapshot of background, or a moment of insight. I'd write them down as soon as I could.

Then I'd build on them, adding the line that followed on naturally, the reply that the other character would have to make, setting up the scene so that this moment could happen. And then I'd work out how they all related to each other, what order they came in. I'd consider what needed to have happened by the end of the story in order to make it satisfying, and I'd add a bit here and a bit there until my lonely archipelago had a fully functional infrastructure.

I am still trying to do this, but it's not working as well as it used to. A toddler who just doesn't go to sleep, a commute (once my best writing time) that's down to one day a week, and a dying laptop have all made writing hard, and frankly I'm just too tired a lot of the time.

But I am exploring other creative realms, and the one that's currently interesting me most - knitting - is about as different as you can get. You have to do that in the right order.

At the moment I'm trying to design my first pattern: a slipover. It's going to have to be a slipover because I only have five balls of this yarn. I bought it in a charity shop and the Internet has nothing to say about it. I am having to plan: to measure, to practise, to calculate. I can't just make it up as I go along. It is an alien process to me, but, rather to my surprise, I'm enjoying it. The secret is, I think, being just good enough to be able to do things that make all that interesting rather than tedious. By which I mean, cables. I really like cables. I'm even enjoying the tension square.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: cat purring

tellshannon815

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

This is actually something that I've been wondering if I need to improve on, especially when it comes to writing series. Specifically, how much of a series I should have planned out before I start posting it, although admittedly there have been a few times where I've intended something as a one-shot and then realised that actually I can't really leave the story where it is.

Also, this is a process specifically to Dark more than any of my other fandoms, but I realised I should probably make sure I have a full understanding of the original timeline before I try to change it. A moment of sheer frustration at Ulrich getting stuck in 1953 and being unable to rescue Mikkel from 1986 led me to write a scene where Ulrich did get to 1986, and it became clear I couldn't just leave it there. But at that point in season 1, I didn't have the whole context of how that whole family tree/timeline worked, or the reasons why the character Claudia just would not let the timeline deviate that way. So I now find myself with an ending I know has to happen, but that I was trying to avoid and that's just blocking me finishing the final chapter. Anyone remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books as kids? I'm seriously thinking about those now as I'm tempted to write the one ending where Claudia fixes the timeline her way or trying to work out if there's any way of incorporating the alternate universe characters into the timeline so the minimum of people actually get erased from existence and Ulrich and Mikkel get their happy ending.

Something I have often done is been determined to get a fic finished before the next episode of a show aired and canon could contradict it. This tends to be easier with one shots than series, although I've only ever had one dickhead trying to "correct" me over not incorporating context that hadn't aired at the time that chapter was posted. But since that was a known troll, they could shove their corrections where the sun didn't shine. If that does come up, I don't rewrite.

Sometimes it involves going back and watching old episodes, or even just checking facts on fandom wikis, to make sure I have my details correct. (Even if I sometimes wonder why I bother - for example, I was trying to find out whether Fringe's Peter Bishop's specific date of birth was ever confirmed, to see if it was feasible for a time travelling Daniel from Lost to have met Walter before Peter was born to give him the name. In the process, I managed to establish that Walter's father's date of death in 1944 doesn't make sense for Walter's birth in 1946, so decided that if the writers weren't going to worry about that, I'd roll with my idea whatever!)

As far as requests go, if I'm not doing it as part of an exchange, I'll only consider if we've interacted. Just my way of making sure I don't end up granting a request for aforementioned known troll, whose MO was to ask for requests then spam anyone who didn't take their (very specific) requests with insults.

But anyway, what I'm wondering if I need to do is try and do more planning in advance of any story likely to become a series before I start posting it. I have one now I'm trying to work out (School Spirits, a rewrite of season 2 where Mr Martin possesses someone other than who he actually does possess in canon) so I'm going to start with that.

glinda

Speaking of making a good start on some new year’s resolutions, I thought I’d break myself easy with the re-read/re-watch project with something fairly short.

I was, for reasons, re-reading a bunch of raven’s fic the other night and came across and re-read their Piranesi fic from yuletide (I think?) a few years back. It reminded me how much I enjoyed the book and made me want to re-read it. In a remarkably sensible move, given that I was just sitting at my computer reading fic and chilling to classical music, I got up and grabbed it from the shelf, sat back down and started reading it, planning just to read the first chapter before bed to get me started on the project. I read half the book that night and the rest of it the following morning. (I pretty much only didn’t just stay up stupid late because I got uncomfortable in my desk chair and in getting up to decant to the sofa realised the time and reluctantly made the sensible choice to go to bed.

( Here be Spoilers )

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Jessie Buckley - Glasgow (No Place Like Home)

glinda

Ooooh fandom_trees got revealed, I went looking for a needy tree over the holidays, found one looking for Edge of Tomorrow and thought ‘oh I have that, I should rewatch it’ and wrote this. It was my last watched film of last year and my first finished fic of this year which is pleasing to me. A nice end to my film rewatch project from last year where I pretty much wrote a fic for each film I re-watched.

Possibly/Probably (The Best Friend You've Never Met) (1599 words) by Glinda
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: William Cage/Rita Vrataski, William Cage & Rita Vrataski
Characters: William Cage, Rita Vrataski, Dr. Carter (Edge of Tomorrow)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Friendship, final 'first' meeting
Summary: It’s a cliche often repeated, that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. Cage tries all the same.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Probably - LUSA

shewhostaples

Trying to get back on the bus with this one...

LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

1. I am - not always, but often - capable of finding ordinary things utterly delightful. Like the Wendy Cope poem about the orange. I am not in that state at the moment, but it is lovely when it happens.

2. On the small scale, I think I am slightly luckier than average. For example: my hair went grey in my early thirties, but that happened to be the couple of years in which many people my age were dyeing their hair grey. We moved house the week before the first Covid lockdown, when it could have been the week after. I win raffles, and the occasional twenty-five quid on the Premium Bonds. (Or maybe I'm no luckier than anyone else, but - see point one - appreciate my luck more?)

3. I really like making things. I like that about myself.

4. Fashion aside, I do like the way my hair looks.

Current Music: The Traitors: Uncloaked

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