Fannish things

[thisbluespirit]

As I said, I sort of stopped updating properly for a bit. Just the usual low patch, but I navigated last month's better in terms of posting than this month's.

1. I did manage to do three Fannish ficlets for no_true_pair and still have some rainbowfic ones I'll post for their amnesty, so that is quite good. Although I was quite blurry, I'm not sure how they turned out, really.


2. unconventionalcourtship is back! Time to pick a terrible romance novel and kill it with fanfiction or whatever your preferred approach is. As ever, you can ask the brilliant Unconventional Courtship Generator for ideas if you don't want to personally wade through Mills & Boon's back catalogue.


3. genprompt_bingo is open for a new round!


4. I don't know what is happening with this year, but I received a NYR gift from edwardianspinsteraunt for The Winslow Boy! It is amazing! I need to go comment properly, and will soon, but spent all day finishing off doing the 100 list thingies going around (see point 5.)

At the Threshold (5149 words) by edwardianspinsteraunt
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Winslow Boy (1999)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Robert Morton/Catherine Winslow
Characters: Robert Morton (Winslow Boy), Catherine Winslow, Desmond Curry
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Kissing, Vulnerability, questionable decisions, Confessions (of various sorts), semi-resolved sexual tension, Angst with a Happy Ending, past Catherine Winslow/John Watherstone
Summary: Catherine learns earlier of Sir Robert's sacrifice - a discovery that has surprising results.


5. I've been doing the tumblr-moved-to-Dreamwidth top 100 personal favourite/foundational movies list, plus, because I picked it up from lirazel (who I think was the one that added the other two categories), also 100 TV series, which took the longest. In the meantime, while it moved round my flist, it became solely a book list meme instead, because I suppose that is tumblr vs Dreamwidth for you, lol.

I'm not entirely surely fiddling with things for a week has made my lists any less weird. (You have to bear in mind that my most influential/favourite things, like everyone, tend to be from when I was growing up/younger but then also I have spent the last 15 years having appalling trouble trying to just read or watch anything and at least 5 or so years of that time solving that problem by watching slow-paced Brit TV, some of which was genuinely awesome and then the loss of DVDs for the past 3-5 years has completely scotched any means I had of watching anything not on terrestrial UK TV or the iPlayer. But it does make my list look like it was made by someone whose next words will be muttering about isn't modern stuff too Ruined By The Woke, which is very distressing to me, but that's why. I might mutter that people should write TV episodes like they're one act plays again instead of a soap opera installment and that it honestly doesn't have to cost THAT much to be good, but that's as far as it goes re. the worst effects of all the beige tv on my brain, I promise. It was excellent beige TV! And the bits that weren't, I was looking at James Maxwell's nose or Alfie's face or Suzanne Neve's awesome anyway. And the reading has been even worse, except the few books that worked could at least be from any era, because so far they haven't changed how that works. BUt, still, they had to be old enough to be chanced upon in charity shops so...)

If you want distractions of clicking things and telling me that you also watched/read about 10 of these, here is the film list, the TV List (much beige TV included some of which I had to add manually) and the books list.

No doubt I have forgotten obvious things and would probably make different lists again next week, but I had fun. It had some of the most obscure books and films on it, it just had issues with the TV sometimes.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

I remembered details of it with peculiar and piecemeal vividness for decades and then got a chance to rewatch it in grad school, which confirmed that in spite of my normal reactions, I sincerely ship Miss Price and Emelius Browne.

Aww. I'm pretty sure we did mention it in passing now, too.

David Thomson's Danny Fox, Shelagh Macdonald's No End to Yesterday, Sheila K. McCullagh's Tim and the Hidden People, and Geoffrey Trease's Tomorrow Is a Stranger were the ones of which I had no memory until I saw their titles again.

Aw, that's cool. I'm surprised about Tim and the Hidden People because they were educational reading books and I never knew they were used in the US as well as here, but perhaps it all depends on age - my younger sister had the Pudding Lane ones instead. There was also a slightly older series with a Ghost ship in, and that had the same trick of using silvery/moonlight outlines for all the ghosts/hidden people, which I was so fascinated with, as well as the whole secret hidden world thing.

Rumer Godden's The Doll's House is sort of an edge case in that I have now been reminded of it multiple times since elementary school, but have not actually re-read it despite loving the novel of Black Narcissus when I finally read it—[personal profile] yhlee actually sent me a copy—in 2019.

It's quite a young reader - I knew it via a TV adaptation, which was on the TV list, Tottie, which was one of those stop-motion animation children's series we had so many of in the 70s and 80s. As a child, for some reason, I never worked out that if you wanted something you could tell people or ask for it, to the degree that in my second year of school my teacher had my parents take me to check if I was deaf because I didn't talk much or respond very quickly in class. So the whole aspect of the dolls who could only communicate by wishing really hard was I think just how I felt the world worked anyway. But also history and tragic heroic death; thisbluespirit's First Reader edition.

Which is to say, it's a very young novel, idk if it would be worth reading at this late date if you didn't have a deep and abiding childhood passion for it and stop-motion wooden dolls.

I don't think I had known any Madeleine L'Engle was important to you. Mine would have been A Wind in the Door.

As I see it was! L'Engle was one of those authors I don't mention much, but I read the Austin trilogy when I was first ill and Ring of Endless Light was one I reread and re-read from the library for years. Later on the library got some of the others, which I read and mostly enjoyed, although some not so much, and I think that wound up diluting the effect. But RoEL touched me pretty deeply as a teen. I checked yesterday when you gave me the title, because I thought WitD didn't sound like a title I recognised and indeed that was definitely not one that made it into either my library growing up or the library where I later worked, either.

Color me zero percent surprised about Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time and you can do the same for me.

<3<3<3 For some reason I didn't think you had read that! But it makes much more sense to me that you have, of course.

[sovay]

I'm surprised about Tim and the Hidden People because they were educational reading books and I never knew they were used in the US as well as here

Before ticking the box, I actually checked that series just to make sure I wasn't confusing it with any other magical cat-related adventures like Lloyd Alexander's Time Cat (1963) or George Mackay Brown's Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (1980) or Ruth Chew's The Wednesday Witch (1969), but the first book was vividly familiar to me and I may have read others depending on how many of them were lying around where I could get to them. I don't believe they were used in U.S. reading curricula. Between my parents' books, my elementary school library, and the local public library system, I had access to a bunch of really eclectic stuff. It's not universal! There are authors all over the place I have never heard of or at least never read! But it does produce some unpredictable overlaps, of which I hadn't realized this was one.

There was also a slightly older series with a Ghost ship in, and that had the same trick of using silvery/moonlight outlines for all the ghosts/hidden people, which I was so fascinated with, as well as the whole secret hidden world thing.

That's a great detail.

Which is to say, it's a very young novel, idk if it would be worth reading at this late date if you didn't have a deep and abiding childhood passion for it and stop-motion wooden dolls.

I keep meaning to! I've re-read picture books that were important to me just to see how they strike me now.

L'Engle was one of those authors I don't mention much, but I read the Austin trilogy when I was first ill and Ring of Endless Light was one I reread and re-read from the library for years. Later on the library got some of the others, which I read and mostly enjoyed, although some not so much, and I think that wound up diluting the effect. But RoEL touched me pretty deeply as a teen.

I am glad it was there for you. I started with L'Engle's Murry books and so never really acclimated to the Austins despite having a bunch of them around the house—I kept expecting there to be actual dragons or unicorns and there were consistently not, whereas when L'Engle decided to go for the Flood story, there were seraphim and nephilim and tiny mammoths and quantum unicorns, which was much more the sort of thing I expected from her.

I checked yesterday when you gave me the title, because I thought WitD didn't sound like a title I recognised and indeed that was definitely not one that made it into either my library growing up or the library where I later worked, either.

I wrote badly about it years ago! And later fancast the character in question.

For some reason I didn't think you had read that! But it makes much more sense to me that you have, of course.

I didn't read it as a child! I believe I got it from steepholm. But then it felt like something I had always read.

[thisbluespirit]

I keep meaning to! I've re-read picture books that were important to me just to see how they strike me now.

It is a simultaneously both very cosy thing with a very dark/creepy concept, which, as I said, I got from the TV show first and foremost, so my reading of the books was always informed by that.

when L'Engle decided to go for the Flood story, there were seraphim and nephilim and tiny mammoths and quantum unicorns, which was much more the sort of thing I expected from her.

Starting from the Austins, I had no idea until I encountered a random handful of the others later. I owned a few and reread them a lot, but I didn't end up keeping them. I knew I was missing too many of the earlier Murray books to have any idea what was going on in the later ones that we had in the library, but there was another sequence that tied in with both sometimes, and I liked them and picked them up when the library sold them off, because maybe I was the only one reading them. One was The Young Unicorns or something like that? (Not actual unicorns.)

I wrote badly about it years ago! And later fancast the character in question.

Aww.

I didn't read it as a child! I believe I got it from [personal profile] steepholm. But then it felt like something I had always read.

Well, they have sense. And must surely also be from the West Country with that name, obv a good thing. XD