Beyond the Roundels

I was feeling a bit fed up with not doing very much and remembered that I am supposed to be replacing some of the icons I lost many moons ago when someone hotlinked to something and ate my entire PhotoBucket usage. And these were by far the most popular set. (I was tempted to redo some of them, but I suppose I shall just point out that I made them several years ago and would do things differently now.)

Teaser:


( I don't care a button for such antiquated flummery! )

As I said, it seems to be the week for making progress on WIPs round here, and I have finally made sufficient progress on this fandom_stocking 2015 gift for kaffy_r and purplecat that I can post Chapter Two (which has, in essence, been finished for a long while).

(I'm not sure how quickly the rest will follow, given summer, but it will shortly be done in rough and then it's only a matter of typing up and editing, so barring me being extra ill, it should be done before the end of autumn. \o/)


When the Lights Go Out (4988 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 2/5
Fandom: Sapphire and Steel
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sapphire (S&S), Steel, Copper (S&S), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Brother-Sister Relationships, 1920s, Ghosts, Supernatural Elements, Character Death, seances, Mentions of World War I, References to Suicide
Summary: It seemed like such a lark, to hold a séance in a haunted house, but what human can bargain with time or death - or even Elements?

I accidentally let this drop for a month, but I've been tired a lot, and reading some more fanfic (I had quite a nice Obi Wan/Padme binge for a while, after rewatching AotC and RotS for that Janeway & Obi Wan coffee heist fic I had to write). And so there were stupid Regencies and things not worth mentioning, but otherwise, over the month:

What I've Finished Reading
One of the later books in the Daisy Dalrymple series, Superfluous Women, which I read at the same time as I made my way through We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars by Martin Pugh, an amusing combination as Martin Pugh kept reminding me that the whole 'superfluous women' business was as much a myth as that of the 'Lost Generation' (but I already knew that on both counts).

I also finally finished The Surgeon's Mate, and now I don't have the next one, which is probably a good thing for me and the series, and hopefully I will have more brain when I get back into the series. Hopefully. Or a level that works out, anyway.

And then recently I read and very much enjoyed Angela Thirkell's High Rising. It was written in the 1930s (I didn't actually plan my reading to be this thematic, it just happened) so has some of the usual hang-ups (although less than others, I'd have said), but Laura, the middle-aged heroine (who doesn't get married, but turns down two proposals in the course of the novel) was lovely and it even made me laugh aloud in patches. I enjoyed the three proposals that didn't go anywhere, and the trip to see King Lear even though nobody likes Shakespeare (and "the play is in in itself inherently improbable and in parts excessively coarse and painful. But they may do it in modern clothes, or in the dark, or all standing on stepladders. You never know.") And best of all the bit where the author George Knox gets out-talked by Laura's train-obsessed son Tony and swears he will never talk so much again... in a speech that lasts for a page and a half without a paragraph break.

I have another of hers that I picked up and I am now looking forward to reading that too. The introduction puzzled me mildly, as it is at pains to assure me that even though Angela Thirkell is completely forgotten these days, she is at times even nearly as good as Barbara Pym. I have heard of and seen Angela Thirkell's books before; I have sort of vaguely heard of Barbara Pym but have never seen her works on a shelf anywhere (although clearly I should keep an eye out). I'm not sure whether it's me that's back to front here, or just the introduction.


What I'm Reading Now
Having finished The Surgeon's Mate and being free to read lighter things more suited to a brainless person, I immediately started instead on Norman Davies's Vanished Kingdoms (but to be read in installments, kingdom by kingdom, so I have a Plan in this case), which is excellent and looks at European nations that no longer exist. It is over 700 pages, though, so it will probably take me longer than the next book in the Aubreyad would have done, but NF is easier as I don't have to follow a plot. And it should be very good!

And of course, this week I had my birthday, which naturally included me being given some presents, one of which was a copy of The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell, which I am now happily devouring.


For family history note-taking, I have started Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People From the 1820s to the 1920s (ed. John Burnett), which varies as to how relevant it is, but where it is, it's very useful indeed, as well as being interesting in itself, consisting of accounts of ordinary thing by ordinary people.


What I'm Reading Next
I don't know, Meme, but, given my birthday I am now a bit of a donkey with half a dozen carrots. I expect next up will be the light and hopefully interesting/entertaining A Viking in the Family and Other Family Tree Tales by Keith Gregson, a collection of small but interesting anecdotes about ancestors and how people found them. Less entertainly, but hopefully useful, I have The Wills of Our Ancestors by Stuart A. Raymond to help me understand wills and inventories and things. I also have The Pox: The Life and Near Death of a Very Social Disease by Kevin Brown, which is about Syphilis. (My ancestors, what can I say?)

Probably also that other Angela Thirkell, or something else I shall stumble over in a charity shop/free book shop/library.

I was tagged for one of these on tumblr and since I haven't done the WIP meme here since last May, I thought I'd post it here too:

( WIPs under the cut )

(Another post I had prepared earlier. This has totally been my Blue Peter week.)

Part the Third and last:

( 10 recs in Chalion, Pushing Daisies, Sorcerer to the Crown, The Star of Kazan, Timeless, The Truman Show, Venetia & While You Were Sleeping )

Since I have spent most of the last few posts moaning about The White Princess (it's all right; I'm done now, but srsly, if you want to do historical feminism, you might want to consider what you do with the women, because being useless or committing multiple murders which they didn't actually commit plus bonus unhistorical rape is not really the way to go in my book, even without the horror of the costumes *coughs*), here are some much better historical things of various kinds!


1. In almost insulting contrast to TWP in how to do it right, I've been watching Suffragette (2015), which my Mum kindly sent me because I had missed it on the TV and she hadn't, and she'd liked it so much she watched it twice in a row. And then I had a mystery parcel from Amazon, and now I have also sort of watched it twice, as I watched it once and then watched it again for the commentary. (Both because I was curious about things and also because I remembered Abi Morgan, the writer, being interesting from The Hour.)


2. A clever, haunting ficlet about Catherine of Aragon Seven Sevens (which I fell over and was delighted by both because it was clever, and also because it happens to use the chess scene from Shadow of the Tower as a launching point).


3. For those who don't already have a paid account and might find it of use: Ancestry are offering free access to UK and Irish records for the upcoming weekend.


4. And another excellent historical fic (which incidentally wound up making me a new flister, which is always a happy outcome *waves happily*), from the Chocolate Box exchange, for the sadly short-lived WWII ITV show, The Halcyon: Lex Talionis (Richard Garland & Lady Hamilton).

Part the Second! Yuletide truly is a bottomless marvel. I have never yet read through everything I wanted to in any year, or caught up on past years. (I should also note that I've been rather arbitrary in what I read for fandoms with several works, so these recs are not to say that the other works are not worth checking out!)


( 16 recs in 12th Century RPF, Anne of Green Gables, Bletchley Circle, The Goblin Emperor, Howl's Moving Castle, I Capture the Castle, Jeeves & Wooster, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Last Tango in Halifax, Lion in Winter, The Mummy, Sarah Jane Adventures )

What with all this uncanny James Maxwell activity, it seemed almost ungrateful not to write a Shadow of the Tower prompt, so I did. (For dimity_blue, who now tells me that she has also dreamt of JM in the last few days; in her case she was bringing me a signed Christmas card and a bauble with his face on through snowy Regency woods. I've said I'm not at all sure I want the bauble, but she says it is my doom. But in the meantime, here's fic:)


Title: Legend’s Ending
Author: thisbluespirit
Rating: Teen
Word Count: ~1300
Characters/Pairings: Henry VII/Elizabeth of York, Jasper Tudor
Notes/Warnings: Canonical character death. (Spoilers: it’s history, they all die). Also (by a slight metaphorical cheat) for hc_bingo square “sensory deprivation.”
Summary: Elizabeth surrenders everything; it’s how she’ll win in the end.

For dimity_blue in the 500 Prompts Meme: 038 – Close your eyes – Henry VII/Elizabeth of York (The Shadow of the Tower).

At AO3 | ( Legend's Ending )

I also made things for fandom_stocking. I made a few sets of icons for various people, and wrote four drabbles, using randomised poetry prompts (except for the Six Wives one):

( Four Doctor Who, Six Wives of Henry VIII & S&S drabbles )

Surfacing briefly to say that Yuletide went live this morning and I got two gifts! They are both great and well worth reading and I am a happy bunny:

Rescue (4813 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Daughters of Mannerling - M.C. Beaton, The Grand Sophy - Georgette Heyer
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Charles Rivenhall/Sophy Stanton-Lacy, Henry Bromford/Eugenia Wraxton
Characters: Charles Rivenhall, Sophy Stanton-Lacy, Eugenia Wraxton, Henry Bromford, Mannerling
Additional Tags: Evil Stately Home, Sophy is relentless, Friendship is not required for a rescue
Summary: Sophy Rivenhall and Eugenia Bromford are on just good enough terms to avoid any unseemly gossip. So when Eugenia writes to Sophy begging her to join a house party at the beautiful Mannerling estate, Sophy and Charles know something is wrong.

This is delightful! You may remember I read MC Beaton's Daughters of Mannerling earlier this year and was tickled enough by the concept of Mannerling, the evilest stately home in existence enough to request it just to see what someone might do for it, and what they did was this lovely crossover with Heyer's THe Grand Sophy in which Sophy takes on Mannerling...


And I also got a S&S fic:

Forevermore (2282 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sapphire and Steel
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Silver & Sapphire (S&S)
Characters: Silver (S&S), Sapphire (S&S)
Summary: "Right now, my best guess is that the robot is possessed, but I could be wrong."

A delicious treat, with lots of fun Sapphire and Silver interaction, while Silver gets to play with a robot, and the concept is weird and creepy in all the right ways!

I hope everyone else is having a nice day, whatever you're doing, and that you had similar luck if you took part in Yuletide!

(I have 3 treats in the collection, two of which are probably about as obvious as you get and the third isn't all that surprising either, but feel free to guess. Two out of three of the recips have responded, though, so all is well on that front too.)

And the whole collection is full of shiny things, as ever. *heads off to dive back in*

(RL is pretty good too, if v tiring, and has also involved a lot of seeing of tiny people.)

What I've Finished Reading

I finished up The Castle of Otranto and it continued to be delightfully OTT and ridiculous right to the very last line. I laughed a lot. Especially at the last line. The charm of it is, I think (other than gloomy castles and giant suits of armour and what have you), that it's very hard to tell if the whole thing is some kind of joke, or just bits of it. This seems to have been the question for 250 years, and, indeed, the next book I read, The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve is quite openly The Castle of Otranto, the more rational (and therefore possibly not-truly-Gothic) remix.

As Clara Reeve says in the introduction, certain elements of Otranto, "destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter." (Walpole apparently responded that hers was, "So probable, that any trial for murder at the Old Bailey would make a more interesting story." Hmm, wait, a novel featuring a real life murder...? Shame he didn't try it, heh.)

It does indeed tail off into a long, plodding fixit of everything, though. It's rather like a tumblr-recommended fixit version of Otranto where everything is relentlessly put right and all the bad people are punished or grovel and apologise to the good people. I liked the beginning with the locked up haunted wing with the murdered body in it very much, though, mixed with a more recognisable setting. Also its hero Edmund has an amusing tendency to weep over people. (The best bit was at the end where he flung his arms round both his mentors legs at once and they had to stop him and then he still had to hug them and weep over them.)

But, given that it's still only about 130 odd pages and has a haunted East wing, it was readable and fascinating to compare to Otranto. I'm glad the collection had them both.

I also read another Daisy Dalrymple (Dead in the Water), which you could probably tell because fic happened. My friend is coming to see me again this week - I have hopes she might be able to lend me some more, because the only others I've found are quite a few books on from that. (Obviously, I'm looking forward to seeing her with or without books, but with books is always better.)


What I'm Reading Now
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho, which, as promised by aralias, is very light and enjoyable and just my sort of thing. I seem to be okay with it, too. \o/ (The only downside is the inevitable comparison to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which can do it no favours. It's a shame she didn't set it, say, 20 years later or earlier to mitigate that. Although, of course, I'm only 100 pages in; there are no doubt very good Plot Reasons.)

(I'm still note-taking from A Mad Bad and Dangerous People? and technically sort of reading Desolation Island, but have not progressed far with either since last time.)


What I'm Reading Next
Well, if my friend does bring me some more Daisy, there'll be that. And once I've finished Sorcerer to the Crown, I might try the next Gothic novel in the collection, which is Mistrust by Matthew Gregory Lewis (author of The Monk).

Now I've finally finished my Thriller (Part 1) review/picspam post, I am behind again. Let me talk about what I have been watching over the last couple of months (or more), other than the first 5 discs of Thriler.

1. I finished Secret Army. I did mostly enjoy it, although I got impatient with it again at the end. Terence Hardiman as Reinhardt (who doesn't give a damn about anything since they've lost the war and most of his friends have just been executed in the wake of the assassination attempt on Hitler) did liven things up, though. He was great, and not even actually evil, either. (Particularly his exit when ( Spoiler ) Kessler is rightly both awful and complex, of course, and Clifford Rose was very good in the role.) Bernard Hepton spent most of the last series in prison, on film, but he did eventually escape and return to the studio, and I gave it a lot of plus points for what eventually happened with Monique, too. Anyway, I watched it! I now know where 'Allo 'Allo is coming from.


2. I skipped ahead briefly to watch Suzanne Neve's second Thriller, and while I'll cover it in its turn, I can report that she is better at terrorising innocent Americans than James Maxwell: she sticks them in her underground pottery kiln and bakes them, no angsting required. 1970s Suzanne Neve is so far a lot more evil than 1960s Suzanne Neve. (I would side-eye the ending of the 1968 Dracula here, but personally, I blame Ed Bishop for throwing her down the stairs in UFO.)


3. I finally got to the E-Space trilogy (DW), watching Full Circle and State of Decay (before an appropriate break for the BBC 1977 Dracula). Full Circle has a good SF idea at the heart, but nothing else much with which to pad it out. Except Adric, but, er, well...

I enjoyed State of Decay a lot, though, especially in comparison to Full Circle (it's good to see that future spaceships will go on with BBC Acorn computers on board!). Plus, the whole Time Lords and Vampires mythology backstory is potentially fun to play with and Romana gets two great costumes, while Adric spends at least an episode unconscious, and it has a great look, particularly for that era, especially the location scenes. What more could I ask for? (I'm sorry: Adric wasn't bad in this one! I'm mean, I know.)


4. And so, then, what more appropriate than that I pause to watch the TV show that caused State of Decay to be postponed for 3 years and gave us Horror of Fang Rock instead? (Accidentally; my viewing is not really that well planed!)

I'm not really sure why the BBC were so nervy about this version of Dracula that they thought DW doing vampires at the same time might make them look silly, but apparently they were. They had no need: this is lovely. It's unlike most of the old TV I've been watching - it was 1977 doing glossy event TV with a 2 1/2 hr feature-length version of the novel that's probably the most faithful adaptation still. (Although there are some changes, of course.) It was very good! I recommend it even if you're not usually into old TV, but are into Dracula. (I believe it is up on YouTube, and I got the DVD pretty cheap anyway.)

( Cut for further Dracula rambling )


6. I then decided that I should stop being wimpish and watch the rest of Mystery and Imagination. I'd already seen "Dracula", the Ian Holm "Frankenstein" and "The Suicide Club" (the one with David Collings and the cream tarts and the invisible hyenas and Major Geraldyne, because obv. that is the one that David Collings would be in). The Freddie Jones "Sweeney Todd" was out because I Do Not Do Sweeney Todd, which left me with "Uncle Silas" and "The Curse of the Mummy" out of the Thames adaptations, so I watched "The Curse of the Mummy." ( More about 1960s TV Victorian horror ) After that, I thought I'd had more than enough horror for a bit and left "Uncle Silas "unwatched and returned to Doctor Who and E-Space.


7. Warrior's Gate was very weird and also had Clifford Rose being excellent again. It was definitely the good weird, though, in that way only Classic Who is every once in a while. I mean, it looks like the stranger kind of 80s pop video (one that would definitely get nominated for Yuletide), so it wouldn't be for everyone, but still: the good weird/meta, I think, with bonus believably mundane, petty villains and random lion people. (It must be Doctor Who. <3)


8. I recorded Mrs Miniver off the telly, and the main thing I have taken from this is that Julian Fellowes stole the flower show plot for Downton Abbey. And given that I already know that he stole two plotlines/backstories and a minor incident from Duchess of Duke Street (as well as acting in it), I am now wondering with some interest and amusement, where exactly he swiped everything else from. (Anything from Upstairs Downstairs, maybe?) It's kind of engagingly blatant swiping, though. And gives us May Whitty vs Maggie Smith! Oh my. (I did like it, but it was made mid-WWII and so is very patriotic etc. But well done! There were some really good scenes, and Dame May Whitty as well as Greer Garson, and it was very watchable still.)


9. I also recorded the next old series Drama was offering as well, which is When the Boat Comes In. It stars Jack and Esther from New Tricks (James Bolam and Susan Jameson, who are married in rl, and going out in this). It is early 20th C Tyneside and the first episode was grim about shellshocked returning soldiers, the second had a poor orphan shipped off to Australia alone, and then the continuity announcer went, "And next, things get even harder..." It is, as they say, grim oop north. It seems good so far, though. And maybe one day the boat will come in; there are at least 40 eps on my DVR already and they may not all be equally depressing...


* I don't know if this is really a downside, though. It is very funny.