Beyond the Roundels

My currently regular Thursday feature...

OUaT: Browned Butter by awanderingbard (G, 1956 words. Emma Swan/Killian Jones, Snow White, Regina Mills, Henry Mills.) It's Storybrooke's first Thanksgiving, and Emma is finding trying to be a domestic goddess more difficult than she anticipated. Sweet and funny, with Emma battling to do something impressive on the domestic front.


Miss Marple: Advice From Aunt Jane by DesertVixen (Teen, 1212 words. Miss Marple, Dolly Bantry, Jane Helier.) Jane Helier needs some advice from Miss Marple and Dolly Bantry Pitch perfect conversation between the three, picking up on threads from The Thirteen Problems.


Doctor Who: At Last a Dragon by paranoidangel (All ages, 985 words. John Chesterton, Tenth Doctor.) John Chesterton doesn't believe in Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy or the Doctor. John Chesterton finally realises that all the stories his parents told him were real. Lovely.


Heroes: Drive My Car by Andraste (Hiro & Ando, Hiro/Ando.) "Our life of legend begins!" Great, fun vid for S1 Hiro & Ando.


Diana Wynne Jones: World Enough, and Time by jamjar (PG, 5408 words. Erskine, Hathaway, Torquil, Awful, Howard, Catriona.) The journey of a thousand miles (starts with sending your siblings to Alpha Centauri). Perfect capturing of the novel's tone, with the remaining siblings starting to both mend their ways and move about more freely.

The second half of the recs post!

( 17 recs in Historical RPF, The Hour, Howl, Miss Marple, The Mummy, North and South, Oxford Comma Sentence Examples, Pushing Daisies, Red Dwarf, Ripper Street, Sapphire and Steel, Sarah Jane Adventures, Ten Stupidest Things I've Heard/Shadow of the Tower, Stay, and Thursday Next )

The list!

1. Adam Adamant
2. Emma Peel (The Avengers)
3. Charley Pollard (DW)
4. Eighth Doctor (DW)
5. Soolin (B7)
6. Silver (S&S)
7. Harry Pearce (Spooks)
8. Cora Mills (OUaT)
9. Clara Oswald (DW)
10. Servalan (B7)
11. Vila Restal
12. Esme Weatherwax (Discworld)
13. Arnold Rimmer (Red Dwarf)
14. Jane Marple
15. Harry Sullivan (DW)


( The shenanigans! )

1. Two more runaway_tales installments:

Errors, Corrections (All ages, 661 words. Charles Terrell, undercover for the revolution – compiling lists.)

The More Things Change... (PG, 1198 words. Charles Terrell, Anna Miller, Edward Woodfield. For some people, it seems the rebellion isn’t over.


2. I was poking around at some very old fic the other day, including some efforts from This Time Round (the pub outside reality where Doctor Who characters go in between stories, courtesy of alt.drwho.creative on usenet), and while most of my TTR fics don't really transfer so well out of the Round, I found this Harry and Sarah do a classic Agatha Christie fic and though, despite being rather meta-ish at the edges, it's comprehensible as an AU and hopefully fairly entertaining & so I've been tweaking it and uploading it to AO3.

(Some of the characters are aware of the narrative they're in though, and there's some playing around with that. I seem to recall the original idea was that there were things called 'genre bubbles' that could occur around Nameless, and the characters in the vicinity would all start acting in accordance to narrative rules of that genre. Hence Harry and Sarah in a Miss Marple story.) I seem to have written it some time during or soon after S4 of New Who.

Murder at Mill Cottage (23135 words) by vvj5
Chapters: 11/12
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963), Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Sarah Jane Smith/Harry Sullivan, Ben Jackson/Polly Wright
Characters: Harry Sullivan, Sarah Jane Smith, First Doctor, Charley Pollard, Eighth Doctor, Polly Wright, Ben Jackson (Doctor Who), Jamie McCrimmon, Jane Marple, Various Characters, Amelia Rumford, Louisa Pollard, The Master (Delgado), Inspector Mackenzie (Doctor Who), Mehendri Solon
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Metafiction, Humor, POV First Person, This Time Round, Murder Mystery
Summary: Dr Sullivan's finally got a nice little practice in the country, just like he always wanted - except it turns out there's a murderer at large. It's lucky for him he's got help from a visiting journalist, and, of course, his favourite little old lady, Miss Marple...

I'll attempt to find some brain not occupied by Public Eye, and tell you about how lucky I was for Yuletide (again).

I had a marvellous gift fic in the main collection, from someone who dealt with my incoherent Chalet School request and wrote me a wonderful fic (involving Hijinks & Shenanigans no less) that took so many parts of it and used them to great effect. And Mary-Lou faces down a ghost - and tells it (not unkindly) that it needs to buck up its ideas and stop feeling sorry for itself. Anyway, it's great, and I love it. If you also like Chalet School stories, I'm sure you'd enjoy it too:

The avenues of time (4343 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Chalet School - Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Mary-Lou Trelawney, Original Male Character(s), Verity-Anne Carey
Additional Tags: Sister-Sister Relationship, Female Friendship, Ghosts, Murder, Indiana Jones Style Archaeology, Post-Canon, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Roman Britain
Summary: In which Mary-Lou Trelawney visits a town in the north of England; makes a surprising new acquaintance; and reminisces about her childhood.


I was also lucky enough to have three treats in the Yuletide Madness collection. Two of them were for the Ten Stupidest Things I've Heard Since Richard III's Remains blog post - which has taken off and had some marvellous and hilarious fic written for it. Dear flist, it's a thing! We made it a thing! (Especially akashasheiress who linked me to it and justice_turtle who did the important bit of actually nominating it, of course!) They are both excellent, one a great drabble, one a short, brilliantly biting satirical ficlet. I'll try to do a recs post, but you should definitely check out the rest of the fic for it!

The King of Tallstoria (429 words) and Delayed Interment (100 words).

Also, also - somebody wrote me Inspector Neele and Mary Dove from the Miss Marple story A Pocketful of Rye!

One Good Turn (966 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Mary Dove, Inspector Neele
Additional Tags: Flirting, Banter, Cordial Adversaries, Ambiguous/Open Ending
Summary: They are getting some practice in saving each other. They just aren't either of them sure what the practice is for.

It's exactly what I wanted when I read the book! *dances a bit* It's a delight and I'm thrilled to bits.


Also, happily, my recipient seemed to like my story, thankfully, and my two treats (one in the main collection), one in Madness also. (There are no points whatsoever for anyone guessing which Yuletide Madness fic I wrote. I have never in my life been less anonymous in a gift exchange, but it had to be done.)

I did manage to do some reading while home and there are some glorious things in the collection and in Madness - I'll see if I can manage a recs post before reveal. In the meantime, my brain apparently belongs to Frank Marker. He doesn't deserve it at all, but what can you do?

Because I do want to start trying to make posts that are talking again. (My last week's ones don't count; that was incoherent babbling. ;-D)

1. A much-delayed link/announcement but liadtbunny has started up oldbrit_tvicons - because it's so hard to find a sensible central place to post old British TV icons. However, the problem with that, is there's also no central place to advertise a comm to post old British TV icons. So, do go & join if that's of interest, and if not, if you can pass the word along, that'd be wonderful.

2. At last I can talk about this! seriesfive sent me her WIP by installments, one of the things that has been cheering me up this year, but obviously you can't rec a WIP. But now it's in progress on AO3, so I can. It's a fic in which Silver and Steel get stuck in the His Dark Materials universe and very strange things are happening, including to them. There are many things I could say about it, because it's excellent, but mainly... Silver is stuck as a lemur and it is awesome. (I didn't know I needed lemur-fic in my life, but apparently I did.) That is a terrible rec (sorry, seriesfive!) - it also has a mystery and much amusing and subtle character stuff between the two, which is what people should read it for, but Silver is a lemur. That is all. *cough*

Of Angels and Elementals (30011 words) by SeriesFive
Chapters: 14/29
Fandom: Sapphire and Steel, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Silver/Steel, Silver & Steel
Characters: Silver (Sapphire and Steel), Steel (Sapphire and Steel), Lord Asriel, Master of Jordan College
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Idfic, Community: Fic Rush, Trope Bingo Round 2, Gen or Pre-Slash, Daemons, Angels, Elements
Summary:

Steel and Silver have been assigned. Their destination: Oxford. Upon their arrival they soon discover that they’ve stumbled into a trap — a trap specifically designed to capture an elemental. The question is what is more perilous? Steel realising that he is slowly turning human, Silver discovering that he’s somehow ended up as Steel’s dæmon or the fact that a dark shadow is transforming innocent school-boys into statues?

This is obviously pre-HDM. In Lord Asriel’s world elements are called elementals. The story can be read as Gen or Pre-Slash, just choose according to your preferences.

3. Also, I have discovered the secret of fanfic writing success! Well, obviously apart from writing in popular fandoms, popular slash pairings, and/or being very good. But if, like me, you're not any of those things, what you do is this: write a hasty crossover ficlet in which Miss Marple is in someone else's fandom, being awesome. Then sit back and wait for the kudos to inexplicably roll in.

More seriously, something very nice happened during Non-Existent-and-Horrible-July, which was that someone asked to translate my ficlet So We Meet At Last (in which Miss Marple meets Dracula and it doesn't end well for the Count) into Russian. This was very exciting - I don't think anyone's ever asked me if they can do anything to any of my fics, and certainly not to translate one. I can't give you the link, because it was for a specific challenge on a Russian site, but the translator gave me a guest login, so I had the fun of seeing my fic in Russian (and putting all the comments into Google translate) and, as there was a link back to my original fic, I suddenly got about 20 extra kudos on it. Which means that my top two fics are now both Miss Marple crossover ficlets. Hence my joke. But wasn't that lovely?

1. violetcreme made lovely cover art for my House of Eliott Bea/Jack ficlet, which I don't think anyone's done before!

2. A very entertaining post I found in my meanderings about why Miss Marple is awesome. (Because obviously, she is. I just watched an old ITV Dracula in which Van Helsing was patronising to Joan Hickson as a fluttery old lady. It was awful and wrong.)

3. A Ficathon Walked Into A Bar has returned from the dead! Sign-ups can be found at intoabar or intoabar. I've been wanting to do it ever since I found out about it, but it was deceased by that time. And since the rules are pretty much "random crossover meeting in 500 words or more" I think even I can cope, since that's the kind of thing I write anyway.

( further waffling )

4. ... and so then I wrote a Miss Marple meets Dracula ficlet for fan_flashworks in revenge for the 1960s TV. Just to prove the point. :lol:

5. Anyway, it's open, and it should be fun. And just looking at the LJ version brought up a Chalet School fic I didn't know existed! I'm having a sort of craving for new Chalet School fic, which is because I am really bad still at reading anything offline that isn't a CS book, but I've read the whole lot (very slowly) twice in two years now and I can't do it again. I hope. Also because I'm miffed that lots of the fill-in books cost £80 on Amazon, which would be the ideal solution. *sigh* (What if I went to freudesheim and said "Let's have a ficathon!"? Do you think there is anybody left there? *sigh again*)

6. Also, thanks, LJ, I suddenly seem to have 6 extra loyalty icons appear in the last few days for reasons beyond my understanding, so now I need to re-upload my CS and HoE icons. I have already instantly used it to have at least one more sallymn masterpiece and G'Kar. (I don't know how fannish I will be about Babylon 5 yet, though I enjoyed it v much, but obviously my life would be incomplete without a G'Kar icon.) (I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining things! I know I had only one icon space left and was deliberating over what to use it for and whether to delete other things and then suddenly I had 7 spaces left. Or maybe this is an alternate universe with only very slight changes...)

7. I am reasonably sure I had something else to say, possibly something more sensible. Oh, yes. I am, for the time being, feeling a bit better again, at last. :-)

The ficlet meme is not as dead as I thought! I don't seem to be able to retrieve the one I thought of for lolmac or yet come up with anything for seriesfive (sorry!), but for what it's worth, I've now managed one for everyone else. \o/ And here goes (in two posts):

For lizzie_marie_23 who gave me the prompt: Miss Marple, sunset

Title: Sunset
Author: lost_spook
Rating: All ages
Word Count: 535
Characters/Pairings: Jane Marple, Raymond West, Joan West
Notes/Warnings: None.
Summary: Small details are so often what counts.

( Sunset )

(Um, yes. But hopefully it will be fairly amusing, anyway, even to people who aren't me.)

Just to show what I've been doing with my time this year, or something. You know me; this is not going to be entirely serious & I will endeavour not to be spoilery, even though this includes Blake. Plus, there will be a cute cat, I promise.

... And I don't know whether it makes it better or worse that the main part of this picspam only exists to justify the highly ridiculous mini-picspam at the end that I wound up with after making icons for naarmamo in August. Hmm...

Pics from Elizabeth R, Doctor Who, Midnight Is A Place, Sapphire & Steel, Blake's 7, Miss Marple & Press Gang. I managed to find an old DWM interview with him from 2003 and have used some bits from it that I thought were interesting/amusing.

Also, I realised at the beginning of this year that everything I'd seen him in, his characters didn't end well, so I went looking for things in which that didn't happen. So I've chalked up happy/unhappy endings (but not in a spoilery way). Indeed, a website I chanced on described him as a "Perennial player of gentle naive creatures with a delightful sing-song voice that invariably come to grief." (Although my main experience being DW, I found that he was just as likely to be the bad guy and come to grief deservedly as well.)

( There is probably no excuse for this )

Crossover meme fic. Please don't shoot me anyone, because I was meaning to type up the other two I have already written first, but with the editing of End Game stretching on this was as far as I got all week. It's just that I do realise I've now done all three of curuchamion's prompts. *cough* liked them all.

Title: Partners in Crime
Characters: Miss Marple, Major Hugo Darracott
Word count: 627
Summary: In which our two heroes tackle crime and each other in their own unique ways.

( Partners in Crime )

I love hunting for books and videos in charity shops.  You never know what you might find.  Yesterday I found a very old (1985) Miss Marple with Peter Davison in it for 99p.  What could I do?

Spoilers (if you can call it that after 23 years and however long since the book was written)

( A Pocketful of Rye )