Beyond the Roundels

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.

What better than a quick and daft AO3 meme for a small distraction? I swiped this one from astrogirl.

Rules: give us the links to your fics with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the fewest words.

Most hits: Not Bad For A First Attempt (G, 200 words, The Convenient Marriage) with 4,143 hits.

I'm never absolutely sure if this hit count is genuine or if it's one of the tiny handful of works that got hit by that weird hit-count bug ages ago (the actual top on my stats definitely is, so I always have to ignore it), but this one has similar kudos numbers to its nearest neighbours in the stats, so I think it's genuine. Anyway, I wrote this double drabble very hastily because one time early on in my AO3 wrangling days, back when you could do this, I accidentally canonised Heyer's The Convenient Marriage and then realised it had no works. So I wrote a quick post-canon double drabble and voila! It's continued to get a silly amount of hits ever since.


2nd most kudosed: it's the rain that will strengthen your soul (Teen, 10,926 words. Star Wars, Obi-Wan/Padme, post- RotS Padme Lives AU, for Space Swap 2020.) - Fast catching up on Miss Marple (yes, don't worry, she's still top for now), is this one, which I would agree, is probably the best of that whole epic SW Prequels patch I went through in 2020. It was the best fic to write in Lockdown, a lovely gift to be able to give, and obv I can see faults, but still. I'm happy with this.


3rd most comment threads: By the Book (Original, Teen, 5863 words, Demon/Librarian, for Het Swap 2018.) (Top most is still Miss Marple here too.)

Aww, so delighted that people still like this one. It is one of the things I remain the most pleased with, and it's such a compliment when it's Original fic with no particular reason to pull people in outside of the original exchange. I suppose people might be reading through the Libraries tag? Anyway, every so often people still find it. <3


4th most bookmarks: i love the rose both red and white (Teen, 8070 words, Shadow of the Tower, Henry VII/Elizabeth of York, 5 times canon divergence, for Yuletide 2018.) (Miss Marple is no longer top here.) I'm also pretty happy with this one, barring the fact that unfortunately I don't think the recip liked it, which does make me feel guilty about still otherwise being pleased with it. At least it was only a treat!


Most words: UNIT: Strange Weapons ( Teen, 34,661 words. DW, Winifred Bambera, Colonel Crichton, Sarah Jane Smith, OCs.)

Leaving out collections, this is the longest single work, although as it's one of only 2 of the 1980s UNIT stories I've actually transferred over to AO3, it feels fake here as the longest - there were two of that series that were twice as long again, and more. Of 'real' works - i.e. written since I actually had an AO3 account, it's really The Poison Tree (27,259 words for Dracula 1968 for Yuletide 2016.)


Shortest: I have a whole bunch of drabbles, which were all 100 words exactly in Word back in the day, so I reject the notion that any of them are actually shorter, but there are two AO3 puts (wrongly) at 98 - Reprise (DW, Jo Grant/Benton, which was part of a joke series of random AU marriages - i.e. just as random as the characters' actual marriages, so...) and Get to the Point (Four & Leela, for dw100 back in the day.)

I actually managed to do this meme this year! I haven't got more than partway through it since about 2021, which I do regret, but here we are, I've been chipping away at this for a week or so:

Your main fandom of the year?:

Doctor Who, as ever. Not that I don't run off to flail at least briefly about many other deeply obscure things every other day, communicating my enthusiasms to the distant and patient sympathy of the flist by means of semaphore or something, but that only feels fannish if someone responds, and that can't be expected very often.


( Cut for length of me wittering about TV, film, audio & books under here )

This was going around, so I said baa like the good meme sheep I haven't been for ages:

TV questions: pick your five favourite TV shows (in no particular order) and answer the following questions. Don’t cheat!
1. Doctor Who
2. Blake's 7
3. Sapphire & Steel
4. Spooks
5. Once Upon a Time

( 19 Questions )

I picked this up from scifirenegade, and apparently it's taken me a month to answer the last couple of questions and tidy it up, so most of this I wrote in July. Also, I was all: yay! A film meme, and I've actually watched good films recently, so I shall not have to resort to all the very weird things I watched as a teenager... and then every other answer was still one of those things. (I'm so sorry. My A-Level tutors have a lot to answer for.)


( Cut for a very long set of questions )

The usual writing meme for the year. (Last year's post is here.)

( Cut for length )

The second part of the meme!

1. Uljabaan (WtOVPIC)
2. Katrina Lyons (WtoVPIC)
3. Servalan (B7)
4. Silver (S&S)
5. Twelfth Doctor (DW)
6. Ezekiel Jones (The Librarians)
7. Hercule Poirot
8. Robin (BBC Ghosts)
9. The Cat (Red Dwarf)
10. G'kar (B5)
11. Death (Discworld)
12. Lucy Greenwood (Craddock & Co)
13. Orac (B7)
14. John Seward (Drac 1968)
15. Zari (Legends of Tomorrow)

( Cut for more memeish nonsense )

astrogirl did this and, as ever, how can I possibly resist being a meme sheep?

1) Make a list of fifteen characters first, and keep it to yourself for the moment.

2) Ask your f-list to post questions in the comments. For example: "One, nine, and fifteen are chosen by a prophecy to save the world from four. Do they succeed?", "Under what circumstances might five and fourteen fall in love?", "Which character on the list would you most want on your side in a zombie invasion?"

3) After your f-list has stopped asking questions, round them up and answer them using the fifteen characters you selected beforehand, then post them.

I have been so bad at these forever, but I tentatively tried this one on tumblr and it's been working! So, if you want to comment with a ship (or two characters, plenty of these could as easily be platonic as romantic) + kiss no, I shall do my best to oblige in the next week or so:

( List of kisses here )

As ever, any fandom I know, or you think I know - just give me a couple to choose from, or if I don't know it/can't do it I'll let you choose again. ♥

Over on tumblr, I have done: Six/Charley, Silver/Sapphire, Eight & Lucie, Six/Romana & will do Silver/Copper and Eight/Charley by tonight I hope, so not those! (Also: other fandoms than DW are available! Especially as I'm trying to flex my Yule-muscles as it were...)

(I'll link those ficlets here presently, probably once I've tidied them up and popped them over on AO3.)

* First off, no_true_pair is now open for sign-ups! \0/ (I'm still trying to decide who to put on my lists. Only 4 characters in a set!! *runs around in circles*)


* Secondly, Marie-Clare has just started watching sapphire and Steel over on her YouTube channel ("Is this going to be scary?" she asked about halfway through. XD) Anyway, if anyone else would like to see her reaction, there it is!

---

And now for a meme! I picked this up via lirazel - List 8 television shows that you would show someone to get to know you.

Which sounded like fun, although with the necessary caveat that I don't think anybody who isn't me should watch ALL of these, which probably tells you all you really need to know about me anyway. This list is 100% true and I would rec all of the things on it to at least somebody round here, but I don't think it'd make the best watchlist! XD


1. Doctor Who - tl;dr - just watch DW. Bits from all of it. Whatever you like. DW has been just about every kind of show in turn. It's been my first and foremost and sometimes only fannish love since I was 11 and I watched the last ten minutes of The Happiness Patrol and found out that sometimes one show can embrace at the same moment killing Bertie Bassett and reflecting that happiness and sadness are two sides of the same coin. (You can't have true happiness without sadness, because you can have neither without love.) And that blue is a great colour.

I learned that the most extraordinary things begin in the most mundane places, that we're all bigger on the inside really. It's about true friendship (found in unlikely people) across space and time, about imagination and stories - all kinds - and facing your fears and the monsters they shape themselves into; the importance of free will (it's not an illusion after all, do i have the right?), that evil must and can be fought; that change is hard but everything must evolve in the end. There's always good in it, too (even if nobody likes it when you redecorate). No matter how serious you are about what you do, you don't necessarily have to be serious about how you do it. There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. It's better to travel hopefully than arrive. Take the long way round. All of time and space, where do you want to start?

And there's at least one episode or serial or audio or comic or book or Doctor or era to please everyone; and nobody is pleased by all of it.

My most formative bits are probably (inevitably) Seven & Ace, and the first season in 1963, and Robots of Death and Vengeance on Varos and the Fifth Doctor's era, but then there's season 7 (old who), and episodes like Hide and Listen and The Day of the Doctor, and The War Games (which I watched rented out from Aberystwyth Library - 3 day loan - in installments in two days, gripped), and honestly, the point is, you should watch whatever till you find your bits, because randomness and choice and freewill and sometimes being quite silly is the order of the day.


2. Enemy at the Door - it represents history like I studied it, it is TV that is shaped around characters, and it shows you what a librarian actually does, when Miss Brown risks her life for a professional code of conduct that I shared, too, and it was a series that gets how it feels to be trapped through circumstances outside your control. I felt like someone had made this specially for me, weirdly, given that I didn't even want to watch it because I didn't think it'd be my thing.


3. Spooks - my first grown up fannish love, with snarky pretty tragic spies and also RUTH EVERSHED. If you're going to understand me, you need to watch Ruth. Also I love tragedy and characters dying when I'm in the right mood. It helps if it's snarky and ironic tragedy because you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Plus, it's important to know how to kill people with forks and disarm a bomb in your microwave, and the key is in the things that are never said.


4. Shadow of the Tower - because wordy, theatrical historical old time drama that wants to be shakespeare is my thing. also it is the only way anyone can understand my James Maxwell thing. Not that you necessarily will. But SotT does at least make it more explicable than anything else if you can sit through it. Which, tbf, you might not be able to, but. I have. At least ten whole times and probably more. It's awesome really. ;-p


5. Sapphire and Steel. I'm weird, how weird am I? Also you will need to meet Silver and that I think the most perfect relationship is between three mysterious non-human beings who pretty certainly will be doing something that isn't sex when they're together, whatever it might be. I think that's wonderful.


6. Once Upon a Time - for fantasy, my absolute love of fandom crossovers - this whole show is a giant crossover - my ridiculous sense of humour (this show frequently shares it), for a female-led show that also has sword-fighting and dragons and pirates and curses and magic, and for Regina (covering my love of evil ladies who know how to dress + my evident love of grudgingly reformed evil ladies) and also, from s7, Alice, whose story I think resonates with quite a few people, but she's another rare character who genuinely knows what it is to be isolated and trapped.


7. Hinterland (Y Gwyll, but since I watched Hinterland, it has to be that version). Because of Aber. To understand me, Aberystwyth, where I went to uni is important. Hinterland does not necessarily reflect Aber properly because it never goes up Penglais Hill, but it does show a lot of the reasons why I'll always love it. Plus, Wales and Welsh and Mared, and I should have at least one detective show to be representative. (Even if my general taste is more Golden Age/Cosy than this.)


8. Dracula (1968). I couldn't decide at this point, so I went for this because it was the shortest of those vying for the last spot! This has a lot of my favourite old telly people in at once, it is very iddy for me and it taught me where the line lies between the creepy things I do like (often very much) and most horror (which I don't), which is basically that I like a bit of old fashioned (usually historically set) Gothic horror, and Dracula-esque vampires, too. Plus, fainting men, always a plus. You can also experience my sadness at tragic fake hair, which clearly is important.


It is very weird to me that I didn't include B7 and Press Gang in particular, but DW + Spooks = B7 (as I was told when someone who also liked both of those recced it to me) and DW also has Steven Moffat. Even if probably not quite as good as in PG and a list without Lynda Day is probably not quite right.) I did very nearly go for Survivors in the last spot, because even if it also made me wild at times, it was great, and I really really appreciate that it went full steam on asking all the hard questions. EatD doubled for Public Eye and Mr Palfrey. But mainly DW has everything, really. Nothing more is truly needed in this context.

I will try and do a proper update soon, but in the meantime I have been quietly managing some fic in between rl stuff and I have a couple nearly done. But first here is a quick ficlet from the Reverse Writing Meme I did a while back on tumblr, this one for the prompt "Regina & Snow - Minor illness," one of those given me by romanajo123, and also for hc_bingo square "Taking care of somebody."

Nursing a Chill (686 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Evil Queen | Regina Mills & Snow White | Mary Margaret Blanchard
Characters: Evil Queen | Regina Mills, Snow White | Mary Margaret Blanchard
Additional Tags: Ficlet, Meme, Murderous Thoughts, Illnesses, Hurt/Comfort, Community: hc_bingo, Canon-Typical Behavior, Pre-Canon, The Enchanted Forest (Once Upon a Time), Regina being the evil stepmother and fantasising about harming snow, but not actually doing anything (yet), Angst, Dark, Missing Scene
Summary: It’s not in Regina’s interests for Snow to die. Not yet. Not like this.

Memed from nostalgia: Tell the world one (1) fact/anecdote/secret/etc about each of the last ten (or whatever) things you wrote.

( Secrets under here. Also I really have not written much this year so far. I got right back to August with this... )

Thanks everyone for all the questions! Here's the first round of answers:

1. Regina Mills (OUaT)
2. Jenkins (The Librarians)
3. Rumplestiltskin (OUaT)
4. Silver (S&S)
5. Twelfth Doctor (DW)
6. John Seward (1968 Dracula)
7. Death (Discworld)
8. Holly (Red Dwarf)
9. Uljabaan (WtOVPIC)
10. Padme Amidala (SW)
11. Charley Pollard (DW)
12. Jenna Stannis (B7)
13. Lynda Day (PG)
14. Michael (Good Place)
15. Carolyn Knapp-Shappey (Cabin Pressure)

( The results under here )