Beyond the Roundels

34 icons made for the most recent round of iconthat, for ladies10in30, and fandom_stocking.

Teaser:


( Heroes, villains, and fallen princesses )

I wrote several things this year but my actual assignment was for calliopes_pen in Dracula (TV 1968):

The Poison Tree (27258 words) by lost_spook
Chapters: 7/7
Fandom: Dracula (TV 1968)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Jonathan Harker/Mina Harker, Count Dracula/Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker & John Seward, Jonathan Harker & John Seward, Jonathan Harker/Original Male Character(s)
Characters: Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker, John Seward, Mrs Weston, Mrs Perkins (Dracula TV 1968), Mrs Hoskins (Dracula TV 1968), Original Characters
Additional Tags: References to Mina Harker/Lucy Weston, Vampires, Hypnotism, Post-Canon, World War I, Victorian, Edwardian Period, Blood, Yuletide, Dark, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Summary: Dracula may have been defeated, but the future has never been less certain for Jonathan and Mina. Everything has changed, most especially the Harkers themselves…

I both enjoyed writing this a lot (despite surface dissimilarities, we clearly overlap on a lot of tropes and things, which made it particularly fun to do) and worried about it far too much! Par for the course for Yuletide, really, I suppose. The adaptation has a rather open, ambiguous ending (Mina is still showing vampiric influence, while we don't even know what sort of state Jonathan is left in), so it was really interesting to try and write one possibility of what might happen next. I planned it to be somewhere around 8,000-12,000 words - and then it more than doubled in size, taking me way outside my current comfort zone in what I can do without making myself ill. I regret nothing, though. Except that it doesn't have even more stuff calliopes_pen likes in it.

( Some ramblings about writing it )


( And some rambling thoughts on reading Dracula for it )


And I'll have to go and rest now, so I'll post the treats in another post later.



* The upshot of this is that now I want fic about the housekeepers. The housekeepers are great, even if it took me ages to get their actual names straight! Mrs Hopkins is not fazed by anything! (She works in an asylum; fair enough) and Mrs Perkins bosses Mrs Weston about all the time. And they're both tiny and fierce! (O, Network, when will you run to subtitles on your releases?)

** I have to say, The Woman in White must surely have been an influence - asylums, wicked counts, Laura and Marian and Lucy and Mina, mesmerism etc. even in addition to the Collins-esque epistolary/evidence-gathering format.

Because I finally got started on Ripper Street S4 (\o/ But I am only 1 ep in; don't spoil me) and THIS HAPPENED. (No, it was not that they shot Matthew Macfadyen in beautiful blue lighting with perfect matching tie; that happens a lot. It's one of the reasons I watch.) It was much better than that (but probably only if you are me):

( 50 year snap )


In other news, Yuletide progress continues and I'm behind deadline for my Fourth Doctor recs post (the two facts are not unrelated) which I thought was today. Readers, it was yesterday. I hope to have it posted by at least tomorrow.

[Regular flisters, this is just my annual far too long and incoherent Yuletide letter; feel free to wisely pass on by!]

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Firstly, you share a tiny fandom with me, so that makes you a person of taste and awesomeness as far as I'm concerned and I hope that you have fun writing for me.

I am a great believer in the story that you want to tell being the one that's going to be the most compelling to read, so please, write that story. If you are the sort of person who likes a concise letter and a free hand, just go for what you have in mind. All the extra details are for souls like me who want them. Do not attempt to give me everything below in one fic; you'd do yourself an injury. If anything seems contradictory, it's mostly because I like all sorts of different things at different times in different fandoms.

( Annual long flaily letter continues under here )