Beyond the Roundels

Chocolate Box author reveals have happened and I can now confess to my own fannish crimes (and know who was responsible for my lovely gifts, especially the main assignment - I don't think I've ever been quite so impatient to see who wrote my gift, which is cyphomandra, as it turns out. Do you suppose they'd mind if I camped outside their door and waited for them to Do It Again someday? Heh.)

It was good fun, and I'd like to do it again, although the closeness to Yuletide and fandom_stocking is a bit of a thing. OTOH, it genuinely is pretty laid back with a 300 word minimum, so... Still, I'm very glad I did it this time!

I was assigned to shopfront, who had requested three fandoms that I knew, although only one that I'd actually offered for that fandom/pairing. Ironically, then, I wrote a gift and a treat for those two other pairings and fell down on the matched one. Mainly because shopfront had requested Thirteen/Yaz and prompted Thirteen trying to manage some normal dates and I was immediately bunnied, because we all know how that would go. I did eventually, at the 11th hour, also manage to write out the tiny Bel/Lix ficlet (from The Hour) that I'd had planned for ages, because, well, Anna Chancellor and Romola Garai, really.)

Anyway, fic:

We'll Be Dating To the End of Time (1934 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Characters: Thirteenth Doctor, Yasmin Khan
Additional Tags: Humor, human-alien relations, Time Travel, Dating, The Doctor is hopeless at romance
Summary: The Doctor tries taking Yaz on some nice, calm, normal dates. It goes about exactly as well as you'd imagine.


Immoral Support (420 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Hour (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bel Rowley/Lix Storm
Characters: Bel Rowley, Lix Storm
Additional Tags: Ficlet
Summary: Bel winds up where she always does after a bad day; in the safest place she knows...

(And, yes, the title and the line is a Press Gang reference. It's hard not to sometimes.)

And shopfront leaves very enthusiastic comments so between two treats, an amazing main gift and a very nice recip, that was a pretty good exchange experience.

(Also, I'd just been thinking that I missed clocketpatch and their fic, and then saw the name as a recip in the Doctor Who category, and then next fic I read in that section was clearly a Clocket Seven & Ace fic, and I was right. Anyway, it's Clocket Seven & Ace Whofic, you should read it if you haven't already.)

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 )

Still attempting to make it through this year's collection! Have my next installment of recs:

( 17 recs in HIGNFY/HIst RPF, Adam Adamant Lives, Cadfael, Shakespeare, Diana Wynne Jones, The Hour, Libraries, Life, Malory Towers, Miss Marple, The Mummy, Northanger Abbey, and Sapphire & Steel )

1. Petition to save The Hour (you can find all the details here via the links). It's fast heading up to 13,000 and needs over 2000 more people, so, if anyone else feels like saving yet another excellent TV show from winding up with a never-resolved cliffhanger, please go there. (It's about a BBC current affairs TV show in the 1950s with Romola Garai, Ben Wishaw, Dominic West and Anna Chancellor and having just seen S1, I can tell you I don't want it to be left unfinished. It's another Kudos show as well - Spooks, Life on Mars etc.) Probably doomed to failure, but who knows? 15000 people might make a difference.



2. Richard Briers has died (1934-2013)

Some of the quotes from him on his illness, though... I don't have any difficulty imagining him saying them: "I was diagnosed five years ago and didn't think it would go quite as badly as it has. It's a bugger, but there it is. I used to love smoking." And: "It's totally my fault," he said. "So, I get very breathless, which is a pain in the backside. Trying to get upstairs... oh God, it's ridiculous. Of course, when you're bloody nearly 80 it's depressing, because you've had it anyway."