Beyond the Roundels

I continue recovering very slowly but at least pretty steadily - and my things are gradually getting out of boxes too. In the meantime, I thought I could probably manage to do the end of year meme, so here it is:

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

( Cut for length )

Picked up from a few people a little while ago, but then I was ill(er) again. I'm pretty sure I have done this once before, but not for years, so...

From your AO3 Works page, look at the tags and find the answers to these questions.

Current number of works on AO3: 711

1. Under what rating do you write most?

Ratings break down like this:

General Audiences (563)
Teen And Up Audiences (147)
Mature (Mature)

(I was curious for a minute as to what the mature one was and then remembered it had to be the EatD one with the German Generalmajor and the English Major General, and that's mainly for the suicide warning, but, er, the whole thing really.)

2. What are your top 3 fandoms?

Doctor Who (1963) (231)
Doctor Who (2005) (98) --> obv as this is all DW, plus also some BFA, and take away any tagged with both, so I got up the meta tag results within works and came up with DW = 293

Sapphire & Steel (88)
Blake's 7 (62)


I like my old time Brit TV SF? XD I need to get back to my B7 rewatch soon. I miss it when it's been so long since I've watched it or written it. Which explains a lot about the tags.


3. Which character do you write about most?

Silver (Sapphire & Steel) (55)

Followed closely by Sapphire (44) & Steel (42). That's what you get when your most prolific fandom has umpty million characters across 60+ years and various spin-offs and different media and my second has 4 main canonical characters, only 3 of whom turn up more than once in canon. (Kenny Phillips still shows up disproportionately at (29), which is because I once claimed him for 30ficlets. Claims are hard. Even if I love a character, after about 10 pieces in a row, I want to write about somebody else!)


4. What are the 3 top pairings you've written?

The top is actually OFC/OMC, which is not fandom-specific, so have the top four.

Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s) (11)
Elizabeth of York Queen of England/Henry VII of England (11)
Ruth Evershed/Harry Pearce (9)
Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart/Liz Shaw (9)

I suppose this could be correct. It doesn't feel correct, but I think that's because I always have a crisis when tagging Sapphire/Silver/Steel, because I know full well my definition of it mostly would count as gen for many people so I panic and wildly select either & or / or both or something. Otherwise I feel like that would beat 11. Although it could just be AO3's counting, which definitely used to be very off in these side-bars.

I didn't know I'd done that much Ruth/Harry, but there have been a few little ficlets over the years and I suppose they added up! I had a very intense Brig/Liz period ages ago, so that's no shocker at any rate. Most of my shipping is very much one or two and move on, with a few exceptions. *points*


5. What are the top 3 additional tags?

Ficlet (214)
Crossover (143)
Humor (126)

Not accurate at all, lol. /o\ I mean, I feel like I've been a lot less funny lately, and written a lot less prompt ficlets and a lot less crossovers, but me writing crossover crack ficlets played straight for prompts from the flist is a lot of my fannish life, it's true. No regrets. Even the Steed/Baldrick one. XD


The rest are:

Alternate Universe (68)
Meme (65)
Drabble (46)
Post-Canon (45)
Community: hc_bingo (42)
Fluff (30)
Flash Fic (30)

Which, yeah. The AU is largely the AU meme - I have done a lot of that one over the years! It's fun, though. Not done drabbles so much lately, though. And hc_bingo has closed down, alas. I'm really surprised Hurt/Comfort didn't make it in. Er, HOW did I write 42 works for hc_bingo but not then 42 works tagged Hurt/Comfort? AO3 counting or my failure to make it properly h/c enough to tag, but just enough to count? Tbf, that did happen a lot with that one, but... surely, given lots of Hurt/Comfort written outside the bingo, it should even out? I suspect foul play here...

I've not been posting or even keeping up with people so much because I've largely been wiped out for one reason or another or prioritising something else with the reduced summer PC time - sorry. This will continue for a little while yet, until it is eventually replaced by my usual slightly less flakeyness.


* The other week I managed some flash fic/scribblets for AU_gust (AU August) on tumblr. I've only managed to tidy up and post one of them since, & there are 2 others to follow once I tweak them a bit, as well as 1 more that I don't know if is worth proper posting & a drabble I still need to type up. But this used up my posting energy for now, so they can wait.

Anyway, in a shocking attempt at pandering to what might pass as popular demand among my works, I committed another Miss Marple + supernatural fic(let):

Tea on Sunday (572 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Jane Marple, Griselda Clement
Additional Tags: Ficlet, Alternate Universe, Witchcraft, AU-gust | August Writing Challenge, Community: allbingo, Community: 100_women, Community: 100fandoms, Miss Marple is a witch
Summary: Miss Marple's secret is out.


* In other writing, before summer got underway, I typed up the bulk of the longest continuous sequence I'm doing for the current arc at rainbowfic, and then ever since have been scraping away at finishing it and editing it, and I am nearly there, although I suspect it'll still take another week or two before I have the first section ready to post. (I knew this would happen, so I also started two shorter pieces, but one of them, which is more or less done, has just been even harder to edit because tiredness etc. and the other one is still stuck at only two paragraphs, so that plan went well. Summer brain is not up to much. That was why I had to silly no-pressure AU ficlets my way back to life and even then summer rudely and immediately interrupted all over again). But there has been writing of sorts even so.

(The long sequence was one of the very first bits of this arc that I drew up, which is very funny because I essentially set up a sort of grand house murder mystery affair except that then everything changed so much that now my main characters aren't bothering taking part in the murder bit so am not sure if it will read ok (hopefully when edited) or if I committed Worst Murder Mystery ever as a result. I think probably I will also write a note on the header when we get there saying that One Day I Will Come Back, yes, one day I will come back, until then all 2 or 3 of you should go forward in all your beliefs about how people shouldn't wave a murder mystery at you and then literally run away from it, and I will eventually demonstrate that what is going on is in fact an Apocalyptic Overarching Plot, so there. And edit, of course.)


* I am currently listening to: a 1989 BBC Radio adaptation of Wilkie Collins's No Name I was delighted to find, starring Sophie Thompson as Magdalen, Jack May (as Captain Wragge), Eleanor Bron (as Mrs Lecount) & Robin Ellis (as Captain Kirke). I'm going slowly, but have just started part 3. It's very good and they're making excellent use of the epistolary bits, which is where radio has an advantage over TV. Mrs Lecount and her sinister toad have just turned up and Eleanor Bron is obviously a v good choice.


* I have watched some things, which, aside from what I've already mentioned, and a ridiculous amount of TV detectives, includes these:

The Tribe (1998), The Halfway House (1944), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Admirable Crichton (1957), Creation (2009), Cause Celebre (1988) & Eye in the Sky (2015), all of which were either v good or worth talking about anyway. (Creation and Eye in the Sky have brought me very nearly to the end of my Jeremy Northam's viable CV, so I'm a little bit in mourning now; I suppose a new blorbo will come along in time. Talking of which, I found that the iPlayer had the BBC 1970s All Creatures on it, so finally got around to seeing Suzanne Neve's episode of it, which would be the one thing I would certainly have watched with her when I was a child to see if I had shadowy feelings and indeed, as soon as she appeared, before even I saw her, the set was suddenly Significant in the back of my head, so yeah. I think I can prove childhood imprinting on all my top faves and that's what the thing is about, and why even when I'm so ill they reach me in ways that other people, no matter how much I enjoy them in things, don't unfortunately.)

(Hopefully I will get to talk about some of them properly, but I am happy to attempt such talk in comments if wanted, although sense is not guaranteed, and it is true that at least one or two I watched in a fugue state that all I can say is, well, it was good and I watched it very slowly in bits and there we are, but, yes it was good /o\)


* Also random funny thing. My old housemate N lent me a DVD (!!) of The Residence (was not joking about the sheer amount of detectives watched this summer), which I enjoyed so much I recced it to my Dad. A couple of weeks later we had this conversation:

Dad: I've been watching that medical drama you recommended, but it's not that great, really, so I've stopped.

Me: ... Medical drama??

(It turned out he'd found The Resident on one of the back Freeview channels, so I emailed him a trailer of the 2025 Netflix detective show that I magically got lent on DVD as if it was 2015 or something. He found a pirate source and then lost it again, but he definitely liked what he watched so far a lot better than the Resident).

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.)

Thank you again to both edwardianspinsteraunt and WyvernQuill, who between them wrote my three amazing gifts! \o/ (I have read them now, and they were indeed just as wonderful as they looked.)

I haven't read more than halfway through the collection on mere first pickings, though, because while I have two things in the collection, I very nearly made it to three but failed on Christmas Eve, and spent the little energy of that kind I had trying to fix the third all week. It was at that sort of stage to drive me wild not to be able to do so. Anyway, for better or for worse, it is posted now, and I'll link to it here separately later, but it was for The Winslow Boy, for edwardianspinsteraunt.


I was assigned The Shadow of the Tower (!!) for misura, who had once written me a Madness treat for this canon and the same characters (Henry VII & John de la Pole Earl of Lincoln) which I have treasured ever since, so I was pretty delighted to be able to return the favour. I had this idea pretty much straight away, although it took a while to work out and be well enough to type up. I worried a bit over the ending (involving a slightly different take on a canonical death) and kept checking their DNWs (and each time, no, they still had not DNWed death, heh) and am so relieved that not only did they leave me a lovely comment before I even got to the collection on the 25th, but they absolutely got what I was going for in that section.

And thanks to persiflage_1 for the beta, as ever!

that strange unmerciful tyrant (2256 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Shadow of the Tower
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Henry VII of England & John de la Pole Earl of Lincoln, Henry VII of England/John de la Pole Earl of Lincoln
Characters: Henry VII of England, John de la Pole Earl of Lincoln
Additional Tags: Battle of Stoke, 15th Century, Loyalty, Rebellion, Trust Issues, Dreams, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, (that goes slightly differently), Episode: e04 The Crowning of Apes
Summary: John of Lincoln knows what he wants - the throne of England. His heart might have other ideas.


I also wanted to write some treats if I had time, maybe some ficlets for Madness, as there were a few requests I eyed up, especially The Winslow Boy (which along with the SotT request, was the other thing I'd have been most happy to get assigned to), and The Time Master trilogy maybe, or The Net (1995).


I did write TWB, but typed it up second - I knew if I didn't attempt The Net treat now I never would, while I was clearly going to write something for TWB sooner or later now. Anyway, so even though the very morning I typed it up I had decided that I simply couldn't do it, somehow nevertheless I wrote the first Jack/Angela fic for unhindered_dreams because the foe!yay needed to exist, and apparently I had to write it myself, dammit. ;-p

(Some of their other prompts were so funny, too, though. I think "Canon, but soulmates" made me laugh the hardest, because I'm not into soulmates as a rule, but "worst possible soulmate except yes actually in some ways they genuinely are" is amazing. As was "following your boyfriend's trail of dead bodies" even if canon is more "you can tell your boyfriend is following you because there's a trail of dead bodies behind you.")


it's the end of the world as we know it (4805 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Net (1995)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Angela Bennett/Jack Devlin (The Net 1995)
Characters: Angela Bennett (The Net 1995), Jack Devlin (The Net 1995)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, Dubious Consent, Mild Gore, Foe Yay, Enemies, enemies with benefits maybe?, Apocalypse, Swearing
Summary: The end of days happens while Jack and Angela are out at sea. Things go differently.

With many thanks to sovay for the beta and US pick!

(The irony of me and Zombie Apocalypse fic is that I don't like really like zombie things, but somehow I like writing Zombie Apocalypse AUs a lot anyway, even if they usually feature more biscuits and team bonding than zombies, so this was comparatively zombie-heavy for me, but that's not saying much, lol.)


The one downside of my plans, other than not quite making it and exhausting myself at the same time (but what else is new) was that, due to foolishly writing treats that involved two different fictional Jeremy Northams, while waiting for Treat #1, I was, oh, maybe I could start on Treat #2 and then my brain for one moment tried to put Jack Devlin and Sir Robert Morton in the same place and broke into distressed pieces, so I took the wiser course of having a rest instead.

Pretty much the last thing I need right now is another bingo, but this idea from lyricaltitles was such a nice one I couldn't resist! There's no penalties, posting is from Sept-Dec, so maybe I can tie it into no_true_pair, and origfic is allowed, so I can always just use my rainbowfic entries. (You have to use a lyric from a song as specified in the prompt as the title for your fic. Min. 100 words.)

90's song	Nursery rhyme	Meme song	Angry song	Lyric with "love" or "hate"
Pre-1900 song	Romantic song	Last line of a song	Breakup song	00's song
War song	Song in a language other than English	FREE SPACE	Folk song	Lyric with "sleep" or "wake"
Pre-1950's song	Song with a title six or more words long	Chart-topper	80's song	Lyric with "red" "green" or "blue"
Fast song	First line of a song	Lyric with "remember" or "forget"	Song with a color in the title	Line from the chorus

It's been warm on and off for a few days, so that's made things difficult and cut down online time (still not about to electrocute myself to talk to you all) and I had several things I wanted to post and now they're lining up alarmingly. I don't want to put them all in one post, so here's a couple of fannish things to start off with:

1. When I linked to Sesskasays's reaction to Earthshock the other week, I mentioned that my main New Who reactor was getting close to Fish Fingers and Custard, and I just want to report that she enjoyed it! \o/ (JulesReacts; I like her reactions so far, and she's very unspoiled, so I'm really happy that she seems to be taking to Eleven so positively. I'm not surprised, but she was heartbroken over losing Ten and Donna, so I did worry. She also loved the little post-ep minisode.)


Talking of Sesska's reactions, she is now onto Arc of Infinity and her combo of New Who & some general show knowledge vs being very unspoiled for Classic Who delivered a pretty amusing reaction when she spotted Colin Baker straight away, but was still hoping Five and Nyssa would have a proper discussion about Tegan leaving. XD


2. no_true_pair's prompts are out! You can still sign up, though. You just need to do it before you look at the prompt post.

I had some fun results - I signed up with a Doctor Who list, a crossover list and a Starfall (OC) list. I didn't really know who to put with the latter, so it's not as good, but there's still a little thread that's come of it that I think I can pull at, so that's hopeful. But I managed to come up with quite a fun crossover list & a nice DW one. Idk if I can actually post anything, but I think I can at least write some things in rough and see. It was a cheering thing that helped me get through yesterday anyway, and it was worth it for that alone.

(I'll probably post them, or some of them, but the downside of being greedy enough to sign up with multiple lists is that it takes a while to add all the names in to the list if I want to show you.)

1. We have another trailer!



(Still generally crossing my everything. I don't trust RTD any more but... it does look shiny still!)


2. In gifmaking, I did make some more s1 gifs of Wish Me Luck and actually did some Liz and Matty ones as well as a bit more Colin:

( Hugging gifs )


3. I did actually write stuff for no_true_pair, so that was good, but only original (rainbowfic). I had ideas for that for the first 3 days, and then hoped to write 1-2 ficlets for the fannish prompts for the last couple, but I just wasn't feeling up to writing this week so much, so it didn't happen. I think the best thing for me to do is to ask for some more 500 Prompts from people again soon maybe. <3 But I did write things! So that was fun. (I don't really think I've found a good fannish strategy for the mini-round; the more random things tend to work better in the larger round.)


4. Other stuff I have forgotten? Please insert topic of interest here. ;-p

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

( Cut for length )

[Another post I (mostly) made earlier!]

And, as ever, the writing meme for the year. (Last year's post is here.)

( Cut for length )

It's that time of the year again! Last year's post is here.

( Cut for the annual meme/self-fulfilling prophecy )

A variation of several AO3 memes I haven't seen before, ganked from various people on my flist. Not that I've actually finished the Frankenstein meme yet, but I'll get back to that presently:

( Cut for memeage )