pedanther

Inside Job, my random book for January, is one of an ebook bundle of Subterranean Press chapbooks I got a while back. It has a striking and atmospheric cover that completely fails to convey the tone of the contents; if I'd known it was a comedy, I might have skipped it, because historically I have not got on with Connie Willis's comedies. I didn't get on with this one, either; there's potential in the premise of a professional skeptic and debunker being forced to come to terms with two apparent impossibilities, but Willis's approach didn't work for me.

I also read a Bony novel, The Bachelors of Broken Hill, which I have mixed feelings about, and have started reading Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.

The annual Three Sentence Ficathon is on at

threesentenceficathon. I have consequently written six sentences of fic already this year, which is more than I wrote in all of 2024. (It might actually be seven sentences: I had to jam two sentences together to fit one of my responses into three sentences, and the result just doesn't flow right and bothers me every time I look at it. I'm thinking of changing it back to four sentences when I put it on AO3, if I get around to doing that.)

Board game club has started up again for the year. This week I played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong (I was the murderer twice, and got caught very quickly the first time but managed to eliminate the inconvenient witness and win the round the second time) and Mayan Curse (which I enjoyed and would like to play again, though I'm iffy about the way it uses some old-fashioned tropes).

I've signed up for a free trial subscription to AVCX, an online crossword thing that publishes a few new crosswords each week. I heard about it independently in two different places recently (one of the compilers was a guest on the Lateral podcast, and it also got plugged on a puzzle-related Youtube channel I follow), so I decided to take that as a sign to check it out. I'm enjoying the puzzles so far, and have been finding them to be at a satisfactory level of difficulty. (Not counting this week's cryptic crossword, which I've only got about three answers on so far because I've forgotten most of what I used to know about how cryptic clues work and haven't got around to brushing up yet. And I seem to recall I did better at cryptics when they were on paper and I could doodle possible solutions in the margins.)

Dance rehearsals have started for Guys and Dolls. I've had an easy time of it so far; my character moves around in time to the music, but doesn't do anything that rises to the level of Dancing.

I spent the entire week continuing to not play XCOM 2. I did occasionally find myself thinking that my mental state had improved and maybe I could have another go at it, but usually there was something I wanted to get out of the way first, or it was late enough in the evening to be too late to be starting a new campaign.

Memed from

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

I will also be using thisbluespirit's addendum: since the whole point of meme flash fic is writing fast rather than thinking too hard, I can't say there would be much to tell, so I will count fic (of whatever length) but not flash fic, unless I do have something to say about them.

( Read more... )

Stats

List of Completed Fic

Like falling off a log, only perpendicular (Good Omens, G, 136 words) for believerindaydreams in a five-sentence prompting meme

You'd Swear The Dice Were Doing It On Purpose (Marvel Cinematic Universe, G, 62 words) for WingedFlight in the Three Sentence Ficathon

The Limericks of the Ancient Mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, G, 271 words) for leecetheartist

Total number: 3

Total word count: 469

( Read more... )

(via

thisbluespirit)

Stats

List of Completed Fic
The Phantom Dennis of the Opera (Angel: The Series x The Phantom of the Opera fusion, G, 80 words) for thenewbuzzwuzz in Three Sentence Ficathon

The Continuation of Diplomacy by Other Means (Marvel Cinematic Universe, G, 182 words) for sideways in Three Sentence Ficathon

Three Sentences About Susan (Doctor Who and/or Narnia, G, 101 words) for thetransintransgenic in Three Sentence Ficathon

Don't Let the Pigeon Write a Commentfic! (Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, G, 19 words) for anonymous on Three Sentence Ficathon

Assemble (Marvel Cinematic Universe, G, 147 words) for fleetsparrow in Three Sentence Ficathon

A Couple of Letters Can Make a Lot of Difference (Narnia x undisclosed crossover, G, 103 words) for anonymous in Three Sentence Ficathon

Mightier Than the Bird (Discworld x Untitled Goose Game crossover, G, 64 words) for siver in Three Sentence Ficathon

Today is the feast day of St. Peter of Thorkelston (The Hidden Almanac x The Monkees crossover, G, 165 words) for violsva in Three Sentence Ficathon

Professional Standards (Batman, G, 100 words) for conuly in Three Sentence Ficathon

Total number: 9

Total word count: 1,064

( Read more... )

. Apart from the regular gaming group meet-ups, I've also been drawn into a smaller group who meet sometimes on weekends to play the kind of board games that take hours to get through and so don't usually get brought out at the more casual meet-ups. Among other things, that's meant I recently got a chance to play Fury of Dracula again for the first time in years. I played Dracula, and I started well but the hunters found my trail just as I was about to slip through their cordon and get away into the area they'd already searched, and after that I never quite managed to shake them off until they eventually cornered me in Madrid. Everybody had a good time, so perhaps it won't be years again before I next play.

. 'Tis the season to look wistfully at fic exchange sign-ups and then decide not to get involved. Lately I've been particularly wistful about Remix Revival (which I enjoyed a lot the first time I did it, but I'd feel weird doing it again when I haven't written anything else substantial in the interim) and FEAR Buddies, where instead of matching on people to write fics for it matches on people who need cheerleading/motivation to finish a fic they were already planning to do. That one seemed like something that would be useful, and where I could be useful, but signing up would have involved, like, figuring out what kind of motivation I need and writing it down and stuff. I'd sign up for a lot more exchanges if the sign-up forms could read my mind and make these sorts of decisions for me.

. I've just finished re-reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It's the first time I've re-read them all the way through since before the Hobbit movies came out, so I spent quite a bit of time noticing differences between the books and the adaptations. One thing that struck me particularly this time through is about travel times; in the adaptations, journeys tend to be "travel montage of indeterminate length" or "cut to them arriving", but in the books Tolkien always gives a definite idea of how long a journey took, so there's more of an impression of how big the land is and how far apart things are. There are places in the movies where it seems like the characters are getting somewhere the same day but in the books it's several days travel, or in the movies it seems like a few days but in the book it's weeks.

. Another thing I've read recently is "All Systems Red", the first novella in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, which has been on my to-read pile for ages but I never got around to before. Now I have a decision to make, because the second book in the series is significantly more expensive (maybe it's a full novel? I'm not sure), but the current wait time on the library system's copy is two months.

. I've occasionally noted the progress of the local paper's rerun of the Modesty Blaise comic strip, so for completeness there is one more development to note. (This actually happened a couple of months ago, but I didn't hear about it at the time because I stopped reading paper newspapers during the coronavirus restrictions and haven't restarted.) It's not carrying the strip any more, having decided that some of what passed as acceptable when the strip originally ran is no longer suitable for a family newspaper. Looking back, it's not exactly that I was unaware of the strip's shortcomings, but I never really thought about it because it was such a familiar presence; I might have gone "well, it was written fifty years ago" but I never got from there to ask the question "so why is it being given space here and now?". Apparently whoever was responsible for the content of the comics page was in a similar headspace, at least until the rerun got up to the story set in the Australian outback, at which point the problem started hitting close to home and the question was forcefully received from multiple directions and received the only possible answer.

Over on

fictional_fans, a discussion post asked: What fanwork do you most wish you had finished and posted that you haven't (and let's face it, probably won't anytime soon?)

After consideration, I came up with a top three:

* Back in the day, when The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was new and everybody was coming up with League rosters from different eras, mine was a retro-futuristic team based around fictional visions of life on the cusp of the year 2000. Dan Dare was in it, and John Connor, with Susan Calvin and Umataro Tenma providing technical support. The elderly mentor character was from Nineteen Eighty-Four, because even though it fell short of the target by a decade or so I felt like it deserved a nod, and because I was going to have fun seeing how long I could make it look like the mentor character was Winston before it turned out it was actually Julia. My favorite development was when I realised that Stephen Byerley, from the Susan Calvin series, was born within a year of Tobio Tenma, which meant that if Dr. Tenma brought his family over to America when he joined forces with the League I could have Tobio and Stephen be childhood friends and amuse myself enormously by never, ever letting on whether the fic was set before or after Tobio's car accident.

* When Pacific Rim came out, I was also reading Girl Genius, which meant I had two fandoms that involved heroes fighting monsters with mad-science creations called "jaegers". As a result, I spent a bunch of time doing world-building for a Girl Genius fic with the premise of Bill & Barry Heterodyne inventing the Pacific Rim type of jaeger, an enormous combat robot that can only be powered by the combined brain waves of two people who trust each other implicitly. (In my notes, a character observes that given the world Bill & Barry live in -- where mad science runs rampant, and so do conspiracy and mistrust -- their real achievement wasn't building the jaegers but finding people to pilot them.) I had two ideas for turning this into an actual story: one was about Bill's daughter Agatha rediscovering the jaegers and running up against the pilot problem, and the other was a tale of the jaegers in their prime, as recounted by Theo DuMedd (which would have been fun, because in canon he's been known to tell Heterodyne tales that are almost completely made up, so I could have done the entire story and left it ambiguous about whether it was an AU or not).

* Years ago, I read a Doctor Who AU fic in which the Doctor gets talked out of running away from Gallifrey and instead becomes a respectable Time Lord and eventually Lord President, and it immediately gave me a plot bunny for a story set after his death, in which his granddaughter starts learning about his rebellious past that she'd never known of before, and ends up leaving Gallifrey herself to fill the Doctor-shaped hole in the universe. (I also had partial notes for a sequel showing how "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" went down in this timeline.) I never got it into a shape I was happy with -- I did complete a draft, but it was just two characters explaining the premise to each other for the benefit of the reader, so I scrubbed it and tried again -- and then the revived series kept dropping new information about the Doctor's early life that meant I had to keep rejiggering things. It actually absorbed "The Doctor's Wife" pretty well, and I think ended up richer for it, but the new revelations in the most recent season put me pretty much back at square one and I don't know if I've got the energy to try and rebuild it again.

. I wrote something! In fact I have now written several things, all thanks to the 3 Sentence Ficathon. They might be hard to find amongst all the action on the ficathon itself, so I've started copying them over to my AO3 archive.

. Auditions have happened for this year's musical, which is to be Hello Dolly!. Now we're waiting to find out what the results are. In the past few years, I've usually had a solid idea which role I'm going to get in the musical, because the club's pool of male talent for musicals is not large and most of the people in it have particular character types that they gravitate toward. In the case of Hello Dolly!, I don't know the show well enough to have a firm opinion, and the director said at the audition that she has me in mind for a couple of roles and was keeping her options open until she saw who else was available.

. I went to see Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi's new movie, and I'm glad I did; it's an experience I would not want to have missed.

(One of the reasons I considered not going is that I'm susceptible to getting ferocious second-hand embarrassment on behalf of fictional characters, so I'm always very cautious about comedies with the premise "protagonist talks to someone nobody else can see or hear"; I'm pleased to be able to report that Jojo Rabbit doesn't go in that direction and nothing in it set me off.)

. In the foreword to her most recent book, Lois McMaster Bujold talks a bit about her writing process. One thing she says that struck me, and gives me hope for my own writing, is that she starts by accumulating ideas and for a novel can have as many as fifty pages of notes before she knows enough about the story to begin writing the actual words.

. One of my relatives has acquired a new kitten named Ivy, who is adorable and very friendly. I forget whether she was always named after the comic book character Poison Ivy, or if that was something my relative decided retroactively upon acquisition, but in any case I find it an appropriate name because if I let her come and nuzzle me I itch for the rest of the day. Totally worth it.

I was poking nostalgically through old files and came across my drafts for "Old and Young Together", the fic about Rey and Luke that I wrote for the Star Wars Rolling Remix after The Force Awakens came out. The drafts all still had the details in the final scene that I ended up deciding to take out at the last minute to reduce the chances of it being contradicted by the sequel that was about to come out, which was cowardly -- and also, as it turned out, entirely ineffective, because all the details I took out were fine and it was the ones I left in that have been contradicted.

I wish now that I'd left those details in; they gave more texture to the scene, and I never did find a good replacement for what would have been the closing dialogue exchange, which comes after Rey recalls the folk tale about an entire village working together to solve a problem, "old and young together":

BB-8 remarks that between Luke and Rey they already have old and young together, without needing other people.
"No, I don't think that's true," says Luke. "If there's one thing I've learned, it's that we always need other people."

I don't usually make any significant inroads into the Yuletide collection before reveals, but this year I was in need of distraction.

( Part one: The Big Episodic Crossovers: 2 works, 19 fandoms )

( Part two: Everything Else: 14 works, 11 fandoms )

. The Rep Club's Christmas show opens this week. I'm running lighting and sound. I don't recall off the top of my head if it's the largest and most complicated show I've ever run lighting and sound for, but it's certainly the largest and most complicated one I've done recently. The night after the first dress rehearsal, I had a stress dream in which everybody got eaten by zombies and then I forgot to pack for an important trip (in that order).

. I've finished clearing out the pigeon nesting site and other clutter in the garage, and am spending a few days making noises at random times and other stratagems to convince the pigeons that it's not a good place to hang out. Once they've got the idea, I look forward to being able to store stuff in there without it getting decorated by pigeon droppings.

(While I was waiting for the baby pigeons to grow old enough to leave the nest, I had some interestingly ambivalent feelings about them. Fuzzy baby pigeons are a miracle of nature that made my heart warm when I thought of them, but at the same time I would prefer them to go and be miracles of nature somewhere where their family won't be crapping on my stuff.)

. At gaming group this month, I've played Dungeon Busters, Custom Heroes, and Betrayal Legacy.

. On homeward leg of the Globe trip, I listened to the audio book of Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks, the first official Doctor Who tie-in novel. I first read it years ago and enjoyed it, especially the bits that expanded on what was on screen; I didn't enjoy it so much this time, because parts of it are very much of their time. Ian has some moments of taking it for granted that women are the weaker sex that needs to be protected, and everybody, including the Doctor, is completely on board with the idea that the Daleks must be evil because they're ugly and the Thals must be good because they're beautiful. There's also a weird bit near the beginning where Ian, a non-smoker in the TV series, lights a cigarette to settle his nerves; it doesn't help that it's fairly obviously happening to set up the next bit of the plot, and Ian never so much as mentions cigarettes again for the rest of the novel.

. Here's a delightful Star Wars sequel trilogy fic that more people should get to appreciate before it inevitably gets stomped on by Episode IX:

a gate to many wonders (3643 words) by melannen

In which Luke Skywalker does his first manifestation as a Force ghost, and there's some interesting thoughts about what it actually means to be a Force ghost, and also the first person he meets is the last person he was expecting.

(memed from

thisbluespirit, who did it properly, unlike what I'm about to do)

This is probably going to be very short this year, because I have only one completed fic, my contribution to this year's Remix Revival.

It's still going under a cut, because the fic I remixed had strong language in it, including the title and summary, and so does the remix.

( Read more... )

remixrevival has gone live, and there's some good stuff in there.

One of my cracky meme ficlets got picked and expanded into a full story with some great lines:

Pedaling a Mile in Someone Else's Shoes (The Extra Meaty Remix) (3302 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sixth Doctor, Melanie Bush
Additional Tags: Bodyswap, Remix
Summary: The Sixth Doctor and Mel, swapping bodies and eating burgers.

(I have also heard from the person whose work I remixed that they were pleased with the result, which was an unspeakable relief.)

Of the works that had nothing to do with me at either end, here is one I particularly liked:

the pretty birds have flown (the bird in the hand remix) (4842 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Thor (Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jane Foster/Thor, Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Sif (Marvel)
Characters: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie (Marvel), Jane Foster, Sif (Marvel), Thor (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Canon character deaths
Summary: “What’s an apocalypse?” Caroline asked, looking up from where she was sharing her pop-tart with the dog.

It's set in a slightly AU version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe during Infinity War -- 'ware spoilers, therefore, and assume the usual content warnings -- and as you might be able to tell from the tags has a focus on the female characters. My favourite sentence is the one about ballet, but it's all good.

1. I did end up signing up for Remix Revival, and assignments are now out, so now I'm at the (presumably traditional) next step of staring in dismay at my assigned recipient's fic and being intimidated by how good it is.

2. At gaming group last week, I played games of Cards Against Humanity (still don't like the actual game at all, but had fun playing it because of who I was playing with), Magic: The Gathering (was tired and rusty, and got squished quickly), and Skull (still not much good at it, still having enormous fun playing regardless).

3. Having failed to get cast in How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse (which has a very small number of roles, and I will happily admit that the people who got them were at least as well suited as me), I am instead working on the lighting and sound. It's the first time I've been lighting designer on a production (as opposed to working under someone else's instruction) and I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out.

4. We had the AGM for the brass band recently. For the last year, I've been the vice president of the committee, and found myself fairly well suited to it. This year I've swapped roles with another committee member who had been stuck with the role of secretary for the past few years and not thriving in it; apart from giving her a break I'm interested to see how she does as VP because she's always been one of the committee members who cares about the band having good leadership and not just keeping things rolling comfortably along, and did things about it even when she was just an ordinary committee member.

5. A while back I discovered on Youtube a really neat TV series from the 1980s called Playing Shakespeare. It's presented by John Barton, one of the founders of the Royal Shakespeare Company, accompanied by the actors of the Company, who provide practical demonstrations and share their experiences. That includes a lot of people who went on to become world famous (Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet -- who's a revelation in this to one who only knew him as Poirot) or who will be familiar to people who watch a lot of British TV from the 1970s and 1980s (Sheila Hancock, Mike Gwilym, Donald Sinden) or just had massive stage careers (Peggy Ashcroft drops in for one episode to reprise one of her famous roles). There's an episode on character interpretation that consists almost entirely of actors who have played Shylock discussing and demonstrating their very different approaches (all from productions directed by Barton; one of the points the episode is making is that there's no one correct interpretation). Another episode, on "Passion and Coolness", ends with a performance of Leontes and Hermione's reunion scene in The Winter's Tale, with Patrick Stewart reprising his then-recent and highly regarded performance as Leontes.

(via

thisbluespirit)

Account created: January 2010
Total stories: 33

Total wordcount: 13,950
Average wordcount: 422.72
Longest story: Time Out of Mind (Old and Young Together Remix) [Star Wars] (1,863)
Shortest story: Your choice of seven stories written for a 50-word story meme. When I sort my works page by page count, the one that comes out at the bottom is Quiet [The Muppet Show].

Total kudos: 524
Kudos per story: 15.87
Story with most kudos: Sesame Treats [Sleepy Hollow, Elementary, and Agents of SHIELD by way of Sesame Street] (70)

Total comments: 108 (including replies, because there doesn't seem to be a way of excluding them short of going through each comment section and counting them by hand)
Comments per story: 3.27
Story with most comments: C is for Conjuration [Sesame Street] (15, not including replies)

Total author subscriptions: 1
Total story subscriptions: 3
Story with most subscriptions: A Step Forward Into the Unknown [Wonder Woman/Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover] (2), which makes sense since it's admittedly a vignette out of a larger story that I may even get around to writing the rest of some day.

Total bookmarks: 58
Story with most bookmarks: C is for Conjuration (11)

Stories with no comments or kudos:
A Solemn Warning [Batman by way of Hoosier Riley]
untitled prompt fic [Batman]
The Kumars at the Type 40 [Doctor Who by way of The Kumars at No. 42, or vice versa]
Rather Be Happy Than Right [it's complicated]

(All of these did get comments when they were first published elsewhere, on Usenet or Livejournal, just not on AO3.)

1. There's a "post the opening sentences of your recent fics" meme going around that nearly every fic-writing person on my friendslist has done. I keep looking at it and then remembering that I haven't finished any new fic since the last time I did a meme that involved posting the opening sentences of my recent fic.

2. Another thing I keep looking at and then deciding not to do is Remix Revival. I do just scrape into eligibility for it this year; the trouble is the bit where you also have to say what fandoms you're willing to write for. I never know what to put when it's left completely open. (That's one of the reasons I like exchanges like Yuletide where there's an eligibility requirement, because they generate a list of eligible fandoms and I can go through crossing off the ones I don't know or don't like or don't feel up to, and then choose from what's left. If I'm left to choose from all fandoms that exist everywhere, with no idea of what people are likely to ask for, I don't know where to start.) (Well, Doctor Who, obviously. But then what?)

3. At gaming group this week, I played Potion Explosion and Dice Forge.

In Potion Explosion, players have to assemble magic potions out of randomly-dispensed ingredients (represented by coloured marbles); completing potions earns points, and then completed potions can also be used to gain advantages (some potions let you collect more ingredients in a turn, others let you substitute ingredients, and so on). I'm pretty sure I came last, but I'd be willing to try it again.

Dice Forge is a variant on the deck-building game, where you start with a deck of weak cards and over the course of the game acquire more powerful cards, but instead of a deck of cards each player has a pair of dice with removable faces that can be upgraded over the course of the game. There's also a map of locations with mythologically-themed challenges; completing a challenge gives some benefit in resources to use on other challenges, unique special die faces, or just massive amounts of victory points.

4. I don't think I've mentioned yet that I signed up a while back for LearnedLeague, an online trivia competition. I've now competed in two seasons, one as a rookie that ended with me being placed in the C grade (the second-best possible result of a rookie season, as you can't go straight to A), and one in C grade where I performed solidly but not well enough to be promoted. In each round, players get matched in head-to-head contests where points are scored not just for getting the correct answers but for predicting which answers their opponents will get right (to be precise, a player's prediction will affect their opponent's score, and vice versa; it's balanced so that a player who gets every question right that round will get full points regardless and conversely a player who gets every question wrong will get no points). To aid players in their predictions, there are detailed statistics kept, including breakdowns of each player's performance by question subject: apparently my best subjects are Science, Language, Mathematics, Film, and Classical Music, while my worst subjects are Business/Economics, Pop Music, Art, and Current Events.

5. After my run of John Buchan's thriller novels last month, I saw Witch Wood mentioned somewhere as the most highly regarded of his other novels, so I decided to give it a go. The first few chapters have been an interesting experience, because I didn't know anything about it going in except the title and the author, so on top of the usual figuring out of plot and characters I needed to figure out what genre it is. It's set in the 17th century, in a village on the outskirts of forest with a dark and mysterious reputation, and revolves around a young priest who - we're informed in a present-day prologue - is remembered in local legend as having been carried away by either the Devil or the Fair Folk, depending on who you ask. There's several ways a premise like that could go, depending on whether the author is writing fantasy or horror or an adventure story where everything turns out to have a material explanation, and at first I wasn't sure which this was, which added an extra level of ambiguity to scenes like the one where the protagonist is travelling home one night and meets three men who he senses are not quite what they seem to be.

(memed from

thisbluespirit, who claimed to have not written much this year)

List of completed fics:

An Equivocal Kinship
(G, 256 words. The Ship Who Sang x stealth crossover)
in New Year's Resolutions 2017

Time Out of Mind (Old and Young Together Remix)
(G, 1863 words. Star Wars, Rey & Luke)
in Star Wars Rolling Remix 2017

A Step Forward Into the Unknown
(G, 100 words. Marvel Cinematic Universe x Wonder Woman, Diana/Natasha)
in Multifandom Drabble Exchange 2017

( Read more... )

(via

thisbluespirit)

Give me a character/pairing and I will write snippets of ten different alternate universes for it. One line, ten lines, a ficlet if you're lucky.

Wild West
Coffee Shop
Shapeshifters
Fantasy/Fairy Tale
. . . In SPACE!!
Apocalypse
Schoolfic
Emergency Services (Police, Firefighters, Paramedics, etc.)
Supernatural
Regency

Offer not valid for characters I've already done, namely Benny Summerfield, Kay Harker and Havelock Vetinari.

Briefly noted:

The Star Wars Rolling Remix 2017 collection has opened. The works will remain anonymous for about a week, for the benefit of those who like to amuse themselves by guessing who wrote what and in what order.

From the existence of this post, you may safely conclude that one the works in the collection is by me.

For the explanation of what is a rolling remix and the details of how this one was organised, I refer you to

starwarsrollingremix.

List of Completed Fics:
Ten Alternate Universes: Bernice Summerfield (481 words; Doctor Who & spinoffs)
Ten Alternate Universes: Kay Harker (606 words; The Midnight Folk et seq.)
Ten Alternate Universes: Havelock Vetinari (1062 words; Discworld)
New Flowers Bloom (100 words; Snow-white and Rose-red)
A week next Saturday at the Stork Club (401 words; Captain America: The First Avenger)

( Read more... )

1. I have been to the cinema to see a movie for the first time since, according to my notes, July. The movie was Arrival, and it was worth going to see. I will probably go and see some more movies this month, because we have Rogue One arriving this week and then Moana in the post-Christmas summer season.

2. I finally got around to reading The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards, which has been lurking in my to-read pile for years. The author is the wife of the film director Blake Edwards, aka the actor and singer Julie Andrews, and I'm pleased to be able to say I enjoyed it, although probably not as much as I would have when I was the target age and less capable of spotting the bits that are designed to impart important life lessons. Other things that stuck out to now-me that wouldn't have to child-me were the puns (especially having recently read the bit in Summer in Orcus where the child protagonist is scornful of the kind of puns adult fantasy writers put in children's fantasy), and the wise token adult's attitude to the designated adversary's concerns, which I felt should have had a hashtag on them saying "#notallhumans". I was very pleased that the designated adversary turned out to be not evil, just doing his best in very trying circumstances, and that the token wise adult was shown to be a human being with his own flaws and blind spots (and that he started listening to his former adversary more by the end), but I felt it could have done with an explicit call out that even though the designated adversary turned out to be wrong about this specific group of humans he had perfectly valid reasons to be distrustful of humans in general.

(PS. I probably would have identified with one of the children when I was a child, but as an adult the designated antagonist is definitely my favourite character.)

3. Another thing that's been sitting on the shelf that I finally got around to is the Big Finish audio drama Storm Warning, the first of their series featuring Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor. It was okay, I guess? I mean, I enjoyed it, but I'm not in a big hurry to find out what happens next. (Although part of that's obviously because I'm starting the series fifteen years late, so I already know from fandom osmosis quite a bit about what happens next.) And, to be fair, I've never been all that good at audio dramas; I don't tend to find them engaging enough to sit still through.

4. The Rep Club Christmas Show has been and gone. I was involved only as an audience member, which I think may have been the right call. On top of the reasons for making that decision in the first place, I'm now in a position to tell that I enjoyed watching it once but it would probably have worn a bit thin through a month of rehearsals and performances. (It would also have been a crimp on my social life that I'd have regretted, in terms of things I've been able to go to on what would have been show nights.)

The next Rep Club production is, as I've mentioned, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I've been cast as the socially awkward science nerd, which as you can imagine is going to be a stretch.

5. Fanfic rec: Third Wheel, in which Bruce Wayne makes his first official visit to Metropolis, and Lois Lane is assigned a celebrity profile that turns out to be more interesting than she expected, while Clark Kent investigates sightings of a mysterious bat-man.

"I've always wanted to learn how to fly," Clark said, sounding impressed.
"You should," Bruce said. "It's fun."
"It always seemed like it would be."

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