Hiding fandom in the underwear drawer since 1977

It's been a long time but I finally posted Chapter 16 of Apostolic Way last night.
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Remix reveals are up!!! 
I am so lucky!! I ended up remixing the people who remixed me!!  snacky wrote this lovely follow on to Follow the Star and lotl101 wrote an alternate view of how Lucy and Asim might have met!  Go and tell them how wonderful they are!!

Thank you both so much for these wonderful stories!!

I wrote two, a Narnia/Silmarillion xover for Snacky here and a Doctor Who story for lotl101 about the OTP between Doctor 10 and his Converse trainers.

I made the mistake of looking at word count since November 1 -- AW chapters 10-15, Rat and Sword, and one chapter of H&M totals over 140,000 words in less than 6 months.  So, if I'm a little slow getting off the mark at the moment, I guess that's why.  But I've started writing and outlining again and actually wrote a few hundred words of H&M dialogue last night. What follows is some writing blather below with the offer to share any thinky thoughts you may have:
( Blather about AW, H&M and request for thoughts if you feel like sharing! )

Happy Easter!  Or, Happy Cat Sacrifice Day! (based upon a badly translated t-shirt econopodder spotted abroad a few years ago). 

Should you be so inclined the story is up, Rat and Sword Go To War.  Once all the Big Bang stories are up, I'll post it on FF and AO3.  Also, I'm very close to posting a companion chapter to AW.  Look for that in a few days.

heverus did the art, here and it is amazing.  It has the map of the area in question of the story in the background and two very important items in the story, the Horsa glider and the Little Joe crossbow.  It is wonderful and I'm so grateful that she picked up and worked in these two elements of the story. 

A huge thanks to autumnia for a brutal round and round and round on the beta.  amine_eyes, Clio and snacky have all been so helpful and a huge thanks to the NBB mods.  Thank you to Clio and lotl101 for the assistance with WC Tebbitt’s poetry.

A few additional research notes are below, and spoiler heavy. 

( Links, pictures, research and commentary ahoy! )

I had to google fu More Joy Day. Admittedly, I’m not feeling terribly joyous the last two days due to some badness and woe – one of those situations with a close family friend about your own age going into the hospital for a backache and coming out a day later with a dire prognosis. WTF? So, I’ll just get that out there and move on.

After 2 plus years of hiding rthstewart from the Old Fandom Friends, I’ve now come clean, more or less, and so some of them are now over here. So, Old Fandom Friends meet New Fandom Friends. Fanfiction has been my social network for a very, very long time.

We’ve all had some fun watching this Ur Doing It Wrong unfold (also here and here) and if you want to read more, PM lady_songsmith about it who has done a wonderful job dissecting the Ur Doing It Wrong advocates.  (I very much want to buy Sasper and NotAFan a drink.  Step up to the bar, ladies, whoever you are).  We went through some of this earlier over here with the “fic slayer” Anaprate which turned into a lovely discussion here about textual analysis, communities, and canonicity.

It does make me a little sad and wistful as I have noticed that some folks who have been long time readers, have apparently finally abandoned the stories and jumped on board with the above. I suspect that, to their mind, I finally went where they just could not follow, first with the NFE, and then when I tried to recognize what the data show about the social impact of the war on women with Helen and her guilty relationship with the widow Beatrice next door. I get where the objections come from and I regret that we seem to have parted company as I do really value the associations that have developed over the course of the last few years.

Something interesting from the last chapter is the reader split on whether the “children” would perceive the relationship.  They are all adult and sophisticated.  Susan sees something and dismisses it -- essentially concluding, "I know what that looks like but of course it's just my imagination.  My mother would never do anything like that."   I’d written several versions of the scene in the kitchen with Susan and her mother and in some Susan did recognize it.  Readers definitely went both ways on the issue.

Last, there’s been (again) a lot stuff about poor Mary Sue. Geek trendsetter Felicia Day recently Tweeted that more than “meh” she was coming to hate the term Mary Sue, which led to the often posted link to the discussion of why Mary Sue was sexist. My favorite exploration of Sue comes from Pat Pflieger here. It was that article that formed the basis for my own exploration of Sue in the character of Dalia. The article is dated in its fandom references but in the end, Ms. Pfliger comes down solidly in the camp that Mary Sue is an expression of feminine empowerment, and maybe the very first one for a young girl.

Granted I don’t read all those stories on the ff.net page. But that’s not the point. I think of it this way. When I was 10, I used to make sure I always wore sensible shoes to school because, should a portal open and take me to Narnia, I’d be ready. I knew it wasn't real, but if it was real, one does not simply walk into Narnia in sandals (I grew up in So Cal). And you can bet there was a purpose/prophecy in me going there; I didn't think romance at the time but adventure and awesome ninja fighting skills definitely.  By 13, I was certain I had a tragic past and I was totally the 10th member of the Fellowship.   My spousal unit mentions that there’s not a boy (or man) in the world who, alone, shooting hoops or kicking a ball, doesn’t pretend he’s the hero scoring the game-winning point. Every girl out twirling on the ice pretends she’s an Olympic medalist. These are self inserts, the products of our glorious imaginations, and damn it, most of us will never make a living as a basketball player or Olympic skater. The fact that we aren’t great at these endeavors, and might even be really terrible at them, doesn’t matter because it’s the glory of creative pretend play.  So there.  (I've been thinking about this a lot as someone posted the first 1700 words of a girl falls into Narnia using some of rthstewart-verse, so I'm anxiously waiting to see what (if anything) happens next.  Oh vanity but I am curious really to see a modern FOC/Peter set in rth-influenced Golden Age crack Narnia).

Oh and I’m looking for a 1940s Brit speak for insert into the following [assume drunk paratrooper grunts at a pub]

“That trout was plaster-of-paris,” Peter added, laughing at Brotheridge's quote.

The others all stared at him.

“The book? Three Men in a Boat? To say nothing of the dog?”

More blank, glassy looks.

“I’ll just shut it and drink my pint,” Peter said.

Bailey laughed and slapped him across the shoulder blades so hard he nearly upended his beer.  “It’s cuz it’s about boats.  That's how you know it."

“Pevensie don’t know ___ from ___, but he does know boats!” Parr hollered.

Finally, I get Chapter 14 up, after a detour to something hinted at in Under Cover.

There actually isn't that much research that I haven't already discussed before.

The King's Speech took some research to find and while it's quite the info dump, I just didn't feel right editing it.  The part in the House of Russell was in my previous Christmas story but edited slightly to fit better within TSG. 

I did have fun with Susan's fashions and spent a lot of time here looking at the pictures of French fashion from the 1930s.  I imagine Susan wearing something like this:



Source:  HPrints  Also at this stte, you can see pictures of the sort of lovely things that First Officer Pole has in  her attic. 

Oh, I dropped the hint that Michael Pole is with the RAF Photo Reconnaissance Unit flying out of RAF Benson in Oxfordshire.

Edmund's musing on the Leipzig War Crimes tribunals come from various sources and while generally reviled as a failure were also precedent-setting.  My particular spin on it comes from Telford Taylor's The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials.  You can read the basics in the wiki entry.

  This page has good information about the context of Foreign Secretary Eden's statement to the House of Commons on December 17, 1942 regarding what would eventually be called the Holocaust.

Thanks to adaese, Doctor Dolly, anastigmatfic, h_dash_h and felipemarcusthomas who have been invaluable as I juggled with the different interactions. 

That's all.  Thanks so much for reading.  I'm now at the point where I can really turn to the NBB.  First check in is in a week and I've not started, so here's hoping I can pull it off.  And that's all for now.  I do hope I hear from folks.  I was two days late posting this.  I promised Christmas Day, but I felt I disappointed by using the King's Christmas Message and the repeat of the Russell House part, so I wrote the Under Cover tie in.  Writing that segment took a little time. 

EDIT:  I forgot to add the real reason for my post!  British super mystery writer PD James has written Pride and Prejudice fan fic.  Death Comes to Pemberley


Actually, it isn't, in my experience.  I am fine, humming along, though my desire for massive quantities of baking wars with my desire to not eat all the cookies.For those of you who find this time of year especially stressful, whether to exams or otherwise, I send good thoughts and the guarded recommendation to check out the three sentence ficathon.  The recommendation is made cautiously because once you start scrolling through the 30+ pages of prompts and comments, you'll end up in a TV Tropes sort of daze and 4 hours have passed.  It has slowed down a bit, and I didn't post much as I've been writing AW.  There are wonderful, wonderful things there.  Like a perfect bite-sized piece of chocolate, with no calories or fat. 

( Narnia, AW, etc. )

As I was researching, I learned that there was a 1938 Jack Benny program sponsored by the makers of Jell-O. The wriggly stuff has been around a really long time.  And speaking of Jell-O and not eating all the cookies, I'll post here a favorite cookie recipe of mine.  Tomorrow, I'll do a separate recipe exchange post and I hope that others will share their recipes for holiday food traditions and favorites.  I am going to dig up the lime Jell-O and pretzel recipe, just for the hell of it. 

( Come to the Dark Side, we have chewy ginger cookies )
( Very brief comment on the US public health decision of yesterday regarding "Plan B" )

Back to our regularly scheduled escape from It All.

Awww, isn't Baby Hula adorkable?



According to the Whipsnade Zoo, Baby Hula the Hippo has made her debut splash. You can read about it all here.

Which brings us to a question h_dash_h posed of whether Peter Pevensie's attractiveness is specific to camels or extends to all even toed ungulates, a question which I intend to address in Chapter 12.

Thanks so very, very much to everyone who commented on the latest. I am so grateful and the reason I've not responded is that I've been trying to finish up the next chapter. It's not been a good week for writing, so I'll just keep pushing. It's a good thing I'm not doing NaNo, because I'd be so far behind it's ridiculous. So, let's talk about some things.

( About Jill -- wait a minute, is that in the book? )

( Breaking the Borders, AsCast, and Big Bang )

( comment fic on toomuchtebbitt )

(In other words, I've apparently decided screw the ages, let's go for it).

Seriously, this trying time period can stop right now. Any time. Like now.

But Keep Calm and Carry On as the War Office exhorted. I've been forcing myself to (re-)outline and have found the following to be, while not exactly motivating, at least inspiring.
( Pretty pictures! Christmas 1942! )

It's just that I'm working on a Star Wars/Doctor Who cross over and have returned to writing a particular character in the Star Wars Expanded Universe after 17 years. Eeep. It's going slowly (5,000 words or so) but it's really, really fun and I'll shove it into the femgenficathon as satisfying both my previously written prompts.

And speaking of Doctor Who, being reported all over the place this morning, including here the Doctor Who Christmas special is supposed to be a cross over with the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, complete with creepy old house and World War 2 evacuees. There are lots of great Who/Narnia cross overs including ilysia_039's touch the sky with two arms and be_themoon's Whose_Other_Side_Is_Salvation. metonomia has done several, including with Susan, the Doctor, and Merlin, and one with the Doctor and Polly for the NFE here. I think wingedflight21 might have at least one as well. Please add others in the comments!!

Also, and this is edenfalling's fault because I really wanted more Shezan and Ilgamuth or Cor and Aravis, so I bit, even though I don't usually do this, but you know, I could use a kickstart to get back to AW and maybe this well help on the Spare Oom sides of things.

The first five people to comment on this post get to request that I write a drabble/ficlet of any pairing/character of their choosing. In return, they have to could post this in their journal, regardless of their own writing ability level. Or bake me cookies. [edited]

So, if you want to play, just ask in the comments and hopefully it will get me going on Lionsgate (the next chapter) and how I'm going to write Peter at Normandy and Susan in France short of a full blown, multi-chaptered epic war story.