clo_again

Um. So there was a Wimbledon final at the weekend which involved Roger Federer. And had Andy Roddick commentating - or in truth, talking non-stop for five days about how amazing Roger is and how great he is and how he only copes with being asked about 2009 because he has so much respect for Roger and even though it's been a million years since I wrote anything actually postable in tennis fic, I did a thing. Like, drink too much Pimms and bash angrily at my keyboard while Roger lost, and then spend two days spamming kindoftrouble with emails going DOES THIS MAKE SENSE HOW CAN I MAKE MY DRUNKEN RAMBLINGS MAKE SENSE WHY DO I LOVE TENNIS PLAYERS WHEN THEY DO STUPID THINGS LIKE LOSING, ARGH.

In short, have fic. It's even go about 21% plot going on behind the PWP. Sort of. This is mostly the angry-that-he-lost bit; if I get the sequel, and the prequel, and the sequel-sequel done, there might be actual plot. Plus the other thing I'm about half-way through that isn't even in this series. Because apparently I'm writing tennis RPF again, god.



beautiful and drunk (singing softly to yourself) - Andy Roddick/Roger Federer, explicit, 6093 words post-Wimbledon 2015 final, drunken hurt-comfort sex and Andy pining when he should know better.



I er, was about 50-80% Pimms at various times when I wrote it, so hopefully the editing-bashing means it at least vaguely makes sense.


Posting on AO3 is amazingly more nerve-wracking than here or the Pit of Voles. I'm going to go have a little sit down now.

Hahahaha 'post more often'. Yep. So, moving on!

Hello, I am not yet dead or giving up on LJ or- actually no, everything else is pretty much what you'd expect; work is boring yada yada, life continues much unchanged yada yada...well I suppose that's not technically true. There's been recent work dramallamas in the continuing saga of Why Must Everyone I Work With Be So Relentlessly Stupid and it all kicked off with an official complaint by another admin girl last Monday, but I've had phone conversations since (I was off Wednesday - Friday) that implies it's all sorted and we are in fact in good nick with the management who think we're doing a great job. I guess I'll see tomorrow. The whole stupidity has really crystalised the fact to me that I don't want to work for that place long-term even though I don't mind the job itself, because stupid dramallama stuff that should've been avoided with a little common sense happens all the time. It's reminded me that I need to actually focus on saving money towards an eventual Masters, preferably in Cardiff, so I can flee the place.

This resolution to save started most excellently well as I almost immediately went off on a three-day shopping trip to Cardiff. In justification it's been planned since April, I did actually desperately need new shoes/jeans, and it's like getting it all out of my system before I go cold turkey on spending, right?

(It made more sense when I was using it as an excuse to buy things, really.)


This building never fails to make me happy. <3

The trip was so lovely - I think I definitely needed just to get out of dodge for a few days because I'd been getting more and more stressed with everything at work and actually just leaving the county (and the country, given that I went back to Wales!) was good timing, and I felt better about life, the universe and everything just by the time I got to London Euston.

Yes, I went to Cardiff via London. Yes, there was an excellent reason for this; I arranged the entire trip around going to the Hampstead Theatre to see Propeller (I may have mentioned them before. At length. In the previous post. I really like Propeller) perform their Twelfth Night again. I love the play so much, I couldn't bear the thought of not seeing it again and despite fretting the entire way down that I'd miss it (due to engineering works I had to catch a train to Manchester, wait an hour for my next train to London, then catch a couple of Tubes and find the theatre by 2:00pm) I got there in plenty of time. I did a post about it over in the Propeller comm, so I won't repeat myself but it was wonderful. In the interval I tweeted "My idea of heaven is sitting in a dark theatre and watching Propeller perform this play over and over", and I meant it. If it hadn't finished touring yesterday I'd say to go see it; as it is they're touring Midsummer Night's Dream/Comedy of Errors starting in November and everyone should go see at least one of them. I am. Multiple times. (No, I really am.)

Then, after catch-up sushi and mocking the Tie Rack workers at Paddington station with kindoftrouble and A, it was a packed train and then Cardiff. I love Cardiff. I may have mentioned this before. And this time it was mid-week so the shops weren't too busy (apart from flocks of graduates in robes that bizarrely kept congregating everywhere), everywhere had great sales, the weather was hot but not humid at all, and everywhere I went people had Welsh accents (a girl standing behind me in Schuh exclaimed over a pair of Converse "Oh those are lush!"). It was lovely. I shopped all day Thursday, ate down at a packed Cardiff Bay full of people enjoying the sunshine and workmen turning Roald Dahl Plass into a beach, complete with helter-skelter.



It's going to be a beach for all of August, complete with sand, a water play area, and traditional seaside amusements. I wish I could go back to see it because I think it'll be amazing.

I also saw Pacific Rim on Thursday night which was so delightfully, uncompromisingly ridiculous that I loved every second of it. I think it demands a suspension of disbelief from the very first line and how much you enjoy it depends totally on how far you're willing to simply shrug and roll with it, but if you do it rewards you by being a lot of fun. Even if every time someone said 'jaegar', I couldn't stop myself mentally adding 'meister' onto the end.

Friday was more shopping, and gbk and then an endless six hour trip home which definitely increased my stress levels again but an entire weekend of dedication lounging has fixed that. I'm sad that I have to go back to work tomorrow and that I don't have any more time off until October, but Cardiff remains fabulous. I wish I could win the lottery so I could just buy my penthouse flat on the Bay and stay there.

~

Other Things:

- jesse_kips is a rockstar and got us tickets to see Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus after Christmas. I want to say how awesome this is but I don't think words that awesome have been invented yet. It's entirely possible one or both of us will end up with restraining orders against us but given the general insanity of Hiddleston's fans we'll probably just blend right in.

Incidentally, that'll make it five times that I've been to the theatre this year. That's pretty good. Next year I'm thinking that I'll aim to make it six.

- Andy Murray won Wimbledon! This made me utterly delighted, (especially since they can now stop repeating that awful interview from 2012 when he was crying too much to speak oh my god BBC seriously, STOP SHOWING IT). I wrote 5000 words of post-final Murray/Djokovic in a fit of inspiration that was killed by work stress and shopping. It's so close to being finished, I should actually just suck it up and do it. Argh.

- In general, writing is going- well, I don't want to say 'not well' but 'distinctly average'. Must try harder.

- The sun came out in Britain about two weeks ago and hasn't gone back in yet. Everyone enjoyed it for about a day and then old people started dropping like flies, doctors started screaming about skin cancer and all the salt marshes on my train ride to work have dried up. Dear Britain, the next person to complain about the rain will be taken out and shot, understood?

- Still haven't won the lottery, despite multiple attempts. Sigh.

- I promised to post about Peter and Alice, didn't I. That's not a question. I know I've failed, even though I have it all written down. It was fantastic and made me cry like a baby, and I think that may be as far as I get in forming coherent thoughts. Sorry. :(

- I had another point, and then I thought of Ben Whishaw and promptly forgot it. Er. It probably wasn't important.

- This is probably it for another two months but I do check LJ every day so if you do want to check I haven't fallen off the face of the planet, leave a comment & I will get it & reply. Keep posting. For all its failings, it makes me sad that LJ is slowly dying. I'll miss it if - when - it finally gives up the ghost (plus I've forgotten my Dreamwidth password again. Typical).

Oh my god, my brother has a touchscreen Sony Vaio which I am typing this from right now and I want one so much. SO MUCH.

Also, currently surrounded by five dogs all trying to see what I'm typing. It's hard to see even a touchscreen with Pippen's face in front of it. Yes, I love you too please stop licking my face.

In conclusion, MY BROTHER'S MENAGERIE IS INSANE. But he has the world's most amazing laptop aaahhh.

It seemed like a marvellous idea to have Ben Whishaw's face to look at every time I opened my journal. Keep catching myself staring at it instead of doing anything useful. May have been an error of judgement.

While I'm on the topic, may as well post some of the collected Skyfall Bond/Q (known delightfully as 00Q on tumblr) fic links I've been collecting since I fell face-first into Skyfall fandom two weeks ago. There's not a lot around right now aside from a few wonderful exceptions but I'm hoping it'll kick off now the film is out in the U.S..


Until then:

Shoot to Thrill by alittlebitontuesdays, NC-17 00Q. PWP but done deliciously well, utilising the teaching-how-to-shoot trope that never gets old. Hot and lovely and so in character, and I hope she writes more.


Towers by couldbeaspaceraider, Q is nearly positive he falls in love on a tuesday. Bond/Q, spoiler-free for the movie. Falls into the unfortunate habit of song-ficcing that Skyfall fandom seems to have picked up and run with, but in this it works like poetry with the writing style and is, frankly, exactly the right choice. Very sweet.


quietly into the night by skylights, One look and James knows, everything else is broken. Established relationship Bond/Q that looks at how people deal with grief when their entire life has to be a secret, even from the person they love. Heartbreakingly logicial, heartbreakingly lovely, (no canon character death and spoilerfree for the movie.)


minutes slipping by (but with you, they feel like hours) by fell_from_grace, nc-17 Bond/Q, Bond/various male others, Sometimes, James will receive a folder along with tense looks and bated breath. Sometimes, he's expected to say no, to refuse to sleep with a man just for a mission. But every time, he says yes.. This isn't a happy fic, especially for me who prefers happy endings, but the way it's handled, with James so broken and desperate and Q listening, always listening, is excellent and runs with the What makes you think it's my first time? comment in a way I wouldn't have expected. Wonderfully done, but I hope she writes the happier ending she mentions in the note at the end.


the perks of constancy by superpol, "You should have sex with other people," Q says once. Bond/Q sort of with the asexual idea brought into play again*, though handled a little awkwardly but this fic has jokes that hit the mark perfectly, a sparse writing style that races along without ever quite tripping itself up and a casual ease with creating a relationship around the actual job these characters do for a living. It says a lot that there's some silly spelling mistakes but instead of hitting back like I usually do, I'd read the next line and think "Oh no, that'd good enough to rec". Very fun to read, if unproof-read.


Habitual Prologue by plingo_kat, Bond/Q, delightful PWP with bonus sarcasm. Short, hot, delicious.


You may have my number, you can take my name by lc2l, G-rated gen and yet I'm still reccing it with all my shippery little heart, so it must be something special. Q's POV following the aftermath of the movie, sweet and heartbreaking and all about how to keep yourself when you become a letter instead of a name. Slightly - lovely - crossover so pays to have seen Captain America too but it's not essential to the fic as a whole.


so you were never a saint by paperclipbitch, teen-rated gen that has Q/Eve bffness, the Great British Bake-off as a running theme and Bond lurking in the background in a wonderfully-underplayed plot. Part of me wishes it had gone the way of Bond/Q because the author works them so wonderfully together as the beginning of something like friends that I'm sure this could've been an amazing full-on pairing fic, but seeing asexuality used in a way that works perfectly well with canon turns this into something even more interesting than the standard wham-bam-thank-you-relationship fic. It's funny and a little bit sad and little bit more optimistic.

And her Q is fantastic and doesn't take shit from self-service checkouts because he's Q. Hell yes.


~

This is everything I have bookmarked to rec right now, though I suspect I may have missed a couple more that are worth the read. It's worth checking the Skyfall tag on AO3 regularly right now as new stuff is going up every day

I need a Bond/Q icon. Must look into that.

~

* Confused as to where this idea that Q is asexual has come from; I've stumbled across it a few times now. He flirts very easily with Bond in the movie, for all that I could see some of that being an act (his moments of panic are sweet in their reveal of his sudden vulnerableness, one of my favourite parts of the entire movie) but I didn't see any clue that might lead to a general acceptance of Q as asexual - Ben Whishaw himself seems to be fumbling around his preferences from the couple of articles I've read, but that's something else entirely. It works, but it feels like just one interpretation to me so I was a bit perplexed to see it crop up again.

Thankfully no one has yet gone down the "asexual Q until he meets the healing powers of Bond's cock" route but I'm sure it'll show up presently because this is the fandom that has surprise!death-ficced me at least five times now. Suspect it needs to get big enough to get itself some fandom etiquette sooner rather than later.

I've just noticed that scoobydumblonde has gifted me a pair of dragons and my face went :D , which is pretty amazing for a Sunday night. <3 Thank you! :D

Secondly, I am not dead. I've been meaning to make an LJ post for- er, yes, not actually going to count the days because that's depressing but some time!

In that time I have: bought a blu-ray player; played an awful lot (around 45 hours so far apparently) of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, most of it spent flapping around Skyloft on my giant red bird BECAUSE I CAN; got a new job (but in the same hospital); left my old job (by walking across the road to a different building); spent far too much money; decided not to do Wimbledon this year as I can't afford it after spending all my money; bought a piano-sized keyboard; failed to play anything recognisable on piano-sized keyboard; watched a lot of Suits; read of a lot of fic (mostly Suits); saw a spectacular production of Henry V with jesse_kips; read at least two fairly average books; watched the entire first season of Sabrina the Teenage Witch for the first time in years; thought a lot about how I should make an LJ post with all my Suits fic recs; started making this post, which will include at least one Suits rec.

That pretty much sums it up.

~

The Henry V production we went to was by the fabulous Propeller who I've seen do The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, and who have pretty much ruined Shakespeare done by anyone else for me forever. You can see a nifty trailer for their Henry V here and for The Winter's Tale production they're touring with it here. Their Winter's Tale even comes recommended by Stephen Fry! They're in New Zealand right now but they're touring the UK until August; I'm going to see Winter's Tale in London in July and honestly, if you even remotely like Shakespeare or theatre, go. Propeller are so amazing. I still mourn that they don't do DVDs so I'll never see their beautiful Twelfth Night again (see post title: the way Simon Scardifield delivered it was heartbreaking. Him not being in Henry this time was the only thing wrong with it.)

Did have the weird realisation halfway through Henry V that Dugald Bruce-Lockhart who plays Henry has been in all three of the Propeller productions I've seen (Petruccio in Shrew, Olivia in Twelfth), making him the only stage actor I've seen on three separate occasions.

When I confessed this, jesse_kips accused me of stalking. Then I also confessed that I'd slashed him with Simon Scardifield after watching Shrew (they kissed on stage, the entire play is basically them having epic emotional battles since they were Petruccio and Katherine respectively, what was I supposed to do?)

And then I remembered I even had a LJ icon of Dugald (see: this post's icon) and gave up on anyone hope of arguing that I wasn't a stalker. In my defence it's been mostly incidental; he is in a rather fabulous Shakespeare company.

I'm in the front row when I go to see Winter's Tale. Er. Maybe I'll keep my head down.

~

I started this an hour ago as an escape from tidying my wardrobe a brief update and there's still boxes all over my bed (woe), so wrapping it up with an incredible Suits/Avengers fic rec:

Sidekick by Closer, (who wrote the amazing Mike/Harvey Pizza verse.

Sidekick was written on the kinkmeme for the prompt 'Harvey Specter wasn't the rich renegade badass that plucked Mike from his potential life of crime. Tony Stark was.' It's well-thought out and hilarious and Mike's grandmother forces Tony to eat regular dinner and all the other Avengers show up (Mike teaches Thor yo mamma< jokes omg) and it's all so ridiculously in-character that it's almost unbelievable. Oh and if nothing else, SPIDER-MAN HAS A CAMEO. All of Closer's Suits fic is brilliant but I wouldn't be too sad to see her take time off to write more for Iron Man/The Avengers too because her Tony is amazing.

My one weird thing with it was that's Tony/Mike- and done awesomely - so even though Harvey shows up (as Tony's lawyer) it's obvs not going to have the same Mike/Harvey relationship. I felt a little sorry for Harvey missing out - Mike works for Iron Man; he's not missing out on anything - BUT I have just noticed that she's added a bunch of codas and there was the promise of a Harvey/Mike/Tony threesome so I'm just going to check that out.

Tidying? Pfft. Go read fic!

This post was originally going to be a Merry Christmas and then Happy New Year and then that New Year meme that does the rounds every December/January...

...and then I thought it'd got a bit past all that and I'd talk about getting fanfiction printed into bound books instead. (And then I left this post sitting half-written for about two weeks and I'm finally posting it in a rush just to get the damn thing off my to-do list.)

So on New Years Eve I was being somewhat sad and stuck at home with family + guests and, as I seem to end up doing quite often around Christmas and NYE for reasons of a nostalgic nature, I was idly re-reading some of the fanfiction that I've loved almost longer than any other fic: BagEnders. (For those of you yet to encounter the wonders of BagEnders, it essentially follows the premise of 'Let's make the original Fellowship from Lord of the Rings immortal, assume they've all lived through history, and stick them together in a three-bedroom house in the year 2000, with all the ensuing psychological, social and lack-of-personal-space issues you'd expect from being several millenia old and still having to live with Gandalf. It's rough and typo-filled and ridiculous, and still one of the best things I've ever read on the internet). It was written way back in internet terms - around 2001 - and it's been gradually disappearing from the internet over the years; the website crashed back in 2004ish and some stuff got put back up, but only the first series is really accessible on there these days. Various efforts have been made to save it but there's a general feeling that one day in the not-to-distant-future, it's going to vanish.

With some widespread Googling and much c&ping, I collected the last few chapters on series III on NYE, and sat back with a glow of contentment. Now it'll be mine forever! I'll always have BagEnders!

Until a snide little thought said, my computer breaks. Until they're no longer on the internet and replaceable. Then what?

Side-track: when I went backpacking around Australia a few years ago, I invaded the house of chickybee32, a long-term (maybe my longest actually!) internet friend. We met a long long time ago because of an epic-length fic she'd written called Bitter Wine and, while I was staying with her, she showed me a paperback book - Bitter Wine, neatly formatted and printed into an actual bound paperback by another mutual friend as a present. It was fic! In a book! With chapters and actual pages and collected stories in the same 'verse at the back!

In short? It was super cool. Fic in an actual book format. I can't be alone in thinking that's pretty nifty.

Ever since I've sort of hovered around the vague idea of getting my favourite fics printed into books because honestly, I re-read all the time. I read new books constantly too but if I'm cleaning my teeth or stirring the pasta or just want something to occupy my brain for half an hour without having to process anything beyond letters on a page, I pick up old books. I open them to random pages, I re-read paragraphs and lines or entire chapters, in pieces and snatched minutes. I've re-read my entire Tamora Pierce collection dozens of times and constantly have at least one of them on the go; I'm currently heading towards the end of Squire for the umpteenth time, after reading odd paragraphs while cleaning my teeth for two weeks.

I would love to do this with fic, but. It is tricky impossible to do this with a laptop. For a while I clung to the idea of getting a Kindle and filling it full of fic but that's hardly a safe thing to have near a running tap in the bathroom and I quickly realised it wouldn't be any sort of assurance of safety for much-loved fic in the long run; a Kindle is, basically, just a mini-computer and we all know what computers do in the end - break. Usually at the most inconvenient moments ie, when you've lost your backup/s.

So I'd been sitting on this idea of fic-books for a long time, without really ever getting around to researching it. I thought it'd be expensive, maybe, or there'd be copyright issues if the company noticed what they were printing (not that I'd have any intention of selling fic-books to anyone other than myself because hey, no and also not mine to sell and did I mention no? - but it kind of bugged me. So, I'd left it.

But with the thought of BagEnders graually vanishing, and it being the start of a shiny new year and also fic-books would be really really cool, I Googled for printing services. First option up was Lulu.com and, after browing for a few reviews on the service, I thought it looked promising. I spent about a day trying to format my BagEnders chapters into something approaching consistent - Lulu asks for .pdf files with all fonts embedded etc. which is super-easy to do with OpenOffice (on Writer, just go File -> Export as .pdf and hit save. Lulu has a step-by-step gide, although you may have to open an account with the site to read it - accounts are free and easy though!) but it's way more important for a book to be consistently formatted than a collection of chapters posted on separate webpages - chapter titles had to stand out, Author Notes to be italicised, footnotes etc.

Towards the end I was sick of staring at the thing and I figured I'd save what I had - which was almost a completely-formatted version of series I and II complete with all the comic strips originally drawn for the fic by Calima that are still available on the website - and upload it to Lulu just to see. I wasn't intending to print it yet - I still wasn't sure it was a great idea - but I wanted to test the Lulu process and so, I hit publish and followed the steps and I'd designed a cover to fit the A5 format using another one of Calima's illustrations and-

-and yeah, I got to the final step and it was there looking at me in all it's shiny temptingness - and I clicked publish.

(Aside: Lulu claims that you are "publishing" these books and will go some way to make it seem official, offering you the option of an ISBN and prcntages of sales etc., but during the creating process they offer you three options: publish outright and make available to buy, complete with ISBN; publish privately for only you to view/purchase; and another option that I've forgotten and probably isn't that important since the other two are the ones we want. For fic-books, I'm pretty sure the option will always be "PUBLISH JUST FOR ME" because you get royalties or some such if other people buy something you've 'published' and even if it's your own fic, that's getting into pretty sketchy territory legally. I can't stop you doing it, but I recommend you don't. Seriously. Don't.)

So I'd published the damn thing, formatting errors and all, and when it took me to the private-to-me book page after, I ordered a copy. With series I and II included plus illustrations (I didn't think I could fit III into Lulu's 740-page limit), it came to 612 pages for an A5 paperback which cost £10.34, plus £2.99 p&p. If you order multiple items - as far as I've tested anyway - p&p goes up by £1 per item; there may be a limit on this or there may not. For 612 pages though, I figured that was pretty good.

( Three days later, it arrived (image heavy) )

A few days after BagEnders arrived, I got twitchy with the knowledge that I could create fic books. This time I wanted to test things I'd learned from BagEnders (smaller font size, margin sizes etc.) but I didn't want to spend another entire day formatting, so I looked for a fic that was already formatted pretty perfectly and that would c&p as such. Plus, it had to be something I'd re-read enough to justify the money, and long enough to justify the book. With all that in mind I went for The Student Prince, a modern-day Merlin AU by FayJay. I re-read it fairly regularly, it's a proper book-length at 147,000 words, plus it wasn't too NC-17-rated (I'm still not entirely comfortable sending anything too dubious off to some company somewhere to print because hey, they might not read anything they're sent but then again, they have to check the printing and such; I didn't want to risk them banning me before I've even got started) and it had the nice bonus of, on the surface, looking like just another King Arthur story that anyone could've written without reference to the TV show. Formatting was mostly a simple matter of c&p, making sure the chapters started on a new page, and finding a cover design. Published it all up, ordered - £8.51 + £2.99 p&p; it came in at 525 pages of US trade paperback size, which is larger in surface area than A5 so they probably charge by page count instead - and ordered. In the same thee-day turnaround, it was dispatched and arrived.


( The Student Prince by Fay Jay )

So, that's Lulu.com and fic books. I like Lulu a lot; the step-by-step process is easy, and the print inside the book is sharp and perfect. Even the comic strips have printed beautifully. Aside from a few hiccups like the cover type and margin size - which I guess is why they recommend you order proof copies of everything you 'publish' - I have no issues with the two books. I love them and I'm going to keep them for a long time; I've already formatted several other of my favourite fics into .pdf files waiting to be printed, along with an anthology of all my favourite Stargate: Atlantis fic because it all seems to be around the novella-length instead of novel. Someday in the future I'll have a bookcase full of my favourite fic, bound and shiny and free from the threat of computer malfunctions.

~

Other stuff is happening. Today I went to a wonderfully unexpected old-fashioned Penny Arcade in Southport; I lovedlovedloved the third episode of Sherlock; Silent Witness is hopefully going to be on again next month which I'm super-excited about; I'm still working at the hospital a a temp, although I'm feeling like that may not last too much longer; I've read many wonderful non-fic books; I'm going with jesse_kips to see the marvellous Propeller perform Henry V in February and I can't wait.

But all that will be another post, because I should've been in bed an hour ago. :)


eta: Oh dear god that was an epic amount of html!fail to fix. NOW I AM GOING TO BED.

When I was about eleven, I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I handwrote a seven-page story about me and my friends finding a kitten called Smudge in the local church; it took about three nights after school and I was as proud of it as if I'd written a seven-hundred-page novel. After that I went through the usual learning-how-to-write-while-being-a-crazy-teenager process; I wrote stories based on books I'd read, I wrote stories about my friends, I created ridiculous female characters who Obi-Wan Kenobi and Legolas immediately fell in love with (and I'll never stop being glad that I learned what a Mary-Sue was before those had a chance to make it onto the shiny new thing called the Internet).

But in and around those things, I read. I read everything. I worked through the children's/teen section of my local library and picked up books at school, stole books that my brother had for birthdays and scavenged anything literary around the house that looked like I might possibly be able to read. And one night - I don't know if I'd run out of books at the library but I know I was searching for anything to read - I went to the pile of sci-fi/fantasy novels that my mother collected haphazardly and went over them with sticky book-wanting fingers. Based on nothing more than a liking for the cover art, I picked out The White Dragon and took it downstairs to the sofa where I promptly got the side-eye from my mother who was sitting across the room.

"Why are you reading that?" she asked.

I shrugged and said, "It looked interesting."

She hmmmed a bit. "It's probably not the best place to get into the series. You should start with the first book."

I shrugged again and said "I like the look of this one," already several pages in, and she left it.

It's never really occurred to me before but there are very few authors or book series that I can clearly remember picking up for the first time. Tamora Pierce (Alanna: the First Adventure at a high school book fair, the kind that had metal boxes that opened outwards into shelves of books), Neil Gaiman (American Gods from Waterstone's in Cardiff, just before a long train journey home that I entirely spent reading). Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair, when he came to do a talk at my university). And, earlier than any of those, Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon.

I quickly realised my mother was right and it was a terrible place to begin the series, but I finished the book, liked it, was intrigued. When careful perusal of the book list in the front revealed that Dragonflight was the recommended place to start - and an irritated rummage through the McCaffrey books we owned proved that it wasn't among them - I bought it. Immediately when I finished, I was delighted to discover Dragonquest on our bookshelf and my school library had Dragonsinger, while the local library had The Crystal Singer and I found Freedom's Landing forgotten in a cupboard and slowly, over a few years, I worked my way through the Talent and Ship series' and argued with a schoolfriend over whether McCaffrey stole the title for Power Play from a Sweet Valley High book or vice versa (no, seriously).

When it came time to pick somewhere we wanted to go for work experience, I knew exactly what I wanted to do; I wanted to spend time with a writer. I sat down and, in wobbly teenage writing on my best paper with a horse's head on the corner, I wrote to Anne McCaffrey to ask if I could gatecrash her house for a week so she could teach me everything I needed to know to write fabulous dragon books.

Of course it was a ridiculous request. Looking back, I can't believe I actually sincerely and utterly believed I'd get a "Yes! Come to Ireland immediately!" response back by return post but I did. I posted it and waited a couple of days alternating between panic - what if it got lost? how was I even supposed to get to Ireland, from Wales? Swim? - and excitement, and back to panic etc. For a few days and then a few more, nothing.

And then maybe a week later, two at most, I got a letter back. Typed on paper headed 'DRAGONHOLD-UNDERHILL', it said - very politely - that she didn't think my family would like me to go running away to Ireland to live with a complete stranger, regardless if she was old enough to be my grandmother. But, it said, where you live isn't such a small town and a newspaper or a bookshop would be invaluable work experience for an aspiring writer. And read she said, read everything - "so you know what has been said as well as how it has been said."

It concluded "Good luck" and was hand-signed, in blue biro.

I know this after all this time, because that letter is in my hand right now.

I'm so glad that I'm a massive hoarder who never throws anything away; my only regret is that it's not dated, although I could pretty easily work out which year I went for work experience (in the end, at a newspaper. It was invaluable; it taught me that I never want to be a newsaper journalist). I was disappointed by the 'no' but at the same time, I had a letter from an author. The name on the front of the book was a person, sitting in front of a computer screen somewhere under a hill in Ireland and taking the time to reply to a teenage fangirl (the letter in no way reads like it was typed by an assistant and then merely signed; I believed then and I believe now she typed every word herself). Authors existed, as people.

In the years after that I discovered the internet. Some time in those years, I found out that the internet had a generally low opinion of Anne McCaffrey. She'd said some silly things, her books had issues. She hated fanfiction. Being a McCaffrey fan was something you 'grew out of'. More and more, I left her books on the shelf while I re-read Pierce and Jacques and Wynne Jones. I picked up The Crystal Singer again last year and was surprised that I found Killashandra irritating and stuck-up. 'Grown out of it' I thought, and packed all my McCaffrey in stacked layers on the bookshelf out in the hallway while books I re-read and loved more stayed in my room.

And then on Tuesday, after a lovely day of tennis at the O2, I turned on my netbook for a quick check of Twitter and was surprised to see 'Anne McCaffrey' trending. Because she'd died, aged 85.

I was sad; it's been a rough year already with losing Diana Wynne Jones, but I wasn't really sure how I felt. I'd grown out of McCaffrey a long time ago. Hadn't I? She said those dumb things, she wasn't really something you named among your loves as a serious adult fantasy fan.

But in the last day or so, I've read a lot of tributes. Everyone says the same: she was wonderful. 'She made me believe in female heroes', 'in girl characters not backing down from a fight', 'in dragons'. And I started to think about the number of comments I've read over the years along the lines of "I started with the Dragons of Pern books when I was a teenager" and you know, I realised there's been a lot.

A lot of people in fandom today have an Anne McCaffrey story. I bet even more people outside of fandom do. No matter what she said or believed throughout a career that spanned decades and won pretty much every fantasy award going, there are countless people out there in the world who can say "I started loving dragons/fantasy/female heroes/etc when I first read Anne McCaffrey at age x."

I think that counts for a lot more than anything else.

RIP Anne. I bet your queen dragon in the afterlife is amazing.

(I'm re-reading The Crystal Singer again and you know what? Killashandra is irritable and arrogant... and she doesn't take shit from anyone.

I remember why I love her, now.)

One more Merlin-related thing (hey, NaNo starts on Tuesday; I have to get all this urge to internet!stalk Eoin Macken and Rupert Young out of my system by midnight tomorrow); on an idle 'oh look, press stuff that Eoin and Rupert did together!' watching of a Youtube vid, I was half-watching the montage of Merlin clips at the start of this interview here and at about 11 seconds into the vid ( cutting this in case you're super-avoiding ANY potential Merlin spoilers )

You may now return to whatever useful thing you were doing before reading this, and I'll try to stop watching the same three seconds of film over and over so I can actually watch the interview. Oh internets. How did people find such joy before you existed?

Oh dear, why has LJ made my default font when typing an entry into the posting box, so terrible? Didn't it used to be Verdana or Arial or something you know, that didn't hurt your eyes to read? My browser default font is still Verdana. This is most perplexing and I do not approve. I'm typing on the Rich text option just to make the font readable but I know from experience that I tend to forget and put my own HTML tags in and that confuses it terribly. Hhmm.


What I was originally going to say before LJ perplexed me so: did anyone else find Merlin somewhat pointless tonight? I was really looking forward to it and it started so interestingly with the pre-credits opening, only to fall into boredom. I spent most of the second half reflecting on how much my foot itched and it was frustrating that Casper was sitting on me so I couldn't reach to scratch it, which I suspect indicates the extent to which I was gripped by what was happening onscreen. I can't even be bothered to put a cut in because I have nothing really pressing to say about it that deserves spoiler-cutting. Just, oh Arthur. You are not this much of a prat anymore. Why do they keep feeling the need to hit the reset button every series and wipe out all the common sense you've spent the previous series learning?

I also spent much of the episode protesting that they were pronouncing 'Caerleon' wrong, because I've always pronounced it 'Cai-ar-lee-un' as in 'Caerdydd' (Cardiff in Welsh, which I've always heard pronounced as 'Cai-ar-dyth' as in the second pronounciation here) but a swift Google after it ended proved me wrong: according to this, it is actually pronounced Car-lee-un', similar to how Merlin had it (although Bradley James seemed to insist on saying it "Carleeon" or "Care-leeon" depending how much of a hurry he was in). I like it when Merlin proves that it's smarter than I've given it credit for, though it doesn't happen often.

The weekly shout-out to the slash-fans is getting a bit bizarre at this point though. Once or twice, fine. Every week, a bit odd. Seriously. We get it; y'all read the internets. Could you read the bits of the internets that want more of the knights please? Though at least they got lines this week. ( Oh wait, I realised something I need to spoiler-cut )

~

What else did I mean to mention (99.9% of my posts seem to be Merlin-related recently; I'm nothing if not obsessive). It was my birthday this last week for which I took two days off from work to have a four day weekend but I spent the day being stalked by a bad mood brought on by idiotic Parcelforce (this is a polite request to all of you: please, never use Parcelforce. They steal and lie and overcharge you, and generally need to be wiped from existence) and not getting a kitten and argh, I don't know. I like to do things on my birthday, go to new places or fun places or exciting places, but this year with work and general lack of money and the parental working on the day, I sat around at home feeling old and sorry for myself. It was a terrible plan. So, next year I'm going to have to do something pretty spectacular to make up for it I think.

But on Friday me and the parental went to Glasgow, somewhere I've heard many good things about re. shopping but I've never got around to going before. The shopping is most certainly excellent and we got lost in the five-floors of Debenhams and I mourned over the beautiful Desigual shop where I couldn't afford anything (£49 for a scarf!) and I braved the busy horror of Primark to stock up on long-sleeved tops which I desperately needed and generally, a good time was had. Not as good as if I'd actually got the kitten I wanted for my birthday but I finally found a pair of boots I liked enough to buy after looking for about five months. Minor victories! I spent a little more money than I should've but I got paid slightly more than I expected and I had birthday money and oh, it's only money. At some point I'll have enough of it to stop worrying about shopping overspends.

In conclusion ( have a picture of the Duke of Wellington with a traffic cone on his head (and some other things) )

~

I am going back to Tamora Pierce's Mastiff now. It's very good but there's something about it that's making me wonder if she's going to kill off characters I love before the end. Just a feeling. (I hope I'm wrong.)