Kivrin

Oh right, clothes and Julian "I Did A Masterclass In Eyebrows With Michael Kitchen" Ovenden.

( I'm watching on Masterpiece so I'm only up to the fashion show )

In which Anthony Horowitz suddenly remembered how to tie A, B and C plots together.

( spoilers, sir )

Hello, Yuletider! This is my first time at this rodeo and I am very excited both to write and to see what others write.

My name on AO3 is also Kivrin.

I will be so very happy to see fic in any of the fandoms I've requested. I've babbled a good deal here about what I love about each, and listed some prompts, but please don't feel limited by those if there's something else in the fandom that you're drawn to write.  You'll see there are a disproportionate number of prompts for Foyle's War - that's because I requested Any character there and so wanted to be sure to have prompts for characters individually as well as in combination, not because the other canons are of less interest to me!

What I like best: I love stories that fit into the interstices of canon - aftermaths of canon events, elaborations of references to past events, backstories, explorations of what-was-happening-back-at-the-ranch-while-[insert other action], and things like that. I love found families and deep friendships, so in romantic stories I particularly like it when the romantic partners' other relationships (friendly or familial) also play a role. Hurt/comfort, particularly with both physical and emotional elements, and with stoic or older characters needing to accept aid from others, is my bulletproof narrative kink.

Things I'm not fond of: Stories in which suicide plays a prominent role are very difficult for me to read, and at this point I don't want to read nominated-character death, please.


FOYLE'S WAR
Requested Characters: Any (Andrew Foyle, Christopher Foyle, Paul Milner, Samantha Stewart)

( what I love about it )

( Foyle's War Prompts )

ADAM DALGLIESH  (novels by P.D. James)
Requested Characters: Adam Dalgliesh

( what I love about it )

( Adam Dalgliesh prompts )

QI RPF
Requested Characters: David Mitchell

( what I love about it )

( QI RPF prompts )

FAKE NEWS RPF
Requested Characters: John Oliver, Andy Zaltzman, Jessica Williams

( what I love about it )

( Fake News RPF prompts )

Thank you so much, and happy writing!

As often with Sherlock, I enjoyed the experience of watching the episode but have mixed feelings about it, both in my cranky-cradle-Sherlockian mode ("but in the stories it went like blahBLAHblah not blahblahBLAH!!") and other modes.

( Stand with me here upon the terrace )

I'm still slowly picking at the Alison Weir book on Mary Stuart and the death of Darnley. SO MANY DAMN NOBLES OMG. As a kid I had an old (probably circa 1935 though hard to say) novelized life-of-Mary-Queen-of-Scots that I read several times, and I browsed the Antonia Fraser bookstop of a biography, so there's a haze of deja vu around Bothwell and Rizzio and Marys Seton, Beaton, Fleming and Hamilton, but no real understanding. breadandroses was asking, and I have no idea, why it is "Queen/King of Scots" and not "Scotland."

Series 2 of Call the Midwife is now up on Netflix; I roped breadandroses into watching the Christmas special with me and look forward to enjoying the rest of it along with more of Foyle's War. We watched the first episode of Bomb Girls the other night and were underwhelmed except by the costumes. In the non-BBC, non-mid-twentieth-century vein, we did start watching Agents of SHIELD last night. I fell asleep halfway through, which is more of a commentary on "rhinoviruses are evil" and "watching most of my TV on Netflix and download has left me unused to putting up with commercial breaks" than on the show.

It is really remarkable that I had managed to not watch any of Call The Midwife before yesterday, because 1) period drama 2) in a medical setting 3) with an overwhelmingly female cast 4) WITH BONUS NUNS. It is as if the BBC knew me!

I watched five episodes yesterday while knitting - appropriately enough, I worked on an adorable little baby cardigan for the forthcoming child of friends. I fast-forwarded a couple times due to humiliation squick, but never for gore. I do find it absurd that the ACTUAL MEDICAL SHOW had a much less graphic, less upsetting eclampsia storyline than A Show About Pretty People's Problems, but I am also grateful, because I was not in the mood for graphic.

I love Sister Julian and Sister Bernadette, and Miranda Hart is brilliant as the nervous Nurse Camilla "Chummy" Brown. The central character, Nurse Jenny Lee, is a little tediously Mary-Sue-ish in the improbable speed with which she goes from being revolted by the conditions of life in the East End and being a friend to individuals, and a lot tedious in her I LOVE A MAN I CANNOT HAVE backstory, but she's all right.

On the continuum between Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman (protagonist can do no wrong) and Bramwell (protagonist gets hardly anything right), CTM falls more on the Doctor Quinn side, so far, which does make for more restful viewing.

I rate the series an excellent accompaniment to knitting; will watch the rest.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Robert Downey, Jr and Jude Law, with Stephen Fry as Mycroft

If you didn't like the first one this isn't going to be any better for you, unless you really really really like turn-of-the-twentieth-century guns. The first film, as I said at the time, had a number of canonical pleasures for a profoundly acanonical experience; this one had fewer canonical pleasures but was still an enjoyable, albeit even less Holmesian, experience.

( brief spoilers here )

Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, with the greater London area as itself.

First, tangentially, I have a very hard time not going into an extensive Izzardian Englebert Humperdinck routine every time I write "Benedict Cumberbatch." Bendybert Cummerbund! Umptydink Crummerbutt! Hashtytag Tumblrbunch! ANYWAY.

Second, and primarily, I enjoyed that quite a lot, particularly the relationships between John, Sherlock, Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft, the passing references to a number of updated stories (there was flailing, I'm not too proud to admit that there was flailing), and the recurrence of the number 1895. Because it is always 1895!

I have one major spoilery objection.

( OBJECTION )

TV
Oh, Downton Abbey, you are not going to leave a single lick of melo un-drama'd, are you? Not even one. I'm okay with that now that one particular storyline has been run into the ground. Bates and Matthew need to have a [spoiler]-off for the title of Most Needs A G&S Operetta Written About His Stiff Upper Lip And Excessive High-handed Moral Nobility. Up next, I presume we're going to have the influenza pandemic?

Oh, Merlin, thank you for dispensing with the Projectiles Mean I Care trope that succeeded the Humorous Coda Is Pastede On Yaye trope.

Oh, QI, you... were really off your game this past week. Though watching a bunch of people attempt ventriloquism was pretty amusing.


READING
I just finished the worst novel-length prose object I have ever fully read. It's the sort of thing that one might want to have on hand as proof that publishers do actually perform a valuable service of protecting readers from assault but its/it's mistakes, missing commas, gratuitous italics ("I'll go down the hall to borrow some coffee from missing persons"), and bizarre variations in capitalization (a local convenience store chain is rendered as Wawa on page 23 and WaWa on page 25.)

The prose object in question is titled Murder at the Mikvah and anyone who drives a lot in the Philadelphia area may have seen billboards for it along I-95. That's because the author's dad owns a billboard business and puts up his daughter's book ad whenever one is open. It's published by iUniverse, an outfit that clearly just fed the author's Word doc into a machine and pressed "Print & Bind."

The plot is distinguished by a lot of infodumps about Jewish religious practice, lashings of obvious misdirection and foreshadowing, and some heavy-handed psychology. I rather enjoyed the "Hey, Jews! Become more observant!" didacticism as a refreshing change from remembered "Hey, everybody! Recite this prayer and be Saved!" didacticism.

Next up: a mystery novel that will probably be bad but shouldn't have nearly as many typos: Jill Paton Walsh's The Attenbury Emeralds: her first attempt to write Lord Peter without even a few struts of DLS' prose to hold the thing up. A Presumption of Death was pretty dire so my hopes aren't high, but it was in at the library, so I shall attempt it. Further bulletins as events warrant.