Kivrin

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!

What it actually says: seeking volunteers for a research study, blahblah qualifications, time/travel reimbursement available.

What I read: TIMETRAVEL reimbursement available.

***

- A lifetime of reading (mostly) amateur-sleuth mysteries is poor preparation for a police-procedural fandom, especially a very small one where there aren't fannish resources. I need a 20th-century law-enforcement equivalent of What Charles Dickens Ate and Jane Austen Knew.

- There appears to be no P.D. James fic in the world. Not even from Yuletide. Not even based on the dramatizations. I sort of expected there to be a small but devoted circle of Adam Dalgliesh/Cordelia Gray shippers writing multi-part curtainfic.

- Department of meta jokes: This bit of Acorn Media's "hey look at all the videos we'll sell you" montage, in which Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison says "Don't call me ma'am, I'm not the bloody queen" and there's a cut to Michael Kitchen as Christopher Foyle saying "Well, unfortunately, the evidence suggests otherwise."

- Apropos of the above, should The Doctor turn up, B&R and I are going to see tiny!baby!Helen Mirren in the 1965 National Youth Theater Antony and Cleopatra, with tiny!baby!Michael Kitchen in a small role. (And then we'll go see Antony Sher's Richard III and Patrick Stewart's Othello and the original cast of My Fair Lady and Liam Neeson and Laura Linney in The Crucible and...)

- Department of Foyle's War spoilers, Series 7/8 (depending on numbering) Ep 1: The Eternity Ring: ( Read more... ). Short version: still not planning to take anything after V-E Day as canon.

- I would really like to see the other scripts Anthony Horowitz apparently wrote for 1943 and 1944 but had to throw out due to ITV being all "hmph, only one more series for you."

- Connected only by WWII, Strange Glory by Charles Marsh is a very good life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's... well, it's pretty grim, because Nazis, and there's a good deal of fairly serious theology covered, but it's readable and informative and I'm glad I'm reading it as my first Bonhoeffer bio and not the Eric Metaxes one.

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.

LAST BOOK I FINISHED:
Monday night I finished the second Maggie Hope book, Princess Elizabeth's Spy. It is even more of a WWII Mary Sue fanfic than the first book was. Not only does Maggie go to Windsor as an undercover protective spy for young Princess Elizabeth (unlikely but okay) she and the princess are ( spoiler ) Also there's new people-have-been-keeping-secrets-from-you crazy for Maggie (someone else she was told was dead isn't dead!) And there's feistiness. Maggie is soooo feisty. Super super feisty in the face of moustache-twirling sexism that completely crumbles before her feistiness.

I will admit that if Maggie was crushing on a spunky lady-in-waiting or dashing Land Army woman rather than a procession of fighter pilots and senior (and therefore of course male) spies I'd have more patience with all the soap-operatic plotting and the dicey details (surely a new tutor wouldn't be invited to call the heir to the throne "Lilibet," and the phrase "on lockdown" wasn't used in 1940s Britain in the modern what-you-do-when-there's-a-mad-gun-wielding-person-in-the-school sense? If only because UK English so often does different things with prepositions than US English does.)

The book was a good illustration of some of the points raised in this interesting article on Strong Female Characters that penwiper26/eight_of_cups brought to my attention. It's as if the author doesn't trust readers to be interested in Maggie unless she's absolutely extraordinary - a brilliant mathematician, fluent in multiple languages, first to figure out all sorts of stuff, a favorite of Churchill, with a crazy history involving mysterious parents and hidden information. She can't just fight crime espionage, she has to be Super Super Special Good at it. She can't just be the protagonist because she's the protagonist, it has to be justified by her stupendousness.

It's tiring. And in the next book apparently she'll be parachuting into Germany (because she's totes fluent in German, of course!) I think I'll just reread Code Name Verity instead of pressing on with this series.

WHAT I'M READING NOW
A novel about Wallis Simpson, The Shadow Queen by Rebecca Dean. I'm not sure if I'll finish it - it's pretty romance-novel-ish - but at the moment it's a diverting enough look at high society (and would-be high society) in US cities in the aughts. Since most of my reading about the Windsors has been focused on QEII and her parents, the texts have tended to take an anti-EdwardVIII and anti-Wallis tack to reflect the views of George VI and his family, so it's interesting to read something sympathetic to Wallis.

I'm also reading Joseph Anton, Salman Rushie's memoir of his years in hiding after the publication of The Satanic Verses. ("Joseph Anton" was his alias, compounded from the names of two writers he admires, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.) It is somewhat exhausting in its detail about the nuts and bolts of publishing negotiations - there are pages I want to stamp with AND PEOPLE WERE TOO SPOOKED TO PRINT HIS WORK because that's the upshot - but it is vivid and compelling about the emotional (and financial) cost of living under the radar.

All the furor about The Satanic Verses happened when I was old enough to take notice but not old enough to have much of a grasp of the situation. An author had been forced to go "into hiding" - I pictured a man under a table. Years later, in a critical theory class in college, I offered the image as a joke on my young self. It turns out, however, that Rushdie did have to make uncomfortably frequent dives under tables and into closets whenever unexpected visitors turned up at places he was staying.

I really like his prose in the memoir, and I particularly enjoy his choice to write in the third person. It gives a sense of the disconnection he felt, but it also effectively underlines the fact that he is a writer before anything, and making narrative out of experience is something he does as much as he breathes. Unfortunately I don't expect to get any further in reading his fiction than I already have, because magical realism just... does not ring my bells. But I may try again after Joseph Anton.

WHAT I'LL READ NEXT

Absofricklinlutely no idea.

One of the Kindle Daily Deals is $1.99 for Strong Poison. Get it here.

WHAT I WAS READING ON THE WAY TO WORK: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. And a long gen seaQuest fanfic, AU after season 1, in which the only allusion to a certain character is "Admiral Smith's daughter had been killed in the attack on [place X]."

WHAT I MOST RECENTLY FINISHED: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose.

WHAT I MOST RECENTLY REREAD: Bits of The Mercy Rule by Perri Klass.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl because I've, uh, never actually read it. I was thinking, while I was reading the Francine Prose book, that I don't actually remember finding out about the Holocaust. I surmise that it was between when I was five and when I was eight or nine but I'm not sure. I think it was The Upstairs Room by Johanna Reiss, which I got out of the library at my school in India around my ninth birthday, that kicked off my READ ALL THE YA HOLOCAUST NOVELS stage, and it was I Am Rosemarie by Marietta Moskin that I read over and over. And The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black, since it's come in at the library.

The most exciting sort of present to receive, I think, is a totally-unexpected-yet-highly-readable-and-engaging book, and this one (a Christmas gift from my parents) totally fits that description. Death Comes to Pemberley is P.D. James writing Austen fanfic and it's good fun, though a reader's mileage will vary depending upon what she likes and dislikes in Austen and in James. I found things to enjoy and things to enjoy quibbling with, so it's a win-win.

The short, nonspoilery comment is "This is pretty much what you might expect, in that it's what you'd get if you put Pride and Prejudice in a Cuisinart with Original Sin or possibly Shroud for a Nightingale - a pre-professional-police-force police procedural, featuring the Darcy family and associates."

( spoilers within )

breadandroses and I took a Last Gasp Of Summer trip to Boston over the long weekend. It was, overall, lovely, but a bit odd as always to keep crashing against younger versions of myself.

We went out to Concord on Friday, where we visited the home of Louisa May Alcott and the Old North Bridge where there was the first formal engagement between British and American forces. At the house we had a tour from a friendly but disorganized guide, and at the bridge we listened to a stirring (a word that here means "over the top") account of the skirmish from a talking box and then a more nuanced conversation with a park ranger about the memorialization of the battle and particularly the small monument to the three British soldiers killed there. Being a park ranger would make me crazy, but I do covet the Smoky-the-Bear hats.

On Saturday we made a pilgrimage to the New England Mobile Book Fair - which, I observed as a child, would better be called the New England Immobile Book Fair because it is, literally, a warehouse. Everything is at least 20% off list price there, and the remainders rooms are wonderlands. The management keeps overhead down by simplifying the shelving: all the new books are organized by publisher and within that by title, so everything that comes in can go straight onto the shelf with no sorting. (The markdowns are sorted by genre and within that by author... sometimes.) When I was young there were multiple copies of BOOKS IN PRINT through which you would browse to find the publisher you needed. Now, of course, it's computer terminals, but there's still a luddite feeling to the operation, given that the terminals are running something like Windows 2000. The age of Amazon has definitely dealt the Book Fair a blow; I've never seen the parking lot so empty, even on a weekday, and this was a Saturday afternoon. I bought more than I would have anywhere else (viz. a nice paperback Pippi Longstocking, a new-to-me Emma Donoghue, and a freestanding copy of A Study In Scarlet) just to do a little something for a beloved institution.

On Sunday, after church, we went to another local institution tenaciously holding on into the internet age: the West Newton Cinema. Though it lives in infamy in my memory as the place I once spilled a large root beer across the lobby carpet and had to clean it up with teeny tiny napkins under the gleefully critical eye of an elderly patron who chirped "look what you did!" as I scuttled after ice cubes, it also lives in fond memory as the place I could get hot tea to go along with The Madness of King George. We saw Rob Brydon and Steve Cooper in The Trip, a fictionalized account of a road trip the two comedians took through the north of England. It's a bit humiliation-squicky in places but sidesplitting in others, as when Rob and Steve start doing dueling Michael Caine impressions, or when, in the course of long drives, they start riffing on random things like costume dramas. You'll be able to tell if someone's seen this film by their response to you barking "To bed!" at them.

Quite some time ago I read a biography of C.S. Lewis which was so interesting that I wanted to write a post about it. A really chewy post.

You all know what happens next, I'm sure. Or, given the fact that I haven't posted for over a month, you can guess.

So, briefly and incompletely - the bio I read is by A.N. Wilson, and anyone who was paying more attention than I was to Lewis studies in the mid-1990s - which would be anyone paying any attention at all, or at least, both my parents and penwiper26 - might remember hearing of as having a negative spin.

I didn't find it meanspirited or even particularly negative, in the sense of having a JACK LEWIS WAS A JERK take-home message. It is a critical biography, but "critical" in the sense of "analytical" not in the sense of "passing judgment on the subject and finding him wanting." Specifically, though Wilson illustrates a number of ways in which Lewis-as-experienced-by-his-students-and-colleagues differs from Lewis-as-experienced-by-readers, and indeed ways in which Lewis'-life-as-known-from-the-historical-record differs from Lewis'-life-as-recounted-in-Surprised by Joy, he never seems to use the variations to accuse Lewis of dishonesty or hypocrisy, and indeed seems to find Lewis intelligent, skilled, and interesting, if rather an odd duck.

Things that Wilson does snark at, in descending order of magnitude-of-snark:

- Lewis's early poetry. (If his first publication, Dymer, is an artistic and emotional touchstone for you, you probably should not read this biography.) (You should also not read this biography if it would distress you to consider the possibility that Lewis might have been sexually intimate with as many as two women in his entire life, one pre-conversion and one his wife.)
- Walter Hooper, literary advisor to the estate of C.S. Lewis and (in Wilson's view) quite a silly self-important man who has made much hay out of quite a brief personal association with Lewis.
- American C.S. Lewis fans who seem keen to reimagine Lewis in their own image - whether that image is (in the case of Hooper) traditionalist Roman Catholic or (in the case of Wheaton College) teetotal casserole-eating non-dancing G-movie-watching mainstream evangelical. (To paraphrase Anne Lamott, we can be sure we've recreated C.S. Lewis in our own image when we are sure he drank only the same things we do.)


OTHER RECENT READING
- the Small Change trilogy, by Jo Walton (Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown, in that order.) Mysteries set in an alternate UK that made peace with Hitler in 1941. Depressing (because the only thing more depressing than historical fascism is EXPANDED historical fascism, avec bonus explicit homophobia) and fascinating (1940s genderswap production of Hamlet?? YES PLEASE.) Does not end with unrelieved gloom.

- The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson. What Eat Pray Love would have been if the author had more perspective. It's a memoir by an American woman who went to Cairo to teach English, converted to Islam and fell in love. It's particularly remarkable how she manages to describe the experience of being a young American woman learning to navigate shopping and housekeeping in a totally different culture and climate without either downplaying her own fear and discomfort or totally exoticizing the world she's entering.

- Volume 5 of the Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery. Makes me glad all over again to live in an age of medicine that has a fair chance of actually working.

- rereading Long May She Reign by Ellen Emerson White, the fourth book in the President's Daughter series. I couldn't put it down, but at the same time I found it rather more distressing on rereading than I had the first time through. I wanted to take Meg by the shoulders and tell her to get. some. fucking. therapy. And failing that I wished her resistance to the idea had been fleshed out just a little bit.

RECENT VIEWING
- White Collar via iTunes. Continues to be love.
- A Bit of Fry and Laurie on my beloved Netflix streaming. B&R and I are trying to pace ourselves because there's not NEARLY as much of it as we wish there were.
- Any bits of Dara O'Briain, Irish standup comedian, that I can find.

RECENT SINGING
We now have a new director of music, a new organist, and paid section leaders, which in some ways is marvelous (we sound awesome every time!) and in some ways makes me feel both inadequate and superfluous (we sound awesome whether I open my mouth or not!) We're singing some very lovely stuff, which is an unmitigated yay. Two weekends ago we had a choral evensong which came off excellently, featuring a Slavonic _Phos Hilaron,_ acres of Herbert Howells (Magnificant, Nunc Dimitis, psalm setting, and two hymns), and a spiritual.

FINALLY
I find it most unfair that it can be thirty-odd or even twenty-odd degrees every morning, and not more than forty-five at the heat of the day, but I am STILL getting springtime allergies. MOST unfair. *rubs eyes*

- Have read Blackout and All Clear. I can imagine the sort of criticism that might be leveled at them (FEWER EXAMPLES, CONNIE), but I don't agree with it (LOVE THE EXAMPLES, CONNIE.) Connie Willis can write as much logistics!porn as she likes and I will read it all. I totally did the "finish book and proceed immediately to reading it over again from the beginning" thing. There were a few timey-wimey things that I guessed ahead of time, but most I did not. And of course, in Connie Willis, the timey-wimey is mostly a means to an end.

- Have been reading more Austerity Britain which is my very favorite kind of history - lots of tasty primary sources stitched elegantly together.

- Finished The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. It's by far the least Gothic of her first four books (I haven't yet read the fifth), but ultimately it's the most depressing. Not quite Slammerkin depressing, but headed in that direction. ( Spoilers beneath. )

- Am rereading Laurie R. King's With Child, the third Kate Martinelli novel, for what might be the first time since high school or college. It's a lot more depressing when the characters I once looked at as grown-ups are peers. Still, it's hard to put down, because King is really, really that good.

- I'm also doing a haphazard reread-all-of-Anne-Lamott project. Sadly, I think my copy of Traveling Mercies is not coming home, but I don't mind buying another. I've reread Bird by Bird and Operating Instructions and almost all of Grace (Eventually) and I've got Plan B by my bed.

- I'm also dipping in to The Year of the King again (Antony Sher's memoir of playing Richard III.) This time I'm really savoring all the physical backstage details of the Barbican, and remembering how much pleasure it gave me, when at drama camp, to mentally call the PA system that carried the show back to the dressing rooms "the tannoy." When I first read TYotK I was probably at the height of my want-to-be-an-actor-ness, and so reading it is nostalgic in a good way.

- On that theatrical note, for my birthday breadandroses gave me Stephen Fry's new autobiography The Fry Chronicles, which picks up directly where Moab is my Washpot left off and covers the ensuing ten-ish years of his life. It was... honestly, it was a bit disappointing, primarily because it never quite settles down to being either a narrative of his emotional life or a chronology of his professional development, which means that it... well... it rather lurches. Partly (and laudably) this is due to the fact that many of the other figures in the narrative are famous in their own rights and he chooses not to go into much detail about his early experiences with them except to say, repeatedly and warmly, that Hugh and Emma (in particular) are absolutely spiffing and brilliant and lovely. Which WE ALL KNOW, thank you very much, Stephen, and would just like a tiny bit more of your POV on the whole Emma-trapping-you-in-the-hallway-while-she-ran-about-aggressively-naked situation. (I never dreamed, years ago, that Peter's Friends might in some ways be a LESS odd version of Stephen's Christmas parties.) Or, if you're not going to do that, which would be a very reasonable choice, maybe you could take us through the emotional experience of college with not quite so much time on the academic set-up? I mean, as a clueless American I'm grateful for the tutelage, particularly as to the differences between Cambridge and Oxford, but... well, the relationship with Kim, for example, is all a bit pat and Kim doesn't seem to have much personality. Which, again, is very courteous, but also frustrating.