regshoe

I watched Kidnapped again yesterday, on the anniversary of its first performance last year. It doesn't dim with rewatching; I was a little afraid it would, but just hearing that opening guitar-strum still takes me right back to that moment in the theatre, thinking, right, this is happening... :)

I ended up turning my semi-break from fandom into a mostly-disappearance, for which apologies. RL has been going pretty well if busily, about which I may write more in another post. Fandom has been difficult, and I've had a bit of thinking to do about where I am and what I should do from here; I've decided that on the one hand I should stick to a somewhat-reduced level of activity for the foreseeable future, but on the other hand I do want to stay here at least that much. So I've also been thinking about how I might make that work, principally by avoiding as completely as possible the things I need to avoid. AO3 Saviour has been a great help ever since I started using it, and I've extended my blocklist there; what would be really useful is if I had something similar for Dreamwidth, and so—

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(Other stuff: I will probably stop going on Tumblr; and I won't do Write Every Day check-ins anymore, though I will try to keep up with the spirit of it.)

In the meantime, I've been writing! I have four WIPs (for three different Kidnappeds and Jill) in various states of almost ready to post; I was vaguely planning to return to them over the Easter weekend, but Good Friday is here and I'm deep into a new WIP which is so absorbing I might just keep going on that until the first draft is done, so the others might have to wait a little while longer. (On the other hand, one of them is for NTS Kidnapped and the new WIP isn't, so I might harness the fresh-rewatch energy to finish editing that one... we'll see.)

On that topic, verecunda tagged me a while ago on Tumblr in a 'post the last sentence you wrote' meme, which seems a good excuse for a snippet...

But that last morning in the Cage upon Ben Alder, and through all the hard, miserable days that followed, I think I never quite got out of that bad dream; until— I will tell what happened.

(Not as interesting out of context as in, but perhaps you can tell why I'm reluctant to stop there.)

I've also got quite a bit of new fic to read, which looks very good indeed—I've read a couple this morning and am looking forward to making my way slowly through the rest. :) And I've kept up writing (short) book reviews, without posting them, so I may have an unusually long Recent Reading entry to make at some point. Right now I'm reading another Hornblower book (which finally turned up at the library after having it on hold for three months), which, oh dear... However I am also re-reading Kidnapped as inspiration for that WIP, which is not exactly conducive to concentrating on Hornblower, so it might be a little while before I find out whether

spoiler

Bush really is dead after all.

And while re-reading Kidnapped I am making notes for a timeline, which is being a fun project!

What a good idea this holiday love meme is! Here's mine.

✨ holiday love meme 2023 ✨
my thread here

I was delighted to learn that Big Country, whose song 'In a Big Country' featured very memorably in NTS Kidnapped, have another song that's actually about the Appin Murder:



Lyrics here. The first part of the song is from the perspective of the murderer—though avoids any actual statement of identity—and the POV then shifts to James of the Glens. I think 'John, John' refers to John Beg and John More Maccoll, two servants of James's who were examined as witnesses during his trial (and treated shamefully by the prosecution). Also note the prominent use of the word 'kidnapped', which I take it is a reference :D

Thanks to troisoiseaux for this: details of a Jacobite drinking glass in the Met Museum, New York. The inscription is a version of 'God Save the King' with Jacobite lyrics—the song was only just being adopted as the national anthem around this time, and apparently there were both Jacobite and Hanoverian versions in existence before the Hanoverians made it an official thing.

Thanks to scintilla10 for this: Miss Broster Comes to the Highlands. I wasn't sure quite what to do with this fascinating article, but it will be very much of interest to some of you, so I've just put it up on the website. It's a lovely little glimpse of what Broster was like as a person, as well as her travels in Scotland in connection with her Jacobite fiction—how good to hear that she had 'the loveliest speaking voice'!

I don't know how reliable this kind of technology is, but pretty interesting: Death masks recreate face of Bonnie Prince Charlie. I like how he looks! And it is reasonably like his portraits, which would seem to be a sign of reliability.

Well, now that the busyness of hosting WED is over, I'm taking a review of the other fannish things I have going on and trying to do some sorting out. So! At the moment I am working on:

• My Flight of the Heron/Kidnapped crossover longfic! I'm on chapter 17 at the moment and the total wordcount has just passed 90,000; I think I've got another four or five chapters to go, give or take a little epiloguing, which suggests a final wordcount somewhere in the 110-120k range. This is exciting! There are definitely plot difficulties, but I am making steady progress working through them and keeping going (very much thanks to beta feedback from the excellent sanguinity and luzula). If all continues well, I'm fairly comfortably on track for my goal of getting to 'only final edits needed' stage within this year.
• Another meta post resulting from the FotH Wikipedia research. This one has been fully written up for months, I just haven't got round to posting it; I will soon.
• A meta post about the textual history of Kidnapped. Also mostly written, needs a bit more polishing.
• The Flight of the Heron ebook! This has slowed to a crawl due to various technological problems, but I'm now three-quarters of the way through scanning and OCR-ing the text and hoping to make a final push on the last quarter soon. And then will follow the pleasant text-corrections stage in which I get to read FotH again. :D
• A Wikipedia article on NTS Kidnapped. ♥
• A vague plan to make my own fansite, probably over on Neocities. This is an idea I've had for some time, resulting from a convergence of 'I love all this cool HTML and CSS I'm learning for ebooking, what else can I do with it?', 'I want to archive my Flight of the Heron and Kidnapped fic somewhere where no one can tell me they know better than I do what the fandom is called' and 'hmm, it'd be nice to have some kind of permanent place to put all this stuff I'm digging up about FotH and D. K. Broster', and the recent Things happening to do with AO3 have lent it further impetus. I've got a collection of disorganised and half-finished HTML files, which need a lot more organisation before I can do anything with them, and I need to make a decision about the scope of such a site ('everything I'm interested in' is all very well for Dreamwidth, but I feel a proper website ought to be a bit better-defined; but it needs to include at least both FotH and Kidnapped, and fic, meta and general canon/history info; perhaps a broad 'old books about Jacobites' theme?). But it's progressing, somewhat.

So that's enough to keep me busy for a while, and who knows how long any of it will take. But it's good fun :D

An interesting etymological ramble I've been meaning to post about for a while...

Some time ago I was thinking about the Middle English song 'Mirie it is while sumer ilast' (as you do), and I thought, hmm, 'with fugheles song'—surely 'fugheles' is the same word as 'fågel', the Swedish for 'bird'? So I looked it up and yes, it is; more obviously, they're also both the same as the modern English word 'fowl', which must have lost the G somewhere along the way.

'Fowl' used to mean what 'bird' and 'fågel' mean now, referring to the entire class of Aves, but it's rare these days, and most of its surviving uses are in specific contexts to do with domesticated birds and hunting (wildfowl, Guinea fowl, etc.). I'd never heard of any other distinction between 'bird' and 'fowl'; but The Country Housewife and Lady's Director by Richard Bradley, a housekeeping manual published in the mid-eighteenth century which I recently read for fic research, makes a very specific one: according to Bradley,

a Fowl always leads it's young Ones to the Meat, and a Bird carries the Meat to the Young: For this Reaſon, we find that Fowls always make their Neſts upon the Ground, while Birds, for the moſt part, build their Neſts aloft; ſo then our common Poultry are Fowls, the Pheaſant, Partridge, Peacock, Turkey, Buſtard, Quail, Lapwing, Duck, and ſuch like are all Fowls: But a Pigeon is a Bird, and a Stork, or Crane, and a Heron, are Birds, they built their Neſts aloft, and carry Meat to their young ones.

This is the distinction between what modern ornithology calls 'precocial' and 'altricial' birds. I don't know how widespread using 'bird' and 'fowl' like this ever was, but I've never come across it before and it's not in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word 'bird', meanwhile, is rather mysterious. It appears in Old English as a word for young birds, and took a bit of a semantic detour through young animals in general and young humans before becoming a synonym of 'fowl' in Middle English and eventually supplanting it as the generally-used English word for Aves. But where it actually came from, we don't know; it's not part of the fughel/fowl/fågel group of words in Germanic languages, nor is it related to Latin (avis) or French (oiseau) or Welsh (aderyn) or anything else, apparently. I imagine some Anglo-Saxon peasant looking thoughtfully at a robin and going, 'you know what, Egbert? I'm not going to call that a fowl any more. I mean, it just looks more like a bird to me, you know?'

Having got copyright clearance from Project Gutenberg for Sir Isumbras at the Ford when it came into the public domain at the beginning of the year, I've been working on making the required files.

This is being an interesting process so far, getting to grips with the intricacies of text rewrapping (you don't realise how many words are more than ten letters long until you have to format line length to within ten-character limits), line breaks (it turns out different operating systems—invisibly—use different systems for marking line breaks, and my computer was using the wrong one—happily I've now got a text editor that can convert them) and so on. After all that, I now have what looks like a workable text file!

The next step will be putting together the html ebook, which I think will be a challenge—my current knowledge of html is limited to what I've picked up from formatting on Dreamwidth and AO3, and this is a bit more advanced—but hopefully a rewarding one. Anyway, it's certainly interesting seeing the details of the work that goes into making an ebook, as well as getting to know Sir Isumbras very well indeed.

I'm not sure why it's never occurred to me to try this before, but: I have discovered the delights of downloading fic from AO3 and putting it on my e-reader, and it's an excellent way of reading longfic! Much more pleasant than the screen, the formatting all translates well, and AO3 even puts a little note at the end reminding you to go back to the website and comment :D Anyway, I've now downloaded all the existing Flight of the Heron longfics for future re-reading.

I don't think I posted about the Ghosts finale at the time—I watched it last week, it was very good! Aww, such a lovely happy ending for both couples, even if the big misunderstanding between Alison and Mike was a bit silly, haha. Kitty's enthusiasm over the wedding was adorable, as was the Captain getting quietly really into all the trappings of the celebration. Robin giving his opinions on relationships was hilarious, and I liked the unexpected Mary backstory details! Hey, and I see there's going to be a Christmas special—that's two TV specials to look forward to this Christmas. :D

I have had a pretty meh weekend. For the last few months I've been precariously balancing going out for walks, very early in the morning when it's nice and quiet, and getting enough sleep, and this weekend I was tired enough that the walks had to be sacrificed entirely. And it's been such nice weather, and there are terns on the river, and I really want to go out for a properly long walk, and I suppose the idea that I won't be able to just do that in the daytime for many months yet is getting to me a little.

However! Other things continue. I have finished a draft of my latest Flight of the Heron fic, which has ended up over 11,000 words long—the second longest fic I've ever written, which I'm quite pleased with, although some of the ideas in it are still slightly rough and it needs a bit more polishing before it'll be ready to post. We shall see.

Also, lots of reading. I've finished the third and final volume of The Lyon in Mourning (1750-75), which contains all sorts of good stuff. Forbes kept on collecting for some years after the Rising, and went on taking an interest in the people he got these stories from also—he's a real champion of the men who helped the Prince in his flight after Culloden, singing their praises to all his correspondents (do you know that they spurned a reward of thirty thousand pounds sterling—which, to be fair, was an awful lot of money in those days, Forbes is right to be so impressed) and organising collections of money for them when they fall on hard times. There's also some more useful stuff for Broster fandom, including a detailed description of the Prince's relations with Lochiel and Archibald Cameron during his time in hiding, which appears to have been Broster's source for some of the timeline in part 5 of FotH, and an account of Dr Cameron's later execution, which I suppose will be relevant later on... About halfway through this volume Forbes appears to have run out of material on the '45 itself, and the rest of the collection is made up of copies of his correspondence with various Jacobite friends—in which Charles, still evidently a dangerous topic, is referred to under such disguised names as 'Cousin Peggie' and 'the Sultan of Constantinople'. These were less immediately relevant, although there are some interesting comments on current events later on in the century—including the troubled economic times, the Parliamentary drama surrounding John Wilkes, the brewing War of American Independence and a sadly prophetic observation of the beginnings of mass emigration from the Highlands, which, says Forbes, 'may terminate in depopulating Old Caledon!'. Volume III read, I now only have the itinerary of Prince Charles's movements while he was in Scotland, put together by the publishers as a supplement, to go—I will either get to this at some point, or just use it for reference when writing FotH fic and meta, I think.

Now I'm reading another Selma Lagerlöf book, which is going well. I've also discovered that the excellent fadedpage.com has South Riding by Winifred Holtby (which, due to the way the dates work out, is public domain in both Canada and the UK but not in the US, so not on the big US-based ebook sites)—I'm very happy about this and anticipating a re-read soon. :)

I'm still enjoying the Malory Towers TV series—I don't think it's perfectly faithful to the books, but it's such good fun that I don't have anything to complain about. Enid Blyton's boarding school stories were my favourite thing ever when I was ten or so, and this is a great reminder of why I loved them so much. Having had to cancel my original plans for next week's holiday from work, I'm now intending to spend the time re-reading the books—we'll see how quickly I can get through all six of them...

I have another JSMN fic coming together in my head. So far I have a perfect setting, some ideas about characters and some brilliant historical details that I really want to include, but no plot. Why do I have to have things happen??? I shall do some more historical research and see what falls out...

I realised earlier that I'd managed to get to the chapter in The '45 on the battle of Culloden today, on the anniversary of the battle of Culloden, completely by chance.

Also in 'things to do in lockdown': I've found this seven and a half hour-long recorded folk music festival featuring musicians (including some of my faves) playing from their front rooms. So I know how I'll be spending the rest of my time on holiday :D

I have had a good day today! Yesterday I did too many things (good things, but too many of them) and overloaded my brain, so I've been recovering by staying in all day and keeping to quiet things. I've made lots of progress on the jumper I'm knitting (I'm making a gansey in the traditional style, using a pattern from Staithes on the Yorkshire coast—I've now finished the 'miles of stocking stitch' bit and got to the more interesting patterned section, which is great fun and going well) and written over 1,000 words of delicious hurt/comfort for The Flight of the Heron—my usual pace when I'm working steadily on a fic is about 500 words a day, so I'm very pleased with this.

Anyway: I was going to post this rec yesterday, but sensory overload makes listening to music impossible, so here it is now. Folk music, ambivalent moods and nature imagery are three of my favourite things, so of course I like this song a lot, and I'm always reminded of it at this time of year—the weather for the last couple of days has been both mild and very windy, which feels appropriate.



I think my favourite thing about it is the contrast between the lyrics and the music. One of the comments quoted on the Mainly Norfolk page about the song describes it as 'Male Chauvinist Pig Song of the Year', which is understandable if you're just looking at the words (although, in fairness, there are plenty of recordings by women which address it to a 'young man' rather than a 'woman'—arrogance is a common folk song trait :P). But that seems to become much less obvious when set against that lovely, haunting tune, which was apparently collected from a street singer in Newcastle in the 1820s.

If I had to pick an existing folk tune to set the Raven King ballad from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to, this one would be my top choice if it wasn't for the metre being twice as long as it needs to be. It has just that sort of slightly eerie, unsettled, ambivalent sound (it even has that perfect little falling-back twist in the final line in just the right place to sing 'the Raven King...' to if you arranged the lyrics right), which undercuts the arrogant certainty of the lyrics beautifully. You get the feeling, listening to that tune, that the narrator's confidence that his former lover will return to him is decidedly misplaced—and, perhaps, that he knows this, that he realises that the human heart and will are not as constant and predictable as the seasons.