regshoe | Entries tagged with snowflake challenge

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Challenge #12: Create a Rec Countdown.

How about some ballad recs? A non-comprehensive list of my slightly-less-well-known faves:

272. 'The Holland Handkerchief' or 'The Suffolk Miracle': traditional lyrics; Mainly Norfolk info page; recording by Alasdair Roberts. This is one of my favourite ghost ballads, with very effective use of specific detail for a creepy twist.

215½. 'Annan Water': traditional lyrics; Mainly Norfolk info page; a recording by Kate Rusby. A solemn, touching and rather mysterious tragedy, lovely in its sense of inevitable doom.

213. 'Sir James the Rose': traditional lyrics; recording by Steeleye Span. This one's just a really good adventure story—murder, flight, betrayal, punctilious but rather pointless Honour, a gory ending—and Bob Johnson performs it with the enjoyable gusto he always brings to this kind of song.

14. 'Bonnie Banks o Fordie': traditional lyrics; info from Mainly Norfolk; recording by Old Blind Dogs. A proper bloody murder ballad with a cruelly ironic twist ending; I especially like this tune and arrangement.

Challenge #13: Interact with someone in fandom you haven't talked with before. Done!

Challenge #14: In your own space, create your own fandom challenge.

Natural history is a fandom; it also goes well with story-based fandom, I think. So my challenge is in two parts:

1) Find a wild species (anything: bird, wildflower, insect, fungus, etc.) that you can't already identify on sight/sound, and—using whatever suitable resources are available: books, the internet, asking knowledgeable people—identify it.
2) Incorporate this species into a fanwork. E.g. you could describe it in a fic, use it as a motif in a piece of art, make an icon by overlaying a quote from your canon on a photo of it, use a recording of its song in the background of a podfic...

Challenge #15: Talk about an unexpected joyous moment you experienced last year.

Reading my Yuletide recipient's prompts for the first time! The Warm Hands of Ghosts wasn't something I expected to feel very confident about writing for, but I read those Laura/Pim feelings and ideas and went ':D :D well then, I'm doing this!'. I love how fandom in general and exchanges in particular can do that, and it's nice to think of it while pondering what exchanges I might sign up for this year.

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Challenge #7: In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a wishlist of sorts.

1) I wish for more fannish love, fic and other fanworks for Witching Hill and Uvo/Gilly.
2) I wish someone would make me some icons out of the illustrations here (especially those on pages 91 and 306), because I cannot figure out how to do it without the pictures going blurry and it's driving me up the wall.
3) I think A Glass of Blessings is top of my 'number of times I've requested in an exchange but never received it' list, so: I wish for some Piers fic!

Challenge #8: In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for a beloved character, relationship or fandom.

So to encourage the granting of my first wish: Witching Hill by E. W. Hornung is a book/short story series published in 1913 and set a few years earlier, about a) bizarre possibly-supernatural happenings in which the dramatic eighteenth-century past insists on its own ongoing presence on a comically modern and mundane new housing estate and b) the beautifully slashy friendship between 'Gilly' Gillon, the book's narrator and good-natured stalwart sceptic, and Uvo Delavoye, a sensitive, 'morbid', implicitly-queer believer in the supernatural power of the past. Here is Gilly talking about his first meeting with Uvo: Then young Uvo Delavoye dropped into the office [...] And life began again. It is weird, adorable and deserves to have a fandom.

Challenge #9: In your own space, create a fanwork. Working on it! I have an Alan/Davie ficlet half-drafted which I hope to finish and post for Burns Night.

Challenge #10: In your own space, talk about one of your fandom firsts.

My first fic was a rather indefinite short character-centric/worldbuildy story. I still think it's decent, but it's interesting to reflect on how much more comfortable I've become with longer, plotty fic since then.

Challenge #11: In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.

I love the thing (trope? motif) where one half of the OTP sits in an armchair, ideally beside the hearthrug, and the other sits on the hearthrug/floor and leans their head against the first character's knee or in their lap. It's intimate, cosily domestic, but also interesting in its suggestion of inequality; a powerful demonstration of devotion, dependence, fondness, loyalty... I'm also toying with a variation—which I don't think I've ever actually seen, but I would like to—where one character is sat in the chair and the other character tries to invoke this trope by sitting down on the floor, whereupon the first character goes, no, I reject your gesture of symbolic inequality, we are and will be on a level!, and gets down from the chair to sit on the floor beside them instead.

I'm not up to whole posts for

snowflake_challenge this year, but I wanted to participate in a smaller way, so here are some mini-answers for the challenges posted so far. :)

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Challenge #1, Update your fandom information, I have done by updating my Dreamwidth profile.

Challenge #2, Talk about your fannish origin story, I did in this (locked) post from a few years ago, and since the relevant stuff is in the past it hasn't really changed!

Challenge #3: Talk about a fannish opinion you hold that has changed over time.

I have ceased to be an adaptation-hating book purist! I was never very extreme—I liked the Lord of the Rings films, for instance—but I did believe that an adaptation was good insofar as it was faithful to the original: it could be nice to see the characters interpreted by actors or appreciate the music in a good soundtrack, but changes from the book were always bad. But then, well, Kidnapped happened, and I think it did pretty profoundly alter my understanding of what an adaptation that's not sticking to the letter of the original can do. It changes so much—plot, language, mood and style, all that music—and it completely gets at the heart of the book's story, interpreting it for a new medium and audience, commenting on it, bringing out new aspects of it. It's an absolute joy and it's really good.

Challenge #4: Since this is the start of a new year, this challenge will be to set your own goals! Of course we can all make large or ambitious goals, remember that small and/or short goals are also good!

My fannish goal for this year is to do as much as it's a good idea to do, and try not to do more than that.

Challenge #5: Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom.

I have made some wonderful friends. You lot are really the best, you know ♥

Challenge #6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.

Well, I have lots of favourites, but:

So we've got to keep going, you and I. Knowing that more adventures still await us, and that every mile we cover is making our companions smile.

You might think you know the ending, but you've got to walk on to find out. Turn the page, trust the author. Davie, you are so young. You will grow. You will live the life of a gentleman. You will feel and learn and taste and travel. You will see fully who you are and all that has made you. You will come into your kingdom. And then one moonlit evening, years from now, when the fear and threat have subsided, you'll be walking by your house, considering your beautiful Scotland and you'll stop. And take out that silver button, and know that he was always there. But that also, now, he's...

[Please picture me, still lying on the floor crying, just reading this bit in the transcript again. I love this play so much ;__; ]

The final

snowflake_challenge is to opine on the future of fandom, which is a good thing to think about.

snowflake_challenge presents this question in the context of the recent chaos on Twitter, the emergence of new platforms and the resulting 'in flux' feeling of current fandom, and honestly I feel I don't really have much to say about that. I enjoy reading and thinking about debates over online platforms and the wider nature of fandom and so on, but as far as my own fandom life goes I'm quite happy doing my own thing in my tiny fandoms on Dreamwidth, blissfully isolated from the upheavals of megafandoms and commercial social media sites.

I don't think Dreamwidth itself is ever likely to become more of a centre for fandom than it is, though some people will migrate here as other sites collapse. This way of doing fandom isn't a popular one these days, and that's fine; I only hope that the people who are currently in fandom on Twitter and Discord and so on and are unsatisfied with it, and who might be more suited to the slow, text-based, active-interaction-requiring (rather than having likes, reblogs etc.) style of Dreamwidth, manage to find their way here—like I did!

How about some not-too-serious predictions for my own fandom, then? The future of Flight of the Heron/D. K. Broster/wider Jacobites in Classic Fiction fandom...

One thing FotH fandom hasn't done very much of yet is really wacky changed-/different-setting AUs: different historical setting, genderswaps, m/m marriage exists and now Keith and Ewen have to get married/pretend to be married for reasons, someone is secretly a vampire, non-obvious crossovers. I think we'll start branching out more into these; without going into specifics, I know several people have ideas like this already, and this is a good thing.
I think at some point we'll rediscover "Mr Rowl" as we have The Wounded Name, and it will result in some really interesting Raoul/Barrington slash fic—a much more fraught and potentially dramatic pairing than Aymar/Laurent and, in some ways, Ewen/Keith.
More Kidnapped fic will be written, and it will be very good.
The subtextually-lesbian Jacobite novel of my dreams totally exists and we will discover it! (Or write it, perhaps? either as a genderswap fic or as an original work).

So that's it for the Snowflake Challenge! It's been great fun, if slightly hectic—an opportunity to reflect on and post about things I wouldn't otherwise have written about but that are relevant and interesting to fandom life in general—and I'm very glad I took part. :)

snowflake_challenge #14 is the Fandom Wrap Challenge, some summary rankings of fannish things over the last year...

What were your top 5 fandoms for 2022 based on the amount of time you interacted with them?
1. Flight of the Heron, my main fandom! All my longer fic, all the podfic, several of the shorter fics and much of the general reading/fandom discussion was here.
2. Kidnapped, largely thanks to the longfic WIP.
3. The Wounded Name, which I re-read, talked about a bit and wrote some fic for.

That's about it for my main fandoms—the rest are 'one-off' canons which I know and briefly did some fannish stuff for but don't think of myself as being continuously 'in fandom' for, as it were.

4. White Cockades, for which I wrote a medium-long crossover with FotH.
5. After that it's exchange fandoms, and I think A Little Princess (for Hurt/Comfort Ex) and The Horla (for Yuletide) are probably more or less tied here. Also Jill, for which I did not create anything but I did request and receive multiple excellent exchange fics for it!

What were your top 5 fandom spaces (Discord, Twitter, etc.) you experienced fandom in terms of time spent?
1. Dreamwidth—my main fannish space, and I'm very happy with this!
2. AO3, my primary place for posting fic.
3. Tumblr, where I read

sanguinarysanguinity's and

chiropteracupola's blogs and like FotH posts.
4. Discord, which is mainly lurking these days.
5. Squidgeworld, for cross-posting FotH fic.

What are the top 5 things you did to contribute to fandom in terms of time? Did you write? Comment? Send positive energy into the universe? Create art?
1. Write and post fic.
2. Post about, comment about and generally discuss my fandoms on Dreamwidth.
3. Read and comment on posted fic.
4. Beta read fic.
5. Record and post podfic.

What were your top 5 most appreciated fandom contributions? (i.e. in terms of likes, kudos, reblogs, comments, etc.)
By kudos on AO3:
1. When I am sick and like to die, my first Kidnapped fic
2. A Propitious Season of Living, the A Little Princess hurt/comfort fic
3. Six foot two (without stocking or shoe), a silly FotH ficlet
4. And ilka bonny lassie sang, my second Kidnapped fic
5. That Cup of Cold Water, another FotH ficlet written for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth.

Have a Top 5 List you'd like to share?? By all means!
Have the results of the Ewen/Keith slash poll that I posted for challenge #8! Full quotes at the linked post—fandom's favourite lines are:
1. '...like the roots of two trees...'
2. '...a species of bondage...'
3. '...you gave me back that night in the hut.'
4. '...extraordinarily handsome Ardroy had looked...'
5. A tie between '...a man of his proportions' and '...his pulse quickened with pleasure...'
Good taste, everyone :D

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of three snowmen and two robins with snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

I do love the robin and brambling!

snowflake_challenge #13 is to rec three fanworks...

Flight of the Heron fandom now has almost 100 works in the AO3 tag, which is fantastic, and I thought for this challenge I'd go back and rec some of my favourite fics from the early days of the fandom. We do have some pretty good stuff in this fandom, and these are always worth a re-read. :)

An Ally Better than the Sidhe by

hyarrowen. Ewen/Keith, T, 12,939 words. I love the supernatural aspects of FotH, and this fic develops the worldbuilding in a brilliant and very fitting way. It's a canon divergence branching off during Part V of the book, and introduces some folkloric elements which provide, between them, an opportunity for Ewen and Keith to work together against a common enemy, some excellent hurt/comfort and some emotional revelations and relationship development. The writing is beautiful and the coastal West Highland scenery highly memorable, and the shippiness is amazing—the getting-together scene has an emotional sharpness and vividness to it which has stayed with me ever since I first read the fic.

Crossing the Arkaig by

luzula. Ewen/Keith UST, T, 3,649 words. Another Part V canon divergence, this one branching off immediately after Fort Augustus and giving Ewen and Keith another meeting at what's one of the most interesting points in their relationship. It takes several of the most enjoyable things about Broster's writing and develops them just that bit further: we have another conflict between duty and love, some excellent huddling for warmth beneath a plaid in the heather and lovely scenery description. This fic is the prequel to/first part of a longfic which is itself now the first in a series—the whole thing is well worth reading, but this fic stands on its own and is highly recommended with or without the rest.

When the Fighting is Over by

garonne. Ewen/Keith, M, 4,750 words. This one is post-canon-divergence, starting with Keith's survival at Morar and then following Ewen's life over the next several years of exile in France, return home and finally reunion with Keith. I love how it builds an atmosphere out of detail—there's a beautiful sense of the time passing and the emotional weight of it, with some interesting historical detail about the post-'45 years in France and lovely descriptions of longing. The scene in which Ewen and Keith finally get together has an amazing feeling of peaceful, restful homecoming.

snowflake_challenge #12 is to set some goals for the coming year—so here are my fannish and related goals for 2023:

1) Get the longfic to 'only final minor edits needed before posting' stage, and begin editing and posting it.

2) Don't sign up for too many exchanges when this makes 1) more difficult.

3) But do sign up for Yuletide, and write at least one treat this year!

4) Record more podfic.

5) Get the Chantemerle ebook finished and uploaded, and make at least one more ebook.

6) Finish reading Ronja rövardotter, and at least start another Swedish-language book.

I'm trying to be a nice, balanced amount of ambitious! The longfic is the big one, and I'm not entirely certain how realistic this goal is—it depends how long the thing ends up being and how complicated it gets later on—but I think at the moment it is looking decently achievable. And I do want to keep prioritising it over other fic, much as I love exchanges. Both the Chantemerle ebook and Ronja rövardotter I've nearly finished, and I don't know what I will do next in either case, but I look forward to deciding.

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snowflake_challenge #11 is to talk about your favourite trope, cliché, kink, motif or theme.

Now, as I'm sure will be absolutely shocking to anyone familiar with my fandoms, my favourite trope is hurt/comfort! I love how hurt/comfort situations can bring out strong emotions in various ways—reacting to another character getting hurt, showing emotion through comfort, realising how much the person comforting them really cares about them... And I love how the high stakes and emotional intensity of a hurt/comfort scenario can break down barriers between characters, or between characters and their own emotions, revealing feelings that would otherwise have remained hidden—because the characters are nominal enemies on opposite sides of a war, because of external or internalised homophobia, because one character has a tragic backstory and/or a terrible brain and is convinced they can never truly love or be loved.

As that suggests, it's mostly about the comfort for me. I'm not really into whump as such, and while the hurt may well be very serious I don't like it to be too brutal. My favourite kinds of hurt/comfort scenarios are those that provide the best opportunities for those emotional revelations and breaking down of barriers: huddling for warmth, bandaging someone's injuries or helping them to eat and drink, wrapping them in your coat/plaid as a blanket, abandoning other priorities to go and help the hurt character instead ~~out of Philanthropy~~... I also like characters being comforted for something they didn't consciously realise was hurting them, like exhaustion from pushing themselves to work too hard or emotional pain caused by a tragic backstory/terrible brain to which they've inured themselves over the years—that's its own lovely kind of emotional revelation. And I love all sorts of little expressions of intimacy during hurt/comfort scenarios: handholding, reading aloud to the hurt character, keeping a vigil at their bedside during a fever, little forehead kisses—especially when done by a character who doesn't quite yet understand the emotions behind their comforting actions.

For any given pairing I don't tend to have strong preferences about who gets hurt and who comforts them, but I do like appreciating the different configurations. One of my favourite things about Flight of the Heron is that it has multiple significant hurt/comfort scenes in both directions, with various emotional complications in each case. There are different opportunities for fic, too, especially if the canon is more imbalanced—so a Wounded Name fic with hurt Aymar is 'yay, more canon-style deliciousness' while with hurt Laurent you would get 'ooh, interesting role reversal'.

I'd just like to quote Davie Balfour, a very wise person, deliberately invoking the power of hurt/comfort to resolve his quarrel with Alan:

No apology could blot out what I had said; it was needless to think of one, none could cover the offence; but where an apology was vain, a mere cry for help might bring Alan back to my side. I put my pride away from me. “Alan!” I said; “if ye cannae help me, I must just die here.”

And it totally works <3

Finally, if you are reading this post because you too love hurt/comfort and you have not yet read The Flight of the Heron or The Wounded Name, I highly recommend that you do—both are incredible gifts to hurt/comfort fans!

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snowflake_challenge #10 is to create a fanwork. The challenge post encourages us to consider all sorts of different types of fanworks, not just fic, and since most of the fanworks I create are fic I thought I'd try something different and make some icons! Now, I am not very good at making icons, but I like making them, and I firmly believe in doing things that bring fannish joy even if one isn't very good at them; also the ability to have multiple icons and match them to the post or comment is one of my favourite things about Dreamwidth, but I don't think I really make the most of it, and clearly having a wider range of icons will help me to do so.

This is from the cover illustration of the edition of The Last of the Wine that I read a while ago, because I totally need a Mary Renault icon. I think those lambdas are upside down—unless it varies? I don't actually know the Greek alphabet—but never mind:

Orange-and-black illustration in the style of an Ancient Greek terracotta vase, showing head and upper body of a young man with Greek text '𝚨𝚲𝚬𝚵𝚰𝚨𝚺 𝚱𝚨𝚲𝚶𝚺'

Orange-and-black illustration in the style of an Ancient Greek terracotta vase, showing head and upper body of a young man with Greek text '𝚨𝚲𝚬𝚵𝚰𝚨𝚺 𝚱𝚨𝚲𝚶𝚺'

This line from The Flight of the Heron delights me and I've wanted an icon with it for ages. Ideal for all sorts of Ewen/Keith posts and comments :D

A folded red-and-green tartan scarf, with text 'certainly not philanthropy'

A folded red-and-green tartan scarf, with text 'certainly not philanthropy'

The text here is a line from the Jacobite song 'Both Sides the Tweed'. I like it a lot (I have also used it as a fic title before), and I foresee wide applicability to D. K. Broster books and other historical fandoms:

Photograph of a sunrise, with text 'honour's the sun of the mind'

Photograph of a sunrise, with text 'honour's the sun of the mind'

And a Tolkien icon! The background is my own photograph of the Ridgeway, which seemed like an appropriate Road to use here:

Photo of a white chalk road bordered by green hedges, with text 'there are many paths to tread'

Photo of a white chalk road bordered by green hedges, with text 'there are many paths to tread'

snowflake_challenge number 9 is to celebrate a personal win from the last year. And one fannish thing I'm especially proud of from the last year is that I started recording podfic! I made three podfics in 2022, all for Flight of the Heron:

Such a Stranger by me
Calltainneach by

hyarrowen
Highland Laddie by

philomytha

It's been great fun, and very rewarding, branching out into a new kind of fanwork creation and getting to appreciate the fics, the characters and the fandom in general in a new way! A really good thing. And thank you to

luzula for your encouragement and inspiration <3

I definitely intend to make more podfic this year—I have been stymied by having a couple of nasty colds in December, which left a lingering cough and my voice not quite in its usual state for a while, but it's almost entirely cleared up now. And I know which fic I want to record next. :D

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a chubby brown and red bird surrounded by falling snow. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

(What a pretty bird! It's not one I'm familiar with, but a bit of searching suggests perhaps female Cardinalis cardinalis? Very nice, anyway).

snowflake_challenge #8 is to create a quiz or poll. I was inspired by

philomytha's recent Biggles/von Stalhein poll, and have created one for my own OTP :D Please do read the quotes and vote even if you haven't read the book—I've deliberately avoided very spoilery lines, and I think most of these are pretty good out of context.

Poll #28243

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 28

View Respondents

Which is the best shippy Ewen/Keith line?

View Answers

Meanwhile, to Keith’s surprise, the horseman sprang to earth, flung the reins to his henchman, and came forward empty-handed—a magnificent specimen of young manhood, as the soldier could not help admitting.
3 (10.7%)

He was wearing the kilt to-day, and for the first time Keith Windham thought that there was something to be said for that article of attire—at least on a man of his proportions.
6 (21.4%)

He liked to see his civilised young barbarian on the high horse.
4 (14.3%)

‘My own young Achilles still very well-bred and agreeable, like his Chief.’
5 (17.9%)

Strange that he had not at first recognised him that night—extraordinarily handsome Ardroy had looked, and devilish cool he had kept, too, in a tight place! . . . Fool that he was, he was at it again.
9 (32.1%)

Was it really only philanthropy, as Keith had assured himself a few hours ago, which had sent him back to the shieling that night? It was certainly not philanthropy which was driving him to Fort Augustus now.
3 (10.7%)

Yet now the remembrance of the night in the shieling hut was no longer a draught of poison, but what it had been at the time, that cup of cold water which holds a double blessing.
1 (3.6%)

“I had some dark days, it is true. . . . Yes, they were very dark . . . but not so dark after your return. You gave me hope; and above all you gave me back that night in the hut.” He smiled. “I often think of it. . . .”
10 (35.7%)

It was strange, it was alarming, to feel (...) how strongly their intimacy had progressed in two months of absence and, on his side, of deliberate abstention from communication—like the roots of two trees growing secretly towards each other in darkness.
19 (67.9%)

But he was never to see him again, so it seemed, for the five meetings were over. Again he counted them: here, at Edinburgh, on Beinn Laoigh, at Fort Augustus. And suddenly his pulse quickened with pleasure—that made four, only four! . . .
6 (21.4%)

So not knowing where else to dispose it, he still carried the packet with the lock of hair upon him, a material token of the tie between him and the foe who had captured him a year ago, and had held him in a species of bondage ever since.
11 (39.3%)

Some other line which I will quote in a comment!
0 (0.0%)

snowflake_challenge #5 is to share three creative/fannish resources, spaces or communities you use or enjoy... My fandoms are mostly too tiny to have much in the way of fandom-specific resources, so this post has ended up as a collection of resources useful for old/historical book fandoms in general.

First of all, resources that provide free access to ebooks of old books are very important to me! Project Gutenberg is the big one, and has a wide range of amazing, sometimes very obscure books (a few of which I put there, hehehe :D ). Its Canadian cousin Faded Page is also well worth knowing about—Canada's less stringent copyright laws mean this site has a lot of stuff that's not yet eligible for PG. And Wikisource is often worth a look, especially for things that aren't full-length books.

For stuff even more obscure than that, and also for all sorts of random minutiae, the redoubtable Internet Archive really can't be beaten. It has nineteenth-century Jacobite history books, eighteenth-century copies of the Scots Magazine, old issues of the magazines in which D. K. Broster's short stories were published, etc. etc. Their lending library is also a great way to find books in that annoying in-between category of old and obscure enough to be seriously difficult to find IRL but not yet out of copyright. Hathi Trust is also worth a look for this sort of thing, although it is much less accessible and download-friendly.

The Oxford English Dictionary is another extremely useful resource. Access to the site is by subscription, but many public libraries and academic institutions have access—I can use my library card to log in from my home computer. I use the dictionary a lot while writing, often for simply checking meanings (wait, does redoubtable definitely mean what I think it means??? Yes it does—OK, great...), but also for checking whether this or that word or phrase is period-appropriate for historically-set fic, and the OED is great for this with its lists of dated examples and etymological explanations. It's very thorough and contains a lot of useful and interesting information!

(Aww, look at that brambling on the right there! They are very pretty and wintry birds, and it complements the robin on the left beautifully.)

Anyway,

snowflake_challenge #4 is to 'add something to your fandom's canon', and this is my post for it.

~~My OTP kiss. There, done!~~

...But apart from that, I was struggling to come up with a clear answer for this challenge. Perhaps because it's so open-ended and there are so many different things one could do—and indeed many things I already have done, as quite a few of my fics are missing scenes or otherwise canon-compatible. Most of what I've written for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is 'extra bits of Raven King folklore/backstory', for instance; my favourite of my own 'extra things' fics in Flight of the Heron fandom are Such a Stranger, which expands on Mr Fosdyke's character and life, and Thy Kingdom's Pearl, which develops Aunt Margaret's backstory.

But it occurs to me that there are really two different things this challenge could mean. The sort of fannish filling-in of gaps that those fics do is a fun and rewarding thing to do in fandom; but that's different from wishing that canon itself had done something it didn't (although one can of course write fic about things one wishes had been in canon!). I had fun writing those fics, but I think JSMN as a canon has the right amount of Raven King backstory and folklore in it, and FotH tells us just as much about Mr Fosdyke and Aunt Margaret as it needs to do to tell the story it's telling. In fact I can't think of anything I would add to FotH, the canon, if I could; it's really a very economical, well-constructed story. As for my other canons, hmm... I think JSMN could have benefited from having at least one explicitly queer character (I think it's almost canon for Emma and arguably Drawlight, and it's pleasingly easy to read most of the main characters as ace if one wants to, but the book doesn't really do anything with it).

So there are some thoughts!

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of snow-covered mushrooms and green moss. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

After watching from afar while deciding I didn't have time to do extra fandom stuff in January for a couple of years, I'm participating in

snowflake_challenge this year. Challenge #2 is to write a fandom promo for your fave character, ship or fandom... Now, obviously my fave fandom is Flight of the Heron, but I've already said quite a lot about that fandom, including actually writing a promo for it during Yuletide, so I thought I'd do something different—therefore this post is about my current love and the other half of my big crossover WIP, Kidnapped.

Kidnapped is a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1886 and one of the classic novels about the Jacobites. From one point of view it's a serious literary examination of the history and cultural identity of the nation of Scotland, dramatising the historically significant time after the upheaval of the 1745 Jacobite Rising with characters representing the respective sides of the great divides in Scottish culture; from another point of view it's an exciting swashbuckling adventure novel, fast-moving, full of drama and more than a little silly; from any point of view it's amazingly good fun, and what it's most memorable for are the vivid, lively and brilliantly loveable characters.

( Why I love this book so much... )

In conclusion, this book is amazing and you should all read it and write more fic :D