Pen's Nest

So, I've managed to get behind on the Sunshine Challenge, but never mind, I can still have a go. This is #4, I think.

Fun House
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.

( List is in pretty random order )
For a wee bonus, https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1DMrBhsi6e/?mibextid=wwXIfr Gorgeous.

Tunnel of Love
Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like

I'm going to be a bit wayward over the Journalling part of this challenge, but I think a bit of romantic fiction does squeeze into the category, so here goes.

Beast and I have lately started watching Bridgerton. I don't think it was the reason we decided to spend a little while chez Netflix, but it was one of the first things that sprang to my mind, at least.
( Not spoilers, probably, since this is old news, but anyway.... )

The love poem is going to have to wait.

Rose Quartz: soft pink, love, compassion, and healing in all its forms both towards oneself and others; love triumphant; beauty and sentiment.

So, it turns out that the particular shade of rose quartz is due to trace amounts of titanium, manganese, iron, or dumortierite embedded in its crystalline structure. Which sounds to me like strong stuff! Titanium and iron, anyway. And the pathways of my mind took me along a route which ended up as: Real Men Wear Pink!

So I present a selection of Men In Pink.

( Read more... )

Also, something about the prompt made me think of this fic of mine: Sparrowhawk and Beeswax, written for the So Hot Out The Bed challenge way back whenever, which I think contains love, compassion, healing, and love triumphant. And, incidentally, quite a bit of gay Regency sex.

Prompt 7: Zephyrus
The child of Dawn (Eos) and the Titan Astraeus, Zephyrus represents the West wind. Zephyrus was considered to be the gentlest of the Anemoi (wind gods representing the cardinal points of the compass), and the beneficial bringer of Spring. The gentle springtime winds of the West indicated an end to Winter and the new growth of plants and flowers.



We get quite a lot of wind here in flat, flat Norfolk (tho' I do live on a hill, *the* hill, possibly), and most of it is from the west, more or less, but the noticeable winds are the ones which come from the north instead, or the east, bringing snow. Never mind about them.

The beneficial bringer of Spring and new growth, though, that's nice. I like Spring. When I was a teenager Autumn was my favourite season, but nowadays, although I still love the brilliant colours of the leaves, I think Spring has overtaken it. There's something so heart-warming about seeing the first snowdrops poke their heads up, and then crocuses and daffodils, and the new green on the trees.
( Read more... )
Some fics, loosely related to Spring and/or New Beginnings:

A Tale of Dreams and Asses which is about a reunion, aka a new beginning.

Free Range Utter crack... in which AJ has an allergy, and whenever he sneezes, he lays an egg. JC (his boyfriend) is sceptical.

Out of the Habit in which someone isn't altogether suited to life as a monk.

Trials is part of the Chronicles series, and is set at the springtime Elite Trials.

The Things that Juliana Didn't Say A TNG story about Data's childhood.

By Invitation Only another TNG story, in which Data nearly gets married and has a baby.

Prompt 5: Pan

Part man and part goat, Pan is a nature god well known in many mythologies. Born in Arcadia to Hermes and a dryad, Pan was a precocious child whose goat’s feet and horned head delighted the gods, but startled the mortals he lived nearer to; Pan did not live on Mount Olympus, but rather in the forests and wilds of Arcadia. Pan famously invented a musical instrument: the syrinx, or pan pipes as they are more commonly known. He is known for his haunting melodies, and music was often a central part to his worship.

Kinda fun, Pan. He gets to trot about on those nifty little goat feet and rock the horns, and such. Not sure I can forgive him for the pan pipes, though.

I'm quite surprised to read a prompt/introduction that doesn't mention SEX. I mean, Pan is All About The Sex. Famous for it. In lightly perusing the internet for a wider range of possibilities I came upon a delightfully explicit picture of him fucking a goat. He learned (apparently) to masturbate from his father Hermes (um, ew?), and then taught the local shepherds, who were presumably delighted.

So I thought I'd self-rec a few Masturbation Stories.

A Little Bit Extra
Fantasies
The Prone stories
Brown fur with blond tips
The above are popslash. Here's a TNG one:
Buzz (well, sorta)
and a Kradam:
Checking for Titanium (a little bit)

There, that's better.

Prompt 3: Hecate
Otherworldly and mysterious, Hecate is best known for her association with magic, ghosts, and the night. If you hear the baying of hounds in the dark, she's likely near as they were ever at her side. She is traditionally depicted as bearing two torches to light her way or as a triple goddess of the crossroads. In mythology she is known for helping Demeter search for her daughter Persephone, a theme that ties her even more to the Underworld and spirits she is associated with. Today she is often considered a representative of those liminal places where reality bends and all manner of events may unfold...

Yeah, these prompts are coming in a little dark for me. Most of my fic and fannishness are on the light and fluffy side of things, so it's hard to find a fit.

I do, however, have a vague but tenacious association of Hecate with Rome, which was an awesome show. I made a bunch of icons for it, which are here:
https://pensnest.dreamwidth.org/242766.html

Much to my annoyance, the icons on display now have watermarks, thank you Photobucket, but if anyone would like to use any, please let me know and I'll send you a clear version.

The first prompt from sunshine_challenge is up. It's Hades.

Hades is the god of the dead and the king of the Underworld with which his name became synonymous. Despite modern connotations of death as evil, Hades was actually more altruistically inclined in mythology; his role was often maintaining relative balance between the realms. He was often depicted as cold and stern in his judgement, and he held all of his subjects equally accountable to his laws. Above all else, Hades ensured the finality of death and that none of his subjects ever left the Underworld.



I don't tend to write about death much, but here's a link to a story that does have something to say about it: First Blood

Under the cut is what poured out of me when I started to think about death. You may prefer not to read it.

( There's nothing quite so final as death. )

I don't have much experience with indigo. It's a colour, yes, it's a real thing with a cool name, yes, does it really belong in the rainbow or was that just Sir Isaac Newton believing in the power of the number seven, hmm. I do remember ordering a custom hat for my sister's wedding—two custom hats, in fact, one for me and one for my grandma. She loved her hats, and I love hats too, and was delighted to have occasion to wear a very fine one. There was a mad hatter—or at any rate, a very eccentric one—in a shop on the old High Street of the town where I lived at the time. And she swore to me that the colour I needed on my hat trim was indigo and not purple, and I did not believe her—I had a violet suit—but it turned out that the trim to my magnificent magenta hat did indeed work with my suit.

Necessary Aside: My sister, incidentally, got married in St Paul's Cathedral (yes, THE St Paul's, in London), in the OBE Chapel downstairs, since my father had been awarded an MBE for services to military intelligence (we will never know what he actually did, but apparently he was very good at it), and one of the perks of this, besides a shiny medal and a garden party with the Queen, was that he might marry off his daughters in the OBE chapel in St Paul's, if he so chose. I was already married, but my sister was able to take advantage. I well remember standing by the side door with my daughter (bridesmaid) and son (pageboy) waiting for her; the side entrance is very splendid, and would be a Statement on any ordinary church, sadly I have not found any pictures of it. My sister, in a very big dress and full length veil, with my resplendent father in full morning dress and scarlet waistcoat, emerged from a white Rolls to the enormous excitement of the clustered tourists. There are probably also quite a few photos of my daughter Somewhere In Japan, for she (bridesmaid) posed very happily when we adjourned afterwards to the little garden round the back for photos. It was a great wedding, a very family affair. I sang. And we piled onto a big red double decker to be transported to The Waldorf Hotel, where my sister worked at the time and naturally had her reception. Triffic day. /Aside

So, back to indigo

It is, and was, a dye. And that is what my mind fastened on, and what led me pretty much immediately along to a lad in fifteenth-century Europe, a dye-shop apprentice.

I first heard the name Dorothy Dunnett at MediaWest in 1998. I attended a session on writing, and one of the panellists recommended Dunnett as a mistress of Point Of View. I retained this scrap of information, and happened upon 'Niccolo Rising' in a charity shop not long afterwards. I bought it, and was hooked.

I read all the Niccolo series and then moved on to the Lymond books, and in 2000 (I think) I had somehow found enough relevant fandom to take myself off to Scotland for a Dorothy Dunnett convention. Which was lovely, and the Lady herself was a tiny, utterly charming person. There was an 'opera'. Incidentally, it was very gratifying how many of the delightful ladies I met there (very few men) were into the same kinds of fandom that I was—Trek, Buffy, Harry Potter. For Saturday night we went off to a nearby-ish castle for a feast, and were each gifted a very beautiful limited edition hardback copy of King Hereafter, to everybody's joy. I have not read it. Partly because I lack the concentration at present, and partly because it pleases me to know that there is still a book by Dorothy Dunnett which I can yet look forward to reading. (Yes, I have read the Johnson Johnson books, for completeness, but I can't say I particularly care about them.)

Niccolo is my preferred Dunnett hero. He's more pragmatic and down-to-earth than Francis Crawford, and I don't like my heroes taut-nerved and tortured, at least, not too often. (Today's icon (Nick Carter) seems unexpectedly appropriate for Niccolo.) But the books are hard work, a very solid read with so many careful nuances and hidden details, I don't think I'm up to reading them at the moment.

It was an odd little oasis of fannish joy, at the time I was losing/had lost my ST:TNG fandom allegiance. Anyone else have Dunnett love?

It's not that easy being green, as Mandy Patinkin will assure you.

There are all kinds of important Green things I could talk about, about how essential they are, what efforts I make in my daily life… but I don't have the energy to be serious about important things right now. What I'm going to talk about instead is what life was like back when I met Lorne (the greenest person I have ever met).

Oh, and I do mean Lorne. Not Andy Hallett, who, bless him, was fully and totally LORNE that day, and who worked through about three hours of people who wanted to have their photos taken with him in full makeup and costume. He was camp, loquacious, charming, and adorable, and must have been exhausted when, all of a sudden, there was no more queue and he could stop. Bless him.

See, I was pretty much between fandoms, back when I went to Buffy, Angel and Firefly conventions. I fell into fandom through Star Trek:TNG, but fell out of it after (a) the films were crap, (b) the Spinerphiles list fell into corrosive disarray, (c) the advent in particular of ST:Voyager meant all the fanfic writers moved on, and (d) I went to a really disappointing Trek convention.

I define myself as being part of a fandom when I write in it. That doesn't mean I don't read in other fandoms, nor does it mean I'd define anyone else the same way—define yourself howsoever you wish—but for me, I need to write in a fandom to feel that I am really part of it. And between 2000 and 2005, I hardly wrote anything.

Okay, somewhere in there was a Harry Potter story, only it was deemed Too Rude for the Sugarquill (to my astonishment). There was a story about Dr Okun from Independence Day, though possibly that may have overlapped with my Trek period, I can't remember. There were two stories from The Archers (the long-running BBC radio soap opera about farmers, that is), to which I became addicted in the between-fandoms period of my life. I even went to a Dorothy Dunnett convention, although the canon was far too intimidating for me to even think of writing fanfic for it. But that was all.

I was very keen on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (my daughter converted us all), and subsequently Angel—for a while we had family nights in front of the telly watching the latest episodes on Friday evenings, then they switched to Thursdays and I had to watch them on tape(!), on my own, after my musical rehearsals. But I never felt able to write in Buffy-speak. Too many pop-cultural references, in which I delighted but which I did not feel able to emulate. I am fairly certain I would have become firmly entrenched in Firefly fandom, ah, Firefly, ah, Wash, had the series continued. I loved that show, and it was not-anchored in specific time and place (like Trek) so I think I could and would have written it, but… well, never mind.

It was hard, being without a fandom. I did find my way to a few Buffy-universe stories, and I had my daughter to discuss it with and to accompany to cons. We went to a very awesome Firefly con with practically all the main cast (no Jayne, though, which was a pity as the costume competition had an entirely awesome Mudders' Statue Of Jayne entry) plus Badger. Nathan Fillion is excellent value as a convention guest, and Alan Tudyk was entranced by the competition entry of the Wash-o-saurus, Wash riding on a dinosaur…. well, who wouldn't be? He leapt up to pose with it. At that con, or possibly at a subsequent one but probably not, I even joined the autograph queue and got Summer's, Jewel's and Nathan's signatures on my photo, and can report that Summer Glau has the most beautiful skin I have ever seen. She is luminous.

My daughter, incidentally, got a photo with Vincent Kartheiser at one con, and at a subsequent one got him to sign it. He was very complimentary to her, and I was charmed by him.

But all this pro action is not the same has having a *fandom* to be part of. Asking the actors questions (oh, Keith Szarab…uh, Holtz was *most* unsettling, stalking amongst us demanding questions) is not the same as discussing little nibbles of canon with other eager fans, or trading comment fic, or just having a jolly old-fashioned squee over something entirely trivial. And Redemption and Nine Worlds were much, much better cons than the Wolf 359/whatever-it-went-on-to-be conventions.

Worst of all, for me, was the lack of impetus to write. As a Trekkie, I knew I had a readership out there, not a large readership but My People, fellow Dataphiles who would be pleased with what I had written, and would tell me so. And I love feedback. In between fandoms ought to have been the time for me to write and submit something professionally but, well. I love feedback, and it's not the same. I remember, subsequently, talking with a friend who had some professional involvement with m/m publishing, and I remember being glad that I didn't have deadlines (because fannish ones are optional, except for SeSa) or word counts to worry about. I could write the story until it was done, and then stop.

But in between fandoms was my fallow time. Acres of plain grass. I couldn't write, having nobody for whom to bother.

And then, in 2005, I found my beloved popslash, and suddenly there were seeds again, and stories sprouted like weeds, and I wrote more than thirty stories that year, starting in April. And it felt wonderful. The green time was over, here were the flowers again.

Orange. Well, it's the new black, so they say.

Which reminds me that we watched, I dunno, three seasons of Orange is the New Black, ran out of DVDs and never bothered to get back to it. There was much to like about the show—not least, so many women!—and the primary thing to dislike was the leading character, who was whiny, annoying and frequently stupid. I did enjoy it, but obviously, not enough to keep going.

There have been a lot of shows like that. Game of Thrones—I watched some while at my sister's, but had no urge to make the effort to continue when I got home. Dexter, which I was very dubious about even getting into, but which was horribly fascinating for quite a while. We stopped watching at the end of…. eh, one of the seasons, and I carefully forgot to remember to order the next season, because on the whole, a 'good' serial killer isn't really my kind of hero.

We were very fond of Bones at one point, even though it is ridiculous, but again, it wore itself out. Castle, too. The Good Wife, not sure why we stopped bothering with that, but, well, we did. Despite Christine Baranski *and* Alan Cumming, even. Hmm. Might have to see about that one. I suppose my problem is that I don't very often care much about leading characters, which is a bit of a handicap when watching the show that is about, say, an awesome female lawyer. Or possibly, I don't have the concentration to watch good shows. Perhaps I'm improving in that respect.

Have you given up on good shows because you stopped caring, or couldn't concentrate?

*

Back to orange. I approve of orange. I actually look quite good in orange, and have a couple of orange tops and a casual-ish skirt suit which I never wear. My adored Lance also looks good in orange, though I don't see him in it nowadays. I love the colour for decoration, in theory, although as I am looking around my living room, which is filled with pictures in shades of red, brown and gold metallics, there is not a lot of orange in the mix. Odd, that. There are a couple of glass baubles hanging in the window, both basically orange coloured—and someone at Camp Sparkle guessed which bauble was mine because of the colour. Fair enough. My current knitting project includes orange, and my next is a ball of vivid variegated orange yarn for which I have high hopes.

But it's not a colour that crops up that often, is it? I've been contemplating my garden (the garden I'd like to have, rather than the one I actually have), and aside from the crocosmia which might, possibly, spike out some flowers at some point, there isn't anything orange in either garden, actual or imagined. Well, maybe an occasional pumpkin. Orange flowers exist, certainly, but I'm not planning to plant any. I walk past marigolds and such when we venture into town and they make a wonderfully bright splash of joyfulness in any flower border, but most flowers aren't orange. Orange blossom isn't orange!

*

There is an Orange story in the Chronicles, too.

***

There is a bird meowing in the garden. Seriously, it sounds like an aggrieved feline. Odd.