I recently finished listening to a thirteen parts (German) audio play version of Hlary Mantel's novel A Place of Greater Safety. (German title: Brüder.) It was originally broadcast and is now available on Audible. I haven't reread the novel in years, but I found all that made and makes it my favourite among Mantel's books in this version. One of those qualities, btw, also is a reason why the Thomas Cromwell trilogy doesn't work nearly as well for yours truly.


( Lots of spoilery musings on book(s) and play, cut for length. )

It's good to know that Bryan Fuller's American Gods adaption is still on, and progressing. (Not just because I'm looking forward to the Fuller-meets-Gaiman result, but because I would like a Fuller series I can watch again. Says she who tried and disliked Hannibal, thus gave it up after eight episodes.) Meanwhile, I've just seen a (German) tweet to the effect that they want to do a remake of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Methinks someone took notice of the fact that Penny Dreadful is drawing an audience and recalled they still have the Alan Moore property. Dear movie makers who own the LoeG rights: I didn't see your first movie because your git of a director and your idiot of a producer gave an interview before it ever came out in which they said they changed the set up from Mina being the leader to Alan Quatermain being the leader because "can you imagine Sean Connery taking orders from a woman?" So if you want me to watch a new film version, pray go back to the Moore, let Mina stay the leader (and don't change her into a vampire, the entirely human sharp tongued take charge woman of the first two LoeG volumes will do nicely), and if you must add non-Moore characters, don't let these be Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer. Go for Lydia Gwilt from Armadale and Marian Halcombe from The Woman in White instead.

Yesterday I got a mail informing me the BBC will stop its Global iPlayer service, so that was depressing. Whyyyyy, BBC? I loved watching your shows in my trusty iPad! Has the newly confirmed Cameron slashed your budget that much already? On the bright side of BBC news, though, they're planning an adaption of A Place of Greater Safety. Considering this is the Hilary Mantel novel I love, whereas I have mixed "yes, BUT" feelings about the Thomas Cromwell novels, I hope this will indeed come to pass. Not least because: a British production about the French Revolution in which the French revolutionaries are the heroes and there's not a heroic aristocrat, British or otherwise, in sight, that will truly be a first one. (There are some sympathetic aristocrats in Mantel's novel - poor trying-to-do-the-right-thing Lafayette who gets loathed by Marie Antoinette and the Jacobins alike for his trouble, Mirabeau as the gifted and corrupt but not evil type, oh, and Mantel has fun giving a few scenes to the author of Les Liasons Dangereuses since he's Philippe d'Orleans' sidekick for a while - but they're all supporting, not major characters.) I'm also looking forward to bisexual Camille Desmoulins, a tragic instead of evil Robespierre and hope that whoever gets cast as Danton has the necessary charisma (and voice!). Finger crossing for Alex Kingston as Annette Duplessis - for Lucille, I have no opinion yet.


And lastly, because Elementary is so much on my mind these days, a fanfic rec:


When You Know I Can't Love You (3319 words) by AxolotlQueen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Elementary (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson, Sherlock Holmes & Kitty Winter
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Joan Watson, Kitty Winter, Jamie Moriarty | Irene Adler
Additional Tags: Character Study, Platonic Love, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of addiction, Past Sherlock Holmes/Jamie Moriarty | Irene Adler, Gray aromantic Sherlock, Loneliness
Summary:

He had thought himself, for a long time, incapable of love. Some people simply are, after all.

A character study of Sherlock and various kinds of love.

Part of the Yuletide experience is also the fretting about one's own stories. I was fretting A LOT until literally an hour ago when I got the lovely feedback from my main recipient which assured me she liked my Yuletide story. (Given she's someone I highly respect in another fandom than the one we were matched, I was mightily relieved.) With that burden off my chest, I can proceed to the reccing stage. :) A first bunch of recs, to be followed by many more, under the cut.

( Recs for Being Human, Elementary, Broadchurch, Emma, Coriolanus, Historical RPF, A Place of Greater Safety, Orphan Black )

Emerging bleary-eyed from a lot of reading, I bring reccomendations. (Well, the first part of them anyway. More to follow.) As for my own stories, both the recipients liked them and wrote lovely things about them at their own journals (their summaries of what the stories are about are better than mine, drat!), which makes me glad, but not too many other people so far bothered to check them out so far, woe. Ah well. Self, you knew this would happen, a rare fandom is a rare fandom, and within rare fandoms, at least in one case you picked a subject you knew maybe only recipient and yourself are interested in. (But I still want other people to read both stories, she sniffles, they mean so much to me this year!)

However, as a reader, I'm in unqualified ecstasy. Have a first bunch of recs (excluding, of course, my gifts which I have already talked about).

History/Hunger Games: The Sticking Place

Yes, you read the fandoms right. Someone wrote an ingenious fusion of the Hunger Games premise with the 15th century. In the Fifth Hunger Games, Lucrezia Borgia, Richard (III.) of York, Marguerite d'Anjou and poor Henry of Lancaster are all tributes. It sounds like crack, but the characters are played, err, written straight, and of course it has to end the way it does.

History: The most pleasant tale of Lady Bessy

Four titles Elizabeth of York never held, and one she did. The "Five Things" format applied to the woman who was the last Planatagenet princess and the first Tudor queen, but rarely gets fictional or biographical attention. This year, she got several stories. This one which applies the "Five Things" format in ingenious ways is my favourite.

A Place of Greater Safety: Parallel or Together

In which Camille Desmoulins tries to bring Robespierre and Danton together. It doesn't work out the way he expected. The characterisations ring very true to Hilary Mantel's novel, and it does something I've been secretly and not so secretly hoping for when reading the actual book, where it didn't but could have. :)

Babylon 5:

The Subtle Arrangement of Stones: the Babylon 5 story I never knew was missing in my life, but retrospectively it so was, and oh, how it wins at Yuletide! Set during the first season. Londo, G'Kar and Delenn are kidnapped by the Homeguard, and it's up to their valiant aides, Vir, Na'Toth and Lennier to rescue them. The characterisations and - as invevitable given the characters in question - the bickering are top notch, the format (Garibaldi interviewing everyone for the security files afterwards) ingenious, and it fits into canon beautifully. I loved this to bits.

The Price of a Favour: Timov in the days of Cartagia. I'm always thrilled to find fic dealing with my favourite B5 one episode character, and this was great.

In Flagrante: three times Londo and G'Kar are caught in the act. One happy, one angry, one sad. Alternatively funny and heartbreaking, as Londo and G'Kar are wont to be.

James Bond: Protégé

M passes on what she learned. Contains two of my favourite things, M backstory and Eve Moneypenny fleshing out. I loved it.

Elementary (which had 21 new stories in Yuletide - hooray!):

Three Anniversaries: A Love Story: Not all great love stories are about romance is the summary the author gives, and this one celebrates the (platonic) friendship between Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson through the years. Present and future fic that feels true to where the characters are now and where they could be through the years, and has that same restraint and understated affection I find appealing on the show.

The Long Summer: this one is an ensemble fic that uses a frustrating case to show Holmes' relationships to Watson, Gregson, Bell and deliver an excellent Holmes character exploration to boot.

Greek Mythology: this year one of the requests was for a story about Ariadne and Icarus growing up together in Crete. This resulted in a dozen or so great tales, and it feels unfair to single one out, but this is my favourite of them all:

Thirteen Views Of A Labyrinth: They are not so very different, Ariadne and Pasiphaë, Icarus and Daedalus, Ariadne and Icarus. This has fantastic world building and awe-inspiring characterisations of everyone, is full of shades of grey and surprising yet sense making twists on the myths. I admire it so much.

The Count of Monte-Cristo: Constant.

It's a rare story which takes one of the source canon's villains - in this case Fernand Mondego, the later Count de Morcerf - and fleshes him out without going the excuse and woobiefication road. This story accomplishes it.

New Tricks: New Tricks for Old Dogs (or Five Alternate Universes Where Sandra Pullman Was Always Awesome)

What the title says. :) Wonderful banter and character voices in every universe.

Prometheus: Satellites: Three events in the life of Peter Weyland. Dysfunctional family relationships are my soft spot, and they rarely come more messed up than with Weyland, Meredith Vickers and David 8. This story gives us some background for this, in a Weyland, Meredith and David pov respectively, and it's fascinating.

Yuletide sign-ups have begun! I took the plunge and joined this year. Found out there were some more fandoms I could offer without having to refresh my memory by research because I had watched/read the source material only recently. (And even written meta about them!)

On the other hand, I discovered that there are several German fandoms on the offering this year - Karl May's Winnetou novels, Michael Ende's Momo and Perry Rhodan (aka our longest running pulp Sci Fi series), and I felt a bit bad for not signing up for any of them, considering that Karl May was literally the first writer I ever read (Dad & my grandfather were fans and told me tales, so the first year in school, once I could read, I grabbed Winnetou I) and I still have a nostalgic fondness for those books, I do love Michael Ende and PR is a case of childhood & teenage nostalgia again. But the thing is, a) I'd have to reread because it's been so many years, and I just don't have the time, real life strikes again, and b) it would feel weird to me to write in English for these fandoms. Because I do hear the narrative voice and the characters in German in my head, you know? It's not so much that I first encountered them in German - I saw all Star Trek shows dubbed before I saw them in the English original, for example, and these characters do have their English-language voices in my head - it's probably that I can't imagine how they would sound in English at all. Especially Karl May's earnest Wilhelminian prose. Wie der Westman zu sagen pflegt. But if someone else were to try, that would be awesome.

Anyway. The list of requested and offered fandoms so far is here, and if even half of this gets written, it should be fantastic reading for the holidays. As for my own requests, this is as good a place as any to write the obligatory letter to the gracious soul who'll fulfill one of them.

Dear Yuletide Writer,

first of all, thank you! I hope you'll find one of the prompts to your liking. If you want to go in another direction with the characters, by all means, as long as nobody gets bashed and those I indicated show up in a prominent fashion. As for the shipping level, I leave that to your discretion - gen, het or slash is all fine by me. (Mind you, if, say, you pick the B5 prompt and come up with an X-Rated Bester/G'Kar/Londo threesome instead of a gen encounter I would be... surprised, but if that's what tickles your fancy and you can pull it off in character, go you!)

Generally speaking, I'm an ensemble fan; listing some characters but not others doesn't mean I dislike the rest in the respective fandom, it's just an indication of focus preference. I also appreciate when something of the world buliding makes it into the fanfic - for example, Rome was really good at getting the different belief systems and cultural backgrounds across, and A place of greater safety really manages to be about the French Revolution as well as about individual participants. (Considering that as a writer I'm far better at dialogue and character exploration than at a decent plot or atmospheric descriptions, I'm all the more in awe of people who excell at the later two.) Which doesn't mean that if you choose to write a sonnet instead of a 2000 words long adventure, I wouldn't be thrilled as well.

Again, thanks so much for signing up!