Fandom? What Fandom?

I just spent most of my morning rereading "Too Many Women" in preparation for my bookclub post on milk_and_orchids.

Last time I read it was before Mad Men even existed, now when I read it the entire thing presents to me like Archie Goodwin's day at Sterling Cooper.

Thank you for the paid time, damned_colonial!

I haven't been very successful at keeping my 3W4DW resolution to update daily, but I have a good excuse. I've just had a FANTASTIC fangirl weekend with soupytwist. There was much squeeing over the Nero Wolfe books, followed by a long discussion of the Rentboy!fic that I am working on. I've missed having someone around to talk to about fannish stuff.

For non-fandom funtimes we went up Arthur's Seat – hahaha - and saw the stuffed and mounted corpse of Dolly the Sheep. She rotates on a pedestal. Seriously, Scotland, don't ever change!

I also managed to introduce Katie to Man from UNCLE. Stay tuned for a list of fanfic recs!

milk_and_orchids is making me soooooo happy! It's been a while since I've done any hardcore squeeeing over the Nero Wolfe mysteries.

Except now I can't get enough, so I'm forced to take the books all out of order. I just finished reading Might as Well Be Dead. If I needed any support in my belief that Rex Stout is crap at making up plots, this book would be it. It actually makes me feel better about my approach to writing fanfic - I have my story almost done except for the, um, actual murder mystery part. The thing is, I don't care whodunit. I just need something to hang all my lovely character development and relationship dynamics on.

Here's a quote from Might as Well Be Dead that demonstrates one of the things I love about this series:

"You don't know Mr. Goodwin, but I do. He will manage it so that no resentment will bounce to you. He is remarkably adroit at drawing resentment to himself to divert it from me or one of my clients."

...and this is exactly what Archie has already been doing for 25 books by playing the wise-cracking tough guy. I mean, fanfic writers constantly dream up complicated motives behind behaviour like that, but how many times do you get a series where the author comes out and confirms your overly analytical theories about his characters?

LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE!

Things that are awesome:

Nero Wolfe book club is up and running on milk_and_orchids! It's making me a bit sad that all my books are on the wrong side of the pond except for League of Freightened Men which is the one I was reading during my flight. I'll be doing a post on it next week. In the meantime I managed to find a few more at the Oxfam bookshop for only £1.50 each.

Climbing! I've been going with my flatmate and her friends every Monday. I am doing really well and absolutely loving it.

New job. I work at a B&B, which isn't great work, but right now a good job is a job that pays me. So, yay for having a good job. Also it's a completely flexible schedule, which leads me to...

Going to Berlin for a week on the 19th! I've never been to Germany and am really looking forward to it.

Free Bicycle! One of the girls from climbing gave me a bike! It is tall, and I am small, but on Friday I rode all the way to Linlithgow without any real difficulties, so I think it will do. Also, it was free which is all I can afford in a bicycle right now.

Linlithgow was really pretty.

Only four or five weeks until I have a niece!

Question: What's up with all the individual songs nominated for yuletide? I thought I was pretty in touch with what's going on in fandom, but I've never heard of a song as a fandom. Bandom, yes, but individual songs? Are there communities for individual songs or is this exclusively a yuletide phenomenon?

If someone nominates a song like "Mack the Knife", would the assumption be that they are familiar with Die Dreigroschenoper/Threepenny Opera? Does that mean the TigerLilies are part of that fandom? I'm so intrigued by this.

In other yuletide news:

5 people requested Sapphire and Steel and 14 people offered to write it.
15! people requested Nero Wolfe and 13 people offered to write it.
1 person requested Georgette Heyers's the Foundling and 16 people offered to write it.
1 person requested the Zero Effect and 7 people offered to write it!

4 people offered to write Flashman but nobody requested it. This makes me sad. I was so looking forward to writing the slutty adventures of Elspeth with various historical figures.

ETA: 1 person requested and offered Raumpatrouille Orion and it wasn't me because - in spite of the fact that I nominated it - I somehow screwed up and dropped it when it came to my sign-up.

I created a Nero Wolfe community: milk_and_orchids. I figure there's at least three of us who will join.

Fannish meme grabbed from mzcalypso. Yes, I'm procrastinating.

Choose five series (no peeking before you choose them), list them, and then answer the questions behind the cut.

1. Man from U.N.C.L.E.
2. Nero Wolfe
3. Horatio Hornblower
4. Peter Wimsey
5. The Three Investigators

( Read more... )

That was fun. Now, back to work!

Man from U.N.C.L.E. x Peter Wimsey

Gosh. Wow. I just love fandom. There's no crazy thing that hasn't been written.

Except nobody has written Peter Wimsey crossed over with "The Wind in the Willows" yet. I'm hoping that will show up sometime around Christmas. *cough* lasergirl69*cough*

In conclusion: fangirls = strange

Myself included because I spent too much time today speculating about this:

Nero Wolfe = Yellow Shirts
Jupiter Jones = Hawaiian Shirts

Nero Wolfe = bottled beer
Jupiter Jones = too young to drink but I expect when he's grown up he buys canned beer.

Believe me, it goes on from there.

So anyway, an update!

My Dol Bonner/Sally Colt story is starting to intimidate me. I started having ideas for it that I really like and now I don't want to work on it because whatever I manage to get on paper will never be as good as what's in my head. Excuse me while I wallow in angst for a moment.

*wallows*

In slightly more amusing news: I've decided that if Nero Wolfe has the Red Leather chair then Dol Bonner must have a Gerrit Rietvelt "De Stijl" wooden chair. Doesn't it look comfortable?

So, a couple weeks ago my roommate happened to be at a news stand where she saw a magazine with an article in it titled "Inside the World of Fat Sex" which, naturally, she brought home to share with me.

(What did I ever do without lasergirl69?)

I don't actually have much to say about that article except that it referenced a book called "Fat: the anthropology of an obsession" edited by Don Kulick and Anne Meneley, which I promptly requested from the library. The essays in it are kinda awesome.

Ever wonder what it's like to be a 698 pound rap star? Why do Hawaiians love spam (as in canned ham *shudders*)? Why would a woman want to be fed until she is immobile? FAT PORN! All this and more is explored in this anthology. Highly recommended.

Also there is an article about olive oil and Tuscany that should totally be a Nero Wolfe story. It would be about the Laudemio group which is basically an exclusive club for old and wealthy Italian families who own olive estates in Tuscany. The way I see it, someone is going to sneak one bad olive into the olive mill, thus wounding the pride, violating the honour and endangering the reputation of Laudemio olive oil. Of course they have to hire the world's greatest detective to discover the culprit so Wolfe and Archie have to go to Tuscany, at which point the story would be a giant piss take on Frances Mayes' "Under the Tuscan Sun" until they solve the mystery and have explicit sex. Because, you know, if I'm writing it there would have to be explicit sex. How can any self respecting slasher write a story about olive oil and not include explicit sex?

...I wonder if the Laudemio group has ever had anyone killed?