Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

Dear friends (mostly, but not all, on Dreamwidth) who...

... are really enjoying that ice hockey series
... are really enjoying playing ice hockey themselves
... are really looking forward to the Winter Olympics
... are reading that book that everyone is reading
... are reading that book that everyone read three years ago
... are reading books that nobody's read for a hundred years
... are reading things I wrote when I could string more than ten minutes together at a time
... are knee-deep in an obscure spin-off of something I saw once
... are singing or playing
... are listening to other people sing or play
... are going out and eating delicious things
... are cooking delicious things for other people to eat
... are going to interesting places and seeing interesting wildlife and sharing pictures
... are doing small things (or big things) in pursuit of a better world

... I am really enjoying reading about your enjoyment and activity, though I never manage to comment as often as I'd like. Thank you for keeping me in touch with the fandom world!


TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.

Having talked mostly about Dreamwidth above, I'm going to go super literal here and talk about the bandstand in my home town. It's set at the centre of a park next the river, and every summer Sunday afternoon a different brass band from one of the surrounding towns and villages turns up to give a free concert. Programme-wise, you always know more or less what kind of thing you're going to get: a march or two, some film music, an arrangement of some classic rock, and so on, but since it's never advertised in advance you don't know the specifics. There's always a mixed audience: people who know it's happening and have turned up deliberately; friends of the band; people who were just wandering past and stop to listen; kids playing on the slides. Some people stop for a few minutes and then move on; some stay for the whole thing.

I love the energy of live music, and it's so good to have something that's so very relaxed, so very - literally - open.
Something I hate: mansplaining (well, I hate anybody telling me things I already know without considering that they might not be new to me, but I have certainly encountered it more among men)

Something I love: music making

Somewhere I have been: Marseille

Somewhere I would like to go: Maastricht sounds pleasant.

Someone I know: my mother is a Margaret.

Favorite movie: Mamma Mia is tremendous fun. The plot is silly but the songs are, obviously, great, the setting is cheering, and it is an utter delight to see a collection of screen legends and national treasures clearly having the time of their lives. It is the sort of fine careless rapture that cannot be repeated and nobody should ever attempt to make a sequel, particularly if they can't get Meryl Streep back for it.


Request letters in comments if desired.
1. Open up your music player. Hit shuffle.
2. Record the first line or two of the first twenty songs that come up that do not give away the name of the song. Skip instrumentals (and I have also skipped spoken word tracks), but don't skip the embarrassing ones.
3. Make hapless LJ/DW denizens guess the song names and artists. Google is cheating. For musical songs, the name of the musical is acceptable in place of the artist.
4. Least hapless LJ/DW denizen wins admiration. That's right, just like a lobbyist in budget season, the points don't matter.

ETA: I am not judging anybody for not knowing the artists, because most of my songs have been sung by many, many people, and are none the worse for it.

The lines )

***

While I've got the 'Post Entry' window open, here are my Yuletide Thoughts. I have nominated my three fandoms, and now can't think of a fourth that I really want to request. So I shan't. have settled on The Bagthorpe Saga as an impulse, but much-wanted, fourth.



Dear Writing Seasonal Archetype of Choice,

Thank you for writing for me! Thank you for having heard of my tiny fandoms! Optional details are of course optional (and I really mean that); if you want a prompt or six, here you go:

Thunderbirds. I have requested John Tracy, because I think he gets a really raw deal in the series, being stuck in space while everybody else gets to go off and rescue people. (Apparently Gerry Anderson didn't like the way he looked - whose fault was that, I ask?) John doing stuff would be awesome. Alternatively, if you really can't get him out of Thunderbird 5, I would also be enthralled by Lady Penelope and Tin-Tin saving the world and passing the Bechdel Test, or amused by Jeff Tracy finally getting fed up of shoddy nuclear facilities and inventing the Health and Safety Executive. I don't really get all the hate for the live-action film, but in my mind they're all puppets.

Love's Labour's Lost. I have requested all the Princess's cadron volant. You do not have to write all of them if you don't want to! I love this play, and the four ladies are the main reason. I would love femslash (Rosaline/Katherine with extra bitchiness? complicated hierarchical stuff with the Princess and one of the others? OT4 when icicles hang by the wall?) but if you Really Don't See It That Way, something in the spirit (though not the style - I can do without the rhyming couplets) of the play, with the Princess & co. effortlessly proving their male counterparts to be idiots, would be fantastic.

The Merry Widow. I have requested only the title character, but if you want to throw anyone else in with her, do. I love her independent spirit, her political nous, and her insistence on her own terms. I also like the ginormous hats. Just as a suggestion - Hanna/Valencienne femslash? or backstory for Hanna and Danilo? or something with diplomacy and intrigue?

The Bagthorpe Saga - I only remembered the existence of this series when I saw that someone else had nominated it. Please don't think that this is my 'fill-up-the-numbers' request, though, because it would make me extremely happy to receive it. Anyway, I love the Bagthorpes and anything featuring any or all of them would be great. I love Jack's 'one sane man' perspective - same goes for Uncle Parker, though he's not on the character list - and the shenanigans of the genius-ridden and eccentric family sometimes feel all too familiar. Anything about anybody, please. A missing scene? A snapshot of the children all grown up and no less awkward? Jack brings a girl/boyfriend home? Anything light-hearted! I'd rather it didn't wander much over a 12A rating, because, you know, I do have a few childhood memories intact, and this is one of them.

If you want to know more about my general likes and dislikes in fiction, I point you at last year's letter, which was rather longer than this one, and also this post. May I reiterate, though, the fact that you are entirely free to ignore anything that hampers you. Happy writing!

***

In another fandom entirely: dear OpenOffice, I have used the word 'maidenheads' once in eleven thousand words. Please stop suggesting it to me every time I start writing 'main'.
.

Profile

shewhostaples: (Default)
She Who Staples

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Powered by Dreamwidth Studios

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags