Yuletide + Paris + Revolutionary fervour
I've been terminally rubbish at Yuletide this year. I've barely read anything. Trouble is, I tend to read fanfic when I get seized by the fannish need for a particular character or pairing, and then I go out and devour everything I can about her/him/etc/them. But I don't tend to read through archives on spec, so when the Yuletide archive goes live in all its sparkling THOUSANDS OF FANFICS glory, I tend to go @_@ and go and read a Scarlet Pimpernel novel instead. I'll probably read more during the year, as the whimsy takes me.
So I can't do a proper recs post (again). Because I am useless. But I *do* want to point out the gorgeous Regeneration fic I received, as I feel awful about requesting rare fandoms where the writer's not likely to get a huge amount of comment love, and then doubly awful when I don't rec them myself and thereby generate more love for them. So - I got Such Delight As Prisoned Birds Must Find in Freedom, a beautiful Rivers + Sassoon (or Rivers/Sassoon if you read everything with your slash-binoculars set to maximum, WHICH I DO.) fic, threaded through with Sassoon's poetry, taking their relationship through past the end of the war with all its complexities and ambiguities and love. Also, Rivers. <3 Rivers.
For Them What Are Interested, my fic's Six Revolutionary Pamphlets, a series of Camille Desmoulins-centric vignettes working from Hilary Mantel's astonishingly awesome book A Place of Greater Safety (READ IT, IT IS AMAZING. Seriously. I haven't been so bowled over by a book in years.) Sadly I suspect it's largely incomprehensible unless you *have* read the book (or know the French Revolution moderately well - I did try not to put anything *too* horrendously unhistorical in there. Yes, Robespierre did have a waistcoat embroidered with roses, and did serve the soup onto the tablecloth.) But hey, feel free to give it a (probably rather baffled) try.
Place of Greater Safety is probably the most challenging fandom I've ever tried to write for, and I'm actually moderately pleased with how the fic came out. It's not so much the prose style (though Hilary Mantel of course just won the Booker, so that's more than slightly intimidating as well), it's the fact that her characterisations of the revolutionaries are *astonishingly* complex and opaque - it's not a Mantel character if there aren't at least fifteen layers of perception, misperception, focalisation, self-realisation, self-deception, and unreliable narrative comment going on at any one time. Quite apart from the fact that in this book they're all based on real people, about whom I know little and Hilary Mantel knows a TRULY ASTONISHING AMOUNT. There's a reason she reviews all the books on the Revolution they get in the London Review of Books. She's been fangirling it for the best part of thirty years. So my major reaction to writing for this fandom was a mixture of ENORMOUS EXCITEMENT (because the book is *amazing*), and ABJECT TERROR.
I ran the deadline closer for this fic than any Yuletide before - largely because the term's Actual Work took much longer to write up than I'd hoped, partly because the weekend I'd ear-marked for my primary writing effort was the weekend I was stricken with flu and wasn't capable of walking, let alone thinking, but also in part because the research for this one grabbed with tentacles and wouldn't let go. I don't know how people who write historical RPF manage it. When your fandom is *everything about everyone important for a particular historical period*, how on *earth* do you actually manage to stop researching and start writing, unless you've got a Yuletide counter nagging you? As it was I only got through a fraction of the stuff I wanted to (no time for Rousseau, woe). Still, I can do some more before I start proper work on the GIANT REVOLUTIONARY MASH-UP CROSSOVER FANFIC OF DOOM, wherein the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel are the ultimate deus ex machina and rescue everyone I want rescuing, from Camille to Sydney Carton. (I may go a step further and cross Biggles over with Pimpernel and Rosemary and Pimpernel Smith, just to bring all my current fandom enthusiasms together in a neat parcel. Von Stalhein would be a better Chauvelin than Chauvelin was in the later books.)
In any case, research was a good excuse for her and me to go to Paris for the weekend and stalk the Revolution. (Her current blog layout may give you an indication of her specific revolutionary interests, as my the fact that her recent birthday and Christmas presents have included about half of the collected works of Camille Desmoulins, a plate with Camille on it, and several articles about Camille photocopied from obscure journals in the Bodleian. Speaking personally, I have developed an embarrassing love for Mantel's version of Robespierre, and seem to find myself worryingly frequently thinking things like 'but he wasn't *personally* responsible for guillotining many people...' and resenting the fact that I can't find a decent quality version of this picture to make a blog layout out of. DON'T JUDGE ME.)
Unfortunately, stalking the revolution around Paris is made rather more complicated by the somewhat complicated attitude France takes to the revolution, and also by the fact that the nineteenth century happened to Paris and made it pretty and well-designed and completely different from 1789. But we did our best. So, What We Did In Paris:
- saw Max's document case in the Carnevalet. IT HAD HIS NAME ON IT YAY. also saw Danton's shaving kit, but neither of us are Danton fangirls, so less love there.
- We found the Cordeliers!
- We found Max's house!
- We found the most fangirlish Camille picture ever!
- We found the Palais Royal!
Also, T ate frog's legs and my French was, as ever, utterly incomprehensible to French people. Good times.
Now I'm listening to the Frank Wildhorn Scarlet Pimpernel musical. My shame, let me show you it.
So I can't do a proper recs post (again). Because I am useless. But I *do* want to point out the gorgeous Regeneration fic I received, as I feel awful about requesting rare fandoms where the writer's not likely to get a huge amount of comment love, and then doubly awful when I don't rec them myself and thereby generate more love for them. So - I got Such Delight As Prisoned Birds Must Find in Freedom, a beautiful Rivers + Sassoon (or Rivers/Sassoon if you read everything with your slash-binoculars set to maximum, WHICH I DO.) fic, threaded through with Sassoon's poetry, taking their relationship through past the end of the war with all its complexities and ambiguities and love. Also, Rivers. <3 Rivers.
For Them What Are Interested, my fic's Six Revolutionary Pamphlets, a series of Camille Desmoulins-centric vignettes working from Hilary Mantel's astonishingly awesome book A Place of Greater Safety (READ IT, IT IS AMAZING. Seriously. I haven't been so bowled over by a book in years.) Sadly I suspect it's largely incomprehensible unless you *have* read the book (or know the French Revolution moderately well - I did try not to put anything *too* horrendously unhistorical in there. Yes, Robespierre did have a waistcoat embroidered with roses, and did serve the soup onto the tablecloth.) But hey, feel free to give it a (probably rather baffled) try.
Place of Greater Safety is probably the most challenging fandom I've ever tried to write for, and I'm actually moderately pleased with how the fic came out. It's not so much the prose style (though Hilary Mantel of course just won the Booker, so that's more than slightly intimidating as well), it's the fact that her characterisations of the revolutionaries are *astonishingly* complex and opaque - it's not a Mantel character if there aren't at least fifteen layers of perception, misperception, focalisation, self-realisation, self-deception, and unreliable narrative comment going on at any one time. Quite apart from the fact that in this book they're all based on real people, about whom I know little and Hilary Mantel knows a TRULY ASTONISHING AMOUNT. There's a reason she reviews all the books on the Revolution they get in the London Review of Books. She's been fangirling it for the best part of thirty years. So my major reaction to writing for this fandom was a mixture of ENORMOUS EXCITEMENT (because the book is *amazing*), and ABJECT TERROR.
I ran the deadline closer for this fic than any Yuletide before - largely because the term's Actual Work took much longer to write up than I'd hoped, partly because the weekend I'd ear-marked for my primary writing effort was the weekend I was stricken with flu and wasn't capable of walking, let alone thinking, but also in part because the research for this one grabbed with tentacles and wouldn't let go. I don't know how people who write historical RPF manage it. When your fandom is *everything about everyone important for a particular historical period*, how on *earth* do you actually manage to stop researching and start writing, unless you've got a Yuletide counter nagging you? As it was I only got through a fraction of the stuff I wanted to (no time for Rousseau, woe). Still, I can do some more before I start proper work on the GIANT REVOLUTIONARY MASH-UP CROSSOVER FANFIC OF DOOM, wherein the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel are the ultimate deus ex machina and rescue everyone I want rescuing, from Camille to Sydney Carton. (I may go a step further and cross Biggles over with Pimpernel and Rosemary and Pimpernel Smith, just to bring all my current fandom enthusiasms together in a neat parcel. Von Stalhein would be a better Chauvelin than Chauvelin was in the later books.)
In any case, research was a good excuse for her and me to go to Paris for the weekend and stalk the Revolution. (Her current blog layout may give you an indication of her specific revolutionary interests, as my the fact that her recent birthday and Christmas presents have included about half of the collected works of Camille Desmoulins, a plate with Camille on it, and several articles about Camille photocopied from obscure journals in the Bodleian. Speaking personally, I have developed an embarrassing love for Mantel's version of Robespierre, and seem to find myself worryingly frequently thinking things like 'but he wasn't *personally* responsible for guillotining many people...' and resenting the fact that I can't find a decent quality version of this picture to make a blog layout out of. DON'T JUDGE ME.)
Unfortunately, stalking the revolution around Paris is made rather more complicated by the somewhat complicated attitude France takes to the revolution, and also by the fact that the nineteenth century happened to Paris and made it pretty and well-designed and completely different from 1789. But we did our best. So, What We Did In Paris:
- saw Max's document case in the Carnevalet. IT HAD HIS NAME ON IT YAY. also saw Danton's shaving kit, but neither of us are Danton fangirls, so less love there.
- We found the Cordeliers!
- We found Max's house!
- We found the most fangirlish Camille picture ever!
- We found the Palais Royal!
Also, T ate frog's legs and my French was, as ever, utterly incomprehensible to French people. Good times.
Now I'm listening to the Frank Wildhorn Scarlet Pimpernel musical. My shame, let me show you it.