She Who Staples

001.	universe	002.	edge	003.	cleave	004.	distance	005.	away
006.	home	007.	key	008.	star	009.	dust	010.	shadows
011.	old	012.	new	013.	borrowed	014.	blue	015.	promise
016.	dishonour	017.	wreck	018.	fix	019.	crack	020.	discover
021.	fiddle	022.	fire	023.	water	024.	waves	025.	salt
026.	balm	027.	fear	028.	wear	029.	mask	030.	truth
031.	courage	032.	hope	033.	raised	034.	fall	035.	spring
036.	birth	037.	morning	038.	welcome	039.	belong	040.	share
041.	count	042.	mean	043.	teasing	044.	fantasy	045.	game
046.	work	047.	bed	048.	turn	049.	swing	050.	kitchen
051.	cull	052.	quell	053.	arrested	054.	inside	055.	chance
056.	alive	057.	sleeping	058.	late	059.	rain	060.	bottle
061.	steal	062.	brilliant	063.	theory	064.	practice	065.	war
066.	storm	067.	voyage	068.	swim	069.	wallow	070.	settle
071.	ground	072.	space	073.	silence	074.	screech	075.	snap
076.	scratch	077.	bug	078.	lighting	079.	faded	080.	ghost
081.	history	082.	time	083.	mirror	084.	drawing	085.	trailed
086.	way	087.	run	088.	here	089.	heart	090.	perfection
091.	right	092.	sanction	093.	can	094.	collection	095.	crowd
096.	oversight	097.	graduate	098.	laughing	099.	unless	100.	final

Fandoms
Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare
Zenda novels - Anthony Hope
Doctor Who (1963)

1. The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon
2. Guard the Chaos - Jennifer Ward and Hannah Wild
3. I Was Born For This - Alice Oseman
4. Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters
5. Sonny's Blues and other stories - James Baldwin
6. Passing - Nella Larsen

Create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom

Well, I was enthusing about The Count of Monte Cristo the other day, so I shall expand on that a bit. (Also see 2019 post here.

It's a French novel (original title: Le Comte de Monte Cristo) by Alexandre Dumas (père), first published in serial form from 1844-46 and then as a complete novel in 1846. (There were two Alexandre Dumas, father and son. The father is most famous for The Three Musketeers and the son is most famous for The Lady of the Camellias.)

The first part of the book stars too-good-to-be-true sailor Edmond Dantès, who is framed for a crime of which he is, obviously, innocent, and imprisoned in an island prison just outside Marseille. There he encounters the Abbé Faria, who knows where to find some hidden treasure on another island, tiny Monte Cristo, if only he could get free... Well, he can't, but Edmond is younger and stronger and has a much better chance.

The rest of the book follows the consequences - for Edmond (who has restyled himself as Count of Monte Cristo), and for the three men who stitched him up, and for their nearest and dearest. (Edmond has been in prison for a while, and they've all done rather well for themselves - implausibly so, in some cases.) They take a while to work themselves out, but they're very satisfying even as they're somewhat horrifying. It's revenge with an unlimited budget, and then having to come to terms with what that does to a person. (If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then unlimited revenge... erm. Anyway.)

I love the melodrama. I love the Gothic vibe. I love the canon lesbians (Eugénie, the daughter of one of the three villains and an impoverished friend who sings opera with her) who get a happy ending under their own author's nose. I love the background detail, Parisian society, the faint odour of decadence.

Warnings: the dodgy opinions you'd expect for 1846. Alexandre Dumas was in fact Black, but this doesn't stop him going unfortunately Orientalist in places.

Also note that it's very long - about 1200 pages in my edition. This is a plus for me: I read it in difficult times and by the time I get to the end something will have changed somewhere. It's worth being careful about the translation, as some of the older ones are also bowdlerisations and lose vital Eugénie bits. Which is a travesty.

Grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

I answered a couple of requests for recommendations, and am copying my answers here for reference.

1. for someone who wanted to hear from people forty and up about shopping for clothes:

I hit forty last year, and what I've done is to keep on experimenting until I find something that works - whether that's a shape, a colour, a manufacturer - and then keep on experimenting with that. What that looks like depends very much on circumstances - at the moment I have quite a lot of unscheduled time and my small town has a lot of charity shops, so I'm mostly buying things second-hand and donating them back if they don't end up working. But when I was working full-time I did a lot more internet shopping. (Svaha and Joanie were what worked for me then, for what it's worth.)

I had a most illuminating conversation recently with a group of friends, most of whom like Seasalt. I said that Seasalt ought to work for me but never quite does, but that Fat Face is pretty reliable. Interestingly, most of the Seasalt fans said that Fat Face never quite works for them. I take from this the lesson that even makes that appear very similar at first glance will be more or less suited to different groups of people, so it's worth keeping on looking.

I also like the Who Wears Who blog for thoughtful prompts on style and experimentation with same.


2. replying to someone who wanted to talk about femslash

Femslash! Here are three of my favourite books with canon femslash ships:

- my oldest - The Count of Monte Cristo, a rambling but enjoyable French doorstopper tale of revenge, appeared from 1844 to 1846 and has canon femslash. And no bury your gays! (Obvious warning: it is, of course, very much Of Its Time.)
- my newest - I've just finished The Priory of the Orange Tree. Will it be one of my favourites of all time? Probably not, but it was a lot of fun - an ambitious fantasy novel that attempts to put a valiant number of belief systems and all the dragon lore on the page. And yes, canon femslash.
- the one that feels like it was written just for me - the Alpennia series by Heather Rose Jones. It includes many of my favourite tropes (fictional European country, swashbuckling, complicated power dynamics) and weaves religious practice into the way the magic works in a way that I've rarely seen done so effectively. And, for a third time, canon femslash.

Talk about your favourite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Where to start? Let's start with swashbuckling. That's a nice easy one. Really, I think my fannish id was formed by The Prisoner of Zenda at an early age (I am still very fond of The Prisoner of Zenda).

See also: Ruritania. I love a good fictional society, and the deeper we go into the government departments and the transport infrastructure, the happier I am.

And love and duty. I don't necessarily mind which triumphs, so long as both are taken seriously. I also love it when one of the arts - or sports, or whatever - is the third party in a relationship, particularly when the partners are both very enthusiastic about that. Not to mention the creator. (This was why I enjoyed Yuri!!! on Ice so much: it was very much about the skating.)

I like relationships between women, romantic or otherwise. And friendships between men and women where it's never going to become romantic.

And then I always enjoy a good description:
Food. Chalet School breakfasts. The Marseille chapter in Madam Will You Talk.
Clothes. Annoyingly, I can't think of a good example at this moment. Probably Eva Ibbotson.
Landscape. A John Buchan evening. Can't beat an apple-green twilight.

Finally, something that I write more often than I read is the situation where you will never be able either to clean up Dodge or to get out of Dodge, you have to live in Dodge, but nevertheless you can find a way to carve out a happy and/or meaningful life there. And maybe you find you've made it slightly less grubby.

Trying to get back on the bus with this one...



LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

1. I am - not always, but often - capable of finding ordinary things utterly delightful. Like the Wendy Cope poem about the orange. I am not in that state at the moment, but it is lovely when it happens.

2. On the small scale, I think I am slightly luckier than average. For example: my hair went grey in my early thirties, but that happened to be the couple of years in which many people my age were dyeing their hair grey. We moved house the week before the first Covid lockdown, when it could have been the week after. I win raffles, and the occasional twenty-five quid on the Premium Bonds. (Or maybe I'm no luckier than anyone else, but - see point one - appreciate my luck more?)

3. I really like making things. I like that about myself.

4. Fashion aside, I do like the way my hair looks.

In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.

Hmm, well, nobody can give me leisure time or sleep, so I can't guarantee that I'll be able to follow up on any of the following in a timely fashion, but:

1. I got a mini ice cream maker for Christmas, so I'd love some ice cream or sorbet recipes.

2. Travel tips for Lyon or Montpellier, which we'll be visiting next month.

3. Not recs as such, because they don't need to be tailored to me, but tell me about a book or a fic you've enjoyed recently.

4. Art for any of my fics.

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

It's late and I'm tired and badly in need of some gentle quizzing on the telly and then bed, but:

For too much of my life I've felt faintly embarrassed by my own enthusiasms. I appreciate the reminder that it doesn't have to be like that. Thank you, fandom, for being so loudly, unapologetically, gloriously enthusiastic.

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

I've been an occasional participant in this challenge for several years. (I changed my handle this year; I used to be el_staplador, which was feeling increasingly less funny.) My profile is, miraculously, still more or less accurate.

This year feels like it needs a little more in the way of apologia, since I'm very out of touch with fandom at the moment, and have indeed fallen off many of the online platforms that I used to frequent. There are plenty of reasons for that, ranging from the very personal to the global, and I'm not actually upset about most of it. But I am feeling the pull towards more connection, particularly in person, but online too.

And that is why I'm doing this challenge. I don't expect to have the time to get into any fandom the way I used to, but I miss being fandom-adjacent. Snowflake feels like as good a way as any to return to the Internet the way I enjoy using it.

Lust, books I want to read for their cover:
I'm not particularly drawn by book covers, actually. I suspect it comes of growing up reading through piles of Golden Age detective fiction with appalling 1970s covers. Don't get me wrong, there are some gorgeous covers out there. But, publishing being what it is, the moment a lovely one comes out, there are a dozen others riffing off it by the time I get round to reading it, which rather dilutes the effect.

Pride, challenging books I've finished:
My e-reader got me through Le Tour Du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours and Vingt Milles Lieues Sous Les Mers in French, and War and Peace (in English, except for the bits that are in French).

Gluttony, books I've read more than once:
Oh, goodness. I think I used to re-read more than I first-time-read when I was a child and a teen. I've slowed down since but there are still plenty I return to for comfort. A non-exhaustive list: almost all of the Agatha Christie mysteries; ditto Sayers; the Sadlers Wells series up to Principal Role; most of Swallows and Amazons (I don't think I've ever returned to Great Northern?); a lot of Noel Streatfeild (favourites: probably The Bell Family and White Boots as well as Ballet Shoes); the three Zenda novels; some of Jane Austen; some of John Buchan, particularly the Dickson McCunn series; I Capture the Castle; Cold Comfort Farm; early Libby Purves; Starbridge and St Benet's... Things I've first encountered after leaving home and returned to: the_comfortable_courtesan; Eva Ibbotson's romances; The Count of Monte Cristo. What I used to do when I was a child, and don't do so much any more, is re-read and re-read favourite scenes within a book.

Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest:
Les Misérables. countertony and I had a pact to read each other's favourite French door-stoppers. He read an abridged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo, and I stalled quite early on, so we both failed. I've done quite well this year at clearing out the Guilt Books, mostly obtained via BookCrossing, that I don't actually want to read but have been sitting on my shelves because somebody else thought I should. The exception is the Emma Donoghue historicals which I do want to read but which I suspect of being depressing. But I have acquired all my father's Anthony Hopes and Francis Brett Youngs so am feeling guilty about not reading (most of) those instead.

Greed, books I own multiple editions of:
I have a few duplicated across ebook and hard copy: either I have enjoyed the ebook version and found the paper version cheap in a charity shop (e.g. Acts and Omissions, or the book has maps or family trees or something else I want to keep flipping back to (e.g. The Duke is Dead), or conversely I have discovered that the hard copy is huge and unwieldy and I am much more likely to finish it in pixel format. As far as duplicated paper versions go, I'm not too bad. Usually I find a nicer copy and pass the nastier one on. But I have two copies of The Jungle Book because they are both inscribed by different ancestors. I seem to have duplicates of Huntingtower and The House of the Four Winds because I don't have Castle Gay in the red hardback Nelson edition. And I have a paperback Greenmantle because it is the same edition that my father had as his travelling copy. (Greenmantle is an excellent travelling book. However appalling the weather or the Bahnchaos, Richard Hannay is having to deal with something worse.)

I also have a duplicate copy of Above Rubies: Eliza Ferraby's Story volume 2, which I would be delighted to pass on, but I want it to be appreciated and it doesn't feel like the best jumping-on point for the Comfortable Courtesan saga. If anyone would like it, please shout.

Wrath, books I despised:
The Henchmen of Zenda. I was looking forward to this so much - I have enjoyed every other K J Charles that I've read; The Prisoner of Zenda is one of my favourite books - and I was so disappointed. ( Read more... ) Anyway, it's little more than, but still something more than, "ships the wrong guys".

Envy, books I want to live in:
Hmm. The problem with living in books is that generally things are all set up very nicely and then something happens and you have to go and sort it out. It might be fun to visit Ruritania and Evallonia, but I've had plenty of fun elsewhere with an Interrail ticket. The food and the scenery are very tempting in Mary Stewart and the Chalet School, but in both you have to dodge deadly peril and coercive men trying to marry you. I wouldn't mind being a grumpy Tove Jansson artist and living on a Finnish island. I'm pretty sure I actually live in a Catherine Fox novel*. Could be worse. Could be Starbridge.

*Overheard yesterday:
Verger 1: We'll add it to the long list of things that need fixing.
Verger 2: It wouldn't be the Church of England if it wasn't held together with gaffer tape.