Beyond Selidor

The current snowflake_challenge is one that I always find incredibly stressful: I don't really collect fannish merch (other than ... physical books? Dreamwidth icons?), and I'm completely incapable of taking decent photos of anything that isn't a) a tree or b) a body of water.



So, with that disclaimer out of the way, here is the prompt:

In your own space, post the results of your fandom scavenger hunt. earch in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture or description of something that is or represents:

1. A favorite character
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A bookshelf
4. A game or hobby you enjoy
5. Something you find comforting
6. A TV show or movie you hope more people will watch
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A thing from an old fandom
9. A thing from a new fandom

My photos can be found on Instagram. Edited to add that the bad-quality photos were stressing me out so much that I deleted the whole photoset from Instagram, so the link here will no longer work. The descriptions of the photos remain below.

I have merged several categories.

1. A favourite character — Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. This is the back of a t shirt which is possibly the only piece of fannish merch I own, a quote from McDougall's book referencing Una. (A picture McDougall drew of her own character, plus this quote, forms my default Dreamwidth icon.)

2. and 3. Something that makes me laugh + a bookshelf — a small portion of the Terry Pratchett section of our bookshelves. This is only a small portion of our collection as a whole — my copies are all still at my mum's place in Australia, and many of Matthias's copies are still in Germany. At some point, we will have all the copies in the one place and may have to discard the duplicates.

4. and 5. A game or hobby I enjoy + something I find comforting — swimming swimming swimming. I am, as I have said many times, half woman half ocean. Swimming is the only thing that stills the sea inside.

6. A TV show or movie I wish more people would watch — Babylon Berlin

7. A thing from an old fandom — the final lines of Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. This isn't my oldest fandom, but it was my first experience of fandom as an online community, and the HDM forum I joined still remains my gold standard for online fannish spaces. It was the perfect welcome and introduction to fandom-as-shared activity.

8. A thing from a new fandom — the extant books from Pat Barker's Briseis-centric Iliad retelling trilogy.

I read three more short stories yesterday. All are free and online at the Tor.com website.

( Short fiction )

I've managed to pack quite a bit into what started out quite a sleepy Sunday: a sunny walk along the river, among the houseboats, swans, geese and crows, crepes for breakfast, a bit of yoga. I've just returned after a desperate rush into the garden to rescue the laundry from — of all things — a hailstorm.

I've also just finished a book: The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick (a pseudonym for the collaborative efforts of Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms), which felt somewhat old-fashioned in a rather refreshing way — more like the kind of twisty, page-turning secondary world fantasy I used to read twenty years ago. The setting evoked Renaissance Venice (with a dash of the Balkan coastal cities as well), the characters are all, in various ways, con artists attempting disparate kinds of heists, there are various political plots afoot, and everything is artifice in one manner or another.

The eleventh prompt for the book meme asks for:

11. A book that came to you at exactly the right time

( My answer )

( The other days )

The flatbread I'm making tonight needs to sit for half an hour and rise, so that seemed the perfect opportunity to post a handful of links that have passed my way recently.

Last Friday, I attended a Zoom book launch for Philip Pullman's new novella, Serpentine, and everyone who attended was given the link to the unlisted Youtube recording. I've embedded it below. It was a bit rambly, and Pullman is definitely verging on 'old man yells at clouds,' but given he's yelling at my clouds (namely: ranting about Brexit and about how awful Priti Patel and the entire UK Home Office are) I kind of forgive him.



In honour of Black Speculative Fiction Month, FIYAH Literary Magazine and Tor.com have collaborated to bring readers a series of free flash fiction by Black authors. It's freely available to read on the Tor.com website.

I am coveting this coat desperately, but it is definitely not my size. I've had my current winter coat since 2004 and it really needs to be retired, but I hate almost all current styles of coats (and in-person clothes shopping), and am finding the whole prospect very frustrating.

This is the second of my January talking meme posts. I was asked to talk about the new Philip Pullman books in the Book of Dust trilogy, for nyctanthes.

The first such book — La Belle Sauvage, a prequel, in terms of content and chronology, to the original His Dark Materials trilogy — was very much to my taste. I was so relieved that it was published at all, and that it was well written, and showed off Pullman's strengths — a vivid sense of place, gorgeous prose that danced on the page, and a rolicking, page-turning plot. I was full of gratitude and emotion, and delighted in celebrating the book with all my friends I'd made through the Philip Pullman forum that was my first experience of online fandom.

Sadly, I did not enjoy The Secret Commonwealth, the second book in the new trilogy — the first one to pick up Lyra's story after she's reached adulthood (save the brief glimpse we got of her as a teenager in Lyra's Oxford). It did things I disliked to Lyra's character, and unfortunately made me reassess my previous opinion of Philip Pullman as one of the few male authors who were able to write female characters well. Oddly, I disliked the book more and more the more I thought about it after I had finished reading it. I had finished it off thinking it was solid, but not Pullman's best work, but the more and more I contemplated several narrative and characterisation choices (and discussed these elements in verbose Twitter DMs with McDougallSophia), the more I revised my initial opinion to something much more negative. It hasn't tainted my opinion of the original trilogy, which I still maintain is an absolutely extraordinary work of literature, but it does make me more cautious about reading every work that Pullman puts out into the universe and assuming it will be fantastic.

I've still got slots open for prompts for the January talking meme. You can leave prompts here.

I wrote this two days ago on my Wordpress reviewing blog, but I thought it was worth reposting here on Dreamwidth as well.

Twenty years ago (or nineteen years, nine months, and about twenty days ago, if you want to get really technical), I was a restless thirteen-year-old, stuck inside during a rainy week on holiday down the south coast of New South Wales. It was the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve, which meant that I was carting around a massive haul of books, given to me for both my birthday and Christmas. I had read all my new books -- all except one, whose cover put me off. My younger sister, fed up with me moping around the house complaining of 'nothing to read,' made the very sensible point that I hadn't read that book. 'I don't like books about animals,' I objected. She insisted. I am forever grateful that she did. Feeling resentful, I sat down to read Northern Lights (or, as my edition was called, The Golden Compass), the first in Philip Pullman's sweeping, expansive children's trilogy, His Dark Materials. I was hooked from the first page, inhaled the book in one sitting, and, once I'd finished it, opened it up at the beginning and reread it without pause. I reread the book four times over the course of that one-week holiday.

It's hard to describe what it felt like, to read that story as a thirteen-year-old. I was already a voracious reader, and I had already encountered many beloved stories, books I would reread incessantly, or borrow repeatedly from the local library. There were already books I felt fannish about, and whose characters I identified with and drew courage from. But this was different. It was like being seen for the first time. It was as if ideas, beliefs and fears I had long felt but was not yet able to articulate had been given voice and shape on the page. As a teenager, my many rereads of Northern Lights (and, after impatient waits of one year and three years, respectively, for its follow-ups The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass) helped guide both my reading tastes, and my burgeoning sense of political awareness. My love of the series got me a paid newspaper reviewing gig at the age of sixteen, and I continued to freelance as a reviewer for various Australian broadsheets for ten years after that.

Ten years ago (or, if you want to get technical, ten years, nine months, and a couple of days ago), I was in a bad place. I had returned to my hometown after graduating university, and although I had a good job and a lot of family support, I was desperately unhappy, and felt isolated and directionless. All my friends seemed to have adjusted to adult life in a way that I was incapable of, and I felt left behind. In a fit of desperation I — who mistrusted the internet and who barely went online except to check email — typed 'His Dark Materials fansite' into Google. I found something that saved me. 2007 was not a good year, but it was made infinitely more bearable by the incredible collection of people — most of whom lived on the other side of the world — who hung out in the forums of that site. Most of them had been there for years, and were all talked out about His Dark Materials, so instead they analysed other books, shared music tips, or just vented about their daily lives. Although by their standards I was a latecomer, they welcomed me with open arms. For a long time, the only thing that got me through the day was the prospect of hanging out in the IRC chat room they'd set up — the international composition of this group of fans (plus the fact that most of them were students or otherwise kept odd hours) meant that someone was always around at all hours. This was my first foray into online fandom, and I made friends for life. Meeting the sraffies — as we called ourselves — was like coming home. Being with them was, like reading the books that had brought us all together, like being seen for the first time. I was able to relax and be myself and feel safe in a way that I hadn't really anywhere since becoming an adult. Ten years have passed since then, and the group of us have gone through so many things together. We've graduated from university, changed jobs and careers, had books and academic articles published, moved cities, emigrated, fallen in and out of love (in some cases, with each other), mourned deaths, and supported each other through whatever life threw at us. We travel specifically to meet up with each other, and if work, study, or holidays bring us by chance to each others' cities, we make a point to hang out. One of the friends I met through His Dark Materials was even a bridesmaid at my wedding.

I recently did a reread of the trilogy, wanting to refresh my memory before reading Pullman's much anticipated foray back into the world of His Dark Materials. I was anxious that it wouldn't affect me as it had when I was younger, that I would pick up on flaws, that its emotional notes would leave me unmoved. I shouldn't have worried. Reading Pullman's words again, returning to that world, was like falling into water. Like the best and most meaningful of stories, it gave me something different, as it had done with each reread, and reading it as a thirty-two-year-old woman was different to reading it as a thirteen-year-old girl, or when I was in my twenties. But, like Lyra relearning to read the alethiometer as an adult after losing the unconscious ease with which she read it as a child, it was a deeper, richer experience — not better, not worse, just different. In the years since I first opened Northern Lights and read those resonant first words, Lyra and her dæmon, I've finished high school. I've graduated three times from two different universities, with an Honours degree, MPhil, and doctorate. I've changed careers three times. I've emigrated, lived in two new countries, acquired a new citizenship, learnt two new languages (as well as many dead languages), presented at conferences, been published academically in two very different fields, fallen in love, had my heart broken, and fallen in love again. In those years, I found my home, and I found myself again. In other words, I've done exactly what His Dark Materials urges: live, as much as I can, feel, as much as I can bear, and learn, as much as I am able. On Thursday, I will collect my preordered copy of La Belle Sauvage, the first of Pullman's prequel trilogy that will return readers to the world of His Dark Materials. I will sit down and read it in a desperate, yearning rush. I wonder what the twenty years that follow will bring. I know that having read this new book — and those that follow — will help me cope with whatever those next years throw at me.

When I was a child and teenager, I consumed stories with an urgent, hungry intensity. I reread favourite books again and again until I could quote them verbatim,* I wandered around the garden pretending to be Snow White or Ariel from The Little Mermaid or Jessica Rabbit.** I had a pretty constant narrative running through my head the whole time I was awake, for the most part consisting of me being the character of a favourite story doing whatever activity I, Ronni, happened to be doing at the time. (No wonder I was a such a vague child: every activity required an extra layer of concentration in order for me to figure out why, say, the dinosaurs from The Land Before Time would be learning multiplication at a Canberra primary school.) The more I learnt about literary scholarship, the more insufferable I became, because I would talk at people about how 'URSULA LE GUIN WROTE A STORY WHERE EVERYTHING HAS A TRUE, SECRET NAME AND THEN ANOTHER USE-NAME AND ISN'T THAT AMAZING IN WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT IDENTITY?!?!' For the most part, I don't inhabit stories to the same extent, and they don't inhabit me to the same degree, although there are rare exceptions to this.

The rare exceptions tend to be things that sort of satisfy my soul in some deep and slightly subconscious way.*** And the funny thing is that although I can write lengthy essays explaining why something both appeals to me on this hungry, emotional level and is a good work of literature (indeed, I have been known to dedicate a whole blog to this), I can also remember a specific moment when reading/watching these texts and they suddenly became THE BEST THING EVER. I can remember exactly what it was for all of them.

The following is somewhat spoilerish for Romanitas, Sunshine by Robin McKinley, Galax-Arena by Gillian Rubinstein, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, The Demon's Lexicon, The King's Peace by Jo Walton, Parkland by Victor Kelleher, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Robin Hood: Men in Tights,
Ten Things I Hate About You, Cirque du Soleil, Pagan's Crusade by Catherine Jinks and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.


( Probably a closer look at my subconscious than is comfortable )

Do you have moments like that?
____________
*Which led to a very awkward moment in Year 5 when our teacher was reading Hating Alison Ashley out loud to the class, but would skip bits from time to time - whereupon I would correct her.
**(whose appeal was less that she wasn't 'bad, just drawn that way' and more due to the fact that she wore an awesome dress)
***I've seen people describe fanfic like this as 'idfic', but for me this tends to be a phenomenon of professionally published fiction.

In honour of the first World Book Night, we at BridgeToTheStars.net are holding a DOUBLE GIVEAWAY.

For His Dark Materials fans
In the spirit of World Book Night, we’re requesting that you take this opportunity to read a book you might not otherwise read. So for sraffies, we’re giving away a World Book Night copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.

For others
If you’ve not read His Dark Materials, BTTS would love to introduce you to it! We have a World Book Night copy of Northern Lights to give away.

World Book Night is here to promote reading and spread some literary love. If you win one of these books, please read it and then pass it on to somebody else so they too can be introduced to these two great works of fiction. Every World Book Night book has a unique ID number, so that it can be tracked via BookCrossing, so we hope to follow the books as they are passed from reader to reader.

This giveaway is open to everyone. To enter, simply send an e-mail to contest@bridgetothestars.net with the subject line “World Book Night Giveaway” and your name and the title of the book that you’d like in the e-mail. Good luck!

(Please note: one entry per person, the deadline for entries is 11:59pm GMT on the 12th of March)