The King is dead.
I woke up this morning to the shocking news that Chadwick Boseman has died of colon cancer. He was only 43.
He was an impressive lead in the film Black Panther, and part of the ensemble cast in other Marvel movies - and T'Challa is the only role I know him from. He also played James Brown and Jackie Robinson, a black baseball player who was the first to play in the Major League (I know nothing about baseball).
He was also a writer and director.
I'm very pleased with myself. I haven't really tried anything like this before, but at the moment I have time to experiment. I saw a picture of a stag made up of lots of little pieces of scrap paper, in an old copy of Big Issue, and I thought I could do something like that. Then I combined that idea with the style of an old picture book of the life of St. Patrick that I'd admired when I worked at the Children's Bookshop, and I came up with this:
I did Aziraphale first, and got a bit more ambitious with Crowley.
I'm thinking of doing Inspector LeBrock and Billie from the Grandville novels by Bryan Talbot next.
I've been reading Christopher Fowler's blog for a while now (at www.christopherfowler.co.uk) and enjoying it, so I thought it was about time I read one of his Bryant and May mysteries, about two elderly coppers in the Peculiar Crimes Unit. The first one I found was Bryant & May and The Memory of Blood, which I think is quite late in the series.
It concerns Mr Punch - or at least a series of murders on a Punch and Judy theme, which leads Bryant into researching the history of the Punch and Judy show.
I was already fairly familiar with the history of Punch and Judy - Mr Punch is the villain in the first Rivers of London book by Ben Aaronovitch, and turns up here and there in the later books of the series, though in the Bryant and May book no real magic is involved. I was surprised, though, that in all the discussions of the traditional characters and puppets used in Punch and Judy shows, the crocodile was never mentioned - I remember the crocodile very clearly from when I used to watch the Punch and Judy show on Blackpool beach. The booth was built into the back of a van that drove up and down the sands, stopping at intervals to do the show:
This is what I remember - the picture was taken in 1963.
There are digressions into the history of the building used by the PCU - once used by Alistair Crowley, and with a fairground booth automaton of Madame Blavatsky in the attic, and theatre history, as the suspects are all part of the cast and crew of a new play at a recently re-opened London theatre, and that was all fascinating. I tend to be more interested in the background details of a murder plot, rather than the whodunit aspect. There's also a B-plot which starts off as something quite commonplace (woman has troublesome neighbours) and ends up being a lot more sinister, and personal to Bryant. There were also some very funny moments, mostly involving Bryant.
I'm going to be looking out for more Bryant and May stories now.
I first became aware of AO3 (Archive of Our Own) last year, when I started dipping my toes in the shallows of some of the fan fiction I was most familiar with.
Then there was the wonderful moment during the Hugo Ceremony at DublinCon when AO3 won the Hugo for Best Related Work, and the lights went up on the audience so that everyone who had written fan fiction on the site or been involved in AO3 stood up - because this Hugo was for all of them.
After that, I started writing fan fiction again, after a break of many years (I used to write Star Trek fan fiction for fanzines like Starship Excalibur, when the original 79 episodes were all the Star Trek that existed).
I've been having fun - I changed the ending of The Flashing Blade, which has been bugging me for nearly 50 years, so the hero chooses the right girl; I turned Lord Peter Wimsey into Lady Petra and wrote about her experiences in the Great War; and I tried to make sense of The Saint's timeline in the Roger Moore series.
I also wrote a story that brought together all the fictional jewel thieves in Europe with The Champions, set Liz Shaw and Kate Stewart on a new path to keeping the Earth safe after UNIT was defunded, and wrote a few little Aziraphale and Crowley scenes (they are such fun to write!).
I've also read some awesomely good fan fiction, and some that might not be technically very good but which was obviously written with love (I'd put some of my own fiction in the 'technically not very good' category - the main thing for me was having fun writing it), and I've started following some of the authors on Tumblr.
And, since I was using the site, I sent a couple of small donations when they asked.
So I was delighted to be eligible to vote in the elections for new Board members. Reading the bios of the candidates, I learned a lot about what goes on behind the scenes to keep the site running. There are hundreds of volunteers organising, translating, tag-wrangling, dealing with legal issues, and more.
AO3 is part of the Organization for Transformative Works, which also covers Fanlore, Transformative Works and Culture, Fanhackers and Open Doors.
It's nice to be able to vote for something positive.
