Sharon Penman has Died

 Another sad loss - Sharon Penman had been ill for some time, but her death was still an unpleasant surprise.  She had recently been diagnosed with a rare cancer.  She was 75.

She was one of my favourite historical novelists, and one of the few who wrote about Welsh medieval history.  Both Sharon Penman and Edith Pargeter wrote about Prince Llewelyn, the last independent Prince of Wales.  Edith Pargeter wrote four books under the umbrella title Brothers of Gwynedd, and Sharon Penman wrote the magnificent trilogy which begins with the life of Llewelyn the Great, the Last Llewelyn's grandfather: Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning.  Falls the Shadow brings in Simon de Montfort as the main character, as his daughter Ellen eventually married Llewelyn (no thanks to Edward I, who I despise with a deep and abiding passion!). 

 I wept non-stop through the last 200 pages of The Reckoning, partly because I was so involved with the characters, and partly because I already knew the history, so I knew what was going to happen to them.  When I was an archaeologist, I did the site tours of Caergwrle Castle in North Wales, which is where Dafydd, Llewelyn's younger brother, launched his attack on nearby Hawardan Castle (which was held by the English), thus starting a war with England which Edward I very decisively finished.

Sharon didn't only write about Welsh history, though.  Her first book was The Sunne in Splendour, about Richard III, and it is magnificent.  It was also completely re-written after the original manuscript was stolen, while she was still working as a tax lawyer.

She's also written about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Anarchy under King Stephen, and Richard I.  Her most recent book was The Land Beyond the Sea, about King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and the war against Saladin - the same period that was covered in the film Kingdom of Heaven, but with a more historically accurate Balian d'Ibelin.

For lighter medieval fare, there are the lovely Queen's Man books, shorter medieval mysteries about a young man who works for Queen Eleanor.  I'm very fond of Justin de Quincy (and his dog Shadow).

"We are all Star Stuff" Delenn Goes Home

 

Mira Furlan, who played  Minbari Ambassador Delenn in Babylon 5, has just died at the age of 65.

She had only been in the US for two years when she got the part of Delenn, having emigrated from the former Yugoslavia with her husband.  She was born in Croatia, and her husband Goran, who survives her, was Serbian.  They have a son called Marko.  

War had broken out in Yugoslavia when they left.  Mira had been part of a travelling theatre company which crossed borders to perform despite receiving death threats from both sides of the civil war.  When asked about it she said: "What's the worst that could have happened?  Yes, they could have killed me.  So what?  Art should have no borders."

Her official Twitter account announced the news of her death with a quotation from Mira:

"I look at the stars.  It's a clear night and the Milky Way seems so near.  That's where I'll be going soon.  "We're all star stuff",  I suddenly remember Delenn's line from Joe's script.  

Not a bad prospect.  I am not afraid.

In the meantime, let me close my eyes and sense the beauty around me.  And take that breath under the dark sky full of stars.

Breathe in.  Breathe out.

That's all."

How I Got Started in Fan Fiction

There's an argument on Twitter at the moment which started when someone (I'm not linking to it) said rude things about fan fiction writers.

I'm proud to be a fan fiction writer - and I'm incredibly grateful for all the fan fiction writers on AO3.  Reading their stories helped keep me sane through 2020 (yes, even the ones which didn't meet professional standards - they were written with love, and the writers were doing their best).

So, I started writing fan fiction when I was 12.

I shared a bedroom with my sister, and I used to tell her bedtime stories until she fell asleep, which I made up myself.  Then I started writing the stories down.  I was reading my way through the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome at the time, so my stories were heavily based on them.  I was also a great fan of old pirate movies that were shown in the afternoons on weekend TV, and some of my plots were based on them.  In the process, I turned Nancy and Peggy Blackett into 18th century pirates and based them in Cornwall, with a ship called the Sea Witch.  I was also reading my dad's collection of Richard Bolitho novels, which gave me all the knowledge of sails and rigging I needed.  I can still tell the difference between a sloop, a barquentine and a ship of the line.

I didn't know it at the time, but what I was doing was writing Swallows and Amazons AU crossover fan fic, and I was having enormous fun.

None of these stories ever went further than a folder in my bedroom, where they were written out in felt tip pen.

I doubt if there are many Starship Excalibur zines still around from the early 1980s, but when I joined Star Trek fandom in my late teens, I wrote for them.  Looking back now, some of those stories were quite embarrassing - more enthusiasm than skill - but I got enough encouragement to keep doing it, and I kept improving.  My proudest moment was to write a Deep Space Nine story without ever having seen an episode of Deep Space Nine!  The new series had just started, and I knew some of the details, but I didn't have a TV at the time.  I wrote a story about Keiko O'Brien setting up her school and dealing with a problem Andorian pupil, and I seemed to get it right.

I spent many years not writing at all, for various reasons, but eventually I decided to make my best attempt at becoming a published writer, and started writing original fiction.  I got as far as getting a personalised rejection letter from an agent.  So I knew my writing was almost professional standard, but I also knew I wasn't going to get any better than I already was.  

I self-published the stories on Smashwords (see the side bar).

Then I went to Dublin WorldCon, where the AO3 website won a Hugo.  I'd heard of AO3 before that, but it seemed so huge that I kind of bounced off it.  This gave me the impetus to try again.

Last year, I wrote nearly 60,000 words of fan fiction.  Some of it was incredibly niche - I think I'm the only person to ever have written a fan fic for The Flashing Blade, which all of 6 people have read!  I've also written Lord Peter Wimsey fan fiction, in which Lord Peter became Lady Petra - working out how the plots would have changed if Lord Peter was a woman was fun.  (Bunter became Myrtle Bunter, too).  The first story I tried was about The Saint, since I was re-watching the old Roger Moore series and trying to make sense of his confusing and possibly contradictory back-story.

And I've written a lot of Good Omens fan fic, too.

So there we are - I'm proud of being a fan fic writer, and reader.  If it's comfort reading, well, I'm not the only person who needed comfort reading last year, and the process of creation has been very satisfying (I love doing research!).

I'm also very grateful that sites like AO3 exist, because I can remember the days when fan fiction writers could be sued - in fact, Anne McCaffrey once threatened to sue me, so that Star Trek/Pern crossover never saw the light of day!

The Feathered Serpent, Series 2

I had no memory of a second series of The Feathered Serpent even existing, despite loving the first season - I think I was probably in the middle of exams when it was on TV in 1978.  When I sent off for the DVD, though, both seasons were included and I finally got to see the end of the story.

At the end of the first season, the baddies are killed and the Princess seems to be about to marry the Toltec Prince Heumac, but it turns out that they have further problems to solve before they can get to the happy ending....

Nasca the Evil High Priest was far too good a character to kill off (played by Patrick Troughton with great relish), so he immediately gets resurrected, with the help of new baddy Xipec, Governor of the Gold Province.  He was far more fun than Nasca's accomplice in the first season (the rather boring Jaguar General) - silver-tongued, elegant, tall, with long black hair and lots of gold eye paint, and dressed in dark green and gold, a bit like a 1970s version of Loki.  He's also quite happy to torture young Tozo, Prince Heumac's servant, who does a very good job of showing how much he's suffering when he's tied up on the terrace baking in the hot sun.

Here he is with the mad witch Keelag who brings Nasca back to life - a good meaty female role, but not one that passes the Beschdel Test - she and Empress Chimalma never meet, and the only other female "speaking part" is a city woman who has been driven mad by poisoned water, who only screams.

Xipec was played by Granville Saxton, who has appeared more recently as a Death Eater in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and one of the Patricians in The Eagle (the film version of Rosemary Sutcliff's book Eagle of the Ninth).

I don't think I learned much about Aztec/Toltec civilisation from the series, but it was great fun to watch, and I don't think there's ever been anything else quite like it on British children's TV.

Fan Fiction, Fictional Archaeologists, and Libraries

 I love writing fan fiction.  The research for a story can lead me down the most interesting rabbit holes.

In this case, I read a Good Omens fan fic on AO3 called It's Not the Years, It's the Milage, by MovesLikeBucky.  The plot is basically the first Indiana Jones film, but with Aziraphale as Indy and Crowley as Marion, and I enjoyed it enormously.

But before Indiana Jones, there was Pimpernel Smith.

Leslie Howard played the first adventurous archaeologist - Professor Smith, who was in charge of a student dig in Germany just before the Second World War.  When he wasn't directing the students, he was smuggling intellectuals out of Germany before they were arrested by the Nazis.  The film was made in 1941, in black and white, and has a moment of terrible sexism where Professor Smith insults the women archaeology students to make them walk out of the lecture hall, so he can invite only the young men on the student dig with him.  Apart from that, though, it is wonderful fun, with the Nazis puzzled by the tune used to signal to the escaping intellectuals, and a very funny conversation about Shakespeare at an Embassy party.

It occurred to me that Aziraphale would work far better as vague academic Professor Smith than as action hero Indiana Jones - but I didn't want to do a straight swap of the characters.  Aziraphale could go undercover in Germany as an antiquarian bookseller much more easily.

And this is where the research comes in.  I work in a secondhand and antiquarian bookshop, and I had recently been cataloguing some books about Germany.  I noticed that many of them were published in Leipzig.  So Aziraphale could have a bookselling contact in Leipzig he could write to.  I discovered that Leipzig was, indeed, a centre for book publishing - and that there had been a terrible air raid in 1943 which destroyed the booksellers' quarter (the Graphisches Viertel), including the oldest music publishing house in the world, along with an estimated 50 million books.  The German National Library was badly hit.  1,800 people also died in the RAF raid.

That happened after the period I wanted to set my story, though.

I wanted Aziraphale to buy a collection of occult books, possibly from a castle somewhere.  Thuringia sounded like an interesting location, not too far from Leipzig, so I started to look at local castles - and hit solid gold!

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library is still housed in the Green Castle in Weimar.  In the 1930s it was known as the Ducal Library, and it had been a library since Duke Wilhelm Ernst started it in 1691.  Duchess Anna Amalia moved it to its present location in 1761.  It houses important collections of Shakespeare and Goethe, and a 16th century bible connected to Martin Luther.

Aziraphale would be in Paradise!

Even better, it looks like this:

It even has a book tower that reminded me of Aziraphale's shop:

There was a serious fire there in 2004, but it has been wonderfully restored, as the pictures show.

And now I want to visit Weimar....

Happy New Year

 

On Discworld, this year has been declared the Year of the Beleaguered Badger - but I could only find a picture in Spanish.

Happy New Year!