A Sword Outwears Its Sheath

Proofreading and main editing completed on this one -- and YouTube happened to bestow upon me a rather nice still of Soviet Athos (Venjiamin Smekhov) at the end of an unrelated folksong video, which I might even try to make into an FFnet 'cover image', in honour of the actual nature of my fandom!)

( Read more... )

---

A Sword Outwears Its Sheath

Athos has an encounter that will change his life... if not quite in the way intended.

Athos resta mousquetaire sous les ordres de d’Artagnan jusqu’en 1633, époque à laquelle, en revenant d’un voyage qu’il fit en Roussillon, il quitta aussi le service...

The street door opened with a creak and a gust of chilly October wind. The small child hovering on the threshold, half-visible in the dusk beyond, was of indeterminate sex and dirty beyond belief. Athos, sprawled wearily in front of the fire with the mud beginning to dry on his cloak and boots, could not help but be aware that in addition the new arrival smelt strongly of goat. ( Read more... )

~o~

( A rather nice still of Soviet Athos )

Splitting things up

( I forgot all about the cover art when uploading to FFnet... )

---

This evening I dissected the soggy cardboard of the six-pack, into which the roots of the seedlings had of course entwined themselves, making separating and transplanting them more and not less traumatic :-(
We have three Gysophila elegans seedlings -- which I was quite unable to separate and ended up flattening out sideways in a wide pot to try to gain some distance between the plants! -- and several Gypsophila vaccaria, even though I pulled out at least one of those at the seedling stage because it strongly resembled yet another shoo-fly. I split those between a couple of smallish pots, having emptied the supposed Coreopsis pot and transferred the smaller pink Linaria (and four healthy and vigorous possible Blue River daisies around its base!) into a wider pot, mainly in order to free up the small one -- I have no small or medium-small pots left. I then used this pot to put the possibly-white California poppy seedling from the final segment of the six-pack into. If it lives, it will be an interesting but not conclusive genetic experiment!

( Towel-tomatoes )

( Chillies )

Likewise I transplanted one of my smaller pots of marigolds into a larger one out of the motive to use the pot for something else, although most of those marigolds have been flourishing mightily and do rather need repotting! I have split up the main pot of Swan River daisies -- without labelling them, which I hope wasn't a mistake; they should be large enough to recognise now...

The usual spam

Having uploaded a new story, I received another six nine PMs from fictitious fanfiction.net users inviting me to turn my wonderful work into "reasonably priced" manga art... and a review that is weird because it basically consists of a plot summary for the story. A better plot summary than I managed to come up with, incidentally -- obviously I should have consulted generative AI for mine! -- but it's an odd thing to post as a comment to a story. So I'm not sure if this is a genuine user going "Yoo, I have posted a review on your story take a look" in an attempt to be nice (because getting ChatGPT to write your reviews for you is low-effort and still registers goodwill towards the authors), or whether this, too, is an attempt to strike up a conversation that leads to the author paying the 'fan' for art. What a beastly situation this is, where you end up always thinking the worst of everyone :-(

Possibly I should just pinch the review as a basis at least for a new summary: A weary Athos, haunted by his past, finds unexpected solace and clarity in a chance encounter, leading him to reconsider his future beyond the musketeers...

(I'm pretty sure the author of that PM did *not* write that summary unaided, unless she is deliberately trying to appear more illiterate than she really is in order to get matey!)