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Fanfic Year in Review 2025
8 January 2026 03:05 amApparently I missed doing this altogether in 2024, so I'm afraid "The Remorse of Others" will never get a mention...
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List of Completed Fics
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Raoul at the rue Tiquetonne
2 July 2025 12:07 amOn reading the French version of the earlier chapters (this being the rather tediously lengthy chunk of Fronde activity which the film omits entirely :-p) I noticed somewhat to my embarrassment that d'Artagnan explicitly *does* take Raoul 'home' with him to his lodgings on the rue Tiquetonne after the boy gets mixed up in the rioting, and leaves him shut up there in Madeleine's house for some time in order to keep him out of trouble. Since he does this without a moment's qualm almost immediately after Athos leaves for England, it clearly doesn't make much sense to have him embarrassed subsequently by the mere idea of lodging Raoul beneath his mistress' roof ('what would the Comte de La Fère have thought?')
So I probably need to go more explicitly for my original image, which was the idea that what d'Artagnan considers and rejects is the expedient of having Madeleine 'mother' the bereaved boy on his behalf ("I don't know how to give him what he needs now" -- but a woman's touch possibly might).
So I probably need to go more explicitly for my original image, which was the idea that what d'Artagnan considers and rejects is the expedient of having Madeleine 'mother' the bereaved boy on his behalf ("I don't know how to give him what he needs now" -- but a woman's touch possibly might).
Think Only This of Me
27 June 2025 07:51 pmHaving been through the stage of finding myself surprisingly pleased with this story, I am now back in the more expected reaction of realising that it doesn't sound much like Porthos after all ( Read more... )
Think Only This of Me
Athos gave his life to save Charles Stuart. A grieving d’Artagnan must deal with the consequences. And there are some things, at least, that Porthos sees more clearly than any of them.
The Seigneur de Pierrefonds blew in from the little park at Bragelonne like a great gust of wind and demanded Mouston, who had made himself scarce somewhere in the depths of the house. But since his attendant was for the moment nowhere to be seen and the establishment was shrouded in the dismal air that had driven him out-of-doors in the first place, he caught up a candlestick and went himself in search of d’Artagnan. He had a certain uncomfortable sense that in abandoning the house of mourning he had likewise abandoned his friend, and now that the winter dusk had enforced his return, it was time to relieve d’Artagnan of his duties and stand guard in his place, so to speak, over the young Vicomte Raoul. For even if the Comte de La Fère had bequeathed his ward into d’Artagnan’s care, Porthos had a firm intention that the boy should become his son also.
They had gone together to break the dreadful news. D’Artagnan had not asked for support in that task, but Porthos had been quite certain that he needed it.
And it had been every bit as bad as he had thought. ( Read more... )
Fruit, fic and flowers
24 June 2025 10:17 amThe survivors of the overcrowded Oriental poppies that I actually sowed (which are far smaller than the various ones that self-seeded in other pots!) have now finally come into bloom. On the other hand, one pot of orange long-headed poppies from last year has completely died (first one plant and then the two others) -- I think it was because they were sitting in a puddle of water for too long after it rained heavily following a prolonged drought, and I didn't notice that the tray underneath was full, but it could be that they are not so perennial as I had thought. I have a seed-head on one of the other plants, but it is quite small and may be empty.
The tomatoes all have fruit on, which is beginning to turn colour; as before, I think the upper trusses stopped setting during the heatwave, but this may be just as well as the plants are already heavily laden. I have just been setting up tomato-strings to help support them.
I started typing up the Porthos-fic after rereading it and finding that I was actually quite pleased with how it had come out; I don't think it needs major tweaking, although d'Artagnan's 'dream' passage doesn't really sound like his voice (but that is, implicitly, because he is echoing the story in Raoul's words and in the slightly mystical and high-flown language in which the boy recounted it to him). The title is probably going to be "Some Corner of a Foreign Land" (which is, of course, not "forever England" but presumably forever France!) in an echo of the original Brooke quote. The alternative would be "Think Only This of Me", which is also somewhat applicable to the scenario of thinking back over Athos and the past and was the one I was originally inclining towards using, but in fact I discovered that I'd actually put in a 'foreign land' reference early on in the text, which pushes me back towards the other choice :-)
The tomatoes all have fruit on, which is beginning to turn colour; as before, I think the upper trusses stopped setting during the heatwave, but this may be just as well as the plants are already heavily laden. I have just been setting up tomato-strings to help support them.
I started typing up the Porthos-fic after rereading it and finding that I was actually quite pleased with how it had come out; I don't think it needs major tweaking, although d'Artagnan's 'dream' passage doesn't really sound like his voice (but that is, implicitly, because he is echoing the story in Raoul's words and in the slightly mystical and high-flown language in which the boy recounted it to him). The title is probably going to be "Some Corner of a Foreign Land" (which is, of course, not "forever England" but presumably forever France!) in an echo of the original Brooke quote. The alternative would be "Think Only This of Me", which is also somewhat applicable to the scenario of thinking back over Athos and the past and was the one I was originally inclining towards using, but in fact I discovered that I'd actually put in a 'foreign land' reference early on in the text, which pushes me back towards the other choice :-)
Fic conclusion
21 June 2025 07:15 pmI *think* I've finished my Porthos-fic (which is of course going to need a title, although its filename is clearly going to be 'Porthos'!) I'm not sure that I've entirely captured Porthos' 'voice', either in speech or in thought-patterns, although there were intermittent bits that I was pleased with in that respect -- I may need to go through and try to simplify my convoluted syntax a *lot*...
I'm thinking of running this together with "If I Should Die" as an AO3 'series' under the name of "To Save the King", since they are basically both in the same continuity, although this one is much more obviously AU -- ironically enough, given the genesis of the fic, I'm afraid that in this situation Aramis probably *doesn't* ever carry out his commission to pass on Athos' farewells, because the story turned out to be very much about a rift between d'Artagnan and Aramis that hadn't even existed at the point when I set out to write it, and which would have made any such interaction feel impossible :-( I did know that Aramis was busy 'having a life-crisis moment', part of the idea for this fic being that maybe you could 'save' Aramis, in the same way that I did for Javert, by inflicting a canon trauma -- in Aramis' case, losing a friend -- on him at a much earlier point in his character arc, when he still has the moral and mental flexibility to change. But I didn't 'know' (until d'Artagnan unexpectedly threw it into conversation...) that this was because the Gascon was blaming him for not having prevented Athos' death :-(
( Aramis' faith )
( Fic length )
As predicted, I found myself somewhat adrift after Porthos finishes his anecdote about how he and Athos first got to know one another, because I simply hadn't thought up any more to the sequel past that point; normally I only start to write down a fic when it comes to a good end, and with this one I had instead stopped short in the middle of the 'telling myself a story' stage. And I only had four pages left at that point, with no idea where the story was going to go :-(
But d'Artagnan then came out with something completely unexpected (for the second time), and I had a fresh development that tied satisfactorily into what had gone before, and could --on the very last page of the notebook! -- both be linked back into Porthos' previous memories of Athos in his very first days in the musketeers, and sort out some of the extra complications I'd set in the way of a happy ending. The main trouble is that it *is* a pretty random reaction, even if it was genuinely something that came up without planning as an in-character response, rather than the author desperately trying to perform a segue to an arbitrary plot point...
I'm thinking of running this together with "If I Should Die" as an AO3 'series' under the name of "To Save the King", since they are basically both in the same continuity, although this one is much more obviously AU -- ironically enough, given the genesis of the fic, I'm afraid that in this situation Aramis probably *doesn't* ever carry out his commission to pass on Athos' farewells, because the story turned out to be very much about a rift between d'Artagnan and Aramis that hadn't even existed at the point when I set out to write it, and which would have made any such interaction feel impossible :-( I did know that Aramis was busy 'having a life-crisis moment', part of the idea for this fic being that maybe you could 'save' Aramis, in the same way that I did for Javert, by inflicting a canon trauma -- in Aramis' case, losing a friend -- on him at a much earlier point in his character arc, when he still has the moral and mental flexibility to change. But I didn't 'know' (until d'Artagnan unexpectedly threw it into conversation...) that this was because the Gascon was blaming him for not having prevented Athos' death :-(
( Aramis' faith )
( Fic length )
As predicted, I found myself somewhat adrift after Porthos finishes his anecdote about how he and Athos first got to know one another, because I simply hadn't thought up any more to the sequel past that point; normally I only start to write down a fic when it comes to a good end, and with this one I had instead stopped short in the middle of the 'telling myself a story' stage. And I only had four pages left at that point, with no idea where the story was going to go :-(
But d'Artagnan then came out with something completely unexpected (for the second time), and I had a fresh development that tied satisfactorily into what had gone before, and could --on the very last page of the notebook! -- both be linked back into Porthos' previous memories of Athos in his very first days in the musketeers, and sort out some of the extra complications I'd set in the way of a happy ending. The main trouble is that it *is* a pretty random reaction, even if it was genuinely something that came up without planning as an in-character response, rather than the author desperately trying to perform a segue to an arbitrary plot point...
Similes in-period
10 June 2025 02:38 amI had already realised that I can't use "live-wire" to describe a character in the 17th century; it has now dawned upon me that I can't use the analogy of a child's jerky clockwork toy either. Nineteenth-century, yes; seventeenth, no :-p
(I decided to go for the miller releasing the pent-up mill-stream as an idea of jostling, uneven energy...)
(I decided to go for the miller releasing the pent-up mill-stream as an idea of jostling, uneven energy...)
I have been potting up two of the towel-tomatoes and the Roma tomato into what will be their final pots, and have pretty much used up all the compost I bought in the process; I shall have to get some more. Not a lot of progress from the catch-up tomatoes, but presumably they have been developing roots under their sturdy seed-leaves.
The sweetbriar, rose campion and flax are in flower, ( red and yellow poppies )
( Clothes line buckle snapped )
My bedroom clock stopped again this week after I wound it (which is annoying, because it was working up until then!), and turning it upside down didn't seem to help this time :-(
I have been seriously considering writing the third "Twenty Years After" fic that I was running in my head (basically as a sequel to "If I Should Die") and that I was more or less confident that I was *not* going to write, on the grounds that it had no plot ( and can't really be fitted into canon )
( The obvious sequel to 'If I Should Die' being an AU in which he does )
What worries me more is that I'm not sure Porthos' anecdote, originally conceived in the context of a puzzled conversation about Raoul's parentage (a secret which Athos at this juncture has of necessity taken to his grave so far as his friends are concerned) actually fits very well any more into the story as I am now revolving it in my mind; it's certainly not a good ending. It was simply the point at which I broke off my 'what would they say to one another if...' speculations on reaching my own front door :-p
And unfortunately that particular idea was pretty much the whole point of attempting to write this, being the sole original piece of inspiration there :-(
The sweetbriar, rose campion and flax are in flower, ( red and yellow poppies )
( Clothes line buckle snapped )
My bedroom clock stopped again this week after I wound it (which is annoying, because it was working up until then!), and turning it upside down didn't seem to help this time :-(
I have been seriously considering writing the third "Twenty Years After" fic that I was running in my head (basically as a sequel to "If I Should Die") and that I was more or less confident that I was *not* going to write, on the grounds that it had no plot ( and can't really be fitted into canon )
( The obvious sequel to 'If I Should Die' being an AU in which he does )
What worries me more is that I'm not sure Porthos' anecdote, originally conceived in the context of a puzzled conversation about Raoul's parentage (a secret which Athos at this juncture has of necessity taken to his grave so far as his friends are concerned) actually fits very well any more into the story as I am now revolving it in my mind; it's certainly not a good ending. It was simply the point at which I broke off my 'what would they say to one another if...' speculations on reaching my own front door :-p
And unfortunately that particular idea was pretty much the whole point of attempting to write this, being the sole original piece of inspiration there :-(
