A Meme!

May. 5th, 2019 10:56 am
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
flicked off [personal profile] selenak , because I haven't posted yet this month (I have nothing to contribute to Mermay and am too wound-up to talk about my mental health).
So.

Give me a fandom and I'll tell you

Favourite Male Character
Favourite Female Character
Least Favourite Character
Favourite Ship (if any)
Favourite Friendship
Favourite Quote
Worst Character Death (if any)
This made me so happy you have no idea Moment
Saddest Moment
Favourite Location

Fandoms in tags, but feel free if you know any others I like but haven't included.
toujours_nigel: fire graphic and text (alexander)
 I wonder whether the purity brigade on tumblr and elsewhere have ever read something like The Persian Boy, where a 10 y.o. watches his family murdered and is himself castrated and sold into slavery, subsequently forced into prostitution and sold at... about 13 as a sex-slave to an Emperor and then at 15 handed over to his successor as spoils of war. Our protagonist of course falls wildly in love with said successor and spends the remainder of the novel besotted. 

But one wonders how even the canonical tags would be received: Slavery, Underage Rape, Underage Prostitution, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, Underage Sex, Age Difference, Power Imbalance. Nor is all of it presented as outright evil, some of it is indeed romanticised quite a lot.

I ponder because I'm writing in the fandom after years, and in the intervening time anti culture has become extremely prominent. But also my other fandoms where teenagers have sex they have it at a fairly equitable level. Emperor and slave is... not it, but hilariously I have a suspicion that the underage would summon more hostlity. Perhaps I'm being cruel.
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
tending fires (6031 words) by toujours_nigel, filia_noctis
Chapters: 1/2
Fandom: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alexander the Great/Hephaistion, Alexander the Great/Bagoas, Hephaistion/Original Male Character(s), Hephaistion & Ptolemy I Soter
Characters: Alexander the Great (Alexander Trilogy), Hephaistion, Bagoas, Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Series: Part 3 of Sex and Cedarwood
Summary: The boy danced and was beautiful, watched in the shadows as he put Alexander to bed and offered no help, marched with them east to Baktria as the country grew warmer. He had his work, and greater concerns pressing in.
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
 It is an extremely fun but ultimately futile exercise to glean what Hephaistion thinks of Bagoas from what Bagoas thinks Hephaistion thinks of Bagoas. (It is also very difficult to reconcile Bagoas' image of this dour, towering, inscrutable man with Hephaistion's image of himself in FFH as awkward and violent and earnest; the dialogue we get for Hephaistion in TPB is of course rather more in line with the latter.)

One doesn't, thankfully, need to do this. What Hephaistion thinks of Bagoas is that after a full day's march in the desert, when someone (almost certainly not Alexander) tells him that Bagoas is lost in the desert, he turns back around and finds him and brings him back. On a march where anyone who founders (including women and children) are abandoned without hope of rescue, because nobody has the resources for it.
toujours_nigel: fire graphic and text (alexander)

I don't recollect the beginning of my obsession with Alexander the Great. I've been fascinated by history and mythology from the get-go, especially at the overlaps: historicised mythology and mythologised history, so probably this was kinda inevitable. My initial interest sprawled rather towards the English, however, Ivanhoe paving the way to Elizabethan historical novels and precocious reading of Shakespeare. Sometime before age 14, definitely, because I'd been waiting for the film for a while, spurred on by a Bengali review which implied it was deeply queer (which now I think of it was almost certainly a reason for the interest in Alexander III that made me want to watch the film), and I also remember watching it and being horribly disappointed and taking a hard left into the nearest bookstore. No luck.

Read more... )
toujours_nigel: fire graphic and text (alexander)
love enough to break a heart (2121 words) by toujours_nigel
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alexander the Great/Hephaistion, Ptolemy I & Hephaistion
Summary: But he loitered in his tent instead of coming to bed; then put a dark cloak on and went out. I saw him throw a fold about his head; he didn't want it seen where he was going, though he must have known I'd guess. He was not very long away. They must have patched it up, after a fashion; one could tell that after. But if it had gone as he wished, he'd not have finished the night as he did with me.
toujours_nigel: fire graphic and text (alexander)
A bit of story after a very long time. AU, and mostly self-indulgent crack. Someday, dammit, I will write Hephaistion/Bagoas. Some day. (not today)

Autumn, Fall (2817 words) by toujours_nigel
Chapters: 2/?
Fandom: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alexander the Great/Hephaistion, Alexander the Great/Bagoas
Characters: Hephaistion, Bagoas
Series: Part 2 of Sex and Cedarwood

ETA: Why is there so goddamn little Hephaistion/Bagoas fic out there? Fandom, fandom, I thought you were pervier than this. Three! Three is all, wtf? (Written once every five years, no less)

I would say I'm going to write some, but after defaulting out of two fests I'm unsure about that.

toujours_nigel: (writer)

I wrote 17 stories last year, ranging from just over 1000 words to just over 12,000, and totalling over 78k words. A good chunk of that, just under a third of it, was for Yuletide. Still, not a bad haul, for an otherwise fraught and busy year.

The fandom break-down is alphabetical, and within each fandom, by word-count:

Alexander Trilogy:
Foster-Child of Silence and Slow Time (1124 words) (Yuletide)
Autumn, Fall (1062 words)

Hadestown:

the night, the beloved body (12163 words) (Yuletide)

Harry Potter:
Tieresias Trap (8608 words) (w.i.p)
and the life (7709 words) (w.i.p)
The Wish to Move Backward (3166 words) (r-s games)

Mahabharata:
kounteya (6481 words) (w.i.p)

Maurice:

Isn't Love (1170 words) (edited and posted to AO3)

Night Watch:
not the squares of the cinema but envelopes of affection (1428 words) (Rare Women)

Penny Dreadful:
Between the Shadow and the Soul (5027 words) (Yuletide)

The Charioteer:
conditions best suited of all to unreserve (9789 words) (w.i.p)
The Thousandth Man (6569 words) (Yuletide)
Not a House or Even a Tent (6084 words)
restless nights in one-night cheap hotels (3514 words)
A Vote of Thanks to Mr. Abse and Lord Arran (2529 words) (Yuletide)
the unwearying heart over the waves of the sea (1500 words)
Auld Lang Syne (1001 words)


ETA: Because it's right there at the top anyway, my total stats on AO3, over 172 fics spread in 38 fandoms (not counting variations of the same fandom) are:

Woefully small, compared to most who have been around five years and change, but I'm not remotely prolific.

What's interesting about the stats is that I can practically chart my mental health by looking at them. 2014 has been a good year, at least since August and is certainly the most I've written in a year, with 2013 clocking in at just below 60k (59861 words) and 2010 a distant third (42817 words). 2009 gets off easy, since that's when I got into fandom and was writing almost entirely drabbles, and because a lot of what I was writing was in role-plays on various communities. You can see the worst of the depression just by looking at output-levels: in 2011 I wrote just over 16k in 10 stories, of which 7 were for Yuletide; in 2012 I wrote 21k or thereabouts, missing Yuletide entirely but getting invested in The Charioteer as a writing fandom.

My aim for 2015 is to write at least 80k of fanfic, and hopefully get a chunk of work done on the novel.

Reveals

Jan. 1st, 2015 08:58 am
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
I had a rather busy Yuletide, as anyone reading this journal can wearily attest. *g*


I was assigned to write for[archiveofourown.org profile] filia-noctis/[livejournal.com profile] bee_muse to much abject horror. Whining, wailing, ringing up marginally-fannish friends to do the same at them, and similar scenes of mourning ensued, because I'm shit at keeping secrets even when the same haven't got to be kept from my girlfriend who lives in the same room as me, dammit. Fairly certain she knows I was her gifter. Anyway. I wrote two stories for her:

the night the beloved body (12163 words) is a Hadestown pre-canon fic where Persephone finds out about Hades/Minthe and promptly goes up to Mum ahead of schedule, dragging Minthe unresisting in her wake. I had enormous fun writing this, though I'm not very sure about accuracy re: dialect, and will probably add another chapter sometime this month, to flesh out the Eurydice/Orpheus angle. [livejournal.com profile] bee_muse has promised in comments to liveblog this story, so if that happens it'll be fun.

Since the above was dragging, and also because I had the unfair advantage of knowing what she was writing as her assigned gift, I also wrote Between the Shadow & the Soul (5027 words) which is a Penny Dreadful fic set immediately post-canon, where the crew finds out that Ethan is a [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] and in good tradition decide to chain him up, dose him with drugs, and see what happens. This is the approximate plot of both my fic and her Like a Clock during a Thunderstorm, and ideally they ought to be read in tandem, with the significant difference that she approaches it from Ethan's perspective and I from Vanessa's.


I also wrote three treats this year, all Renault.

For [personal profile] greerwatson/[archiveofourown.org profile] greerwatson  I wrote The Thousandth Man (6569 words) about an adult Hugh Treviss serving in the ICS and meeting Ralph quite by accident in slightly discomfiting circumstances. This was extremely interesting to write, since the British in India I have a lot of feelings about, none of them remotely positive, but otoh I do love The Charioteer and had been wanting to write a Treviss story roughly forever: in the end laziness won out and I stuck to familiar ground. *g*

For [personal profile] naraht/[archiveofourown.org profile] naraht I wrote A Vote of Thanks to Mr. Abse and Lord Arran (2529 words) a TC fic set in 1967, a couple of days after decriminalisation. I have any number of feelings about this story, since in India a similar decriminalisation occurred when I was nineteen and was rescinded again when I was twenty-four(ish)  and I cannot imagine, though I might just have to experience, living till you're in your fifties knowing that you are a criminal because of how you love, and then, when use and old age accept them, to be told that your love-life is no longer of legal interest. Especially for Ralph, who is so stern with himself and has disciplined himself into such unnatural shape, already in his mid-twenties.

For [personal profile] fawatson/[archiveofourown.org profile] fawatson I wrote Foster-child of Silence and Slow Time (1124 words), an Alexadriad fic about Pausanias' wife in the prelude to Olympias' overnight stay en-route to Epirus. When I can't supply sisters, I explore wives. That aside, Pausanias' wife, never awarded a name in canon, struck me very strongly when I read Fire from Heaven this time, simply because a woman whose reaction to being scared and mystified is to go over stores of food and weaponry is my kinda girl! *g* I also wanted her to have a good, if largely absent husband, and a place of her own in the world. Enough bad things will likely happen to her soon enough (given canon) that I also supplied her with a brother.


So that was my lot. I'll probably go round and squeal at all my gifters sometime soon.
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
Olympias/Philip: first meetings, early years of marriage, growing hostility, odd moments of similar feeling. anything.

Olympias becoming a witch.

Olympias with friends and devotees.

Olympias after Alexander's departure.

Olympias the newly-widowed: whether or not this is a conspiracy-fic.

Olympias and Pausanias.

Philip as a young prince, in Macedon with Arsinoe.

Philip in Thebes, with Epaminodas, Pelopidas, Pammenes.

Lagos/Arsinoe/Philip, and every combination therein.

Philip/Pausanias.

Philip and Amyntor, in whatever way you like; I think it's an interesting dynamic, or could be.

Philip, no luck with [his] sons.

Philip and his circle: Parmenion, Antipatros, Attalus.

Philip and Attalus.

Pausanias and Attalus.

Kleopatra. Anything at all about Kleopatra.

Leonidas, Alexander and Olympias.

Hephaistion's childhood. Because, dammit, we know nothing about it.

Ptolemy's childhood.

Egypt, Alexander becoming Pharaoh; prophecies.

Any story at all from the five missing years between FFH and TPB.

Hephaistion's perspective on anything in TPB.

Bagoas' reception, not amongst the pages but amongst the generals, rumours, gossip, people being nice to Hephaistion out of concern.

Entering decadent Persia: not everyone can have been as positive about it as Alexander. How do the older men take it?

Hephaistion being asked to select the King of Sidon. (AU take, Hephaistion not declining the crown of Sidon, but I can't see that happening really.)

He is Alexander too. Because there can never be enough fic, and we never get to see that moment in canon dammit.

Hephaistion managing logistics during Alexander's comet-trail through Persia.

Hephaistion torturing Philotas.

Ptolemy's perspective on everything forever!

Ptolemy/Thais.

Proskynesis and how it goes over.

Roxane. Her thoughts on marrying Alexander, her sexuality, her perspective on the court, her political stratagems.

Sisygambis. Just, anything about Sisygambis, who I find a fascinating woman.

Stateira, Drypetis, and the mass-marriage. How the princesses take to it. We know a bit about Stateira's feelings, from FG, but nothing about Drypetis, practically, except that she wonders whether she's going to be married again.

Hephaistion/Drypetis. Please no non-con.

Alexander/Stateira.

Alexander/Roxane.

Alexander/various other lovers. Barsine, maybe, or whoever the unnamed boy was who died in battle to prove devotion.

Hephaistion/various. Of course, Bagoas thinks he's never had anyone but Alexander till he marries Drypetis, but eh.

Drypetis and Stateira after being captured by the Macedonians.

Arrhidaios through Alexander's reign.

Eurydice as a child.

Eumenes' perspective on the quarrel with Hephaistion and its aftermath.

School in Mieza.

Robbing Nike's wreath, a promise to go to war.

Olympias' attempts to get Alexander laid: Doris, Ptolemy's parties, Kallixeina, the virgin who gets sent to his bed.

Kalanos with Alexander.

Anything about India.

Alexander: a happily married man? :P

Alexander's perspective on Hephaistion's rescue of Bagoas in Gedrosia.

Killing Cleitus the Black.

"Tell me you love me best!" er. Discuss.

Setting up Alexander's sarcophagus in the temple intended for Hephaistion.

Bagoas in Egypt.

Teaching the Iliad.

The AU where Hephaistion quite fancies Bagoas too. Though of course this needn't be an AU. hmmm
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
So, I've done this a couple of times, and it's brilliant fun. So.

Tell me about a fic (any fic) that I've never written, and I'll either write a little snippet of it, or tell you a bit about it. Applicable fandoms are in the tags, but feel free to ask about something that isn't listed but you know I've some familiarity with.

OR

If you want, here are my fics on AO3, feel free to ask about any of them. Not everything I've written is up there. however.

toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
Give me a show/movie/fandom and I'll tell you:

my favourite female character
my favourite male character
my favourite book/season/etc
my favourite episode (if it's a tv show)
my favourite cast member
my favourite relationship
a character I'd die defending
a character I just can't sympathize with
a character I grew to love
my anti otp


(fandoms in tags; feel free to add any you know I like.)

Drabbles

Jun. 16th, 2010 11:02 pm
toujours_nigel: (writer)
on offer.

Harry Potter (grand-parents, Marauders, Harry, next-gen)
Bollywood (every SRK film ever, things you know I've watched)
Mythology (Hindu, Greek)
Renault
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Rhea)
a.k.a. comment here with the name of any fictional woman you believe me conversant with, (the fandoms this is tagged with all apply.)
 and I'll either write a drabble about her, or at least talk about why she strikes me as wonderful.

I'm off to the Book Fair. Ta, all.

Feekshun

Jan. 3rd, 2010 05:17 pm
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
I wrote over a hundred fics last year, here and elsewhere. (elsewhere being [livejournal.com profile] maryrenaultfics, [livejournal.com profile] lgbtfest, [livejournal.com profile] yuletide, and [livejournal.com profile] fandomcommerce.) *happy*

Now to start off the count for 2010. Prompts, anyone? In a drabbling mood. Fandoms are anything in the tags. (Or, alternatively, anything I can read up on, or am likely to know.)
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
[livejournal.com profile] yuletide  reveals are up, I see.

So, I wrote Some Man's Scheherazade for [livejournal.com profile] easilymused1956, and I whined and moaned about it on g-talk to everyone who would hear (esp. [livejournal.com profile] 22by7 and [livejournal.com profile] dearlyderanged) because I was having some species of writers' block and, also, omg, hard. However, she liked it, which makes me happy, and I liked it, which surprised me.

And I wrote, for treats:

O that you were yourself! (Shakespeare in Love) for [livejournal.com profile] aurilly,
Pinjre Mein Chand (Kaminey) for [livejournal.com profile] applegnat,
Crying Blood for Vengeance (Iliad) for skazka (who I cannot trace)
Dasrathi (Ramayana) for [livejournal.com profile] steelehearts
Panch Kanya (Ibis trilogy) for [livejournal.com profile] dhobikikutti .

Excellent haul, if I say so myself. *radiates smugness*

Utterly beaten by the gift I got, though: Pyrrha, which is Fire from Heaven Alexander, and made me catch my breath, quite.

I've had a rotten couple days, but better now. Hopefully 2010 will be better than this last year.
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
Dear Yuletide Author, )


***

Feel free to write something entirely different if you’d rather, of course, these are just off the top of my head, (as is everything in the requests themselves) and do not in any way indicate that I must have a story along these lines. I’ll appreciate anything you write. Thank you.
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Rhea)
oh my god, please please please let me get to read my [livejournal.com profile] yuletide story, pleeeease.

i've got page-not-loading thrice, I want my storyyyyyy.

it's a missing scene from Fire from Heaven, and it has Phoinix and Alexander and I want it. waaaaaaantssssss, my precioussssss.

*sobs*

It apparently has adult content.

It's loading.

eeee. *fingers crossed*

Problem Loading Page.

:(

I've been such a good fan, pleeeeease.

YES! AHAHAHAAHAHA, MY STORY!

Thank you, Dear Author, and [livejournal.com profile] elynross and [livejournal.com profile] astolat and all the wonderful AO3 people, I love you all.

*runs off to read*

OMG, you guys, it is so brilliant. Go read.

I wish my stories were anywhere near as good. *cradles gift*
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
and so I've been doing the thing where I laze around, forget to return my books on time (thereby accumulating a library fine it will be a bitch to pay off), and read my way through a ton of old books.

Have some observations:

1. In The King's General, is Dick Grenvile gay? Or am I succumbing to the then-prevalant ideas of presenting as masculine? ) IDK, but Dick does present as what we'd still rate as slightly left of straight, meh.

2. When does 'u' drop into English as spoken in England? I mean, "color", and "honor", etc are all older spellings, right? So, when does it change to "colour"?

3. One of the loveliest scenes regarding Hephaistion is, oddly, in Funeral Games. And is such a shock to the system, too. ) I love seeing Hephaistion through Ptolemy's eyes, especially after the Bagoas-coloured lenses that are all we got throughout The Persian Boy.

4. And then we go back to Arridaios, and the whole horrific scene, and I feel physically sick. I feel sick throughout Funeral Games, more or less, actually, it's such a nightmarish book. Not that FFH and TPB are bereft of horror, of course, but, well, bildungsroman, love story, deathdeathdeath. The elephants. The babies. Stateira and Drypetis. Kynna. Sisygambis. Eurydike. Olympias. Alexander IV. Kassandros, gah.

5. This isn't to do with a book, but has anyone written the creepy bad Maham Anga-baby!Jalal fic? Because I watched Jodhaa-Akbar today, and, boss, that vibe is so there.

6. My copy of Maurice (third re-read, just about done) takes issue in the preface with Maurice's appearance in the film. And, yeah, a large dark-haired man has a very different impression than a large, fair man, esp. when, as in the film, he is more than awkward. Clive is the one who is small and fair. Incidentally, what does Alec look like? Do we ever know, other than the bright brown eyes?

7. I was planning on reading Forster, anyway, but have got sucked into reading A Room with a View solely because of Helena Bonham Carter ). Baby Bella! With that hair! awww.

ETA: 8. I was watching an old Friends episode, where Chandler says, "You're the one who kissed my mom!". The whole cafe turns around. Ross says, "We're rehearsing a Greek play." They all nod and look away. I found this funny for about two seconds. And since then, I've been wondering what play they're talking about. I embrace my geekery, yes, haha, but, is Ross simply misremembering Oedipus Rex? Or is it some other play?
toujours_nigel: Greek, red-figure Rhea (Default)
Macedon Square Garden )

*** *** *** *** ***

Or We Could Just Elope? )

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