Lokifan

drazzi asked ‘When you were a child, say under 10, what were you obsessed/fannish over??’

Reading! I was a horse girl and did some riding which I was pretty obsessed with, and a couple of TV shows fired stuff in my brain in a kind of fannish way (especially Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased, for some reason) but definitely books is the main one.

Enid Blyton, Gillian Cross, Malorie Blackman, Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz, Philip Pullman, C S Lewis, Tamora Pierce, Dick King Smith, Roald Dahl. I reread Malory Towers over and over, and Pig-Heart Boy, and the Demon Headmaster books. Philip Pullman! Certainly The Northern Lights, but also of course his more standard kids’ books - The Firework-Maker’s Daughter especially.

As a small bookworm I adored Matilda, as well as other Dahl, especially the underrated imo Danny The Champion of the World. Anne Fine (Charm School! The Angel of Nitshill Road! I already mentioned The Tulip Touch once this meme) and Eoin Coulfer. Terry Jones! OMG the sound I made when I found out that there was a new The Knight and The Squire book. Frances Hodgson Burnett was a favourite; I ended up doing my undergrad dissertation on The Secret Garden (and Colin as a Gothic Other). And Gobbolino The Witch’s Cat still has pride of place on my bookshelf.

And a lot of stuff that was slightly sideways on, lol, in the way that happens when you’re a kid discovering stuff basically by chance. Like I read King of Shadows by Susan Cooper over and over again without hearing about The Dark is Rising; Tamora Pierce was basically me rereading The Magic in the Weaving over and over for like 5 years before I found anything else she’d written; I had one beloved copy of Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13 and nothing else. Lois Lowry I loved but I didn’t have that many of her books, and I hadn’t even heard of The Giver, let alone read it, until I was at university - I think being British was a factor there, lol. To some degree I’m not sure it occurred to me to go hunting for authors’ other books unless they were in front of me in the library.

Which changed with Diana Wynne Jones. I found Charmed Life when I was 9 or 10 and reread it over and over that year; it’s still one of my favourite books ever. It has so many of the things she’s great at - fantastic magic that combines excitement with ordinariness so it feels real; fabulous, funny side-characters; a great twist; complex, messy family relationships, especially ones between siblings and cousins. It’s also got a fantastic ending, which isn’t guaranteed with DWJ, much as I love her. But omg when she has a great ending (The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Merlin Conspiracy, Year of the Griffin) she REALLY does.

I started hunting down more Diana Wynne Jones over the next few years; it’s what made me decide I was a fantasy fan, having been genre-agnostic. When I was 13 we went on a school trip to France and I discovered two new DWJs in the ferry bookshop (Homeward Bounders and The Power of Three) and promptly spent 25 of the 30 francs I’d been given for the week.

For all Amazon’s depredations… god I love buying books in the twenty-first century.

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I’ve somehow never done this meme, I think, but I love reading other people’s and get good recs out of it, so here we go!

( fannishness this year )

I haven’t forgotten the drabble offer, fyi, and I’m going to do my best to get to all of them!

( first, here is the sadly tiny books list for 2016 )

( the top 5 and honourable mentions )

(Quick fyi: am at my dad’s in Geneva with my family this weekend, so I can’t reply to comments until Tuesday. But please do leave them! Apologies.)

A little while ago I finished Roz Kaveney’s Tiny Pieces of Skull. I feel like a bit of an idiot going all ~commentary about it but! am not at a con to have a long drunken discussion about it so this is basically that in Livejournal form. You should all read it and then come and talk to me about it :)

It’s basically a fictionalised memoir of Kaveney’s time in the trans scene in Chicago in the late 70s and it’s brilliant. The alternative title is “A Lesson In Manners” and it very much is ( a comedy of manners )

A couple of links:

The End
For Terry Pratchett
What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?

My internet didn't work for like fourteen hours yesterday, and then I went to bed. So when I woke up a little bit ago, I immediately went to catch up on shiz and saw “with the loss of Sir Terry” and said out loud, “oh no.”

I keep reading little tributes to him and having to stop for a twenty-second cry.

Or remembering books of his I've loved and having to have a thirty-second cry.

Or thinking about how, the British SFF con scene being what it is, Pterry and I have – had – mutual friends and how devastated they must be. That is the bit that's reminded me of the physical pain in the chest that comes with grief. To quote januarium, I know “so many people who were good friends with him, and people who were good friends with his work.”

God. I don't usually get upset, not really, over the death of public figures – not that it's wrong or silly to be, I suppose I just don't usually feel a personal connection. The only one I can remember before this was Diana Wynne Jones. But with authors it's different, at least for me. You read so much of their voice and their philosophy, and in Pterry's case (and Diana Wynne Jones') their generous response to people and life, and. Possibly this is a weird comparison because this was someone I did know and love very personally, but – I remember in the minutes after my uncle died, his brother said, “the world seems somehow smaller.” And the world seems smaller again today.

Cecilia Tan, aka ravenna_c_tan, is giving away an ebook of The Siren and The Sword to anyone who donates $10 to the Organisation for Transformative Works between now and Friday 17th December at noon. (Her timezone, presumably, though the post doesn't specify. I think she's somewhere on the east coast of the US.) If you're one of the first five to donate $25, you can get a signed paperback or an audiobook download from Audible.

The Siren and The Sword is erotic romance, and fantasy, and 'new adult' - it's the first book in her Magic University series - so I think it'd suit a bunch of us really well. :) A lot of you, particularly those who share my taste for Harry/Draco or Snaco, will have read Cecilia's excellent fanfic.

Plus, of course the Organisation for Transformative Works is a great cause in itself. Those of you who've been around long enough to remember Strikethrough here on LJ might also remember the conversation after it: about how fans needed somewhere we couldn't be ToSed, needed an archive of our own. And now we have one, thanks to the OTW.

Donating $10 to the OTW also gets you a year's membership, which includes things like the ability to vote in OTW elections.

I also agree with Cecilia on this point:

I believe that as corporations realize there is money to be made and material to be exploited, the right of fans to create transformative works is one that will need to be defended even more zealously than it was when they were just calling us “pirates” and “molesters” for doing it.

Go! Donate! Get yourself a book!

Here are my answers to the ( book meme questions )

1. If you have an AO3 account, please go and fill in the AO3 census! It took me less than five minutes and definitely won’t take you more than ten. It’d be interesting - plus there is always very little demographic data on fandom and the stuff we have is all pretty old. So do fill it in!

( cut for a small rant, Legend of Korra, what I’m reading, and a plea for help with a title )

May, apparently, was children’s fantasy month.

( Heriot by Margaret Mahy )

( Fly By Night by Frances Hardringe )

( Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardringe )