Snowflake Challenge: day 12 and 13

Jan. 26th, 2026 05:47 pm
shewhostaples: A cheerful bird (cheerful)
[personal profile] shewhostaples
Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

Dear friends (mostly, but not all, on Dreamwidth) who...

... are really enjoying that ice hockey series
... are really enjoying playing ice hockey themselves
... are really looking forward to the Winter Olympics
... are reading that book that everyone is reading
... are reading that book that everyone read three years ago
... are reading books that nobody's read for a hundred years
... are reading things I wrote when I could string more than ten minutes together at a time
... are knee-deep in an obscure spin-off of something I saw once
... are singing or playing
... are listening to other people sing or play
... are going out and eating delicious things
... are cooking delicious things for other people to eat
... are going to interesting places and seeing interesting wildlife and sharing pictures
... are doing small things (or big things) in pursuit of a better world

... I am really enjoying reading about your enjoyment and activity, though I never manage to comment as often as I'd like. Thank you for keeping me in touch with the fandom world!


TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.

Having talked mostly about Dreamwidth above, I'm going to go super literal here and talk about the bandstand in my home town. It's set at the centre of a park next the river, and every summer Sunday afternoon a different brass band from one of the surrounding towns and villages turns up to give a free concert. Programme-wise, you always know more or less what kind of thing you're going to get: a march or two, some film music, an arrangement of some classic rock, and so on, but since it's never advertised in advance you don't know the specifics. There's always a mixed audience: people who know it's happening and have turned up deliberately; friends of the band; people who were just wandering past and stop to listen; kids playing on the slides. Some people stop for a few minutes and then move on; some stay for the whole thing.

I love the energy of live music, and it's so good to have something that's so very relaxed, so very - literally - open.

Snowflake Challenge: day 11

Jan. 25th, 2026 08:45 pm
shewhostaples: (Default)
[personal profile] shewhostaples
two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

I answered a couple of requests for recommendations, and am copying my answers here for reference.

1. for someone who wanted to hear from people forty and up about shopping for clothes:

I hit forty last year, and what I've done is to keep on experimenting until I find something that works - whether that's a shape, a colour, a manufacturer - and then keep on experimenting with that. What that looks like depends very much on circumstances - at the moment I have quite a lot of unscheduled time and my small town has a lot of charity shops, so I'm mostly buying things second-hand and donating them back if they don't end up working. But when I was working full-time I did a lot more internet shopping. (Svaha and Joanie were what worked for me then, for what it's worth.)

I had a most illuminating conversation recently with a group of friends, most of whom like Seasalt. I said that Seasalt ought to work for me but never quite does, but that Fat Face is pretty reliable. Interestingly, most of the Seasalt fans said that Fat Face never quite works for them. I take from this the lesson that even makes that appear very similar at first glance will be more or less suited to different groups of people, so it's worth keeping on looking.

I also like the Who Wears Who blog for thoughtful prompts on style and experimentation with same.


2. replying to someone who wanted to talk about femslash

Femslash! Here are three of my favourite books with canon femslash ships:

- my oldest - The Count of Monte Cristo, a rambling but enjoyable French doorstopper tale of revenge, appeared from 1844 to 1846 and has canon femslash. And no bury your gays! (Obvious warning: it is, of course, very much Of Its Time.)
- my newest - I've just finished The Priory of the Orange Tree. Will it be one of my favourites of all time? Probably not, but it was a lot of fun - an ambitious fantasy novel that attempts to put a valiant number of belief systems and all the dragon lore on the page. And yes, canon femslash.
- the one that feels like it was written just for me - the Alpennia series by Heather Rose Jones. It includes many of my favourite tropes (fictional European country, swashbuckling, complicated power dynamics) and weaves religious practice into the way the magic works in a way that I've rarely seen done so effectively. And, for a third time, canon femslash.

Snowflake Challenge: day 10

Jan. 23rd, 2026 03:37 pm
shewhostaples: image of a crown with text 'heaven doesn't always make the right men kings' (zenda)
[personal profile] shewhostaples
two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).


I've never done a digital moodboard (have done physical collages, back in the day) and this sounded fun, if a little challenging to manage with limited laptop time. As I've been burbling about The Prisoner of Zenda quite a bit recently, I thought I'd stick with that. All the images came from Wikimedia Commons.

I can never make DW images play nicely, so I'm just sticking this under a cut and hoping for the best. I hope it doesn't come out too huge!

Read more... )

Snowflake Challenge: day 9

Jan. 19th, 2026 07:34 pm
shewhostaples: image of a crown with text 'heaven doesn't always make the right men kings' (king)
[personal profile] shewhostaples
Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.


Talk about your favourite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Where to start? Let's start with swashbuckling. That's a nice easy one. Really, I think my fannish id was formed by The Prisoner of Zenda at an early age (I am still very fond of The Prisoner of Zenda).

See also: Ruritania. I love a good fictional society, and the deeper we go into the government departments and the transport infrastructure, the happier I am.

And love and duty. I don't necessarily mind which triumphs, so long as both are taken seriously. I also love it when one of the arts - or sports, or whatever - is the third party in a relationship, particularly when the partners are both very enthusiastic about that. Not to mention the creator. (This was why I enjoyed Yuri!!! on Ice so much: it was very much about the skating.)

I like relationships between women, romantic or otherwise. And friendships between men and women where it's never going to become romantic.

And then I always enjoy a good description:
Food. Chalet School breakfasts. The Marseille chapter in Madam Will You Talk.
Clothes. Annoyingly, I can't think of a good example at this moment. Probably Eva Ibbotson.
Landscape. A John Buchan evening. Can't beat an apple-green twilight.

Finally, something that I write more often than I read is the situation where you will never be able either to clean up Dodge or to get out of Dodge, you have to live in Dodge, but nevertheless you can find a way to carve out a happy and/or meaningful life there. And maybe you find you've made it slightly less grubby.

Snowflake Challenge: day 8

Jan. 18th, 2026 10:29 pm
shewhostaples: Kif says, 'I'm creating!' (creating)
[personal profile] shewhostaples
Snowflake Challenge: A flatlay of a snowflake shaped shortbread cake, a mug with coffee, and a string of holiday lights on top of a rustic napkin.


Talk about your creative process.

Five years ago I'd have talked about volcanic islands rising out of the sea, and building causeways between them. A good premise or prompt would spark a snappy exchange between two characters, or a vivid little snapshot of background, or a moment of insight. I'd write them down as soon as I could.

Then I'd build on them, adding the line that followed on naturally, the reply that the other character would have to make, setting up the scene so that this moment could happen. And then I'd work out how they all related to each other, what order they came in. I'd consider what needed to have happened by the end of the story in order to make it satisfying, and I'd add a bit here and a bit there until my lonely archipelago had a fully functional infrastructure.

I am still trying to do this, but it's not working as well as it used to. A toddler who just doesn't go to sleep, a commute (once my best writing time) that's down to one day a week, and a dying laptop have all made writing hard, and frankly I'm just too tired a lot of the time.

But I am exploring other creative realms, and the one that's currently interesting me most - knitting - is about as different as you can get. You have to do that in the right order.

At the moment I'm trying to design my first pattern: a slipover. It's going to have to be a slipover because I only have five balls of this yarn. I bought it in a charity shop and the Internet has nothing to say about it. I am having to plan: to measure, to practise, to calculate. I can't just make it up as I go along. It is an alien process to me, but, rather to my surprise, I'm enjoying it. The secret is, I think, being just good enough to be able to do things that make all that interesting rather than tedious. By which I mean, cables. I really like cables. I'm even enjoying the tension square.

Snowflake Challenge: day 7

Jan. 17th, 2026 10:04 pm
shewhostaples: (Default)
[personal profile] shewhostaples
Trying to get back on the bus with this one...

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

1. I am - not always, but often - capable of finding ordinary things utterly delightful. Like the Wendy Cope poem about the orange. I am not in that state at the moment, but it is lovely when it happens.

2. On the small scale, I think I am slightly luckier than average. For example: my hair went grey in my early thirties, but that happened to be the couple of years in which many people my age were dyeing their hair grey. We moved house the week before the first Covid lockdown, when it could have been the week after. I win raffles, and the occasional twenty-five quid on the Premium Bonds. (Or maybe I'm no luckier than anyone else, but - see point one - appreciate my luck more?)

3. I really like making things. I like that about myself.

4. Fashion aside, I do like the way my hair looks.

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