Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

It has been a while!

( Thirty questions )

Work: Is great, in most ways. New job is rewarding and doing something important and actually out of the house 75% of the time. It is a bit more of a Kobayashi Maru situation than I was ideally hoping for - "we need a solution to this problem which is both good and cheap and fast!", hmmm - and the subject matter can get a bit upsetting sometimes, so I'm even more glad of being able to take it out of the house and come away from it when I'm off work. 

Writing: It is all Tolkien, all the time. I am lost. Rings of Power has reawoken the Balrog of my latent Tolkien fannishness and I can remember all of it now and ohhhhhh I've missed this. I am also really, really pleased to have rediscovered writing fanfic as stress relief and am amazed by how much I can get written on my phone on the train. I am carving out a really nice happy-place writing niche for myself writing Galadriel and/or Sauron Rings of Power woven into wider Tolkien canon and I am having so much fun with it. Latest:

So Wide a Sea: 5500 words, explicit/mature (kind of borderline), Galadriel in s1 Rings of Power era then after LOTR, Galadriel/Sauron and Galadriel/Celeborn but mostly Galadriel, really.

Shadow-Bride: ongoing WIP, currently 50k words and 8/15 chapters. Galadriel/Sauron which lol I never thought I would be writing and is now this huge pairing, all hail the ff.net girlies who saw the light in 2003. 

Also I have a fandom Twitter account now! all welcome come say hi. It is a wild and crazy world out there and the other week I got accused by some 'Tolkien purists' (pffft you kids know NOTHING) of being a paid-for Amazon promoter. lollllllll. Amazon if you're out there: I will come work for you if you give me a job that is as interesting as mine, less stressful than mine, and comes with an extra few seasons of The Expanse please please please. 

Reading: more Tolkien. Currently on umpteenth Lord of the Rings reread, after... about fifteen years I think. But so SLOWLY, I have so little free uninterrupted time and much of it is spent manically writing fanfic. I am also reading Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, a memoir of addiction and life on Orkney. 

Watching: not so much because ditto. I saw the first episode of s3 Picard and I quite liked it (but then I've always liked how previous Picard seasons started, just went off them as they went on); I saw the first episode of Wednesday which was fun but hasn't made me desperate to watch more; and I've started watching Lockwood & Co which is very young-adult-y but in the best way. Oh! And I finally saw Wakanda Forever when it came out on streaming, and LOVED it. 

Peter Jackson's LOTR films were great and all, but my first ever Tolkien adaptation was the BBC radio drama from the early 1980s. My local library had it on cassette and I used to borrow it over and over and over again. One thing that did really really well, and that I missed from the film versions, was the use of Tolkien's songs - done not as background music but sung by the characters as part of the narrative. Here's Sam singing 'Gil-Galad Was An Elven King':



So one of my absolute favourite moments in Rings of Power was Poppy (one of Sam's distant ancestors?) (I will CRY FOREVER if Smeagol/Gollum ends up being one of the harfoots we've met) sings this:



It's not one of Tolkien's songs (although it lifts some words from his) but there's something wonderfully Tolkien-ish about the spirit of it, and it captures the feeling of those radio drama songs in a way I did not realise I had been missing.

Also also I am really loving some of the shippy fanmade music vids (I believe the youth of fandom call them 'edits' these days) that Rings of Power is producing. ( Putting these behind a spoiler cut because even the static image is spoilery )

With thanks for giving me the opportunity to write things I wouldn't usually write and that none of you asked for Byron.

Lochley + teacup, for selenak:

( Left Behind )

----

Gimli + elves, for meg_the_ebmod:

( Secrets )

----

Grima, for kakodaimon:

( Following )

Funniest Movie Moment:
Toy Story. Yes, shush. All pretenses to great levels of sophistication went out of the window when I got a Buzz Lightyear action figure for Christmas a few years ago.

Woody: You are a toy! You're not the real Buzz Lightyear, you're an action figure! You are a child's plaything!
Buzz: You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. Farewell.

Most Intense Movie Moment:
If we're going for 'scariest', then I can't watch - literally cannot watch, have to walk out of the room during - the scene in Stand By Me when the boys are being chased by a train. Trains don't scare me in any other context, and I have no idea what bothers me so much about that one. Second, the scene in Don't Look Now when Donald Sutherland catches up with the little figure in the red raincoat. Otherwise, I don't think many things in films do scare me any more; I was a devout X-Files follower (co-founder of my school's 'Mulder and Mulder's Hair Appreciation Society', aged 14) for too long, my academic work has centred on Scary Stuff for the past few years, and I think somewhere along the line I just got jaded, which is a shame.

Non-scary: The scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, when McMurphy returns from electroshock therapy for the final time. Maybe 'non-scary' isn't really appropriate, since although it's not frightening in an edge-of-the-seat way, it's utterly terrifying on its own level.

Also, the first time I saw The Empire Strikes Back, I didn't know Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader's son and was still young enough to scream "No!" at the screen.

Most Heart-Wrenching Movie Moment:

The scene which should have been the last one of The Shawshank Redemption. Red's last words, after setting off to Mexico to look for Andy: "I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake him by the hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams. I hope."

The film ruins the impact of this, IMHO, by showing Andy and Red meeting up again in Zihuatenejo, which is so not the point. The important thing isn't that Andy escaped from prison; it's that Red, for the first time in his life, has hope. Although it's a pretty heart-wrenching film all round, this moment wins for making all Andy's suffering before it (which was itself well-handled and non-gratuitous - learn, Mel) worthwhile.

Best Dance Number in a Movie:

I blame every single teenage sleepover party I ever went to for this one: Dirty Dancing, after the "Nobody puts Baby in a corner!" line.

Best Adaptation of a Classic Work:

I like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, which does a very nice combination of keeping dialogue mostly intact and transposing the action to a completely different setting. (I especially loved some of the minor details - the prince being replaced by "so-and-so Prince, Chief of Police" in particular.) However, Clueless wins, for managing to be sweet enough to make Jane Austen's 'a heroine no-one but myself will much like' as likeable as Emma is in the novel and for being the only romantic comedy which doesn't make me roll my eyes.

Favorite Bond Moment: Revoke my citizenship, do what you must, but I don't actually like Bond films all that much. Either every scene with Judi Dench as M, or Q in Tomorrow Never Dies. (Bond has just discovered how to use the phone-operated car, and zooms it about at ninety miles an hour before bringing it to a screeching stop inches away from hitting both of them. Q, deeply unimpressed: "Grow up, 007.")

Greatest Martial Arts Moment:I know nothing about martial arts, and therefore I'm interpreting this one as 'fight scene', in which case the duel from The Phantom Menace (yes, shut up, I like the prequels, and 80% of the Star Wars fans should stop grumbling that Star Wars isn't as good as it was when they were eleven, thank you) wins. The lightsaber duels in the original three films were okay, but here you get the impression that the people involved seriously want to hurt each other, and it's much more effective for it.

( And applying the meme to books: )