nineveh_uk

Real life crashes into the best intentions of more regular posting. But before January is quite out, another challenge post.

Challenge #12
In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I don't do resolutions, other than the years I did the easy "spend more money on having fun". Looking at the challenge DW, I saw this meme about writing goals done by commoncomitatus, and it looked fun to give a go.

( This got quite long... )

I thought I'd have a go at a few snowflake_challenge posts this January, so kicking off - a bit late - with #4.

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon.

There's only one answer to this. It isn't Arthur Ransome's unfinished Swallows and Amazons novel. It isn't the discovery that Tolkien actually finished a third self-contained Middle Earth novel. No, it has to be Dorothy L. Sayers' complete manuscript of Thrones, Dominations. This triumphant concluding volume to the series was discovered in a box in the possession of her descendants, and immediately showed both why it was thoroughly deserving of being published, and why it never was. The sex scenes alone - so thoroughly embedded in plot and characterisation that they could not be excised - would have seen it unpublishable, but could have been rewritten. Likewise, the canonical confirmation of Bunter's bisexuality is important, but not essential, to the themes. But it was the combination of the unflinching depiction of domestic violence against an initially unsympathetic victim, gradually revealing the reader's complicity in the social mores that made it possible, and the excoriating depiction of the monarchy, that set it beyond the pale politically. Though there was also the fact that a central chapter was written as a playscript and Sayers never seemed to find a way to do it otherwise to her satisfaction. While traces of this work survive in the chapters eventually adapted by Jill Paton Walsh, and the other archival extract in which Peter and Harriet discuss sado-masochism and Peter's really not getting it as a kink*, it's a pale shadow of what might have been.

*I'm not joking, that does exist.