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Day 1: My Happy Place

It will surprise exactly no-one who knows me to read this, but my happy place is St Andrews, Scotland.  I spent four years there as an undergraduate.  I loved the town, I love the friends I made there, and I loved being surrounded by history and the sea.  (Celebs popping up for the golf on occasion were an added entertaining bonus.)  I adored spending cool summer afternoons at the beach or lazing in the cathedral grounds, book in hand - and that was also the period in my life when I first got really into fandom.  I shyly posted a couple of one-shots at the erstwhile lotrfanfiction.com, got some good feedback, started chatting to people, and the rest is history.

I work in Manchester now, and live in Clitheroe, neither of which are very much like St Andrews at all - but I married someone I met there (we actually met in the Students' Union on the first night, although it took us eighteen months to get our act together romantically), and we had our wedding ceremony in the university chapel.  Some of our friends have done the same thing.  In non-wedding years, we try to get up there for a long weekend if we possibly can, to walk the streets and see what's changed - and revisit what hasn't and (hopefully) never will.  Dolphin-watching from the end of the pier.  Sunset on West Sands.   If we're very lucky, the Northern Lights over the Eden Estuary.

I'd love to move back one day, but until my firm decide there's a role for me in our Edinburgh office, I'm happy enough where I am and lucky to have had such a wonderful place to call home for four years.

Taking a quick breather from the festivities (and procrastinating on editing exchange fics) to cross-post some old responses to ask memes on Tumblr.

( Writer's Ask Meme )

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday period and finding the time to relax.

Over the last few weeks I've accumulated a bunch of snippets that I'm not planning to post separately on Faerie, SWG or AO3 - either because they're just too small, or because at some point I plan to expand them, or work them into a longer fic. For now I'm popping them on here so I've got them all grouped together; I'll do something with them eventually!

Expect appearances from the usual suspects - mostly Noldor, plus various OCs (including the Paradox crew) and a few other guest stars. Content ranges from festive fluff to mild horror/gore. Nothing NSFW. Nothing more than 500 words, most significantly less.

( Read more... )

As some of you know, there was a lot of discussion after B2MeM about other fandom events it would be nice to have happening in the Tolkien community.

One of the events mentioned was a reverse Big Bang, where artists produce artwork, authors claim the art they like best and write a long-ish short story based on it. Well, raiyana has been hard at work setting up an event for this summer - officially I am her co-mod, but I will be completely honest and say that so far she has done all the difficult stuff (sorry, Raiy; work has been crazy).

We have a Dreamwidth community here and a Tumblr blog here - if you'd like to come and join us, we'd love to have you on board! Please spread the word to your fellow Tolkien lovers too.

B2MeM Prompt and Category: Prompt No. 20, Nocturne (Initial Prompts)
Format: Short Story
Genre: Vignette
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mild language
Characters: Maglor, OFC
Pairings: N/A
Creator’s Notes (optional): Nocturne: a night-piece, music that evokes a nocturnal mood
Summary: A chance encounter by moonlight takes an unwary student by surprise.

( Read more... )

Will post to the community and tag up properly tonight.