bunn

I started writing Rexque Futurus, my vaguely BBC Merlin Arthurian story inspired by sally-maria's LJ post,  in 2015, and now at last it is DONE.

Chapter 15 : Beyond Destiny is the last chapter, in which we discover the world is changed forever, learn what the Future King does once the Darkest Hour is done, inform the bees of our progress, and return the Volvo to its garage.

No beta for this last chapter, I have spent far too long agonising over how to get here and couldn't bear to bother someone to beta read it having finally got there.  

I think if I ever write anything novel-length again, I'm just going to write the ending first and then go back and write the rest of it.  This business of starting at the beginning and proceeding onward is far too hard. 

But I am pleased, I think, with what I wrote, even if I did learn some things about not making an adversary so ridiculously hard that any form of defeat for him feels a bit anticlimactic.  

I've recovered from the vaccination (ow! ow! and also BLURGH), and got on with writing. Have finally got to the main confrontation in my King Arthur, Merlin and the Volvo story (AT LAST). I was rather hoping this would be the last chapter, but not quite. The last chapter is really more of an afterword, but the story would end very abruptly without it.

Rexque Futurus: Ch 14, the Hunting of the Snake.

I looked back over my old entries and found the bit where I started writing Rexque Futurus, the story about Arthur, Merlin, the ancient Volvo. Apparently in December 2015 I had already written 32,000 words, which is really odd because the last few chapters that I have been writing have come VERY slowly. But that time was when I was working on a bunch of other things at the same time, and also endings always seem to be harder than beginnings. My optimism about being able to summon up a chapter a week for the last 5 chapters was ludicrous in retrospect, but hey, it's a learning experience.

Anyway, I wrote a chapter, with no Volvo but there is a dragon and a bunch of ravens, and it's here.

Oh, also my car (ironically, an ancient Volvo, though when I started writing the story my car was a Saab) went in for its MOT and failed, but the garage seems optimistic that it can be tweaked and fettled sufficiently to pass, which would be good since second-hand cars seem to be thin on the ground at the moment (presumably because people are trying to avoid public transport).

We shall see. It currently has 160,000+ miles on the clock, one of the rear doors is very bashed, the driver door is a different colour and the window doesn't work, and nor does the sun roof, so it is at least aging. But it's still surprisingly nice to drive, and also there is an excellent feeling of invincibility to it. Anything short of a lorry that drives into it is is probably going to come off worse and leave little sign of impact. And you can get a lot of stuff in it.

Writing with all the speed of a particularly inagile two-toed sloth, I have written another chapter of Rexque Futurus!

It's here, should anyone want it.

It contains meetings, tea, a certain amount of constitutional law, a dragon and destiny. Also this is the chapter where Vernon Bogdanor works out how to incorporate Arthur Pendragon into the unwritten constitution of the UK. Fortunately for me, the POV at this point is Merlin, who is not very interested in constitutional law.

For an astonishingly long time I have been writing this post-BBC Merlin modern day Arthurian story, inspired by sally_maria 's disappointment at the final episode of Merlin ending with Arthur dying before he ever really got to be satisfyingly a proper king and have adventures with Merlin. This spring I got thesmallhobbit to kindly beta-read as far as I had got, and then I stalled again!

But I've written 50,000osh words and put far too much overthinking into this to just abandon it, (not to mention all the people who have had their ears half-talked-off about it over the years) so I am determined to finish it.

I would love to be the kind of writer who can actually completely finish a long thing entirely self-fuelled with my own enthusiasm, without encouragement, but I'm not. Or not yet, anyway. So, I'm going to post a chapter a week. I've posted the first two already, I'm doing Monday Evening posts, and with luck that will put me under just enough pressure to get my act together and get the ending written. I have lots of diffuse ideas about it, they just haven't gelled into A Good Ending yet. So far the pressure has been enough toget me to sort out the Messy Bit in chapter 2 that had random notes scattered all over it, so that's a start.

It's here:
Rexque Futurus

The Once and Future King sleeps in the hills, waiting to return in Britain’s hour of greatest need. This much we know. Arthur’s name echoes down to us out of the Dark Ages. But why? When that terrible hour finally comes, what will happen?

My theory involves an ancient Volvo, a lot of bees, Arthur in pyjamas from Marks and Spencer, a random dog, some very old Anglo-Saxon magic, doom, death and the serpent-spawn of a dark god.

We were supposed to be learning about painting misty rivers. I have an ample supply of my own photos of those for reference, so I dug out a number of them, and put them on an old minilaptop that is ideal for this purpose, since it doesn't have enough disk space to apply Windows updates and therefore isn't really safe to connect to the internet, but is fine for browsing photos off a USB stick. Which is just what I need in the art class church hall, which has no wifi, and barely even a mobile signal. But I forgot that the dratted thing won't start unless the battery is charged, so instead this is adapted from a photo of Glastonbury Tor that someone had clipped out of a newspaper. With some added water.

I don't know if there's anyone interested still here, but in case there is the collection is open!

My gift had lots of weird Mithraism in it, which was very cool! A Strayed Cow.

I wrote High Days of Heroes, about Gault and Levin.
Levin's lover, Gault was killed, and Levin hoped to follow him. Artos convinced him that he could only choose a death that would be worthy of his friend, and so Levin waited. Gault waited too.

Somehow I had completely missed that someone had previously written a long Gault/Levin story and if I'd known I might have chosen another subject, or at least a different angle... but oh well!

An old friend is on holiday in Cornwall, so we agreed to meet up and wander around Tintagel.
I don't normally venture to a touristic spot in July! It was busy. (I knew it would be, so for possibly the first and last time in my life, I actually arrived somewhere first and had to hang about. Fortunately, there are lots of places to get icecream in Tintagel, and about 999999999 friendly dogs to talk to, so I was well occupied eating icecream and petting friendly dogs. I could have quite happily done that all day.

The tide was low, so we went and had a look in Merlin's Cave:

( Read more... )

I don't seem to have posted anything about writing, for a while. This is not because I haven't been writing, but because I seem to have ended up writing something that by my standards is a bit long, and since I am a rather slow and terribly indecisive writer when it comes to fiction, it's taking me ages.

Over the summer, I found myself doing a bit of an 'assorted Arthuriana' re-read, and then I had a few days off, the weather was terrible, so I randomly decided to watch the BBC Merlin DVDs that I acquired a few years back, when I accidentally started watching 'Merlin' in the middle of Season 4, and ended up getting copies of the rest of it in the hope that at some point I would watch the whole thing in order, and that it would then make sense. I can now report that it did make quite a bit more sense, watching all five seasons in order back to back (even if you watch a lot of them while painting like a loon and therefore not actually looking at the screen a lot of the time.)

But, a few things about the end of the series still niggled me a bit, and also, I noticed things that people pointed out in comments to this post which I had not previously thought of, and then I started thinking about Sleeping Heroes and Apocalyptic Beasts, and before I knew it I started writing this modern setting followup to the very last scene, which is now getting towards 32000 words and shows no signs of slowing down.( Read more... )

When thinking about England*'s Hour of Greatest Need, I started considering previous Hours of Apparently Insufficient Need. It must be admitted though, that my knowledge of anything that happened during the period between about 1485 and 1900 is pretty appalling, so I thought I'd ask for suggestions.

I thought of :
- The Viking Invasions
- The Norman Conquest
- Stephen v Matilda
- The Wars of the Roses
- The Spanish Armada (but then dismissed that as a scary thing that basically just got blown away)
- The English Civil War
- 1916 (although if you argued that this is a lot more than England's, Britain's, or even the UK's Hour, I'd have to concede the point)
- Dunkirk

Then it occurred to me that we actually have a gadget that is supposed to specifically indicate Hours of Need just down the road at Buckland Abbey, so I looked up Drake's Drum to see what times of national emergency it had seen fit to signal. But it seems to be a most erratic indicator, drumming for things like Lord Nelson being given the Freedom of Plymouth, which doesn't really seem like an emergency, even in Plymouth.

Incidentally, there's an excellent list on Wikipedia of Sleeping Kings** In Mountains. I knew there were quite a few of them, but I hadn't previously realised quite what a superb range of sleeping heroes was available in the event of emergency.

* I'm not being too picky about national definitions here, although I think 'Albion's Hour of Greatest Need' definitely has more of a ring to it than 'United Kingdom Maximum Necessity Moment' or similar.

**Although not all of them are kings.

( It doesn't rhyme though )

I suspect that probably anyone who really wants to watch a three and a half hour play based on Sutcliff's Arthurian epic, Sword at Sunset has already picked up the link from http://blueremembered.blogspot.co.uk/ or http://rosemarysutcliff.com/ but just in case you didn't (and so I've got the link)

I haven't watched it yet, but am looking forward to it!

Also, muchly amused by this review: "Of the two or three weddings I have been forcibly removed from, the most memorable was in Lewes. “How can you say you don’t like Rosemary Sutcliff?” I angrily demanded of the classicist groom, “You’re getting married in the very Sussex Downs that fired her imagination.” The desk sergeant who brought me morning tea in the cells agreed."

And while I'm at it, there is this!

http://blueremembered.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/sword-at-sunset-play-writer-james.html?spref=tw

Apparently so. I imagine that such a fat (and on places, let's face it, slow) book must have needed a fair bit of pruning, but I wish I was close enough/could spare the time to go and see what they made of it!

Today I have seen so many shares of photographs of Nelson Mandela with inspirational captions.

I'm trying to resist the temptation to do a survey of the captions and find out how many of them should really be attributed to other people (my guess? definitely some, probably many, and just possibly, lots).

I think all the *photos* are really Mandela - although now I say that, the temptation to see if I can slip a photo of some other bloke in, with a quote stolen from Pam Ayres is growing almost unbearable...

I guess this is what it really means to become a legend.

It is Sutcliff Swap time! Can I tempt anyone to join in? Look here is a tempting Frontier Wolf!

sutcliff_swap on Livejournal | sutcliff_swap on Dreamwidth | AO3 collection
Sutcliff Swap Fanwork Exchange Schedule and Policies (DW) | FAQ (DW)
List of Works (DW) | Promotion Post | Sign-up Form

Here is my Sutcliff Swap Dear Creator thingymabob!
I requested:
( Read more... )

Basically, I like All the Sutcliff Things. So probably I'm going to be delighted with whatever you make! But possibly more detail would help?
( Read more... )

( Finished it! ) As usual it doesn't look as good as it did in my head. Oh well. I'm sure all those faces were good practice!

I've been watching the BBC's Merlin on and off, mostly on the grounds that it is Arthuriana and quite pretty. The plots and characterisation seemed to get in a bit of a tangle from time to time, and sometimes you could only conclude that Monty Python was right about Camelot being a very silly place, but on the whole I enjoyed it.
( Full o' spoilers. )

Went up on Dartmoor to watch our local stage of the Tour of Britain. It was exciting, although I have to confess my grasp of what was going on was a bit shaky. Fortunately philmophlegm was packed with relevant knowledge.
( The people! the cars! the motorbikes! Oh yes, and the cyclists... )

Ate a huge icecream with clotted cream on top. Was too greedy to photograph the icecream. It was a Willy's.
( Willy's Ice cream van posing majestically atop Pork Hill. )
Retrieved curtains to replace curtains rent in twain by high-velocity dog.

Watched film : Tristran & Isolde. Amusing, though Tristran and Isolde are fundamentally just quite irritating characters and the movie fails to make them less annoying. Mark of Cornwall and Isolde's pop-eyed Irish maid much more interesting. Ireland is played by Ireland, but Cornwall is played, rather unconvincingly, by the Czech Republic. Liked the overgrown Roman ruins though.

Repaired many dog toys that had been ripped into holes, tails, ears removed etc. Briefly, our livingroom has no fluffy stuffing decorating it.

Picked blackberries with my mother. Now need to decide what to do with blackberries. Possibly crumble.
Seem to have accidentally agreed to become vice-chair of Oldies Club. Drat.

Words : 1676
Fandom: Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset
Written for

sutcliff_swap 2012

Old Aquila's last battle : the Battle of Badon Hill, which led to forty years of peace between Saxon and Briton.

In The Lantern Bearers, we learn how the Roman British farm where Aquila grew up was burned by Saxon raiders, how Aquila was seized as a thrall, returned to Britain, escaped and became one of the High King Ambrosius's commanders against the invading Saxon threat. There he met Ambrosius's young nephew Artos - who we now know as King Arthur.

When Ambrosius died, Artos took over as the leader of the remnant of Roman Britain, and Aquila went with him to fight at the great battle of Badon Hill, as the commander of what had been the High King Ambrosius's bodyguard. Thanks to

carmarthen for last minute beta reading.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: dramatic

I am hugely enjoying watching this 70's TV series. Brian Blessed, hamming relentlessly! Tom Baker, ditto! Actually, lots of people all making a drama out of a crisis, apart from Arthur (Oliver Tobias), who is rather subtle and dangerous (if a bit pouty) with 70's Rock Hair and is my new Favorite TV Arthur...

Lots of horses hammering around at top speed (I don't think people on TV ride horses as fast as that now,on the whole, it really looks dangerous). Hilarious wigs, bizarre beards, strange leather jackets with have a definite 1970s-not-500s vibe about them, mad battles with really-not-enough people... and yet, the plots are weirdly compelling!

Did people in the 70's actually have more teeth than we do now?

Current Mood: cheered

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bunn

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Entries tagged with arthuriana

IT IS DONE

Rexque Futurus

I wrote a chapter!

Rexque Futurus: Chapter 12: Kindly do not Nuke Us

Rexque Futurus

Isle of Avalon

Sutcliff Swap!

Tintagel

I'll tell you all about it till I'm blue

England's Hours of Not Quite Greatest Need

Apparently all this Arthuriana I am watching and reading has driven me to poetry

Ooh!

Sword at Sunset : the play?

Nelson Mandela as seen through social media

Sutcliff Swap : Dear Creator ( Dawn Wind, Lantern Bearers, Sword at Sunset, Eagle of the Ninth)

Bedwyr sings in the mead hall of Cador of Dumnonia

Merlin's End

Things Done

With a Strange Majesty

Arthur of the Britons