Prompt 2: Eos
The dawn goddess Eos was almost always described with rosy fingers or rosy forearms as she opened the gates of heaven for the Sun to rise. Eos had a team of divine horses to pull her chariot, providing daylight as they climbed the arc of heaven scattering sparks of fire across the sky (she was also sometimes depicted aloft by the power of her own wings). Eos is known for having had many lovers, which has led to Eos being known by some as a goddess of joy and pleasure in addition to being the goddess of the dawn.

I thought, for Eos, I'd offer the webpage design for a story I wrote back in 2014, "A Little Chat over Breakfast".

Once upon a time, there was a LiveJournal community (maryrenaultfics) for fans of Mary Renault's books. It lasted for ten years, all told, though the decline in the last few years was becoming obvious (to everyone else, though possibly not to the moderators). Still, there had been a glorious fifth-anniversary celebration to which many of the members were active contributors. The main event was a series of stories set in a metaverse where the characters from all of Renault's books could meet at a clubhouse. The mods decided to do the same for the tenth anniversary as well.

Well, it wasn't the same. (Couldn't be, really.)

If you're up early, there's a stage when dawn looks a lot like dusk. Except for being in the east, of course.

Posted to Maryrenaultfics under this title on March 29, 2012, 23:10.


For more than twenty years now, I have attended the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in the third week of March. Over the years, I have given papers on comics, SF, fantasy, genre theory, and popular culture. This year, for the first time, I spoke about our own maryrenaultfics.

You may, of course, be wondering how we qualify as an appropriate subject for such a conference: after all, Mary Renault's books may be !!!FaNtAsTiC!!!, but they hardly qualify as fantasy (or SF, either). However, our community has created the ITOWverse; and that most definitely does qualify.

Our beloved moderators have expressed interest in seeing the paper. For those among the members who are academics, I should point out, though, that it was written specifically for oral presentation. It therefore has a less formal style than would be acceptable to a journal. Indeed, people will note a number of places where emphasis or interpolation has been made explicit so that I won't forget how to read my lines—all in order to improve the "performance"! Furthermore, the paper lacks such supporting apparatus as notes and bibliography (though there were some references listed in the handout). I have, however, added a few pertinent links, so people can, if they wish, check out my sources.

I might add that the most frustrating thing about the paper is the fact that, with only twenty minutes allowed, so much had to be left out!

( So this is the paper, as I read it at the conference.... )

The mods at maryrenaultfics have just announced that it is going on "hiatus". Meaning (since the gap is clearly intended to be open-ended) that it is closing down. On the one hand, this is not really news, since they gave some of us the heads up a short time ago. On the other hand, it's a shock: like being wakened at dawn to be told that your father has just died when, the previous evening when you visited him in hospital, it was obvious that he only had hours to live. Not a surprise, therefore; but a horrible, unbelievable, unwanted finality.

Actually, at the moment, I believe it is still possible for a few of the members to post at the mods' discretion. As my sister and I have just got back to working on the final tenth anniversary (10YO) celebration posts, I'm glad of that. We got so depressed this past summer that we never got them finished; and recently, of course, we've been frantically writing for Yuletide. We do want to finish 10YO—and in the original venue, too, where the posts belong.

(I was meaning to post tonight about Yuletide. Now that Flo has gone home after Christmas and things here are less hectic, I had intended over the next week or so to make webpages for my own stories, post about them here, do wiki articles about the Forever Knight and Renault Yulefic, and then either get back to work on sundry Fanlore articles or revise a pair of FK stories that have been waiting for a long, long time for me to fix the holes in them. This announcement about maryrenaultfics has kind of got in the way.)

I joined the comm in 2007, having lurked for a while reading the archive and current posts. It was lorie945 who persuaded me to join. I had just read two of her stories in a row, loved both, and belatedly realized they had the same author; so I e-mailed her to tell her how much I'd enjoyed them. We got to talking; and, when she realized that I was aware that there were two very different editions of The Charioteer, she told me that the comm was just about to start a long chapter-by-chapter (CBC) discussion of the book focusing on the effects of the changes, and that I should join in order to participate.

I could have come across like the newbie-from-hell: pushing into every discussion and talking at length as if I knew the book word for word from cover to cover. (Well, I pretty well did.) In fact, everyone was incredibly welcoming. And the mods were so helpful: showing me, on my first long post, how to make an lj-cut, for instance. Later, when I persuaded my sister to join, they helped her even more: she didn't seem able to figure out how to join, how to comment, how to post, or ... well pretty well anything. I had never been on LJ before. Flo had never been in fandom, as far as I know. (At least I had mailing-list experience.)

So, for several years, all seemed well. More than well: things were grrrrrreat!!!!! Insert Tony the Tiger here: things were thoroughly enjoyable. The comm went from high to high: CBCs, ficlet challenges, poetry challenges, bookcover contests, and character interviews. People often posted new stories and art, or links to them. We celebrated the fifth anniversary of the comm in style (though I certainly hadn't been there that long). We compiled glossaries of the characters and indexed all the stories. Basically, there always seemed to be something new going on, often two things concurrently. I popped by every day to see if there had been a fresh post—and there so often was!—and check out what comments had been made, and add my own.

Oh, there were the occasional spats and flurries; but these mostly came in reponse to events outside. (Surely, I can't be the only person to recall the Russian bots?) It is true that gradually the comm changed; but these seemed the sort of shifts in response to altered environmental conditions that any living organism makes. People drifted in and out, as they do; but there always seemed to be new faces icons popping by.

It was gradual, that's what I'm saying. And to those who were already members of the comm, a lot of things that were supposed to be temporary were still taken to be so even when they continued indefinitely. Gradually, there were fewer people around, and fewer posts being made. But all communities go through busy and idle times—or so we told ourselves.

Then, of course, it became obvious that the comm was in serious difficulties and had a bad reputation. The reasons for this were far less obvious, though, when one knew the place from the inside. We were all ... oh, I suppose, living in the halcyon Golden Age of past joys.

It's been obvious for at least three years that the mods have been less interested than they used to be. It's been obvious for a couple of years that they are, for some reason, not merely going through a bad patch—busy in RL or that sort of thing. (Nor drifted off to other fandoms, as far as I know.) It's been sadly obvious for about a year that things were dire. So, in that sense, we've all been on a deathwatch. And in denial.

De Nile is for de Sphinx. It's no place for a comm.

Riddle me this: what could we have done? Where did we go wrong? I don't mean the mods: the decisions were theirs, of course; but I'm not privy to the truly behind-the-scenes stuff. I'm talking about the people who loved maryrenaultfics. (In its day it was lovable.) What could we have done, more than we did? At what point, if we had had crystal balls, might we have turned things to a better course?

Write me an AU someone, please.

Meanwhile, I mourn. This is not what I wanted for Christmas.

It's that time of year again. According to this post on Yuletide Admin, nominations will officially open on 24 September. People are already starting to try to whip up interest in their favourite tiny fandoms.

Naturally, I've been thinking what I'll nominate myself. As was the case last year, we are only permitted three fandoms. Forever Knight and Mary Renault's The Charioteer are certain. For my third, I'm vacillating between Prehistoric Park and Time Team RPF. I asked for the former last year, but didn't get it. As for Time Team, I love the show, and would dearly like to read a "behind the scenes" gen story about the making of an episode (whether an actual aired episode or one that was made-up just for the story).

Well, some time before nominations close, I'll have to make that decision. For the moment, though, I'm concerned about the other problem: the rules only permit a maximum of four characters to be nominated for each fandom.

Last year, Forever Knight was nominated more than once; but there was a fair amount of overlap between the characters people asked for. That's a waste, isn't it? If, say, three people nominate the show, then we want this to mean a full dozen characters from whom to pick! Mary Renault fans have the same problem, multiplied by the fact that she wrote quite a few books, most of which count as separate fandoms.

As a result, queen_ypolita has started a post over on Dreamwidth so that Mary Renault fans can coordinate.

I'm thinking that I'll start a post myself for Forever Knight fans. We've a proud list of characters; and it'll be possible to come up with more interesting prompts if the nominations include as many as possible.

Problem solved. I just downloaded over a hundred Microsoft updates that I've neglected to install. Although I do still sometimes have to refresh maryrenaultfics once or twice to get the posts to appear, they do eventually; and every other problem seems miraculously to have disappeared.

There's a moral in there somewhere, I suppose.

One thing's for sure, though: no credit accrues to LiveJournal Support, who basically just left me dangling. Let us instead thank ESET: when I was about to do a virus check, it decided as a preliminary to tell me that my operating system was not up to date, and suggested I click for updates.

Light dawned....

Ah, the sun is out (though it's actually nearly nine p.m.); birds are singing; and I see little apples on the tree. They will be picked in the near future, I promise.