Mettula Orionsis

• I laid low for a bit after that #MeToo. On the one hand, I did witness and experience some mild sexual harassment at Regen, and I wanted to support friends who experienced far more icky stuff than I did. On the other hand, causing fandom uproar and/or getting attacked en masse for fingerpointing a beloved celeb is something I'm not really up for. I prefer a quiet life, and yet I feel bad for not being braver and more outspoken.
  
  
• New Who: I love Jodie and ESPECIALLY Mendip Gill as Yaz, yet I've fallen behind on Series 11? Why? I may talk about it a little more in a future post. Basically, I love love love many things about the soft reboot of series 11, up to and including the new TARDIS team, more emphasis on friendship and less on angst and shitty relationships, the Doctor going back to being more Doctor-y and less of a boastful superhero, and the tacit effort to include PoC and/or women writers, directors, musicians, etc. Some of the historicals have been absolutely kickass (you know which). But I think the Doctor isn't Saving the Day quite enough (see the spider story, where she comes up with A Plan but it's hijacked by an asshole), and some of the SF stories feel a little flat and shallow (In Kerblam! the Doctor was as proactive as I want her to be, but the story was a rather shallow take on the topic).
  
  I think Chibs needs to hire some Big Finish writers to show them how to make maximum use of an hour to tell a good yarn without resorting to some of the soap opera intercharacter dynamics that characterized the last few years.
  
  That said, the new series is a breath of fresh air, and I'm enjoying it. But I haven't seen the past two episodes, so I need to catch up. As usual I'm avoiding spoilers.
  
  
• I have fallen WAY BEHIND on Big Finish reviews on VHSwhovian. Life has happened. Including various trips and starting a new medication for fibro that absolutely laid me out, but which may be useful in the longterm.
  
  
• Dalek Free Spirit, my fic with the Nyssa clone left over from a Big Finish story, is on hold again, because one of my other fandoms is eating me. (Well, two, actually. I've been doing a lot of Pokemon Go to help my arthritis, because *gasp* it's actually a huge social activity in my city and there's a discord so we can get together and coordinate).
  
  
• I'm intermittently active on Twitter as TrakenTourist.
  
  
• In early 2019, I'm going to two cons, Gallifrey One and Regen. The latter is a bit of a problem, though, as they screwed up my hotel reservations.
  
  
• I posted some Inktober Who fanart on Tumblr. I'm happy with the Yaz and Crispy!Master and Jean Marsh as Morgaine pics; the others not so much. (The Drashig glee club was also kind of fun.)
  
  
• As usual, I hope to do some new fanart to get autographed. It may not look as good as previous fanart, since I used to scan my pencil sketches before inking them and overlay the sketches on ref photos to find and correct mistakes, THEN I inked them, whereas now I just...draw. And screw up. My skills are slowly improving, but portraits are hard.
  
  
• On the non-fandom side of things, I'm dealing with fibromyalgia/arthritis about as well as ever, and I'm learning oil painting and having a ball.
  
  
• I should also note to those for whom it matters that I'm bi, demi, and a cis woman, which is largely irrelevant since I'm old enough to relate to most fans as a sort of Fandom Godmother or eccentric aunt... but it does mean this is a safe space for LGBTQIA+ of all stripes.

Nyssa: You’re quite sure this outfit isn’t a little too showy? Oh.

Doctor: Nothing’s too showy for the Grand Coronation of the High Hierophant of the Five Revealed Truths. Oh.

N: We’re not at the Celestial Basilica, are we?

D: Apparently not.

N: Then where are we?

D: I’m not sure. Remote outpost, maybe? Or some kind of fortress? Not exactly bustling with life.

N: It’s a prison, isn’t it.

D: I admit the fifty-foot-high wall does tend to give that impression.

N: I had enough of prisons on Folly. Can we go?

<Cries for help>

D: Did you hear that?

N: Doctor. The Coronation of the High Hierophant, remember? Perfumed rain, falling from clouds sewn with powdered diamonds… you wouldn’t want to miss that.

D: I’ve had the invitation for the past 300 years, Nyssa. I can wait a little longer… come on!
 

( Babbling about how the story came together... )

Nyssa: You’re quite sure this outfit isn’t a little too showy? ...Oh.
Doctor: Nothing’s too showy for the Grand Coronation of the High Hierophant of the Five Revealed Truths. ...Oh.
N: We’re not at the Celestial Basilica, are we?
D: Apparently not.
[chitchat, cries for help]
D: Did you hear that?
N: Doctor. The Coronation of the High Hierophant, remember? Perfumed rain, falling from clouds sewn with powdered diamonds… you wouldn’t want to miss that.
D: I’ve had the invitation for the past 300 years, Nyssa. I can wait a little longer… come on!

Wait what? Go back! I want to visit the Celestial Basilica!

Sadly, they never did, leaving to me to wonder what it was like. I wrote a few scraps, but all I had was a poetic image of the setting. I needed a story to match the grandeur. 

A year later, I listened to Big Finish The Church and the Crown featuring Queen Anne of Austria. As so often, a DW historical inspired me to look up the period and learn stuff I didn't know before. I found a surprisingly readable dissertation about Anne. It had an appendix describing the development of ballet as an offshoot of French court etiquette. Turns out her son, Louis XIV, had won popular acclaim by dancing ballet as frickin' Apollo, and that's why he's called the Sun King.

Look at this video around 2.15 or so. I mean. LOOK. 
 

Invented dialogue, but the scene is pretty much historically accurate.

So what? 

So, Nyssa is a trained dancer. She'd probably like that sort of thing. And I needed a suitably grandiose archetype on which to base my just-about-to-be-crowned Hierophant.

Corollary: why is it that science fiction always imagines futuristic design as minimalist? Why can't some advanced civilization suffer an attack of questionable taste and go for Baroque? 

Before I knew it, I'd decked out Nyssa in something suspiciously Zuhair Murad, and I won't tell you what poor Five's wearing. Now I was getting somewhere. I had dancers. I had a stage. I just needed a libretto.

It took another several months for the story arc to gel, but boy howdy, do I have a plot. I know right down to the sentence where readers are going to start posting "FIRST OF ALL HOW DARE YOU." The hardest part will be holding back the chapters until I've choreographed the whole thing.

*snaps fingers* Write yourself, story. I command you.

Ah well. *frantic typing*