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Have you already decided what fandom(s) to write for? If so, how about doing a little promoting? :D

We've all chosen tiny obscure canons, needless to say. But by posting here you might be able to entice someone else to give it a try — or perhaps you'll even run into a fellow fan, who can't wait to read your coming fic.

Your promo can be long or short, and contain whatever you feel like. Want to post a couple of intriguing screencaps from a movie? Quote a few paragraphs from a book? Rec the best episode of an anime or a TV series? Talk about why you love your favorite character and/or pairing from your fandom? It's all good; anything goes!

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From:

sunfright

[ Imagine this whole drivel set to Cécile Chaminade's Arabesque no. 1. ]

A Woman Appeared to Me (une femme m'apparut) by Renée Vivien, psudonym for the British writer, Pauline Mary Tarn, who lived in France and worked in the French language, is a pseudo-autobiographical novel originally penned in 1904, but undergoing vast revisions later and re-published in 1905 under the same title, although in many ways, they are two different books. Until recently, English translations were hard to come by (for the longest time, I survived on an old copy of the Naiad Press' 1970s translation of the 1904 version), but a couple of years ago, Brian Stapleford did extensive work on the material and had a back-to-back translation released of both the 1904 and 1905 editions in English. I warmly recommend it!

"A Woman Appeared to Me" is, in both editions, a story about unfulfilled love between the female narrator and a woman called Vally (in the 1904 version) or Lorely (1905 version), as well as their lives and shared group of friends in early 20th century Paris. The novel is written in the Symbolist style and reads very poetic (which is one reason among many to love it), working with themes such as happiness/unhappiness, religion/doubt, friendship/love, 1st wave feminism, history and art in various forms (music, poetry, etc.)

If you love Victorian flower language, I promise, this book is for you!

I haven't quite decided what edition of the book to work with yet. If I end up going for the original 1904 version, I'll be writing something about Vally, the unattainable love interest, and if I go for the 1905 version, I'll be writing about Ione, the childhood friend of the narrator, who gets a story arch of her own in the revised edition. It very much depends on what mood I'm in on the day I start writing, since Vally is all playful, cruel allure, whereas Ione is pious, melancholy loneliness.

In any case, I would like to leave you with a quote by Vally in the 1904 edition, taken here from my loyal, steadfast Naiad Press translation by Jeannette H. Foster:

Like Art, Love is complex, and to attain it finally one must follow a long, rough road. The sculptor who conceives of a statue never expects to meet his divine vision in any single model. He finds absolute beauty through dissimilar figures, each of which reveals to him its greatest beauty. And I, to realize my dream of passion, must collect scattered perfections, in order to unite them into a harmonious whole created by my dreams. What I love in you is your power of loving, a bit wild, a bit primitive, but absolute.