Bank of England are letting you vote for what animals you want on their new bank notes: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/help-us-design-our-next-series-of-banknotes
I chose the fox as one of mine, it's an obvious choice but it'd be nice to celebrate an animal so commonly denigrated. Not that old 'foul mart' has had much of a fun time of it historically either.
Some interesting options here in general, they've not just gone with the obvious animals.
I ended up not choosing the fox, purely because I actually reckon it's going to romp home - for all the controversy, it's the most common wild mammal people see in urban centres, and it's charismatic
I went pine marten, as I've been involved in helping their reintroduction to Wales, and then I wrestled with myself for an Age before finally going hedgehog.
Birds: puffins were the easiest choice. The UK - and Pembrokeshire Coast National Park in west Wales specifically - has a significant portion of the global breeding population of puffins, thanks to Skomer and Grassholm islands. In a country with the biodiversity depletion we have (bottom 10% of countries globally for biodiversity), the islands of Pembrokeshire are almost obscene in how high their biodiversity is, and it's for breeding specifically. We can be justly proud of those. Plus, puffins are fun clowns.
And then I agonised about the others until I finally went for the Great Spotted Woodpecker, a bird I do periodically see and get excited about every time
The Lumped-Together-Others: the bumblebee, you have to. I adore bumblebees.
And then I went for the marsh fritillary, because it's super endangered and I'm an environmentalist with a specialism in habitat management and ecology, and therefore spend a non-trivial amount of my time explaining how to manage for the little assholes.
hi! I’m dipping my toes into Midsomer Murders fic but I have to confess writing John’s POV has me absolutely stumped. With Jamie I just wind him up and let him go but John is inscrutable to me lol. Do you have any tips/advice for writing from his POV?
hi nonnie! flattered that you think I write John well enough to ask! <3
Starting off with my favourite general fanfic characterisation tip (because my John Barnaby may not be anyone else's John Barnaby), which is Watch The Show - honestly I don't think for characterisation there is any substitute for a focused/intentional/understanding review of canon. If you have a good grounding, you have license to extrapolate/go off-track, and people will walk with you, but first you have to watch, and when you watch you have to treat the character like your favourite bit of your favourite song.
My main methods for this are:
- watch the show and in every scene he's in, pay attention to the character to the exclusion of other characters (eg, if someone else is talking, you watch his reactions to them, not them). What is he saying? How is he saying it? What is he doing? What is he not saying or doing? Consider the episode from the character's perspective and try to understand why he behaves as he does.
- watch an episode and write down everything the character says (this can be a pain, typing is slower than speaking, but very helpful for character voice, if you don't have time for a full episode try just a scene or two). Look at what you've written out - how does he talk? eg, full sentences? hedge words? If you get this down you should be able to "hear" the character's voice in your head when you read over your work. (Note - I usually worry about this at the editing stage, because sometimes in a first draft a character just has to say whatever the plot requires them to, agonising in a first draft just means nothing gets written.)
Okay, now to talk briefly about John Barnaby - obligatory Your Mileage May Vary, everything after this point is my interpretations of him.
You've described him as inscrutable and I think in many ways that's on the money. My headline on John is that he is by nature a quiet man, who cares deeply for those few he loves and has an incredible understanding of human behaviour (other humans' behaviour, at least), but this is wrapped in a thick shell made of being-a-british-man-of-a-certain-age; my usual red line when writing John is that he will not be expressing a feeling to anyone except Sarah (and perhaps not even noticing he has one) until someone is bleeding and/or it's been bothering him for at least half an episode.
This is not a rare affliction in Causton CID, exactly, but it is an important facet of John, especially as concerns his relationships with his sergeants, which are usually what I'm focused on when I'm writing him. With them on the whole I'd say he attempts to maintain a professional relationship, leaving most other things unsaid and making a doomed effort to retain plausible deniability as to how much he loves them, despite his actual behaviour often standing in contradiction.
Some of my favourite John bits:
- When he uses his sergeants' first names! He does this while talking to them unprompted exactly twice, once while talking to Jones in Murder of Innocence, and once to Winter in Death of the Small Coppers (we were robbed of ever getting a Nelson moment like that and I still mourn). I love a character-who-only-surnames-uses-firstname moment, so those are Big for me, and I especially enjoy how these two instances compare and contrast with one another. I think they both fulfil the purpose of trying to reach the sergeant concerned. Metaphorically, in Jones' case - iirc Jones is refusing any sort of police protection despite an attempt having just been made on his life. Barbaby firstnaming him feels more calculated, perhaps an effort to get through to him, or strip away the protective, professional veneer of "DS Jones", to remind Jones that he could as easily be a victim as anyone else. In Winter's case, meanwhile, Barnaby does not have time to consider anything. His voice is the only thing that is going to reach Winter before that arrow, though he tries to run to him anyway. I don't think he means to use his first name in that moment - it's a raw instant of exposure, betraying his care for Winter, and naturally they will never, ever talk about it. :)
- The scene in The Christmas Haunting, when he tells Nelson that a murder wasn't his fault. It's kind, and I love it so much - the way he notices Nelson's upset (not that Nelson's being subtle about it), and takes the time to reassure this poor guy who's been a DS all of five minutes that he'd done nothing wrong. Also, for contrast, see him telling Jones in Dark Secrets that a murder isn't about him. The situations aren't identical (Jones has the tone of a man asking for an excuse while Nelson has already decided he's to blame, Nelson has far less experience, etc), but perhaps this shows mellowing over time, or that his eventual partnership with Jones has led him to be kinder with his sergeants. We also have the conversation in The Lions of Causton, when Winter says he's never lost one (a killer, presumably) before, and Barnaby just tells him quietly that the killer had made up his mind - and for me there's just so much going unsaid there, but Barnaby is meeting Winter where he's at and reassuring him, just as he tried to Nelson, that there was nothing they could have done.
- During Winter and Nelson's first episodes, he makes sure they're introduced to Sarah - even ignoring the knock at the door from Winter so she'll go to answer it - like he wants to check them with her. In my gentle headcanons this is from an unspoken understanding that his sergeant is their sergeant.
- In The Witches of Angel's Rise, when they arrive at the psychic fair and he has the most horrendously awkward check-in with recently-bereaved Winter as to whether he's okay to go in there. Yes, Sarah had reminded him, told him to look out for Winter, so we had the "are you sure you should be in today" earlier in the episode, but the later one - Barnaby is recognising that Winter is in a potentially vulnerable stare, that the psychics/mediums might be upsetting to him (or might even prey on him), and checks in again (eventually). Also later in the episode he stops a guy hitting Winter with a stick. Big fan of that.
- In Let Us Prey, when he's afraid that his child won't like him. It's so vulnerable and sweet. We've seen in other episodes that he's not hugely social, he doesn't seem to have many of his own friends, and he's content with that, right up until there's this one person that it matters more than anything else to him that they like him - but he doesn't know how. Just leave me here in a puddle of my own tears I suppose.
Probably have to leave it here or I'll never stop but yeah. Hope this has been at all helpful? And good luck with your writing!
- again in Death of the Small Coppers, but how he talks to Penny Kingdom and the killer's father on the way through the woods. I really like his Fuck You And The Horse You Rode In On speech to the killer in The Sleeper Under the Hill, but for the most part by Winter era he's kind of mellowed from that - except, Winter is in trouble, and he gets rougher with people who aren't even the murderer!
if you use genAI in the cover/promotional art of your audio drama I am not touching it with a barge pole. have some respect for other artists, for the environment, fuck, even for your own artistic work, on the off-chance you didn't auto-generate that too
incredibly pleased that everyone is following the instructions i forgot to give and reblogging to explain their choice in the tags 🙏 more of that please i want to know about your ocs and also i love you
Hi I’m obsessed with your MM fic (there are dozens of us) and I was wondering if you were planning to ever continue A Village Built on Bones? The first chapter lives in my head rent free.
hey nonnie! glad to hear you've been enjoying my fics! <3 I am planning to continue that one (it's on the to do list for the year, but it was last year as well, so that's no guarantee) - there's a couple of scenes at the end where I'm especially happy with what happens, and I want to get them out there, but between me and those scenes there's 45k words of first draft still to edit (the wordcount for Ch2 is currently a little over 8.5k), so it might be a while! I've also got a couple of original projects crying for attention, and am currently neck deep in a rather hefty fic-with-deadline, so, uh, the tldr is - yes, but it's unlikely to be very soon.
I come back to “abandoned spaceship” a lot bc like a spaceship AI would be designed to prioritize caring for humans above all else. floating empty for decades, centuries, especially if it believes it failed this primary task. it would go crazy. it would do anything to have a human life inside of it again and absolutely anything at all to keep that human safe. tons on tons on tons of metal completely fixated on you. for better or worse.
Don't you just love when a character is barely a person? When they're just a big lie dressed in some silly clothes? Like, who are you? What do you mean you have no idea? And yes I absolutely would love to find out.
Another absolutely perfect piece by @xfreischutz who has drawn all of my dogs with the same attention to detail to both their physical appearance and their very souls. This captures Tyche so beautifully and I will treasure it forever! Thank you again!!
