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mjulianwrites · 2 years ago

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credit to @yvesdot for this template!

happy almost new year! 2022 was the first year in a very long time that i consistently wrote every month, so i'm excited to look back on it! my writing this year was dominated by my latest wip, next day after dawn, including both canonverse content and a lot of stupid au bullshit <3

details under the cut!

january

in january i was still very much in dearer than a friend mode after finishing the first draft in november, but with no progress to make on the book itself i ended up writing some speculative post-canon (and very non-canon) nonsense involving preston getting into a terrible terrible relationship with another man. this one was a collab with @inkgel for which we definitely wrote a sane and normal amount of content

It’s not that he intended for this to happen. But the truth has been bubbling up for so long now, and eroding him a little more each time it does, wearing away at whatever remains of his willpower, his sense of himself, his belief that he has anything left to lose. And he’s already damned. He knows that deep down. He could repent, he supposes. Maybe God would forgive him. But Val won’t. He doesn’t really see the point. And it’s because of that too. Because he’s alone now, in a way he never has been, never could have been for the past eleven years of his life, because he always had someone who was supposed to be his. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to forget it when it feels like a piece of him has been ripped out, leaving a gaping wound that throbs and bleeds and refuses even to begin to heal. So he has to find someone to fill it, even if they don’t fit quite right.

february

in february i was mostly focused on my classes, but that did involve reading paradise lost and briefly getting very fixated on eve. i wrote less than two pages of this, but i was having fun with some dialogue between eve and satan. it was interesting to try to figure out what the pov of someone so ignorant of the world might look like

“Are you an angel?” I ask. That creature that he is talking to as I am talking to you. I do not really know what an angel is. He would not let me listen with him so it could be explained to me. But I know that an angel is something greater than me, and you are greater than me, but you are not Him, so I think maybe that is right. “I was an angel,” you say. “Was?” “I don’t know if I can explain it to you.” I feel something when you say that, something that I have no name for, but I know it is something that is bad to feel. Frustration, I think. I am good at naming things. I am as good as him. Sometimes I wish that He had left some of the animals for me to name too, but that is something that is bad to wish.

march

in march i decided i needed to get out of endlessly spinning dtaf mode. i also read gtn and remembered how much i love ensemble casts. and lo and behold, next day after dawn was born. this was one of the very first scenes i wrote, between mona and her mother austra when mona is (spoilers) experiencing life threatening illness moments. their mother/daughter dynamic is everything to me

“Don’t lie,” she said, and tried not to think about the fact that she sounded more than a little like she was begging. “Don’t—Selene can’t lie for shit, and she told me everything was fine, but she probably just wanted to avoid a difficult conversation, probably thought it was for the best, because she’s an idiot, but if you lie—” The room felt suffocating, stuffy and overly hot. She was suddenly viscerally aware of the sticky dampness of sweat beneath her shirt, and that, somehow, was more overwhelming than the pain that spiderwebbed from her pounding head all the way down her back. Her mother was silent, her face still very nearly impassive, but there was something in the slight furrowing of her brows that Mona thought looked terribly sad. “Don’t you dare,” Mona said furiously. Her eyes were burning. She blinked hard to clear the definitely-not-tears forming there. “Don’t you dare act like I’m going to die.”

april

more ndad snippets! this was from the first full scene i finished, which ended up being prince cyrus' pov of the first night after the coup. he is so mentally ill

Cyrus thought that was a nice enough idea on paper, given the circumstances. But when it became clear that it involved putting on his least comfortable court clothes and shuffling into a musty, overly crowded hall where three scuffed tables and a dozen mismatched chairs had been pushed together in some imitation of a royal banquet, he very quickly began to have second thoughts. Cassandane tried to motion for him to sit at the head of the table when they came in. He sat just to the right of it instead, as he would have if he really had been at court. If the king had been here. But the fact that he wasn’t didn’t make it feel any more right to take his place. So Cyrus didn’t. No one else did either. The chair sat untouched at the front of the room, a ghost in an empty seat. Not a ghost, Cyrus tried to remind himself. Just not here. He would be back soon. They would all be back soon. He couldn’t handle thinking anything else.

may

ndad strikes again! this is going to be most of this. here we have the first darcy pov i wrote, featuring them being sent to woo princess cassandane for prince cyrus and falling head over heels in love with her themself. (take a shot every time someone in ndad has a line about being or not being their father's son)

“I am not a real princess,” she told them after a long moment. “But I am interested in becoming a queen.” She looked one already, Darcy thought. Her eyes were diamond hard, her jaw and cheekbones carved from marble. She could have knocked her father’s statue to the ground and stood on the pedestal in its place and put it to shame. She could have told them to do anything for her, and it wouldn’t have crossed their mind not to obey. She was all that a queen should be. And Darcy was what they should have been. They were not truly the King’s ambassador, nor the Prince’s surrogate. Their loyalty went only as far as their self-interest. They were not their father’s son. But they were, if nothing else, an excellent liar, which was why they could never fully explain the sudden urge they felt to tell her the truth.

june

in june i wrote a short story for a shakespeare-themed horror anthology! it did not get in, but this was my first shot at horror, so i had a ton of fun anyway. i'll probably post this one on ao3 soon -- it's fun little examination of the inherent freakiness of the ending of all's well that ends with, this time with 100% more black magic

Here’s my confession: I don’t love my wife. Confession’s probably the wrong word though. Cause it’s not like I can tell anyone. Everyone around here thinks we got our perfect miracle of a storybook ending, so maybe I’m the one who’s wrong for not wanting it. Maybe I deserve this. My happily ever after. I don’t know how they believe it. Well, they believe it because I said it, I said I love Helen, and the lie came out smoother than it should have, given the circumstances, because God knows I’ve had too much practice. Maybe I sounded like I meant it. What I actually said was that I’d love her forever. I never said I was smart.

july

we're back in ndad land, and oh boy, this was a month. july was the first time i've ever beaten nanowrimo, fully unintentionally, simply because @wren-is-writing and i went fucking insane with the au fanfiction. but the piece that started it all was renan's backstory, aka renan's spiral into destroying every part of himself over his love for a terrible little boyboss war criminal (hi king cyrus). this is the first time the two of them meet, when cyrus is still in his rakish misbehaving prince era. brainworms are found in the gay old men

The others are already drinking deep again, eager to accept another newcomer into their circle for the night, but your mouth has gone dry. It’s almost hard to look at him. It’s harder to look anywhere else. He notices you staring. When he catches your eye, it makes your heart jump into your throat. “What?” he asks. “Something in my teeth?” You’re barely breathing. “Your Highness,” you manage, and you can’t read the look that crosses his face. Hebes slaps his hand down on the table so hard it makes your glass rattle, and lets out an incredulous, booming laugh. “Stars above, Renan, is that Prince Cyrus?” The boy next to you winks and flashes another incandescent grin. “Just call me Cy.”

august

and here we come to just a small selection of the insane au fanfiction wren and i engaged in. not ALL of it was about cyrenan, just most of it. here's some darcy and cassandane in the criminally extensive college au. darcy's pining, what else is new

It would happen, though, they told themself. It would happen eventually. Because she loved them, they were sure, even if neither of them had phrased it that way exactly. They’d as good as told each other more times than they could count. They had always worked that way, reading between the lines but knowing they were on the same page. “You’re brilliant, you know,” they murmured, dropping their voice so low they were sure only she could hear it. Just one more way of telling her. They knew she’d understand. “At dancing or in general?” “Both.” “I do know,” Cass replied. Her slow, curving smile made them flush too much to hide. “I want to do this more often,” they whispered. They risked stroking their thumb lightly across her shoulder, a gesture they hoped was too small to catch. “I want to do this all the time.” Forever wasn’t a word they would pull out in public regardless of how softly they were speaking, but they were sure she got that too.

september

we're back to canonverse ndad, thank god. more backstories! this one chronicles austra's girlbossification, and this moment specifically is right after her daughter mona is born

She’s not going to make it. That’s the first thing the doctors tell you. It’s the first thing the Church proclaims on the matter too. You’re still confined to your hospital room. You can’t witness it pronounced in a chapel or read it in a star chart. You have to hear it from your husband’s mouth instead. His eyes are red. He’s been crying. You haven’t been. You’ll break down when there’s nothing left to fight for, not a moment sooner than that. Your daughter needs surgeries that haven’t been performed in a century. Your daughter has long brown eyelashes that flutter when you kiss her while she sleeps. Your husband tells you that her doom is written in the stars, and he says it like he thinks it’s true.

october

and i actually followed austra's backstory up with castor's, because apparently i spent some of this year being semi productive. castor's terrible little psyche revolves around the fact that his brother (everyone's favourite son) died when he was a teenager and he thinks it's his fault for not being a hardened soldier at 17. here he is trying to be a hardened soldier (it's not going well)

You’re not a natural. You’re not even a hard-won talent. Even when you’re not half sleepwalking, you’re slow, clumsy, unsure. Your sword arm grows sore after barely an hour. The straps of your armour chafe against the skin of your neck and leave it raw. You’ve tried your best, memorized a hundred manoeuvres in sparring sessions, but somehow you still freeze in the field. The first time an enemy makes a swipe for you, you run like a coward. By the fiftieth time, you’ve learned to stand your ground, but you don’t know if your allies feel the difference. At night, every comrade you couldn’t save has your brother’s face. He had scars when he—when you saw him the last time. A barely-there line through his eyebrow, another tiny one on his chin. Your father has the gouged-out pit in his left cheek, the mark that proves he is and isn’t invulnerable. Every time a blade flashes in your face, you wonder if you’ll end up with a matching one. It never happens, probably because you’re too quick to flinch back from the strikes that might get close enough. Your skin remains despicably pristine.

november

wow, a new wip? well maybe. this one is still in very early stages, but i got seized by brainworms consisting of "what if richard and bolingbroke from shakespeare's richard ii were lesbians (and not cousins) and fucking hated each other." also it's the 80s, i think. rielle is our larger than life femme richard who's never met an emotion she couldn't turn into a performance, and the narrator here is jack, butch bolingbroke, who has a lot of daddy issues and hates rielle so fucking much.

Don’t get me wrong. My dad was an asshole. He was a dyed-in-the-wool red-blooded homo-hating bigot and I didn’t shed a tear at his funeral. But he was the kind of asshole where if I called my hair a pixie cut and ditched the Doc Martens for mascara when I came around for dinner, he’d happily keep paying my tuition. He’d even hug me, sometimes. Mostly after Mom died. Both arms around my shoulders, like he meant it. So I had my reasons, basically, for not wanting to publicly tell him to go fuck himself. And even if I hadn’t, she was the last person I owed an explanation. Easy for her to say she’d cut off her parents in a heartbeat when she didn’t have any, just an inheritance ten times the size I was ever getting and a bunch of framed tabloids with pictures of a Rolls-Royce twisted around a lamp post and a cherub of a girl who knew, even at ten years old, how to cry pretty.

december

this past month i've been juggling grad school apps and finals and prepping for my thesis, so i haven't written a ton, but i went back to fun shakespeare fanfiction collabs with @inkgel for a bit! here's me attempting to write julius caesar pov `for our caesar/antony character study that we did after playing those characters on zoom (and playing them as in love, of course)

He could do the same with Antony. Antony wouldn’t make him ask twice for it—wouldn’t make him ask at all, probably, because he is always so delightfully quick to capitulate, all it would really take is a finger ghosted over those plush and slightly reddened lips. But Caesar doesn’t like him to be carved out of marble. He likes it when Antony stumbles, the laugh bubbling up from his throat loose and lazy, the perfect planes of his cheekbones marred with a ruddy flush. When Antony clings onto him, half for balance, half because he’s surely looking for any excuse to. When he hangs on several moments longer than he needs to, his pupils blown, his hair mussed not-quite-artfully, and kisses him with the heady scent of wine still on his breath. Perhaps sometimes he would deign to think he loved it, but it’s been years since that word has been his to offer. These days, it’s only for lesser men to give.

if you got this far, thank you so much for reading! see you all in 2023!!

#my writing #next day after dawn #dearer than a friend #preston young #mona lunares #austra lunares #prince cyrus #darcy mercurialis #princess cassandane #renan mercurialis #king cyrus #cyrenan #castor martis #rielle blanchette #jack livingstone #orphan heir

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papermoonloveslucy · 2 years ago

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RADIO on TV!

Radio Shows on Lucille Ball’s TV Sitcoms

Television was an outgrowth of radio. Many of our best loved shows originally came from radio - including “I Love Lucy,” which was inspired by the success of “My Favorite Husband”. Here are a few stragglers - radio shows that were mentioned on Lucy TV!

There was some thought about creating an “I Love Lucy” radio show to run in simultaneously with the television series as was being done with “Our Miss Brooks.” A pilot show was produced, but it never aired. It was created by editing the soundtrack of the television episode “Breaking the Lease”, with added narration. It included commercials for Philip Morris, which sponsored the TV series. Philip Morris eventually sponsored a radio edition of “My Little Margie” instead. Here’s Ricky’s opening narration:

“Hello. I’m Ricky Ricardo and I’m the guy who loves Lucy. The whole thing started ten years ago. I had just come to this country from Cuba and I didn’t know much about your customs. The first girl I had a date with was Lucy. It was a romantic night and after all I had a reputation to live up to as a Latin lover so I kissed her goodnight. It was right then that she told me that under the Constitution of the United States if a man kisses a girl he has to marry her. Then I found out that she tricked me. I didn’t care. Because after all, if I hadn’t married her, I’d would have married someone else. And Lucy’s just like any other American girl, who is pretty, charming, witty, and partly insane.”

FREDDY FILLMORE QUIZ SHOWS

“The Quiz Show” (1951)

With Lucy’s household accounts in arrears, she goes on a radio quiz show to win a thousand dollars. All she has to do is pretend a complete stranger is her first husband in front of Ricky. A tramp at the door throws a monkey wrench into the scheme!

This is the first of three episodes to feature Frank Nelson in the role of Freddy Fillmore, game show host extraordinaire. He is the host of “Females Are Fabulous”. The announcer who encourages the audience to applaud is played by Lee Millar. The premise of the show has Lucy being pelted with various items (mostly liquids) when Ricky sings a trigger word from a safe distance.

“Lucy Gets Ricky on the Radio” (1952)

When their TV breaks down, the gang tunes in to a radio quiz show. Surprisingly, Ricky correctly guesses the answers to all of the questions, so the next day Lucy signs them up to be on the show. Little did she know that the quiz was a delayed broadcast and that Ricky overheard the answers while at the studio! This episode is based on Lucy’s radio show, “My Favorite Husband” “Quiz Show,” which aired October 23, 1948. In the radio version, the show was called “His and Hers” and is hosted by Smiley Stembottom (Frank Nelson).

On television, the quiz show is called “Mr. and Mrs. Quiz” and is hosted by Freddy Fillmore (Frank Nelson again).

Everyone on the series loved Roy Rowan’s on-screen announcing for "Mr. and Mrs. Quiz” so much that he then became the announcer for “I Love Lucy.” To be sure Ricky wins, Lucy steals the questions. Unbeknownst to her, Fillmore changes the questions at the last minute so Lucy’s answers make no sense.

The next time we see Freddy Fillmore he has made the transition to television with his latest quiz show “Be A Good Neighbor”.

“Off To Florida” (1956)

Radio plays an integral role in the plot of the episode. Lucy and Ethel hitch a ride to Florida with a Mrs. Grundy (Elsa Lanchester), an eccentric woman. To fall sleep in the parked car, Lucy turns on the radio for some soothing music, until...

NEWSCASTER: “Now here's the latest bulletin on the Evelyn Holmby case. Police have definitely established that Evelyn Holmby, famous gray-haired hatchet murderess who escaped from New York State Prison Thursday, is heading south in a cream-colored convertible coupe. Stand by for further bulletins. And now back to our recorded music.”

Having found a hatchet in the car’s trunk, Lucy puts two and two together and is wonders if their driver is the wanted criminal on the lam! Lucy and Ethel chalk it up to coincidence. In the morning, they try to cat nap while Mrs. Grundy is driving. When they are sleeping, she turns on the radio.

NEWSCASTER: “That winds up the news from Washington today. And here's the latest bulletin on Evelyn Holmby, escaped hatchet murderess. Police have learned that, before leaving New York, she dyed her gray hair red, and is heading south with a blonde companion.”

Now Mrs. Grundy suspects Lucy and Ethel!

The radio announcer is voiced by Roy Roberts. The big band music in the background was also heard in “Country Club Dance” (1957).

“Lucy is a Chaperone” (1963)

Lucy and Viv chaperone a group of Chris’s friends on a beach vacation. When the girls are dancing to music on the radio, Viv mistakes the Mashed Potato for the Jitterbug. When Lucy attempts the steps, Viv remarks that she's got “lumps in her gravy.” The Mashed Potato was a popular dance craze of 1962 made famous by James Brown. A companion dance song was titled (appropriately) “Gravy”. This marks the first of many appearances by the red transistor radio - albeit in black and white!

“Ethel Merman and the Boy Scout Show” (1964)

During a tribute to show business, radio is represented by Mr. Mooney as a radio host presenting a lady saxophone player (Lucy) from Altoona, Pennsylvania, playing “Glow Worm” (poorly).

“Lucy and the Beauty Doctor” (1965)

At the start of the episode, Lucy and Viv listen to the radio show “Morning Magazine of the Air” which presents Lady Cynthia's Beauty Tips. It is from this broadcast that Lucy hears about a $25 beauty treatment by Dr. Fleischer.

LADY CYNTHIA (voice on radio): “Good morning, ladies. How would you like to have your biggest beauty problem behind you?” VIV (listening to radio): “That’s where mine is now.”

Lady Cynthia is voiced by Carole Cook and Sid Gould is the announcer.

Now easily identified in color, Lucy’s red transistor radio will turn up many times on “The Lucy Show”, even after she moves to Los Angeles.

“Lucy the Disc Jockey” (1965)

Lucy wins a mystery sound contest on the radio, winning $25 and the chance to be disc jockey for a day. Naturally, things don’t go smoothly when she takes over the studio.

The host of the radio show Gordon ‘Fair’ Felson (Pat Harrington). The call letters of the radio station are WLDJ representing the first letter of each word in the episode’s title: “Lucy the Disc Jockey.”

After playing the mystery sound, Felson announces the return to “the swing sounds of Jan Garber.” Garber was a bandleader known for ‘sweet’ and ‘swing’ jazz. His nickname was “The Idol of the Air Lanes.”

Mr. Mooney says that the ‘Name the Sound’ contest is the silliest thing since ‘Mrs. Hush’. The Mrs. Hush contest was a feature of “Truth or Consequences” radio show in 1947.

“Lucy the Rain Goddess” (1966)

Herbie (Marc Cavell), the bank office boy, is blaring “Do The Watusi!” on his transistor radio. The song (without lyrics) was also heard in “Chris’s New Year’s Eve Party” (1962).

“Lucy’s Burglar Alarm” (1969)

At the start of the episode, Craig is practicing guitar and Kim is listening to a transistor radio playing an instrumental version of “I Know a Place” by Tony Hatch. The song was made popular in 1965 by Petula Clark. This is the third time the song has been heard on “Here’s Lucy.”

“Lucy and Jack Benny’s Biography” (1970)

Helping Benny write his memoirs, Lucy plays all the women in Jack’s life. In the fourth flashback, Jack Benny is a radio star broadcasting with Mary Livingstone. In this sequence, Lucille Ball lip synchs to the voice of the real Mary Livingstone, who became Mrs. Jack Benny in 1927.

“Lucy, the Other Woman” (1972)

While having breakfast, Lucy listens to a radio news report about a marital triangle that caused a Mrs. Mercedes Smith of Sherman Oaks to shoot a Mrs. Vivian Boone for breaking up her happy home. The newscaster is voiced by Roy Rowan.

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