#serendipity

[beary-good-finds]

🌊 The whimsical illustrations of Serendipity, written by Stephen Cosgrove and illustrated by Robin James, 1974 🌊

[just-a-girl-07]

[kelogsloops]

Something Found, 2023 watercolor & mixed media on paper

#brbchasingdreams

prints | tutorials

[winter-wise]

Terry Pratchett is amazing at writing women, this isn't a new thing to say. But I was having a think about how he wrote women, and tried to think up what common thread there was between his woman characters (especially because with most authors, especially male authors, you tend to be able to tell the author's 'type' by the way they write woman love interests).

At first I couldn't think of anything, because Pterry wrote such a diverse range of personalities, ages, jobs, body types etc.

And then it hit me. The one prevailing thread in all the Pratchett books I've read so far: Pterry's woman characters are just so opinionated. And I love that.

[wedgeantill]

12 o'clock in movies and tv shows:

Cinderella (1950)

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

Serendipity (2001)

Shrek 2 (2004)

How I Met Your Mother 5x18 Say Cheese (2005)

Stormbreaker (2006)

Moonlight 1x08 (2007)

A Christmas Carol (2009)

Cinderella (2021)

¡Garcia! 1x01 (2022)

[joyousjoyfuljoyness]

Update on the owner of "Boop" finding my painting on Reddit!

She got the print and loves it! WOOOO!

What happened:

Millie:

[serendipideee]

| i love being a black girl <3 |

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

[rsier]

[petermorwood]

Once there was a bookshop.

Its name was "Dark They Were And Golden Eyed", the title of a Ray Bradbury short story.

I'd seen it advertised in the back of my "Conan The Barbarian" comics, black-and-white UK reprints of the US originals which came out on the same day - Thursday, I think - as a two-hour first period history lesson (9AM-11AM).

So I bought my weekly Conan on the way to school as a pleasant back-of-the-class distraction from such A-Level delights as "Metternich and the Congress of Vienna" or "Bismarck and the origins of the Franco-Prussian War" or "Causes and Consequences of the French Revolution".

I was getting into fantasy at that time because British publishers were bringing it out like there was no tomorrow - Robert E. Howard "Conan" stories from Sphere, Clark Ashton Smith "Zothique" stories from Panther, and the Michael Moorcock book-of-the-month club from Mayflower.

Dark They Were was a sort of holy grail, because London wasn’t exactly round the corner or even a mere long train ride away as Dublin might have been, and my parents weren't willing to let me make a trip like that all alone. (I also suspect Dad had checked a map and found that Dark They Were was in the heart of Soho, a place with Other Kinds Of Bookshop.)

*****

I finally went to London after getting A-levels good enough for Uni, despite my History result not being what it might have been (no idea how that happened). :-P

Dad was right about the Other Kinds Of Bookshop, a couple of which I duly investigated and found to be educational, although not in the way intended. Even though the places I ate and drank and the books and records I bought on that same trip are long forgotten, I can still remember it.

Despite having at least my usual allowance of critical-faculty-blunting late teen hormones, the shops outweighed it with their air of furtive sleaze, like the carpet in a seedy bar that sticks to your shoes - except this was an all-body experience. They certainly filled me with desire, but that desire was for a long, hot shower.

So much for the main attraction of late-'70s Soho...

*****

Far more attractive was my discovery, just a short walk round the corner from DTW, of 58 Dean Street Records, which specialised in soundtrack albums.

I'd been buying soundtrack LPs for years, so what with DTW and 58, I was well laden on my way home, and none of those purchases needed hidden from the parents, either... :->

Despite that, Forever People in Bristol was an even more important SF bookshop, at least to me. For one thing it was easier to reach, less than an hour away when visiting an old school friend who at that time lived in Cardiff.

For another thing, I'd become a keen fan of fantasy anthologies, which were like samplers or tasting menus for different writers - you could call them selection boxes,and Irish / UK readers will know what I mean by that.

FP was where I found imports like Offutt's "Swords Against Darkness" series and DAW's "Year's Best Fantasy" series. I'd already got the first two in Carter's "Flashing Swords" series as UK imprints...

...so the instant I saw the US-import Number 5 I nabbed it.

A bit later, back in Belfast, I found a novel by one of those writers in Queen’s University Bookshop.

It was set in the same world as the short story and though the cover was, er, a less than accurate summation of the contents, those contents made for a fascinating read.

I met that writer twice, at SF conventions in 1985.

Then at a couple more in 1986.

After that came Boskone in 1987...

And the rest is history.

(Pedantic writer note: this has two typos. There's no apostrophe on Authors' - unless it's short for Authors Have A Wedding and I doubt that - and there's an extra O where I don't need it, a first but far from last instance of having my name misspelled in print...)

Happy soon-to-be-38th Anniversary, loved!

[dailyg3]

Daily G3 My Little Pony is: Serendipity! ♡

[haleyatwell]

KATE BECKINSALE as SARA THOMAS SERENDIPITY (2001) dir. Peter Chelsom

[mrbigpepperoninipples]

Bill’s handing the break up well

Bill with movies

Titanic

The Notebook

Wall-E

Lego Batman

Accidentally in love from the shriek 2 soundtrack

Serendipity

Lego Batman

Meme potential lol

[beary-good-finds]

⚜️ Beautiful drop cap at the start of Serendipity, written by Stephen Cosgrove and illustrated by Robin James, 1974 ⚜️

[serendipity-books]

Serendipity

[poisonder]

guilty of the crime of watching wwe. anyways my friends challenged each other to draw our dnd characters as wrestlers