there will be a fish

1. Zombie fic! I'm one of those folks firmly in the "everything is better with zombies" camp, so imagine my delight at running across these three ficlets. Especially because one involves Jeeves & Wooster, of all people, and another involves Holmes & Watson. My only regret is that they are not longer, but YAY ZOMBIES!

2. So apparently Lord Peter Wimsey kinda started life as an OC in unpublished fanfic. I find this hilarious. :D

3. Discovered: an online glossary of WWI slang. It's an Australian publication, so it skews toward that country's vocabulary, but there are lots of general/American/British terms as well. I've been amusing myself looking up bits of slang that Bertie Wooster uses, and comparing the meanings for words like "bung" and "old bean" and "biff." Also: WWI is apparently where "cooties" originally came from (see this page). Who knew?

4. I've been running into a lot of characters recently along the lines of this trope and this one, in such bizarrely different sources as the Temeraire series, Georgette Heyer's Devil's Cub, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion – even James Bond, and a little bit of Jeeves, weirdly enough. It's been making me think about how pretty much all of my favorite fictional characters run along these lines: burdened with an superfluity of principles and a shortage of self-interest. (They tend get really battered along the way.) The rest tend to be rogues, thieves, con artists, and the morally-ambiguous-but-good-hearted types. I wonder what this says about me.

5. Did you know that Mark Twain forbid his autobiography from being published until 100 years after his death? I sure didn't. But apparently this is the year, and it finally will be published. Isn't that cool? Talk about outrunning death...