something queer going on

No one ever said they had to be consecutive days, right?

Day 2: Something new! (i.e. a new fanwork of mine)

Since I am not prolific, I'm interpreting "new" as "written within the last year."

Buttons and Bayonets: A Small History of the Great War (5505 words) by kindkit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Mervyn Bunter/Peter Wimsey
Additional Tags: World War I, War, Shell Shock
Summary: Peter and Bunter, surviving the war together.

This was my 2013 Yuletide story. lilliburlero had offered some really interesting prompts: she mentioned a WWI-era story (how could I resist that?) and also said that she was interested in the material details of the books, like clothes etc. The latter gave this story its structure: the sections are organized around physical objects. My original title was "A History of the Great War in Ten Objects," but then I revised a section to feature letters, and since there were multiple letters it threw off my count, plus I got hung up on whether letters are objects in the same way that a button or a pen is an object, and thus a new title happened.

The structure allowed me to use multiple narrative voices, which I was pleased about; the primary voice is Lord Peter's but I like the way it's sometimes interrupted, muted, or challenged. That was important to me because a Peter/Bunter story can never not be, to some degree, about power. There's a huge power imbalance between them, which is complicated--increased in one way because Peter is Bunter's commanding officer, lessened I think in others--by the war. Playing with narrative voice a bit let me, I hope, consider issues of power in a way that wouldn't have been possible if the only POV had been Peter's.

Peter/Bunter is not every Wimsey fan's cup of tea, but I'll note that there's nothing in the story that necessarily contradicts later canon. (Peter/Bunter fans, of course, are at liberty to make their own interpretations.)

I'm making my third attempt to read Dorothy L. Sayers's The Five Red Herrings, which is not only by far the weakest of the Wimsey novels but is damn near unreadable. If I have to struggle through another chapter of railways timetables and missing bicycles, I swear I'm going to invent a time machine just so I can go back to 1930 and hit Sayers with a stick.

It does, however, contain this gem of 24-karat WTF-ery from Bunter (cut because it relates to a clue):

( Bunter's revelation )