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BAND OF BROTHERS (2001)

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clegan as that one scene in atonement (but its just an excuse to draw teary bucky)

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1ST MOTAVERSARY Week 6 • Black & White

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Believe!

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MASTERS OF THE AIR as told through stills (03/∞)

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Happy National Doughnut Day, everyone!

First started in Chicago in 1938 as a way to fundraise for the Salvation Army, who'd started the practice of serving donuts overseas during World War One, the day also became a day to celebrate the hard work of the Salvation Army Lassies who went overseas to provide comfort, coffee, and a little bit of home. The Red Cross took up this work during World War Two with their canteens and Clubmobile service, and continued through Korea and Vietnam, where so called "Donut Dollies" were a regular feature in their blue uniforms even though the actual donuts had fallen out of fashion.

And this is as good at time as any to share a cool vintage find from a couple of months ago! I've been looking for this LIFE magazine (February 28th, 1944) for ages and spotted it out in the wild when I was in Minnesota.

If you'd like to read more about the Red Cross Clubmobile service in World War Two specifically, I have a reading list here.

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Hello, Blind Dates Fest fans!

Hopefully everyone's summer is off to a fabulous start and we all have some rest and relaxation planned.

A couple of months ago we all came up with some great and wonderful new characters and had a lot of fun introducing them to the world. (You can re-read all of this year's festival submissions here!)

But now summer's happening, and it's a great time to send them on another adventure - maybe with a friend?

Enter Blind Dates: Friendship Fiesta!

Write a piece using an original character and their canon friend, or celebrate your writing friends by writing a crossover piece for your OC and a friend's OC! Do your friends write for different fandoms? No problem! Obviously OCs need vacation plans, too - write an AU where they're in the same universe.

The characters you use for this fest do not need to be previous Blind Dates entries (although it would obviously be great if they were.) This is a small and informal challenge to give us something to work on during the month of June!

You may publish your finished piece on the site of your choice and provide a link to the blind-dates-fest blog. If the post is here on Tumblr, tag us in it so we can see it! You can look through the tag #fest submission here on this blog to get an idea of how these posts are usually formatted. (And please, this fest is pro read-more. Please use one if you are publishing here on tumblr.)

What is Blind Dates, anyway? Blind Dates is a festival/challenge that takes place during February and celebrates creating and writing original characters! Blind Dates: Friendship Fiesta is an additional summertime event encouraging writers to expand horizons for thier original character. The guiding principle is to do something new, and possibly challenging, and to serve as writing practice. It can also be a low-stakes excuse to try out a new character in a fandom you don’t usually work in in a small and manageable way.

Do I need to sign up? Nope! This fest is designed to be low-stakes and informal. There’s no penalty for thinking this was a great idea a few months ago and not having time or energy now.

You can read more at our Festival FAQ.

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The promised (threatened?) Jack Kidd fic! A small moment of quiet.

With apologies to @noneedtoamputate, who gave me Phoebe months and months ago and I never did anything with her.

He saw the shadow on his desk before he heard her approach, and looked up to see her leaning in the doorway, half-smiling and all mischief. "Don't make me say it."

The joke had been old and tired well before he'd arrived at Thorpe Abbotts, but was it his fault that someone had made him Air Executive? All work and no play makes Jack…"I have reports to finish."

Her arms were crossed and she was not moving. "You need to eat sometime, Jack. Come out with me."

It was true enough, but he knew what his options were at this hour. "Bar peanuts in the officers club isn't a meal."

"I'm sure I could find someone to make you a sandwich," she replied, undeterred. "I've been told I'm very persuasive." He half-smiled at that - persuasive wasn't even close to the word. A force of nature, more like. She simply breezed into rooms and people found themselves doing what she asked - even him. "A half an hour in a chair that isn't this one, Jack. One half of one hour. For the sake of your back and your shoulders, if nothing else."

He sat back slowly in his chair as if he were considering. "Just my back and my shoulders?"

She shrugged. "Well, a girl likes to be held once in a while, that'd be nice, too."

"And danced with?"

"Only if it doesn't interfere with eating that sandwich and remembering you're a human being and not a machine." A pause. "And if you don't get out of that chair in the next thirty seconds, I'm going to come and sit on you, Jack Kidd."

Half a smile curled at his mouth. "Maybe that's what I'm hoping for."

It did not take more than a moment before she had made good on her threat - crossed the room and moved him back from his desk and installed herself on his lap, arms looped around his shoulders, a bodily wall between him and the work he'd been doing. Uniform jacket just so, nothing out of place except where she was seated. He caught a faint whiff of her soap, the warmth of her jacket.

"Phoebe."

"Jack."

He loved the weight of her on his body, the gentle pressure to stay in this moment and not worry about the next. Not worry about tomorrow, or the route they would fly, or the planes they would lose, or the men that would die, or the replacements they would need to request. Only Phoebe - straight-forward, force of nature Phoebe, with oceans in her eyes.

"And what if I don't…want to share you with the officer's club?" he asked, voice quiet, all too aware of the tide of his breathing around the coasts of her collar, her throat. "What if I just want you here? Where it's quiet? For thirty minutes." The officer's club would be loud, and full of music, and replacement pilots trying to sound like they'd flown a hundred missions, and other, stupider replacement pilots trying to see how far their luck would go with Sergeant Kent and her ocean-blue eyes. Someone would ask her to play the piano, and she would say yes, and she would be theirs for the taking, not his.

It was not widely known they were a couple - Jack did not care to have everyone knowing his business, and she was much the same - and the kind of demonstrative posturing that would have come from stealing her away from the piano or glowering at her admirers did not come naturally to him. (She would say that it did, but that he saved it for things that really mattered.) She would turn them away - she always did.

"The reader will please observe a distinct lack of sandwiches, or eating."

"I could be eating," he murmured into the crook of her neck, nose tracing the line of her jaw as his arms wrapped around her a little more.

"Jack." She was neither scandalized nor surprised by the suggestion, merely warning him off.

He had said it with some jest in mind, though he would have committed if she'd been agreeable. "Five minutes," he said instead, not quite all the way to begging, like a boy who does not want to remove himself from the warmth of his bed. "Five minutes of this, and then I'll go eat your damn sandwich."

"Fine." She pulled him closer, fingers gentle in his hair, and he wrapped his own arms closer around her body and pressed in tight. "We're not going to win the war by you burning yourself to a cinder."

They were fine words for a woman who'd watched two commanding officers do just that - Huglin with his ulcers and Harding with his gallstones, bound to their desks and their duty until pain and circumstance had finally forced them away. But he, Jack Kidd, was still here, though he was ten pounds lighter, and not quite yet consumed by the flames. "I could say the same thing about you."

"You're not coming to sit on me and tell me to eat dinner."

"I can't ever catch you to do it." The laughter in her chest made him smile. "Has it been five minutes?"

"Say one. You have four more."

Agreement buzzed in his throat, and he focused again on his breathing, on the smell of her and the feel of her body underneath his hands, the way her cheek was pressed to his forehead. He was thinking now in earnest about the other kind of eating, the color of her undergarments and the feel of her thighs, but it was abstracted, somehow, and did not excite. Five minutes was hardly enough time for that. This would be enough for him. Her hand was gentle in his hair, and he wondered, for a moment, if he would take such comfort in this after the war, when he was not at a desk with plans for battle in front of him and she was not wearing a rank badge, when neither of them had anywhere to be but where they were.

The idea was strange to him - after the war. A place he'd only heard spoken of and could not look for yet. I've been here too long, he thought to himself silently, and aloud said, moving his legs a little, "Why don't we go find that sandwich?"

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I rewatched The Boys in the Boat and Masters of the Air this weekend, so naturally, there's a crossover.

There was always something magical about ascending the shell house stairs - an element of trespass, reserved for greater mortals than the ones on the floors below. The realm of the coach and occasionally the coxswain, where strategy was decided and college careers were made and lost.

For Cord Callaway, however, it was simply her father's office. "I brought sandwiches," she said, wedging the door open with an elbow without the necessity of a knock. "Ham, tomato and cheese, and some of the salami from that deli downtown that Coach said he liked last time. And there's fresh coffee downstairs, too, when you want it." The tray went down on in the middle of the large table where they had congregated, hair mussed, shirtsleeves out, hats on the tree by the door - a far cry from the greater mortals imagined downstairs. Just four hungry coaches trying to decide on who to keep and who to cut from this year's starting eight.

"Food of the gods, Miss Callaway, you are a wonder," Becker said with relish, reaching over the table and their sheaves of notes to take a wedge of sandwich, lettuce shreds trailing over his time trials. "What would we do without you?"

"Starve, probably," Red Bowman said dryly, reaching for his own.

"Or at least eat less," Wilson Callaway said, altogether more reasonable as he took a sandwich and lightly kissed his daughter's cheek. "Thank you, dear."

She watched with hard-won satisfaction as the team of men dug into the dinner, chewing contentedly, and took a glance at the chalkboard, still blank. "You getting anywhere?" she asked lightly, removing her hands in the pockets of her sweater, an old varsity cardigan of her father's, so she might cross them against the evening chill in the upper floor of the boathouse.

"It's a tough field, like they always are." Harding turned to look from the board to the young woman surveying it with crossed arms, and something seemed to dawn in his blue eyes. "Who do you like, Miss Callaway? You've been out here all week, I'm sure you've got some thoughts."

The room seemed to freeze a moment. Cord paused, looking for a moment at her father to see if she really had permission to give her lowly opinion to the head coach while Red and Becker shifted visibly in their seats. "Now, Chick, what kind of a question is -"

"No, no, Red, I want her opinion. She's been watching teams long enough to have seen as many good boats as she has bad ones," Harding said with a serious look. "She'd be out there herself if I could put up a women's team. I trust her to give us an honest answer - not some nonsense about who looks cute." He looked back up at Cordelia. "Well?"

Cord looked at the board again, taking a breath and composing her thoughts and trying not to be deluged, as Coach had charged her, by the comments about who Phoebe and Mae and the rest had thought were cute. "Cleven's got to be one," she said, straight off. "Be a fool not to pick him, he works well with everyone. DeMarco, probably, and the - the tall one with the red hair. Kitt?"

"Kidd," Harding filled in with ease.

Cord nodded. "Him, yes, he's got focus." The faces she'd been watching all week were flickering in her mind like practice film, bits and starts from the beginnings of the punishing practices, and the ends. What her father and the others saw out on the river was already known to them, documented in pencil in their books and stopwatch takings. She had only the boys themselves and how they moved with their fellows. And that was important, too - a boy who was brash on shore might not be a team player when the boat was out, and one quiet and reserved might prove a better oarsman. "Blakely, maybe, although I'd put him up front rather than the engine."

"How do you like Egan?" Harding's gaze was direct and serious, a professional seeking advice from another professional.

"Egan?" She repeated the name in bald surprise. That was one of the boys that the girls on shore had liked an awful lot, but she wasn't sure he had a chance for the team. Had he been quick enough to take Harding's instructions as he had been to notice the watching girls? "He's…tall. And strong, I suppose." I know he likes to smile and make jokes - saw enough of that, too.

"Be a good pick for the stroke seat, I think," Harding said aloud. "Your father and I were talking about it earlier. Seems to work all right with most of them." He watched her carefully. "But you don't agree."

Cord tried her best to master her face and remember her manners. "He pulls well enough on his own, but he - he doesn't follow the cox. Doesn't seem to follow anyone at all," she added, and almost surprised herself with how bitter she sounded.

"He was helping the other boys in between sets - coaching them." Her father's advice was calm and collected. "You wouldn't have seen that, Cord. Put him at stroke, Neil. I think he'll surprise us. He wants what's best for them all. He'll follow when he knows he can respect what's being asked of him - what he knows will work." Her father smiled at her, somehow still pleased that his daughter had spoken with such authority. "I think we'll have that coffee now, Cord, and then you should go home. No sense in you staying up all night, too."

She nodded, going back downstairs to retrieve the large heavy coffee pot and bring that heavenward, too. The chalkboard was being filled in, with Egan at the stroke. I hope they've got an idea for who to cox, she thought silently to herself, setting down the coffee wordlessly and disappearing back down below. That boat will need a strong hand running it.

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Postcards from Thorpe Abbotts — 7 May 2025

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Four months ago, I said that I was hoping to write a multichapter that'd focus on Lottie. At that point in time, I was convinced that it'd be a fill-in-the-gaps. Just a change in perspective. I thought the story I had already told in the earth is run by mothers would remain a constant throughout: something to fall back on, with this new fic just expanding that world even more.

I was very much mistaken. Because characters don't exist in a vacuum. Characters, if given enough space to do so, are going to grow in ways you never imagined.

And I gave Lot that space. I gave her a chance to grow again. To mature, in a way, and become her best self. The details of her story no longer match the series I already wrote. Things that were keystones before now are loose pebbles at best. I am learning her anew. Getting to know her better, just like I got to know Darlene better when I put her in that MotA-verse.

Yeah, it's gonna be a while before her story's out now. It's gonna take some time. But I know I couldn't tell it any other way, and I hope that you'll love her once she arrives again. Please take this as a sign to give your story and your characters the space they need. No matter how long it takes. You can wait until that sprouting seed's a flower. Promise.

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