One of the best things about organising an archive, is that we can create a host of specialist lists of titles, dividing them up into anything from stories covering specific holidays to cross-overs to episode tags.
Today’s post falls into two parts. First, our list of stories themed around Hallowe’en, with all its ghostly and spooky happenings:
And second, stories linked to that weird, devilishly bizarre episode, A Scarecrow at Hackett’s. We’ve always thought that episode was the Lancer writers’ nod to Hallowe’en, and that whatever else he was, Absolom Weir, was not your normal conman…
AUTHORS ~ we archive completed stories only ~ please note and follow the advice on formatting stories in the submissions guidance ~ please ensure we have your most up-to-date email address
The Hacienda at Rancho San Carlos – some good news!
You might remember that a couple of months ago we issued a Mid-Month Memo on the hacienda at Rancho San Carlos (here), in which we mentioned the rumour that the house had been damaged/destroyed during the recent Californian wildfires.
We’re delighted to tell you that an employee of the Santa Lucia Preserve, which encompasses the old rancho, tells us that the hacienda wasn’t affected by the wildfires. The house suffered a little collision damage recently to the porte-cochere at the front, but is otherwise in very good shape and in constant use with dinner served nightly, guests in residence, and events held weekly. You can follow the Preserve on Facebook or Instagram for current-day photos, including a Lancer-themed post from last month.
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Stories marked with *** are older stories that we’ve just added to the Gateway archives. A final check of the old Peter Brown site revealed several stories that were listed on the Titles page, but not on the relevant author’s page, and so got missed on the transfer across. They’ve been added now – so enjoy them!
Perhaps the most iconic thing in Hollywood westerns, other than the cows themselves, is the six-gun sported by the hero. His fast draw and unerring aim puts paid to rattlers, rustlers and bad guys alike. The western wouldn’t *be* a western without firearms, without the lightning fast draw, and the shoot-out on the streets of a town where dust and tumbleweed swirl in and out of camera shot.
See? Iconic.
Now then, while perhaps many of the writers of Lancer stories are familiar with guns, not everyone is. For those of us in countries where gun carrying isn’t common or legal, all we have to carry us through is what we see on TV and film. And – whisper this softly – Hollywood often gets it wrong, sacrificing history in the cause of action-filled story telling.
That is where Google is our friend. There are many sources describing the common firearms carried in the American west of that golden age of, say, 1865 – 1890, from Wiki to a host of specialist websites focused solely on Western history. One that I’ve found to be very useful is a You Tuber called Ian McCollum who hosts a channel, with more than 2 million followers, called Forgotten Weapons.
Ian is knowledgeable, erudite and engaging. He typically gives a gun’s history, then takes it apart and rebuilds it, all the while explaining how it worked, how and why it was effective, what its good (and even great) points are, what its faults and failures are etc. Even I can watch him and not feel overwhelmed with detail, or so bored my eyes glaze over. He’s very watchable.
Follow this link to see an entire section of 65 videos devoted to guns from the Old West. Whatever gun you have Scott and Johnny carry, pistol or rifle, it is likely to appear here on the list and in 10 – 15 minutes you can learn a great deal about it. Probably far more about it, in fact, than you will ever use in a story, but if it increases your confidence in writing a gunfighting scene or you want to be assured that what you write isn’t complete Hollywood-inspired rubbish, then I’d say that it’s a good investment of your time!
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Any other resources people think we should link to?
AUTHORS ~ we archive completed stories only ~ please note and follow the advice on formatting stories in the submissions guidance ~ please ensure we have your most up-to-date email address
Stories marked with *** are older stories that we’ve just added to the Gateway archives. A final check of the old Peter Brown site revealed several stories that were listed on the Titles page, but not on the relevant author’s page, and so got missed on the transfer across. They’ve been added now – so enjoy them!
AUTHORS ~ we archive completed stories only ~ please note and follow the advice on formatting stories in the submissions guidance ~ please ensure we have your most up-to-date email address
Sorry for the delay today – RL overtook us a bit! Enjoy the latest stories to be archived!
A few weeks ago we announced the creation of a new Specialist Collections page, to list the titles of stories that cover the lives of our Lancer men before they meet at the hacienda.
Thank you, everyone who emailed us with suggestions. Thing is, are there more?! Do take a few minutes to look at the new page, and if you can suggest stories that we should add to it, please let us know, either by commenting on this update or by emailing us at lancerloversarchive@gmail.com or lancerfanfictionarchive@gmail.com.
Have you ever wondered about the enormous house used as the hacienda in Lancer? Many of you probably know that it wasn’t just a backdrop on a film lot somewhere, but a real house near Carmel. Handily placed for the film industry, actually.
While only the pilot episode was actually filmed on location, the house continued to be used throughout the series as background to the stories, although by that time, portions of it had been reproduced as a set on a sound lot for ease of filming.
The real house, the Rancho San Carlos, was built in the 1920s. It was then a place for the glitterati to have nice weekends in the country, and latterly was (still is?) the centrepiece of the St Lucia Conservancy. The Conservancy appears to hold the dual aims of preserving the country around the Rancho as a wildlife habitat and reserve, and allowing up-scale housing development which appears to be managed to be less ecologically invasive than is usual. Houses have been built around the older ranch house, which at one time served as a sort of ‘club house’ for the community. The Conservancy website has a short history of the house here: The History of the Rancho San Carlos which mentions Lancer and has a nice picture of the brothers.
It’s rumoured that the house was destroyed during the Californian wildfires of late 2018, but the Conservancy’s website appears current and makes no mention of the house’s fate. If anyone has up to date news on whether or not the house is still standing (or perhaps has been restored), could you let us know?
Edited on 2 September 2021 to add: we’ve recently heard from an employee at the Preserve, who tells us the house was undamaged by the wildfires and is still in constant use, with with dinner served nightly, guests in residence, and events held weekly. You can follow the Preserve onFacebookorInstagramfor current-day photos, including a Lancer-themed post from August 2021.
Research by Lancer fans
Geraldine visited the ranch some years ago, took a wealth of photos, and subsequently carried out a lot of research on the house and the interiors. This led to some great information being collated on everything from the provenance of the dining room chairs to a possible location for the ranch to floorplans for the house. This is fascinating stuff!
An exact ‘fix’ on the ranch’s location isn’t possible, of course, but hasn’t stopped fans from speculating. As well as the work Geraldine did, Ros Hutchison (Ros) and Linda Borchers (Linda B (Kona)) have shared the research that led them to a location for the Lancer ranch that fits with real old towns, railroads and other features. Click on this link to read Ros and Linda’s research.
Why not take a few minutes to explore the links and the research carried out by your fellow fans? Who knows – it might inspire more stories!!
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Huge thanks to Geraldine, Ros and Linda for their generosity in sharing their work. You’re all stars, ladies!
AUTHORS ~ we archive completed stories only ~ please note and follow the advice on formatting stories in the submissions guidance ~ please ensure we have your most up-to-date email address
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A Moment to Take Stock
In October 2020, we finished the rollout of a new feature to the Gateway: we added a function that allows direct comments on stories.
We never had that on either the Peter Brown site or the old LancerLovers as they were, well, very old and creaky. They just didn’t have that level of functionality. With the Gateway, then, for the first time outside the huge multifandom sites, Lancer authors have the chance to get feedback even on older stories (and in some cases, some very old stories!), and readers can tell writers just how much the stories mean to them.
It isn’t a perfect system. On Fanfiction-dot-net, for example, if you leave a comment on an author’s story, the site is big enough and sophisticated enough to send an automated email directly to the writer to tell them a comment is there. We can’t manage that. Instead, Sandy or I must manually approve each comment, then send it on to the author to see and respond to if they wish to. And then approve each reply…
That isn’t a complaint, by the way! It’s one of the delights of managing the Lancer Gateway, that we can see, on a daily basis, just how much the stories we link to on LancerFanFiction (the new Peter Brown) and LancerLovers are loved by you, the readers. It’s rather thrilling, to be honest, when we look at the sites and start adding up the numbers.
So I thought I’d share those numbers with you. Starting from the first moment we allowed comments to be made until yesterday (26 June), this is the total number of comments the stories on both sites have received — not including stories we link to that are held on other archives, of course:
3,747
When I came up with the idea of the Gateway, it was to give readers a one-stop portal through to as many stories as we could manage to find. That seemed revolutionary enough, to be honest! But with this extra bit of functionality, we’ve moved beyond just being a place to find stories, to a place where authors and readers talk to each other. Not about new stories posted as each chapter is written, because that’s what the .io and Facebook groups are for, but about completed stories, and often about older stories, some of them wonderful classics, being given a new lease of life. Writers can be assured that older stories never die—rather like Lancer itself, if you think about it!
I don’t know about you, but I’m awed by that. And so very, very proud.
Well done all of you who support the authors this way. You can’t know how happy it makes an author feel, to know someone has enjoyed their stories. Keep it up!
Anna (Starry Diadem)
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Help Needed
A few days ago one of our readers, Carolyn, suggested we create a new Special Collection of stories to cover the period before Scott and Johnny came home — what we’re calling the ‘Pre-Lancer’ period. We thought that was a pretty good idea, so what we’re looking for is suggestions to help us compile lists of stories about Johnny as Madrid, Scott before he came west, and Murdoch’s life after moving to the USA from Scotland. In addition, we’ll put in a section of stories that might cover both the family’s pre-Lancer time as well as events that happen after they meet (that is, stories that range across many years or have a lot of backstory in them).
If you have a story you’d like to suggest to go on the new page, please respond to this post or email us using the email addresses below.
The authors listed with the external links are not archived here. Their author pages are a simple list of their Lancer stories for the reader’s convenience.
These figures don’t cover visitors to the Gateway who then go on to view externally hosted stories (those on FFN or AO3, or an author’s personal website etc).
As of today, we have archived or linked to the Gateway 228 authors and 3305 stories.
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Lancer Gateway Team 27 June 2021
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Contact us about this update by leaving a comment below the post.
AUTHORS ~ we archive completed stories only ~ please note and follow the advice on formatting stories in the submissions guidance ~ please ensure we have your most up-to-date email address
A Year of Change and Achievement
On 23 May 2020 disaster struck our fandom when the software for the old lancerlovers site was corrupted beyond repair. On 25 May 2020, we created the new LancerLovers website on WordPress. Since then we’ve: – transferred 158 authors and 2,398 stories from the old LancerLovers archive to the new one, with the help of an archive team which included Ronnie Fish, Margaret Pollitt, and Margaret Smith – worked with Karen on supporting the old Peter Brown site by transferring 29 authors and 365 stories to a new site on WordPress, Lancer FanFiction – created the Lancer Fiction Gateway in September 2020, making it the portal for Lancer fans to find stories to read wherever those stories are archived on the internet. The Gateway, which isn’t in itself an archive, links through to LancerLovers, Lancer FanFiction, and to several multi-fandom archives (such as fanfiction.net and Archive Of Our Own). Although, sadly, we lost links to 133 stories from 4 authors who didn’t want us to list their work on the Gateway, as of today we currently have access to 227 authors and 3292 stories.
The authors listed with the external links are not archived here. Their author pages are a simple list of their Lancer stories for the reader’s convenience.
These figures don’t cover visitors to the Gateway who then go on to view externally hosted stories (those on FFN or AO3 etc). Overall, numbers continue to rise steadily.
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Lancer Gateway Team May 2021
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Contact us about this update by leaving a comment below the post.
“See, the thing about John Madrid? He’s an ace high shootist. He’s the kinda man who don’t care a continental ’bout facing up to them road agents who fancy they got the bulge on him when they’s facin’ him three varmints to one, and that don’t change none ’cause these days he’s callin’ hisself a Lancer. So when them three, four desperados figured they could call Scott Lancer a juniper and crowd him a might, they didn’t reckon on ol’ Scott not only bein’ a curly wolf on his own account — ’cos he got a scad o’ sand, that’s fer sure — but that Johnny, seein’ that this was a real hair in the butter sorta day, had Scott’s back. Sure, he sat back and let Scott play with ’em a mite, seein’ as how Scott was real good at sloggin’ and he was havin’ hisself a real hog killin’ time, but when Johnny sees one of them hornswogglin’ scalawags fixin’ to brace his brother and pull a black-eyed susan on him, Johnny looks blue at them and he wades right in….”
Clear as mud, eh?
One of the things a writer aims to do is create a world for the reader to immerse themselves in. After all, we don’t live in the 19th century wild West these days. We have to create that on the page. So a good writer thinks about how to evoke the world’s history, geography, languages, religions, economy and government; its weather, its societies, its peoples; its plants, its animals … and every other little detail of what makes that world feel real.
Most of the time, you don’t need but a tiny fraction of it to show the reader where they are and how everything fits together. A writer picks out some of these little details and lets them seep through naturally into the story, lets them sink into the background. Do it well, and you’ll bring the West to life.
One great way of doing this, is through how the characters speak and the language they use. You know Scott wouldn’t talk like that (points upwards), and nor would Murdoch: one’s from the East with his own dialect, and the other’s a middle class Scot, and both are well-educated. They’ll sound very different. Johnny might have some of this language, but perhaps not in such an exaggerated form. He hasn’t had the education of his father and brother, and will speak less formally than either.
But that little speech? I can see Jelly talking like that, in the vernacular of the country, where a unique collection of colourful idioms and phrases created a language that had a passing resemblance to English – if you had a dictionary and translator handy!
I wouldn’t write Jelly in quite this exaggerated fashion, but I certainly would sprinkle his speeches with some of those phrases, the same way I’d keep Scott’s voice educated and more formal, and let some of Murdoch’s lowland Scots seep through into his vocabulary.
To help with that, our Resources section here has a collection of 8 different glossaries of the words and terms used by cowboys in the west. If you’re a writer of western stories, or a reader who loves words and learning new ones, then take a look at the glossaries and enjoy the wonderful, imaginative, creative world of slang. It really is colourful and fun!
Oh, and a dictionary of the phrases I used at the beginning? Here you are:
ace high – first class black-eyed susan – a six-gun. brace – confront with aggression curly wolf – real tough, dangerous man don’t care a continental – don’t give a damn got the bulge – have the advantage hair in the butter – a delicate situation hog-killin’ time – a real good time hornswoggle – cheat juniper – derogatory term for an easterner or novice cowhand look blue at – to look with displeasure or dissatisfaction road agent – a robber, bandit, desperado sand – guts, courage, toughness scad – large quantities, plenty, an abundance scalawag, scallywag – a mean, rotten, worthless, untrustworthy person slog – a blow, a fight with the fists
AUTHORS ~ we archive completed stories only ~ please note and follow the advice on formatting stories in the submissions guidance ~ please ensure we have your most up-to-date email address
As of today, the Lancer Gateway offers you links to 3,269 stories by 225 authors.
The authors listed with the external links are not archived here. Their author pages are a simple list of their Lancer stories for the reader’s convenience.
