And Narnia Fic Exchange is Live!

[rthstewart]

WAHOO!  Huge thanks to snacky for once again running a wonderful exchange.  There are 20 stories in the main collection!!
AND there are four stories in the Madness collection.  You can add to the Madness collection until author reveals next week!!  Come play with us!  You get lovely, enthusiastic feedback and it's just terrific.  The prompts are here.

I received a terrific story, The Night Before the Battle.  It's the Four with Caspian the night before the Telmarine battle and its a little gritty and very wonderfully insightful.  I really enjoyed it and am so happy with my mystery writer who so generously filled my prompt.

The other is an absolutely off the wall modern hangout chat and the convention/trope probably has some catchy title but it's basically queer, multi-media extravaganza and is hilarious and I love it.  Added to the chat

Having participated for a few years now (though barely the last 2), there are always certain theme that seem to come to the fore.  This year, there's lots of lovely queer content and women characters are featured prominently. 

I've got 2 stories in there.  I'll speak to them after the reveals.  I've done more fic writing in September than in the last 3 years combined.  I realize how I used to do it -- I didn't sleep and I didn't have nearly as much RL work.  I'm super behind but given the horrors of the last 10 days or so, frankly, writing fic has been better for me and I'm not going to worry about it.  I have the xover challenge next.  I'll see if I can be a little more moderate.  Seriously, I was updating 2K of additional story this morning 30 minutes before the archive opened.

Also, syrena_of_the_lake  wrote the amazing Stuff Remix, Things.  I"m so grateful to her.  She's done some wonderful things for me in the past and this was just one more incredible, generous gift.


I just posted on Twitter that in bad times (and they have been so awful this week), hope is a subversive act.  I may have found that again?  Maybe?  I am writing again and in creating, I find hope for myself and maybe others can find it too. I will try to sustain this. 

Comments

[yalumesse]

welp, there goes my attempt at getting my To Read list down to something manageable. Looking forward to finding out which is yours!

[rthstewart]

Ha ha, yeah, no luck now getting that pile down. It's so nice to be wallowing in fic again, reconnecting with people, writing, wanting to write, having ideas. This year's NFE has a lot of queer content -- so much so it's got its own tag. It's embarrassing to think that when I first did the NFE (maybe 2009?) I would have been side-eyeing it. I've grown up a lot.

[yalumesse]

You're not the only one, if that's comforting? I grew up without any queer representation at all and got annoyed with how few het ship fics there were in comparison. Still aren't.

btw if you want wallowing in fic, I'm doing a big Narnia re-read; first the books, then the movies, then all the best fanfic I've bookmarked (including yours). I have no idea how long it's going to take me to get through it all... but I've missed it. been too long.

[rthstewart]

Aww, that wallow sounds lovely.
I need to be careful in how I talk about queer rep in fan fic bc even now I'm still not into m/m and thinking about how I've talked about that in the past makes me wince bc it can sound phobic. Ugh. Personal growth. Sometimes it's the worst. But progress!
But truth is, m/m isn't my favorite flavor of delicious cake and never has been. What tends to actively bother me is that taken to extremes, it can write women, especially woc, out of the narrative. That does bother me.

[yalumesse]

It's a totally valid viewpoint, and I dislike how some parts of fandom, in their quest for equal representation, end up trying to stamp out any non-queer representation. And that sucks. M/M isn't my first go-to and probably never will be; I like het as much and probably more than slash in general, so I feel the same pressure, just not as heavily.

Personal growth feels like climbing this never-ending mountain of goals with an ever-rising sea of political correctness and peer pressure below. Still worth it, and important, but man is it tiring :(

tl;dr Het doesn't get enough attention anymore. Equal means equal dammit.

[autumnia]

I was trying to guess your stories based on the summary and word count but I've only had time to skim so far. :-)

Looking forward to reading them when I've got a bit more downtime but it's so great to see you writing (unlike me, no time, too many distractions and uninspired). I hope all these new lovely stories out there will give me the push I need to get back into writing. We all need a bit of escapism given the events going on in the world these days.

[rthstewart]

Fic is one way that online communities stay connected. It provides that framework for interaction. I've really missed it. Yes, you found one of mine already, duh. For the other just look for copious research notes. I had already had another idea for adding to the madness round 2? But oh god I really have to work and got nothing done last week and getting exercise in would be good too. I WROTE 13K IN ONE WEEK! Granted, that's the pace I used to keep up in 2009-2013 but then the DQSA was enacted, I got hit over the head a few too many times by emboldened Narnia wingnuts, and saw coming what would eventually become our current President. UGH.

Escapism is key. And beauty, love and wonder. You need it as a creator and those who you write for need it too. All in good time, friend, and I really need to come up and meet you sometime.

[sabrina]

I'm sitting here staring at that Stuff Remix, like, yes please give it to me!

This week has been so terrible, but I tend to agree that hope is subversive, and I love writing and creating as a way of finding it. I've been trying to do some of that myself. Good luck with it.

[rthstewart]

ARGH. I'm so glad you posted because it jogged my memory that you had a post about Mara that I wanted to comment on. I'll head over there in a moment. The thing that both Stuff and its Remix Things posit, the place they begin, is that Luke, whether in EU or sequel tril, is very isolated. There isn't anyone in his life to literally and figuratively slap him on the side of the head. Unless Mara is there. Mara is uniquely positioned because of her strength and her own history, to stop Luke's slide and wallowing and kick him around until he stands up on his own and fights back. She's just not going to permit the galaxy to go to hell and let Luke sit it out. She was enormous (and wasted) potential although I suppose the argument goes that if Mara had been there all along, we never would have gotten the Luke that needed so much repair.

(digression: It's frustrating personally to me bc I just don't see Luke's resigned passivity from both the EU and ST arising naturally from the character we saw in OT, but yet, here we are. I always saw a wasted potential was that Luke had personal and family connections, he had friends and lovers, he had a warm, engaging personality and was a leader. His connections with Han and Leia were what set him racing back to Bespin after all. Even in the first trench run, we see his leadership. And, once we had PT, it seemed that those connections were what would allow him to remake a Jedi Order that didn't try to grind out natural attachments, connections, and affection (this has always been a HUGE issue for me with Jedi Order -- how unnatural that expectation is).)

[sabrina]

A) I have in my Google Drive right now a fic titled 'how Mara could fix this mess', which is like a play on the whole 'how Zahn could fix this mess' from back in the day, and it's just a short character piece, and maybe I will finish it before the year is out, IDK, my fic writing this year has been abysmal. This is not the year for writing fic. But it is essentially hinging on that exact same notion, that yes - if Mara had been around - TLJ doesn't happen in the same way.

B) I can completely see this. I feel like there is possibly something to be said about the toxic ways that the Jedi Order directly before Luke handled relationships, and I can see this sort of detaching from relationships, and trying to re-create what was, rather than repairing the pieces and moving forward - and the pressure of doing that being a weight that doesn't allow Luke to draw on those strengths - if that makes sense?

Which, this also pulls into my frustration with the New Jedi Order series as a whole - because (so, side note, I kinda ended up taking a break from fandom from like 2002-2012 so I read the NJO back in like 2013-2014 just in one big run through and promptly fell in love with Anakin Solo) it felt like a lot of the same personality traits that could have made Luke a really strong leader, were present in Anakin Solo - and Anakin had the distance removed and the lack of attachment to people like Ben Kenobi, for instance, to potentially move forward and do something with it. But of course he sacrifices himself - but then this has ripple effects from there on out, because to me it felt like neither Jaina nor Jacen had the characteristics needed to move the Jedi Order further into the future, and so that falls back to Luke in the rest of NJO, and ... I may be rambling at this point. I have a lot of Star Wars thoughts, generally speaking.

The Tl;dr version is that Luke absolutely has the characteristics to get away from that toxic PT Jedi Order emotional set up, but I can see why there might be pressures he would feel that might not allow him to thoroughly do it - but in either canon, I wish Luke were more of a bridge between the past and the future Jedi Order, and that someone in the next gen was allowed to really move forward like that (Rey, may be able to? I noted after TFA that in some ways she felt like an interesting combo of Anakin and Jaina, and thus... that's a possibility still).

[rthstewart]

OK, more later. BUT 'how Mara could fix this mess', which is like a play on the whole 'how Zahn could fix this mess' from back in the day

THAT'S GRAND ADMIRAL SEAN'S FIC. He first posted it on RASSM. He would DIE if he knew we were discussing it now. I saw him back at Origin in June. We sang old CJ filks. That's was Luci's fault. I'm going to have to find contact info for him and send him this whole thread. OK. mountains of RL bearing down on me now. And yeah, writing has been awful, for me since pretty much 2016 but even before that. I've written more in the last month than in the last 2-3 years. I also left fandom in 2001 and didn't come back unil 2009. Then kinda retreated in the face of the growing strength and vigor of emboldened Narnia christian wingnuts fen. And only have just begun to pull myself together. OK, more about your Mara ideas later... really gtg