rthstewart | Meme see, Meme do

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Meme see, Meme do

Really bad week. I've been dealing with babysitting and cooking for many, many children not my own through 4 days of snow-related school cancellations and power outages and I'm very much understanding that the Donner Party probably turned cannibal and ate their young first. We've lost power, again, and have been camping out either in cold dark houses or in light, overly warm houses filled with children I am babysitting while the parents are all at work. Oh, and the $20 ice cream cake for the kid's birthday tomorrow melted. So, I've been alternating on the Blackberry between increasing frantic work emails coupled with a growing panic that maybe things are repeating and I did something wrong in the latest chapter of AW. Again. So, I'm trying not to cry or angst, because really, I'm just being stupidly insecure.

Also we had 30 enormous donuts that were supposed to go for the class party (canceled due to snow) and I never want to see another glazed donut again, ever. Or Mac and Cheese and hot dogs. On the plus side, as workers crawled home in the a nightmare of ice, snow, and gridlock this week, I was at home babysitting 6 children ages 12 and under and did not have to 1) sit in my car for 8 hours trying to go 10 miles; 2) get stuck and run out of gas in a snowstorm; 3) park the car and walk home as many did, then have to find the car the next day after it was towed; or 4) give up and sleep in a gas station or check into a motel where you pay by the hour.

I'm still not King but I do have Power as of this morning. So, I'm now in my own house, with own firewall, with light and heat and I spent 4 hours actually doing writing work that pays and cursing junior staff who don't understand how to redline documents.

And now I have fallen to the meme-side and I lovingly blame the f-list, including

snacky

metonomia

lady_songsmith

anastigmatfic and

animus_wyrmis who have been circulating these memes. And then Ana went and posted a fabulous one involving Glendon, Edmund, and a tree, and now I just HAVE to play along because I have a BAD RL WEEK and FIC ANGST.

So, these are the memes:

Ask me a fandom-related question in the comments. This can be fandom specific, general, or about fandom/lj stuff/fic writing/etc. in general. Questions can be as wacky as you want. Ask me about tv shows, characters, fanfic in general, fandom issues/meta, anything about any of my stories specifically.

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, a short excerpt, or something else that I want readers to know.

Name a character and I will tell you:

a) a fact about them from my personal canon
b) a reason he/she sucks
c) a reason he/she is amazing
d) a thing that I'd like to see happen to them
e) someone that I can't ship that character with

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

My condolences for the extreme babysitting of this past week. I am surprised that having to feed so many, you have not decided to stage a protest by turning into Cook and making stewed intestines.

As for AW, really, you have nothing to worry about. NOTHING. Your one dozen (an increase from the days of 5) adoring fans still clamor for more fic despite the reviews you've gotten. I think in general, readership has been down in the fandom, whether it is a good story or not.

I'm still not King but I do have Power as of this morning.

But why a King? Why not Queen? Can it not be a matriarchal society instead?

And I'm going to go with Meme #3 and ask for info about Master Roblang the Dwarf. :-)

Master Roblang:

a) a fact about them from my personal canon
b) a reason he/she sucks
c) a reason he/she is amazing
d) a thing that I'd like to see happen to them
e) someone that I can't ship that character with

In my typical make it up as we go along, how I envisioned him with the title of Arms Master is not especially accurate anymore. He is Mrs. Furner's brother and he was part of the resistance Triumvirate of the General and Leszi that goes back decades in Jadis' reign. If the General is the strategist and Leszi the weapons specialist, Roblang is the oil in the gears and the oil poured over troubled waters. He sucks because he's really not especially true to the stereotype of his kind -- he's not mechanically inclined, unlike every other Dwarf, and feels that insecurity. It also sucks because he really wishes he had a canine's nose or feline's sensitivity and he envies them that. He's Army through and through, a detail oriented sort of the Staff Sergeant and does a lot of the unglamorous work. And because he's detail oriented, and has to deal with all those different Narnian personalities, he's really an expert at it. Not a scholar, exactly, but when you've been in hiding in caves from the Witch for decades with all this fractious bunch, he's learned how to communicate and how to avoid trouble.

I'd love to write of the day that he and Leszi realize that the General has been captured by the Witch and turned to stone.

And I don't ship him with ANYONE. Just. Can't.

Well... I wasn't expecting the shipping at all! :-)

But how interesting that he's related to Mrs. Furner! Even if he's not as skillful as the other Dwarfs, he does have other wonderful talents. I would think knowing how to deal effectively and politely with other Narnians is a skill that's worth even more than making things in the smithy.

(And you are most welcome about the research emails. I'm happy to have helped!)

I really loved It's the Same Story the Crow Told Me: you did such a great job with Susan in that, alone and undercover in a completely alien environment. Forced to be something she'd never wanted to be--and yet she's so good at it! And the climax, with her reunion with her siblings, all unexpectedly, well, that was just a masterful piece of plotting, full of emotion without being shmoopy. Great job!

When one thinks of a Pevensie going deep under cover in order to infiltrate the smuggler's ring, the logical person would be Lucy or Edmund. I wanted to use Susan though, and put her into that all-women crew. I love the idea of using Narnia to develop ideas of female-dominated cultures. The smuggler ring, operating illegally and with no small amount of cruelty was both horrid for Susan as she saw the suffering wrought by the trafficking and yet it also played to her strengths. Susan condemned what Captain Nyssa and her women crew were doing, even if she understood why they had embarked upon this path and grudgingly admired them for it. Of course, they had to be stopped -- selling that opium knock off was killing Narnian subjects. When the Narnians finally attacked the ship, well, you know what happened. While the reader might have thought otherwise, there was never any doubt as to Susan's loyalty. Nyssa had been Susan's mentor and teacher, a cruel taskmaster, and lover, and it was appropriate that in this case, it was Susan who her determined her fate.

Oh my...that does not sound like a fun week! Being cooped up indoors even with your own child is enough to make a person turn to cannibalism. (Are you in New England, with this extreme weather? My in-laws are all in MN and it makes me very glad to live in TX!)

A for the meme...since I'm a new friend I'll just go for a more general getting-to-know-you one and choose #1:

What's your favorite moment in the Narnia books? In the films to date, what's your favorite deviation from book canon? (And least favorite, while we're at it.)

Waves! I love Prince Caspian and especially the Romp, the Bacchanal, the Trees (which are so Macbeth and LOTR), the lusty revelry, and really everything about it. It is beautifully written and those sections have significantly formed my vision of the naturalistic Narnia.

As for films, I really liked the Nazification/war elements in LWW -- turning Jadis into this Aryan goddess, the wolves as the SS, Tumnus as the collaborator. I also liked beefing up the role of Liliandil in VDT. I found it very effective. As for least favorite, heh, I really loathed Edmund's characterization in VDT and the castle raid in PC. I don't like my heroes stupid.

I love Prince Caspian and especially the Romp, the Bacchanal, the Trees (which are so Macbeth and LOTR), the lusty revelry, and really everything about it. It is beautifully written and those sections have significantly formed my vision of the naturalistic Narnia.

I have to confess, that bit of PC has always been to me what the Tom Bombadil bits are to FotR--I've never quite gotten why they're there, but props to the people who do and enjoy them! (Really I need to re-read PC; as a kid it was always my least favorite of the books, I think because I didn't get the Baccanal at all, so I tend to skip or skim it when I'm re-reading the Chronicles.)

As for films, I really liked the Nazification/war elements in LWW -- turning Jadis into this Aryan goddess, the wolves as the SS, Tumnus as the collaborator.

Oh, me too! The prologue with the Blitz I thought really added a nice dimension of characterization, particularly for the boys.

I also liked beefing up the role of Liliandil in VDT. I found it very effective.

In concept I like this, except that A) the whole "Blue Star" thing was a little too Blue Fairy from Pinocchio IMO, and B) why didn't Caspian get to say that fabulous line about kissing the princess to wake the sleeper? It's so funny when he lays the mac down and gets rebuffed, but they decided to go for "You're most beautiful" instead. (In general the screenplay bugged me like that--great dialogue in the book that got sacrificed, inexplicably, for trite dialogue.)

for least favorite, heh, I really loathed Edmund's characterization in VDT and the castle raid in PC. I don't like my heroes stupid.

That happened a lot in VDT because of the way they rejigged the order of the story. They had to come up with new reasons for the characters to do things/go places, and they just ended up being stupid. :(

In fandom, I'm definitely an outlier in my fondness for PC the book, my dislike of PC the movie, and in my general meh with regard to the Dawn Treader book. I actively disliked most of the DT film as well. I prefer my tales linear and I don't like things that make me cringe and stupidity usually makes me cringe. There is a reason why I am so fond of book!Faramir and book!Eomer.

The whole follow the blue star was very Disney -- I liked it only because it potentially gave us the opportunity to develop Liliandil as something other than a nameless womb.

There is a reason why I am so fond of book!Faramir

I love him, too. And movie!TTT drove me crazy. Urgh.

The only thing stupid in the castle raid was Caspian.

Ask me a fandom-related question in the comments. This can be fandom specific, general, or about fandom/lj stuff/fic writing/etc. in general. Questions can be as wacky as you want. Ask me about tv shows, characters, fanfic in general, fandom issues/meta, anything about any of my stories specifically.

LOOK! NOT NARNIA! Tell me what drew you into Star Wars and what's the continuing appeal there for you.

Star Wars my first true fannish experience. I'd been a fan of the space opera quality of the films since they first came out in 1977 and had lots of heated discussion in high school regarding whether Leia would get together with Han or Luke. It really hit my romance/romantic genre button and I'll never forget the feeling for the first time of hearing the star destroy rumble overhead in the opening sequence or seeing the Falcon jump to hyperspace. In college, I fell in with D&D geeks and we were all SW fans and so saw ESB and then caught the (it was very unusual then) midnight show of ROTJ. Whenever I was down over the years, I'd get the videos from Blockbuster and watch them and finally, when I was about 30, my husband found me my very own set.

Then, in 1991, I was in a bookstore in my office building and saw Tim Zahn's Heir to the Empire, which picked up the story 5 years after ROTJ. I would sneak into the bookstore during lunch and read it because I was too embarrassed to admit that I liked Star Wars, much less a book about SW with such a cheesy cover. I LOVED the book. Tim is a terrific writer and his character of Mara Jade was just fabulous and she sooo belonged with Luke. The second book was even better than the last and its final lines chilled me to the bone. My one SW friend who Knew The Truth sent me the final in the trilogy, The Last Command, via diplomatic bag when I was in Eastern Europe. Except.... Luke and Mara did not get together at the end, even though it was like soooo obvious, so I shipped them hard, even if I didn't know there was anything I could do about it.

I got on line in 1994 with a new Compaq computer after the release of the book and discovered this AOL community of SW fans, centered around Who Luke Should Marry, horrendous fic, and a lot of women like myself who were older and hung out in chat -- the then called Star Ladies. And we ALL shipped Luke and Mara! The women were funny, plugged in, collected toys, and very creative. We'd stay up late in chat on Friday nights, drinking wine and talking dirty. And then, I started writing Luke and Mara fic and found out just how bonding that experience is. I met a lot of my friends of today through that first fic.

The creativity of that group was just incredible --- lots of cosplay and games and t shirts, filking and buttons and lots of interaction with the authors who were expanding the 'verse. I got confused last night over Ana's filking because I thought she was doing "Pretty Fly for a Jedi" which is in my SW filk song book somewhere, along with songs like Mon Calamari ship (Yellow Submarine) and Naboo Queen (Dancing Queen) and Livin la Vida Lucas. Over the years, we've moved through different fandoms -- anything with Ewan McGregor, Harry Potter, LOTR, and others. You meet other women through the fandom, but you stay for the friendships you find there.

Name a character and I will tell you:

a) a fact about them from my personal canon
b) a reason he/she sucks
c) a reason he/she is amazing
d) a thing that I'd like to see happen to them
e) someone that I can't ship that character with

Hmm, hmm. Let's see. How about Lucy?

I've had a much harder time than I should have with this one. Lucy has been the hardest for me to get a handle on and so much of head canon regarding Lucy is out there, in one form or another.

a)I see Lucy as being the most fiercely and truly Narnian. She is happy anywhere but most happy with the Wood Narnians, the Fauns, the Satyrs and the Trees. She talks to dead people. She was raised by Wolves. The decision to give her Briony as a guard was very deliberate and made early on because I wanted her Guard to be social and to be female and a hunting carnivore. This meant that when someone tries the, "you can't go into battle because you are female," Briony will be there to ask, "Well that's not a good reason" and reinforce it with a growl.
b) That childlike, fearless, spontaneous, emotional quality to her means that she can come across as childish. And, as a living saint, Lucy is not a comfortable person to be around sometimes.
c)Those same qualities in b are also her greatest strengths. She's the sort of person that if she sees something she doesn't like, she is going to speak up about it and do something about it and I really admire that in a person.
d)I wanted the adult Lucy to be involved in the American civil rights movement -- March on Washington, lunch counter sit ins, that sort of thing. And I wish she had been able to have a longer relationship as aunt and step mother to Aidan's brood because she would have been wonderful at it.
e) I could never ship Lucy in any relationship that had a lot of conflict or was in anyway abusive. She would simply not stand for it. The Aidan character on the Narnia side of this vision is quite the Gary Stu -- yet I can't imagine Lucy loving anyone less than that.

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, a short excerpt, or something else that I want readers to know.

The Time of the Son was sooooo good! It was so interesting to see Edmund operating away from his siblings, and with a supporting cast of rather dubious characters. Loved the use of flashbacks and flashforwards to tell the story - the glimpses of the future were so moving, especially after the scene in the caves. I'd love to see more of that future!Ed, and how he ended up that way.

Like so many things, this one came to me via E and several readers from Eastern Europe. I have lived there myself and worked on a mass grave and so when readers asked, "Are you going to deal with the Katyn Massacre?" I decided this was the vehicle for it. Having already drawn parallels between Miraz & Jadis and genocide, it was not difficult to make the jump to the Soviet murder of 22,000 Polish officers outside the Katyn Forest in 1940. There were also numerous investigations and shams -- any of which I could slip Edmund into in a way that would highlight this terrible event, but without diminishing the efforts of the real people who made Katyn their cause.

To do this, of course, the big problem was that I had to write around Edmund' fiery death in 1949 in order to tell the story of his involvement with the American investigation of Katyn in 1951 and 52 (and yes, the Communist-baiting Congressional staff he had to work with were really dubious). Hence the conceit of using the magic in the caves to show Edmund what his future will be/could be in the AU where they do not get on the train.

It was logical -- since I'd already had him deeply skeptical of what was done about Katyn during the drawing up of the indictments in London in 1945-46 and had given him the position of clerk to Col. Clark to explain his involvement and knowledge at so young an age. I see it as a passion never leaves him and he spends years trying to find ways to investigate and learn the truth, to bring closure, and a Soviet acknowledgment of culpability.

I loved the whole concept of Hip to be Square, with Mary encouraging Eustace to follow his interests regardless of what anyone thinks. The Archaeopteryx conversation was hysterical, and I never would have guessed where the lost iguana wound up.

This whole storyline is of course from the AU vision where everyone survives. It was so frustrating to have written all THIS STUFF for TSG and then have it all end in 1949 for most of them just when they got interesting. Mary sponsoring Eustace into University just made so much sense. The iguana of course is your inspiration. So, when Peter, Mary, and Eustace travel to the Everglades in search of American alligators so that Eustace can finish his paper, they find out 1)that those crocodilian hips can gallop on land a lot faster than expected and 2) that iguanas fall out of trees when it's cold.

Aaah! LOVE IT!! AU Pevensies in the US! In the fifties! Why am I imagining Edmund taking off with Beatniks?

I loved "For Better For Worse".

I loved how Edmund managed to have his wedding ceremony be just a small, intimate affair - not just out of consideration for his bride, but also because he didn't want to have such an emotional moment for himself in front of the whole country.

I wasn't sure, though, whether he persuaded or bribed his sisters to delay the celebration ball until after the couple had left on their honeymoon - it was a brilliant idea, though, as he couldn't have expected them to agree to not have any party at all, so having it after they had left, was the logical solution.

I also found it moving to see how Morgan said all her vows and only once managed to look Edmund in the eye. It was so very much Morgan.

Once I decided on the approach, small and intimate wasn't much of a concern. It was more the never ending ceremonies as each of the different Narnian races wanted the bonding ceremony according to THEIR traditions. Once I plotted it all out, I figured that there were probably at least 6 months of ceremonies -- the biggest obstacle being the Spring Dryad celebration, since they were so allergic to pollen. Some accommodation had to be made -- also they did of course balk at the ceremonies involving the patriarchal herd beasts. I wrote the scene, then realized it would have bumped the thing up to an M rating, so took it out and just referred to it. With so many ceremonies, I felt that I could have her manage eye contact once.

6 MONTHS of ceremonies? I'm amazed that they went through with it. That's true dedication to the people they were ruling!
And then it does indeed make sense for Morgan to have some eye contact. The poor dear.

And that was an EVIL prompt. EVIL I tell you. EVIL. I kinda sorta love their story.

Oh I know. I certainly know. I even considered introducing it as an EVIL prompt, but it would have been OOC for the post, so I kept a straight face.

But I enjoyed the evilness of it ...
*mwahahahaha*
I love their story too.

Oh don't angst hun, the story's fine - I'm just back in from a long couple of days so I'm planning to get a cup of tea and sit and read the new chapter :)

And the snow sounds horrible! hopefully there'll be a hugeload of sunshine in the next couple of days to get it all away :)

As for memeage, what actually brought you into Narnia? And more specifically, how on earth did The Stone Gryphon come about :)

And more specifically, how on earth did The Stone Gryphon come about
WHOA. LONG comment follows. In mid 2008, my kids weren't playing in Narnia and one of my Star Wars friends started writing fic in Narnia so I followed her links and recs. I had some issues with what I found. I found the Narnia fic was really down on Spare Oom, that the monarchs, and the Kings in particular, were really stupid about women, that the Queens were absent and marginalized, and the vision of Narnia very rigidly formal -- not how I had ever read the books. At the same time, we were landscaping and I learned about the sexual proclivities of holly bushes and reading Prince Caspian with the kids and it talked about the drunken hollies. WE then read Horse and his Boy and Aslan's statement about "I am a true Beast." I started thinking that not only did the hollies get drunk in PC, but if they were really hollies, they also probably were having sex during the Bacchanal. I was also really impressed by the Discovery Channel Boom De Yada commercial -- I love the whole world and thought, well, why don't the Pevensies like this world too? Are they really so depressed and angst-filled until they find Jesus in the Christian Bible and then die? I was also watching a lot of BBC TV and was very impressed with the multi-cultural vision and the American election occurred. I started thinking how nations change and rebuild, how cultural change occurs. We were also moving into the Darwin bicentennial in 2009 and seeing an anti-evolution bias in the Narnia fandom boards. And last, I started watching some old 1970s epics -- The Lion In Winter (and those visuals were very much like how I saw Narnia); Becket; and Lawrence of Arabia. All three star Peter O'Toole and he is cast opposite these men who seem such opposites in terms of looks and personality -- Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Timothy Dalton, Omar Sharif. Also, I spent a lot of time in some Narnia fan communities and was horrified by the degree of intolerance that I thought was very much in total contravention of the messages I had taken from the books.

So, after years away from fic writing, I couldn't shake the desire to do some fixing. I had the idea of a Golden Age story in which Dryad elders come to invite their young Kings and Queens to the Great Dryad Dance in the Spring -- the first true one that has occurred in 100 years. It slowly dawns on Peter and Susan that "dancing" is not what is contemplated since Trees are trees and so they pollinate and indiscriminately. Peter, being a teenage boy, is all about, Hell YEAH SEX, Sign ME UP. Once Peter gets over his initial enthusiasm, he and Susan have a serious discussion about just how different it is in Narnia and what should they do? Should they try to stop this immoral activity? Or, let it occur? And, it means a great deal to their subjects to have their Monarchs participation. So, Peter does go; and Susan on another night. (This was before I realized that people didn't write fun, consensual sex in Narnia and that I was a degenerate to suggest it).

What happened though is that the smutty romp turned to something more interesting to me, which ran smack into the intolerance rampant in the fandom. If your subjects really were Beasts and Trees, how would that change you and how you dealt with differentness? And how would those changes persist upon the return to a very monochromatic world on the brink of change so profound that in 60 years, America elects an African American as President and England celebrates a richly diverse palate in its media?

And that's where TSG came from. The economy downturned so I wasn't very busy at work and once I got over the, OMG, I'm writing fic AGAIN, I plowed in never thinking anyone would care.

Heh. Long, long answer, but lots that went into this.

Long comment is awesome, that's what it is :)

This is a wonderful insight (and damnit now I can't think of something profound lol), especially about how the changes and various events in the world got you to thinking how the world would be etc :)

Seriously, I am in envy of your gen skills - for all that I love writing and research etc, how you write and research is sheer awesome, so this was awesome to read thanks :D

... anti-evolution bias? no fun consensual sex? Yikes! I'm so glad I've kept my involvement in the fandom relatively limited, I guess...

So I'll snag #3, and please, do tell me about Mara.

Oh MARA JADE! Tim Zahn created this amazing, complex woman, Force sensitive, taken from her family, raised by the Emperor as his top secret assassin. She's smart and sarcastic and she's been a dancer and a cocktail waitress, and a mechanic and all this other awesome stuff. And, if Jabba had let her go on the sail barge, she would have killed Luke and everyone else. She ends up working for a smuggler ring and she hates Luke Skywalker for taking away everything she's ever had but she survives and thrives and I so admire that about her character. What sucks? The fandom and pro fic treatment of her and that in the pro treatment she actually married Luke. (Spores are attacking my womb -- don't even get me started on that one). Done right, she's a an awesome character and with Luke done right, they are an awesome pair. But they were never done right.

My head canon for this pair is extensive. She and Luke go tearing around the galaxy running circles around everyone and everyone is always trying to kill them and they exchange lots of great sarcastic remarks and there's tons of UST. I took it after a couple of hundred pages to RST in a trash dumpster after a dinner date gone horribly wrong. They are absolute headcases, with really severe issues and that's why they should never get married but they eventually should have had two children, both of whom are terrific disappointments to their parents. And every time they have sex on Yavin IV at the Jedi Temple it causes the grazing animals to stampede.

I can ship Mara with all sorts of people except not her mentors -- people like the Emperor or her smuggler boss, Talon Karrde. And not Darth Vader either. Yuck.

I LOVE MARA JADE. And I've never forgiven - well, anyone - for the way she got treated. Especially in the NJO, which is what made me eventually quit reading this stuff altogether and go back to re-reading my X-Wing novels for the hundredth time, and did I really just admit this in public?

Mara and Luke - stampeding animals - disappointing children - making everyone else in the galaxy look like idiots - so, so much better than what was done. Especially Luke falling in love right and left when HELLO MARA JADE, how are you the most powerful Jedi and such a blithering idiot not to notice she's PERFECT for you?!

I really want to see her and Leia have some awesome adventures while Han and Luke have to stay home with the children, because - HA! - I am a stay-at-home mom and I think mothers should totally get to go have fun saving the galaxy once in a while and let the fathers handle the REAL crises at home. And because Han and Luke would be so hilariously incompetent with the children, and Leia and Mara would use finesse and style to handle situations that they would blunder through horribly. And because Leia must get SO sick of being a diplomat all the time.

Ahem. Sorry for hijacking this thread. Just had to get all that off my chest.

I HAD NO IDEA you were an SW fan and had actually READ the EU?!! My monikers and real name are splattered all over the Bantam Spectra line -- weirdest one, my dog's name showed up in the Stackpole/Zahn collaboration, the Union comic. Also there is a HUGE orange bow shown -- a result of our Las Vegas wedding where we married cardboard stand ups of Luke and Mara with Elvis presiding and I wore a purple hoop skirted dress with a giant taffeta orange butt bow. And then Scully and Mulder crashed the party. And the Men in Black.

Ahem, I digress. I wrote my big Luke/Mara story in 1995 to 1996, then took it down for some really complicated reasons and put it back up a few years later. I discovered that it still gets recs -- it's a very flawed work, and yet, I loved it and loved the people I met through it. So, I started posting it over on ff.net under one of my old monikers.

OMG, you are SO RIGHT about Luke falling in loved all over the place -- we called it the Skywalker curse -- kiss him and you die and I have a button that says: "Join the Jedi Academy! Get Chicks! See them buy the moisture farm!" I ended up parodying that in the fic I did by creating the "Tales of the Jedi" holovid with "Duke and Tara."

I'm trying to remember.... I think I did write a Mara & Leia adventure... errr... or maybe I beta'd it. They make a great team. I adore the two of them together.

X Wing books... sigh.... I was very firmly aligned with the Stackpole/Allston/Zahn axis, as opposed to the Anderson/Crispin/Hambly/Kube-Mac. I stopped reading them after... Vector Prime I think? I have friends who are still deeply into it. I understand that Callista has made a re-appearance in the novels as some sort of femme fatale alien vampiric succubus.

I was SO PISSED when I got to the end of Last Command and all he did was give her the darn lightsaber and touch her hand twice. WHAT? WHAT??? And then the fic. Oh gawd, the fic was so awful, with red silk boxers and embarrassing typos and euphemisms and Mara torn between Lando and Luke and UGH. And that was when I thought, "well, I CAN do better than that." The ultimate hubris.

I was ... thirteen? Twelve? Something like that when my cousin and I discovered and fell deeply in love with All Things Star Wars. We used to call each other on the phone and talk for HOURS about the EU.

One of my favorite EU novels was Jedi Academy because of how plainly it picked apart all the holes in the whole Jedi Academy world. JUST BLOW THE DEAD DUDE'S TEMPLE UP YOU MORON. And then Zahn's Thrawn duology, where Mara ruthlessly goes after Luke's incredible stupidity in never moving the Academy away from a clearly dangerous-to-Force-users planet ... and don't even get me started on the fact that Kyp NEVER had to face justice ... yeah. I'm a Stackpole/Allston/Zahn girl myself. Plus the fact that their females are awesome. Mirax! Iella! Shalla! Tyria! Winter! Mirax is second only to Mara when it comes to people I want to be when I grow up. (Actually, considering the whole Emperor thing, I think I might go with Mirax first.)

And, of course, Wes Janson.

As for Callista ... I have no words. At least, none that can be spelled without asterisks.

(I got into fanfic the same way you did - reading bad fic and thinking "I may not be great, but I know I can do better than this." Yeah.)

Er ... I, Jedi would be that favorite, not Jedi Academy. The dangers of writing comments while watching the US Figure Skating Nationals.

Oh dear. Yes, I know I, Jedi and the Hand of Thrawn duology very, very well. And it's time to take this discussion private.

Don't mind me randomly joining this conversation.... I just finished reading Wraith Squadron (last weekend?), and so far, not liking Tyria so much. I think I would have liked her more if she hadn't ended up as last woman standing, and there's nothing really wrong with her, but so far I don't see her as being a terribly strong female character (in how she was written, at least).

But despite having been a long time Star Wars fan (my mother tells tales of seeing the films in the theater when they were first released, so it's definitely genetic, and I don't remember a time when I hadn't seen Star Wars), I never really got in the EU....

Wow, that's one seriously sucky week. And I thought I had RL issues (mainly around a missing staff recruitment report that I'm having to redo, and a conference paper that I'm giving in 4 days, and I still have to write the speaker's note to go with the presentation). Count me impressed.

Anyway, I'd love some rth fandom facts about Asim. Or The General. Or Sallowpad (the Raven one, not George). Or even your vision of Aslan. Nope, not greedy much - take your pick : )

Good luck with the work and presentations!
Asim's background is way harder than it should have been but he has neglected to enlighten me as to most of it.

I believe he was born into a Bedouin nomadic tribe somewhere in the Levant near the Red Sea in around 1900. He was caught up in the Arab nationalist movement very early on and used to go sneaking around into Turkish encampments to spy. When he began riding (horse or camel) in the Arab Irregulars, that's when he picked up English. He admires Allenby more than TE Lawrence and when he was riding around with Allenby's crew, someone in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force recommended him to the Arab Bureau in Cairo. Asim gets pretty cagey about what happened after that and says nothing about the inter-War years. He learned French during his time in Morocco and Algeria and Italian when he traveled south in what was then Italian East Africa (parts of Ethiopia and Somalia).

He found God (or rather, God found him) when he was wandering through the Atlas Mountains in Morocco near the town Demnat and a Sufi Muslim shrine. He had never been an especially devout man before, so this was quite a surprise when, like Saul of Tarsus, he was strike blind and lay on the roadside for a day before a vulture decided to test if he was really dead or just in a state of religious shock. Digory Kirke was the first person he had ever seen who glowed with God's light, thereby affirming that the message he had understood in Demnat and then in the Marrakech souk was correct and that he was supposed to follow this British schoolgirl around.

It never occurred to him to disobey that order.

He likes chocolate and very, very strong coffee, and really does not "get" women at all. I don't ship him with anyone. Ever. It sucks because he really does not know what he is looking for, but whatever it is, I hope he finds it. He has a pretty flexible morality without a home or a family or roots or ties. He and Mr. Patel are very good friends and but it's actually Lin Kun who understands him best, even if they barely speak to each other at all.

Going with #3, I'd like to know more about your personal vision of Eustace. And, especially since she hasn't shown up in your works yet, Jill Pole.

I developed Eustace and Jill in the NFE Under Cover and in terms of those characters' development, that's actually pretty close where I see them.
a) This will come up eventually, but in my personal canon, Jill is Afro-Caribbean and I'm still working out her family life and history. As for Eustace, I feel badly that he's criticized for liking all the wrong books, because I think those are very much the right books, in the appropriate way. Also, lots of girls at Experiment House think he's pretty hawt.
b)Well, for the girls at Experiment House, it sux because Eustace isn't terribly interested in dating them long term. He's not mean, exactly, just really non-committal. Jill can bug me because she doesn't have Eustace's insight and can be stupidly impulsive.
c)Jill and Eustace are both amazing because they are great dancers and have really good communication and there's no room for misunderstanding. They are both really, really brave. They also have a fair bit of self-awareness regarding why they are special as Friends of Narnia and yet why they are not like the Pevensies.
d)I'm not sure what I envision for Jill later in life but that whatever it is, I want her to find a place and the opportunity to be amazing. I wish Eustace had the opportunity to discover the fossilized dinosaur footprints that have been located in Oxfordshire and become curator of a museum.
e)I have never necessarily shipped them together. I think that they die before they are able to work that out between them. I also don't see Jill ever dating either of the Pevensies because I think that the ambiguity in her relationship with Eustace as they worked out what it was would have kept Edmund and Peter well away as a matter of courtesy.

1) What's your favorite Narnia fic trope?

3) Tell me about Aslan?????

Favorite trope??? Maybe Edmund as spymaster? Polly as suffragist? I had no idea that Edmund as spymaster was a trope when I started writing it myself. I have to say that I don't like a lot of the most common Narnia tropes much myself. I loathe Susan as listmaker, for instance. I don't like Lucy as perpetual child virgin. I don't like the WAAAHHHH I'm NOT KING Peter characterization. And, I'm not crazy about Edmund as sexual abuse victim either.

Aslan:
a) a fact about them from my personal canon
b) a reason he/she sucks
c) a reason he/she is amazing
d) a thing that I'd like to see happen to them
e) someone that I can't ship that character with

Aslan has a real sense of humor. He likes to laugh and likes it when the Cheetah, Dalia, imitates him, which she does very well. He sucks when he's not clear about what he wants and lets the poor humans and other flounder about trying to figure out what the hell they are supposed to be doing. Also, he's not as astute as he might be where humans are concerned -- he's a Lion, really and truly a Lion, and so human behavior sometimes confounds him. He is amazing because, when the person/Beast/whomever asks, he comes. In my head canon, in my vision, he is not judgmental, he is very gentle and beneficent, and doesn't set up arbitrary tests or obstacles. He acts with purpose.

I'd like to see the Trickster show up Aslan in Tashbaan during HHB, and do more and be more clever because the Trickster is a sneaky bastard and Aslan just isn't cruel. He didn't really turn Rabadash into an Ass -- that was the Trickster, who got to chose his punishment. Similarly, while Aslan administered the "lashings" to Aravis, it was really to satisfy the Trickster who demanded recompense because the slave Aravis drugged, who was later beaten, was one of the Trickster's people. Aravis should know the pain before she again so casually subjects others to that sort of pain. I don't ship Aslan with anyone, except in your stories, Animus!

POLLY AS A SUFFRAGIST WILL NEVER NOT BE MY FAVORITE. I admit I don't like Edmund the spymaster much. And I do agree with you on the rest. :/

doesn't set up arbitrary tests or obstacles
Looooove. I'll bet he doesn't blind ladies so they stop being so shallow, too. ::still seething about that fic::

I like that! I really love the way you bring the Trickster into Narnia--most writers (lol, myself included) don't do much with other gods, and Narnia is such a polytheistic place!

<333 Aslan/Lucy forever!

I adored your Trickster story "Catch a Tiger by the Toe". The Jalur-Trickster interaction, though a little one-sided (can you imagine if Jalur actually managed to catch up with the mischievous god? oh! the carnage!), was nothing short of sheer brilliance. I shared Susan's frustration with the Rat that's nothing like *her* rats and monniker... or is he? Did I detect some reluctant admiration there? Edmund certainly made no secret of his delight about the whole affair! Wayward, forward, and awkward Tarkheenas, indeed! A veritable trifecta.

(Would it do me any good to beg for an excerpt? :-p)

~Syrena

If I'm not too late, I'd like information on Asim, being as he's my favourite character. :)
~LotL

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Meme see, Meme do

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I'm doing them all, because that is the way I am.

Re: I'm doing them all, because that is the way I am.

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Syrena the lurker goes comment-crazy

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