Meme see, Meme do

[rthstewart]

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.

OR

• 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.

OR

• 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

 

Comments

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

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.

[amine-eyes.livejournal.com]

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

[cofax7]

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