rthstewart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rthstewart) wrote2011-07-01 12:15 am
rthstewart) wrote2011-07-01 12:15 am
A bit of the personal and what's on the tasting menu
So, I really don't post the personal over here, but FYI, I'm not writing much right now as I'm on holiday in the wine country of California. So, I'm enjoying cheese, red wine, white wine, sparkling wine, chocolate, olives, olive oil, and the "spa" life. And yet more wine and cheese and chocolate.
So a HUGE thanks to everyone who has so far posted and reviewed and such in response to chapter 11, and I will respond and such as soon as time and sobriety permit.
I've got about 7,000 words already in the final chapter of this arc although some of it is old and needs to be considerably redone. Also, there is The Lion Broach. And Gifts. And Good Byes. And Explanations. And parts that are making me cry. And then, decisions -- do I press on, or go back to AW? I need to turn my attention to the Narnia Fic Exchange (Woot!) and two prompts for femgenficathon.
So, in the meantime,
There wasn’t anything for Morgan to do. Anything she could do. She was sure that she’d be able to organize Harold’s trunk better, make everything fit just so, but she’d have to fold it all, and Morgan had never been very good at the folding.
There were distractions in fabrics, like that silver thread that Crows could see. She saw it too, in the perfect rows of weave, and she could count the vertical threads and the horizontal threads and imagine how they would have been set up on a loom. Four by four by four by four, over and over.
But folding the fabric she’d have to leave that to someone else. “If you fold them, I could put things in your trunk,” she said, but Harold had smiled at her and said he had a way he needed to do it, with those things needed for a sea voyage on top and the rest on the bottom and she wouldn’t know those things.
But I do know those things. I remember. You were very neat when we sailed here, so many months ago. I always remember, Harold. Your kit was in the right hand corner, on top of a nightshirt you never wear. The soft shoes you sometimes wear on board for traction and protection from splinters during calm days go on the left, with the soles against the side so they don’t dirty the two shirts. You’ll wear your tall boots when you walk to the dock and sail away.
The trunk had a false bottom. Morgan could see that. It sounded differently, hollow-ish and the trunk wasn’t as deep as it should be – smaller on the inside than it was on the outside, so there were secret compartments.
Morgan felt like that’s how she was, broken into so many pieces and compartments. Because she was so broken, she had always been good at puzzles and patterns. She knew how to make each piece fit just so, in trunks and spreadsheets and bricks in buildings, she could see the threads no one but the Crows could see, count all the beans in a jar, and knew when things didn’t add up. She just never could make her own pieces fit.
So a HUGE thanks to everyone who has so far posted and reviewed and such in response to chapter 11, and I will respond and such as soon as time and sobriety permit.
I've got about 7,000 words already in the final chapter of this arc although some of it is old and needs to be considerably redone. Also, there is The Lion Broach. And Gifts. And Good Byes. And Explanations. And parts that are making me cry. And then, decisions -- do I press on, or go back to AW? I need to turn my attention to the Narnia Fic Exchange (Woot!) and two prompts for femgenficathon.
So, in the meantime,
There wasn’t anything for Morgan to do. Anything she could do. She was sure that she’d be able to organize Harold’s trunk better, make everything fit just so, but she’d have to fold it all, and Morgan had never been very good at the folding.
There were distractions in fabrics, like that silver thread that Crows could see. She saw it too, in the perfect rows of weave, and she could count the vertical threads and the horizontal threads and imagine how they would have been set up on a loom. Four by four by four by four, over and over.
But folding the fabric she’d have to leave that to someone else. “If you fold them, I could put things in your trunk,” she said, but Harold had smiled at her and said he had a way he needed to do it, with those things needed for a sea voyage on top and the rest on the bottom and she wouldn’t know those things.
But I do know those things. I remember. You were very neat when we sailed here, so many months ago. I always remember, Harold. Your kit was in the right hand corner, on top of a nightshirt you never wear. The soft shoes you sometimes wear on board for traction and protection from splinters during calm days go on the left, with the soles against the side so they don’t dirty the two shirts. You’ll wear your tall boots when you walk to the dock and sail away.
The trunk had a false bottom. Morgan could see that. It sounded differently, hollow-ish and the trunk wasn’t as deep as it should be – smaller on the inside than it was on the outside, so there were secret compartments.
Morgan felt like that’s how she was, broken into so many pieces and compartments. Because she was so broken, she had always been good at puzzles and patterns. She knew how to make each piece fit just so, in trunks and spreadsheets and bricks in buildings, she could see the threads no one but the Crows could see, count all the beans in a jar, and knew when things didn’t add up. She just never could make her own pieces fit.
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Sometime later today I'll try to post my reviews for chapters 10 and 11 on ff.net. The other computer is running a new version of Firefox - and in safe mode - which doesn't allow me to post on ff.net or on LiveJournal (I read both chapters and wrote the reviews a couple of days ago, and I hope the reviews will appear today).
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It sounds like a wonderful holiday (wish I was there!), something nice. And peaceful. And relaxing.
... but my real question is, "Have you have seen either Bacchus or his Maenads lurking about?" Also, any overly dry wells that have magically filled with wine (and women)?
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Ooooh Morgan's POV is interesting. What she observes and doesn't observe.
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As for the snippet from the next chapter, it looks lovely and sad and may, in its entirety, reduce me to quite a mess.
...
I'm quite looking forward to it.
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(Anonymous) 2011-07-02 01:30 pm (UTC)(link)Krystyna
Looking forward to more of any and all of your stories!
(Anonymous) 2011-07-08 04:32 am (UTC)(link)For instance, I can't put my finger on the point where I started liking Tebbitt instead of thinking him annoying. It wasn't like there was suddenly a revalation that turned it all around. It built up slowly as we came to realize both what he was capable of and what it cost him.
You sometimes have wondered about how much interest there is in Harold & Morgan, especially as we know the end. For me, knowing the end answers some questions, but by no means all. Edmund and Morgan's relationship is so odd and so very much them that I've come to feel that there's no way to understand it other than to see the whole thing. We still don't know exactly how they came to be accidentally bonded/married (except that it's completely in character for each of them and their relationship) and it's still a mystery in AW exactly *how* Edmund thinks of her. His wife? They never seem to have settled into such a neat description (Lucy and Aidan, however, seemed quite happy to do so). The love of his life? Such cliched phrases again just don't seem to apply.
Quite possibly my favorite moment in this whole universe so far is that brief entry from Edmund's journal in the last-to-date chapter of AW. It's the most direct view we've had of how he thinks of her "now" (AW == "now" to me in your world, never mind that we know some of "the future" from the other books).
So my point is that I'll eagerly devour chapters from whichever side of the story you choose to tell. I am most keenly interested in AW because it more closely matches my own place in life- what do you do once you've had some level of success and done a good bit of growing up and discovering yourself? Of course, I have neither the handicap of appearing to be a child, nor expectations of building on such a spectacular past, but I feel a great deal of kinship with your portrayal of the four finding their ways, and a love for your presentation of Digory, Polly, Richard, Asim and others as examples of lives well led (as a friend of mine recently commented after a visit by an old college friend of ours whose life has taken him on a different path, there are many ways to live a good life).
Hmm... I am rambling more than usual. Getting back to my point, I'm more directly interested in AW, but I am very much interested in H&M on its own terms, and feel like AW cannot be told without H&M. And maybe, H&M cannot be told without AW. I hope that we see more of Edmund coming to terms with leaving Morgan behind in Narnia, and hearing her (and others) at the end of the world. Without more H&M, that key part of Edmund's plot thread won't have the same resonance. But without AW, H&M would lack resolution (as it should- those left behind upon the four's departure were left to deal with that lack as you've shown in your glimpses of Morgan, Jalur, Lambert and others in that time).
And now I think I'll let this ramble fizzle out. I can never seem to wrap up my thoughts all that well and so I usually abandon my attempts to comment. But I love what you're doing with both sides of this story and wanted to say so, however disjointed the result (in this way, as in many others, I feel quite a lot of kinship with Morgan).
thanks so much for the stories!
-H
PS- in reaction to your recent post about the article on fanfic, and noting that most folks in fandom are women, I'll just state that I'm a 35-year-old male (although I have never, so far, written any fic, and as a queer male I'm not at all shocked to find myself in a female-dominated space)
Re: Looking forward to more of any and all of your stories!
I went back and read some of AW the other day and was also struck by that journal entry of Edmund's and then his response back to his mother, which readers have had different reactions to. It also pairs with the conversation he has with Asim about the window being the tighter fit than the door and the longing for what lies beyond the end of the World. I've had some of the later parts of their relationship written for a long time, in my head, or otherwise. Edmund's own resolution, such as it is, will come later, much later, in AW -- again another part that has been in my head for several years now -- a pub, a drunken brother, a confused and envious father, a broken relationship, a dart game, and a return to the line, "Do you desire the truth or the lie?" With my late-realized epiphany that absent parents and unconventional families are a thematic element of the work, particularly AW, I've had the scenes and plot points (such as they are) and am now fleshing out the meta around them.
As for the characters slowly evolving and taking hold, I wish I could say that it is intentional, but it really is simply a by product of how I write. I know that plenty of fan fic writers don't put fingers to keyboard unless they 1) have very detailed outlines and 2) have very detailed characterizations. I use neither. I have key plot, character, or thematic points I want to make and then slide the character in to fill the space and I endow the character with the traits I need. Morgan was created in Chapter 3 of BRD because I thought it would be funny to have Edmund riff on his titles, I wanted to take a side swipe at the brothers-incest and love triangle stories, and I thought it would be funny to have him say the line about former lovers calling him ass or brute. I had already made the joke about the Lone Island tax code in chapter 1 being inherited from prior management and the US financial markets were in free fall. And Voila, Evil Banker Morgan was born.
I sensed early on that Tebbitt really grated on readers. He was patterned on Roald Dahl, who was an awful person. In the end, readers don't want Susan hanging out with a jerk and I don't want to write it, either. Given that I knew I was building to the scenes by the Reflecting Pool and in the coatroom with snogging, I knew I had to make him a bit less of an ass. For a lot of readers, they changed their views of Tebbitt with the Not A Chapter when I wrote him as competent in that milieu, and sensitive enough to perceive Susan's attraction, respecting of her No, and then further realizing that there was some history there that had harmed her.
Errr, right, where was I, speaking of rambling?
Thanks for sharing too your bit of real life. Wine country was very enjoyable. I very much appreciate your comments about AW speaking to what happens after you've attained something. And, as the Grossman article points out so well and as evidenced here, I hugely value this ongoing conversation.
Re: Looking forward to more of any and all of your stories!
(Anonymous) 2011-07-08 11:10 pm (UTC)(link)I did like Edmund's response back to his mother, it just didn't hit me so hard as the Journal entry (which I was very much not expecting). I'm quite glad that Evil Banker Morgan popped in, as she's come to occupy such a vital role.
To answer some of your questions:
I don't quite recall how I got into fanfiction. I know it was during a period when I was habitually depressed in my early-mid-20's. My main portal was the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Unconventional relationShipper's List web archive, which for quite some time during the run of the show and for a while after I checked regularly. But how I found that site I don't remember. I also know that I ran across fic while looking for info on X-Men after liking the movies but before I started buying the comics. And then at some point I got on LiveJournal (but even my not-under-my-own-name account is fairly easily connected to me, so I almost never comment on fic with it- perhaps I should add another account).
More recently I tend to check Twisting the Hellmouth semi-regularly for new fic. I love crossovers as a really well-done integration of worlds is always fun. While sick for several weeks back around November/December, I got bored enough to start poking around other fandoms that I had generally avoided in search of more fic. I read an enjoyable Buffy/Narnia crossover so I started looking around for that, and braving the enormous volume of fanfiction.net (which I usually only do if I've run out of more focused archives to check). I find Narnia fandom tricky because incest fic really does not do it for me, and it is so astonishingly prevalent. Although I do tend to like Problem of Susan fics, whether I like how the author solves the "problem" or not. But I set the ff.net filters for "completed" and "over some huge number of words" and TQSIT came up, looked fascinating, and required me to go read TSG part 1 first.
And I just loved it. More than anything else I'm a sucker for detailed, consistent character development, and whether you do it on purpose or not you're great at that. You worry about spending so much time on original characters, but they're great characters and they fit into your world equally as well as the canon characters. Maybe that fits with my love of crossovers- TSG is something of a crossover between canon Narnia and a historical fiction view of both our world and the Narnian golden age.
And as noted before, you're addressing themes that are relatively rarely handled in fanfiction, but are very much of interest to me. Every once in a while I run across a work of fiction (fan or otherwise) that really matches where I am and provides fodder for my own internal musings, and right now AW/H&M is one of those works.
Ever since then, especially once I realized that you actually do update and this is all not in immediate danger of dropping off, I've checked back regularly. I have commented at least once, and I think twice, before, but I can't recall exactly where. They were shorter comments, I think (but I did sign them as "H").
Enough rambling for now- I've hit the word length limit for comments anyway :-P At some point I'll have to comment more with the parts that wouldn't fit :-)
thanks,
-H
Re: Looking forward to more of any and all of your stories!
(Anonymous) 2011-07-09 03:23 am (UTC)(link)-H
Re: Looking forward to more of any and all of your stories!
As for "H" -- heh. I recall reviews signed by H, but I think I assumed you were Hellene or Helen, who pops up occasionally, here and on ff and sometimes signs and sometimes does not.
And thanks so much for the nice thoughts about characterization. I do worry about OCs and all the point of view characters because on that path does often lie Sues and Stus. And, I've had many conversations with myself in the car over THAT one.
Thanks so much!
Re: Looking forward to more of any and all of your stories!