Chapter 16 of AW (ZOMG she posts)

[rthstewart]

It's been a long time but I finally posted Chapter 16 of Apostolic Way last night.

It's no secret that I've been really close to hanging it all up. There are a lot of reasons for that, including a lot of RL writing, the grim reality of the hostile fandom, the grim reality of the story to come, and the real fear that I knew where I wanted to go and that I really didn't think I had the talent to pull it off and that readers wouldn't follow.  But Starbrow and Oldfashionedgirl95/buttonloops started in on the whole post Jill and Eustace in Quebec story with the avowed purpose of trying to get me interested in picking it up again.

I know it's frustrating to read works in progress.  So many don't.  Nevertheless, I know that probably 75% of what is in the stories now would not be there but for readers.  Lucy and Edmund's Spare Oom story during the War was, like Susan in QSiT and Peter and Susan in Rat and Sword, not something I'd ever intended to tell.  Yet here we are.

So, a couple of things.  In the chapters ahead something that will be useful to remember is that Lucy fails and this is a good thing; Edmund succeeds and this is a bad thing.  Also it is in this context, via flashback, that I will tell the story of Black, White, and Gray in Between, of the Mole spies and the traitorous Mr. Noll.  The Narnian elements, such as they are, will be flashback, not the allegory of TQSiT.  I've gotten accustomed to writing historical fiction now, and so that's where we're going. 

I have a lot of reading still to do.  Edmund's story is fun; Lucy's is hard and those who have worked in relief, democracy building, and with the poor and marginalized will know why. 

Alice Jones made her first appearance here, and some of her best lines were first written by others in that comment fic. 
In my non-linear storytelling, you see that Morgan and Edmund have resolved their differences (H&M has for the moment stopped at a cliffhanger) and are proceeding through the Narnian bonding ceremonies, including the Gretna Green bonding.  Heliopause mentioned the Scottish marital rites and I loved this version of a Las Vegas elopement so much, I ended up adopting it for Frank and Helen and the tradition then passes down.  Yes the Reverend Collins is a nod to Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Collins. 

The issue of food aid to starving Europe and the Total War doctrine (here and here, and here and Vera Brittain (and here) and her peace letters are all to come in more detail. 

That line about schools in LWW is an odd one.  Who imposed them or was seeking to impose them again that the Four would abolish them?  How can it be explained other than Lewis' own views of school?    I am now obviously drawing parallels to Nazi indoctrination, wartime propaganda on both sides, as well as the canon issues of Edmund and horrid school, and the in-story issues of Peter, his academics, the expectations placed upon him, and how that would impact Edmund.  Edmund shall meet his father in the next chapter -- I decided to end it where I did because that's not going to be a pretty encounter and I really want to do it from Walker-Smythe's pov. 

So, for those of you still with me, thank you.  I so appreciate your support and reading and would love to strike up the conversation again if you are so inclined. 

Comments

[jjhunter]

<3

I left my review for chapter 16 on ff.net since that's where you posted it first, but I stand by my words whether they're 'Idhren' or J.J.

Also, Rev. Collins bit - eee! I was wondering whether that was deliberate or not.

[rthstewart]

Thank you so much for your beautiful review. You wrote: I am deeply
interested in where Lucy's story is going, much as I resonate with Edmund's
choosing the path he takes forward over and over and Susan's deft unfolding
into more and more the whole of her selves. I was wondering, if you are so inclined, if you could explain that a little more.

Where are you seeing Lucy's conflicts? I know in my head where I see the conflicts and I'm wondering how clear they are to others. Similarly, your comment about Edmund choosing the path over and over is incredibly perceptive given what I have been trying to do there. Susan's many faces and personas is something that has come about several times, especially at the end of TQSiT and in the invasion chapter of Rat and Sword.

anyway, if you want to elaborate, I'd love to hear it.

[jjhunter]

I don't have the time I wish I had to fully articulate all the meta that's been brewing in the back of my head when reading your fic (there's so much going on characterization-wise), but I'll give a stab at preliminary Edmund & Lucy now.

Edmund I see as someone who knows, deep down, that he is not automatically a good person. He knows, in fact, that he is capable of evil. His mind is a mind of twists and turns, and he cannot unsee the moral ambiguities of societies and how they might be worked to the advantage of himself and his loved ones. His instincts are thus contradictory, some alive to the possibilities, some tending more altruistically, some appropriate to a King but not a boy-man still low on the totem pole of power. What he cannot do by instinct - and even when he was young, his mind would have been too active to operate only by instinct - he must do instead by taking great care, by thinking and educating himself and figuring out ahead of time what the more right thing is to do and how he might do it.

Lucy has a different set of hangups. She has an instinct for justice where Edmund has a justice's library, and while she is no slouch in the mental department, her struggles are more external than internal. She doesn't doubt the way people ought to treat one another; she doubts how she can stay true to herself and stay part of a social world where people not only don't always treat each other the way they ought to, but often seek to impose ethics Lucy finds wrong wrong wrong on others and call such ethics righteous and true. She has such a strong sense of self, and Aslan so close as touchstone always when her certainty falters, that Lucy's patience for abiding by social 'niceties' and 'necessities' that contribute to actively harming people is wearing terribly thin. Where Edmund would figure out what the just thing is, and then work to change institutions so that social/economic/legal pressures make people doing the just thing more likely instead of less, Lucy would just go ahead and directly challenge people to do the just thing.

I have a twisty mind like Edmund's married to Lucy's impatience for injustice; I think if I did not feel so personally unworthy of Lucy's moral high ground - well, let's just say that she reminds me very strongly of myself when I was quite young. I want her to handle it better.

[rthstewart]

I really appreciate you taking the time to share this with me. I learn so much from what people write and I've really been impressed with how you pull things out of the story including so much of things that I've never thought of in any conscious way. I continually think I'm not nearly as perceptive or intelligent as my readers!

A lot of people have assumed that I have Edmund on a path straight into espionage -- I didn't know that was a well known trope in the genre. But there are reasons for those dire warnings and Asim's concerns and I thought you completely grasped what I was getting at and why -- I do have two separate threads and paths for Edmund that are chosen and committed to over and over. And while I'd never intended to tell this particular story this way, there is a real dichotomy ahead. As I mentioned above, Edmund sees the big splashy wins and successes in espionage and the period through D-Day has some of the greatest ruses (or at least best researched ones) in military history.

Lucy's journey is one of hard work where success is measured by how many additional people did not die.

Your observation about Lucy's zealousness is something to think about.... there are many (mostly young) people on the ff.net site who roundly condemn me as immoral, perhaps in the same sort of vigorous ways that Lucy does. I need to think about that with her characterization. Where does compromise come in? Does it ever? When does one learn that life is much less certain at 30 than at 15 and even less clear at 40 (or 50) as compared to 20. You've given me some excellent things to think about.

Immoral?

[(Anonymous)]

I don't understand why people flame so much about your writing. Personally, they are probably jealous of your popularity and incredibly inciteful writing. After all, the subjects you speak of are the realities of the world. Considering society today, the slightly Bachanalistic culture of Narnia seems pretty current to us. The way that you create thoughts, struggles, and dialogue so creatively and originally amazes me. I am constantly writin in my head, but lately all of my own work has been wadded up and pushed aside out of disgust because it does not hold a candle to the brightness of your own work. I am not saying this not to be self-deprecating(God and the world know that I have plenty of self-confidence to share) but to point out your talent.
Don't be ashamed or put off by bad reviews. Know that you are making a whole lot of people happy; and I think that I can speak for all of your good fans in saying that we want more ASAP, but we are willing to wait. Perfection takes time, and we will stay with you to see this story to the end.

Re: Immoral?

[rthstewart]

Thanks so much. Those are lovely, lovely thoughts. I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner. I tend to get very inward when I'm busy writing and I just turned in 2 remixes -- 10,000 words total, not Narnia, but it's something and I'm really glad I was able to do it.

Of course I shall scold you for feeling your own work not up to standard -- whatever that standard is.

Something I realized today, and I'm just putting this here because I need to get it out and it's safe because no one will read it, except maybe you if you come back, is that I began writing Narnia because I was filled with hope for a better world. I wanted to show that Narnia wasn't just Eden, that it had some ugliness and difficulty and more importantly that this world has beauty and wonder too. That understanding was possible even if we came from different places, that tolerance was to celebrated. YEAH Darwin!

I was such a naive fool. I learned that American Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals/wingnuts reject science, reject recycling because they have dominion over this world, that they really, really believe that anyone not Christian is going to hell, that poor people are poor because they are not godly, and that tolerance is a dirty word.

And, I guess they won. I don't have that hope anymore and so AW languishes because without hope, it's really hard to finish.

So, thank you for your kind words. I need to remember that there are people still out there who are vested with me in this. Who see that hope and need and want it too.

[psyche29]

I am going to go read this shortly, but wanted to comment. I LOVELOVELOVE your entire universe, and I am always up for reading more of it, though it sometimes takes me a while to get there. RL intrudes often and I forget until I am next reminded.

And then I find I don't always have a comment. Sometimes it's because I need time to re-read and to compose it, but often it's because I feel woefully inadequate to do so meaningfully, and a large portion of that self-consciousness is simply that I am clearly ignorant in every way.

I've only in the last few years or so realized that some people love books so much that they are frequently HORRIBLY DISSATISFIED with many various things within them. It never occurred to me to be so critical of what I read - I generally read something and enjoy it as it's laid out for me, and if I like it enough, I go hunting for fanfic to see what other ideas people have. Until a few years ago, it never occurred to me that maybe Susan wasn't "just into growing up and using makeup and wearing stockings," etc, just as an example.

Reading all the stuff y'all write has been a HUGE education for me, and while I have all kinds of feels about it all, I don't always have words that make any sense about it, or the ability to say why I loved something so much, especially not with coherence...it ends up coming out roughly as, "DURRRRHHHH, KIM LIKEYYYYY."

So I guess my whole rambling, stupid-head point is that you should never, ever think that lack of comments means something is bad or not worth continuing; haters are one thing, and they are every one of them deplorable for not being open-minded, but maybe some others are more like me, and either haven't gotten to it yet or don't know how to say what it is they feel or think. And too, maybe they're self-conscious about it like I am.

And all that said, I know how it feels from the writer's point, too, so I hope you don't feel alone in the way you feel. ♥

[rthstewart]

I LIKE STILL KEEP WRITING is OK by me. If nothing else, it tells me someone is still there and reading. There are a couple of long time readers who I have not heard from and I assume that they've lost interest and/or they don't like me or the chapter well enough to even say "Thanks for the update, dude."

So, always hearing something means a lot.

But... going to your question in your review (and thank you), yes, Morgan is written as being on the Autsim scale -- what is/was Asperger's specifically. She is a very high functioning person in some respects and with the benefit of a talking, highly emotionally intelligent partner in the form of Jina and then Rafiqa she becomes much better. She is still clumsy and has difficult with eye contact and carries on enormous conversations in her head before saying a word. (My LJ entry about Peter and Morgan is a really good example of that. Morgan keeps telling Peter to stop interrupting her and she's not saying anything).

The reason for this was... complex. I gave her the peculiar speech pattern in BRD because I wanted Edmund to riff on his titles. And then having established in chapter 3, I was stuck with it, though it did allow me to set us the whole Harold joke in the last chapters. I'd never intended for the pairing to be romantic. I introduced her solely to be the foil for Edmund's wit in Chapter 3. I also liked the conclusion at the end of BRD that Morgan was not a pack animal which the Beasts understood even if the Humans did not.

But... I got stuck with her because people really liked her. Which meant then what? When I started H&M it became much more deliberate. I did a lot of reading on people on those social scales, I have a family member who is a high functioning autistic, and started writing it deliberately. She's a very difficult character to write and Edmund's own emotional intelligence began so low they were really complete disasters. There is huge growth for both of them from BRD and early H&M to where they are in this recent AW chapter.

Thank you so much for the R&R.

[psyche29]

That's so good to know, because believe me, my first overall reaction is often ZUHHHH WOW. Which is always only an approximate amalgamation of All The Feels that make up each individual little thing.

And thank you for the answer! I mean, of course I don't care if she's Autistic or not, it was more an "insatiable curiosity" thing than a judgment call on my part. I figured if she was specifically on an Autism spectrum, she was certainly very high-functioning, and if she wasn't then I was kind of leaning toward the "eccentric brilliance" camp...which is really just my way of acknowledging that people with extremely high brilliance - whether in one subject or many - don't always operate on the same level as the rest of us.

Either way, characters like that are bound to be difficult for the writer, and I hugely appreciate the effort you've put in with Morgan because she is so real, she leaps off the page (screen?). ♥

[rthstewart]

Thank you! As mentioned, Morgan was an accident. And then as I was filling in the head canon, and necessity of there being succession and heirs, I thought, OK, Edmund is sort of the only one left. So, do I invent a new character or go with Morgan? Readers likes her so I was stuck with her, and so was Ed.