Marie Brennan's Blog, page 197
October 9, 2012
thoughts while packing for Sirens
SELF: Oh, noes! I cannot wear the costume I wanted to bring for the Sirens ball, because I have gained too much weight!
REST OF SELF: Well, we're not eighteen anymore.
SELF: No, we're not. <is tragic>
REST OF SELF: . . . hang on a sec. We have gained something in the waist and hips, yes. But this outfit is cut such that it actually still fits just fine through the waist and hips.
SELF: BUT IT DOESN'T FIT.
REST OF SELF: . . . through the ribcage. I somehow don't think we've gained large amounts of weight in the ribcage. I think we've just grown. Seeing as how this was sewn for us when we were eighteen, and we are now thirty-two.
SELF: Wait, that's almost worse. We can pretend we might lose weight someday, but we can't really pretend our bones are going to shrink back to teenaged levels.
REST OF SELF: I'm going to ignore that weight-loss comment and point out that this is why someone invented corsets.
SELF: HOORAY THE DAY IS SAVED!
(I actually have to wait for
kniedzw
to get home and help me get dressed to see if this solution will work. If it doesn't, then I should probably let go of the dress, since yeah -- it not fitting is a function more of my skeleton than anything else. But I think it will; the dress only just barely doesn't fit.)
REST OF SELF: Well, we're not eighteen anymore.
SELF: No, we're not. <is tragic>
REST OF SELF: . . . hang on a sec. We have gained something in the waist and hips, yes. But this outfit is cut such that it actually still fits just fine through the waist and hips.
SELF: BUT IT DOESN'T FIT.
REST OF SELF: . . . through the ribcage. I somehow don't think we've gained large amounts of weight in the ribcage. I think we've just grown. Seeing as how this was sewn for us when we were eighteen, and we are now thirty-two.
SELF: Wait, that's almost worse. We can pretend we might lose weight someday, but we can't really pretend our bones are going to shrink back to teenaged levels.
REST OF SELF: I'm going to ignore that weight-loss comment and point out that this is why someone invented corsets.
SELF: HOORAY THE DAY IS SAVED!
(I actually have to wait for
kniedzw
to get home and help me get dressed to see if this solution will work. If it doesn't, then I should probably let go of the dress, since yeah -- it not fitting is a function more of my skeleton than anything else. But I think it will; the dress only just barely doesn't fit.)
September at the Book View Cafe
Lies and Prophecy
isn't the only book that came out from BVC last month, of course. I'd like to alert you guys to what comes out there going forward, but I don't want to spam you with book posts; ergo, I'm thinking that what I will do is put them up in monthly batches. (You can get this same information, plus various coupons and other deals, by subscribing to the monthly newsletter -- just put your e-mail address in the appropriate box on the right-hand side of the page.)
The other two things out last month were:
"Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand"
In a post-apocalyptic world, the young healer Snake ventures into unknown lands during her proving year. Her genetically engineered rattlesnake and cobra provide vaccines and medicines, while the rare alien dreamsnake eases pain and suffering.
“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” won SFWA’s Nebula Award. It is the first chapter of Dreamsnake , which won the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. The story is presented by BVC as a stand-alone title, by request.
Some Enchanted Season
Kevyn Llewellyn, a struggling artist, must have the exactly right model for her next project, or she’s going to be fired. When she sees him—none other than Rusty Rivers, NFL player fighting injuries to save his career—she does the absolutely logical thing: she kidnaps him. Or rescues him… it depends on whom you’re asking.
Rusty Rivers is the kind of guy who’s squandered every opportunity, while Kevyn’s had to fight for every success. They’re as different as meteor and moonbeam, with nothing apparent in common, and yet… in this doomed, enchanted football season, dare they hope that anything magical can happen that they can believe in forever?
. . . and, y'know, this old thing. :-) Just in case you missed it the first half-dozen times I mentioned it.
The other two things out last month were:
"Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand"
In a post-apocalyptic world, the young healer Snake ventures into unknown lands during her proving year. Her genetically engineered rattlesnake and cobra provide vaccines and medicines, while the rare alien dreamsnake eases pain and suffering.
“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” won SFWA’s Nebula Award. It is the first chapter of Dreamsnake , which won the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. The story is presented by BVC as a stand-alone title, by request.
Some Enchanted Season
Kevyn Llewellyn, a struggling artist, must have the exactly right model for her next project, or she’s going to be fired. When she sees him—none other than Rusty Rivers, NFL player fighting injuries to save his career—she does the absolutely logical thing: she kidnaps him. Or rescues him… it depends on whom you’re asking.
Rusty Rivers is the kind of guy who’s squandered every opportunity, while Kevyn’s had to fight for every success. They’re as different as meteor and moonbeam, with nothing apparent in common, and yet… in this doomed, enchanted football season, dare they hope that anything magical can happen that they can believe in forever?
. . . and, y'know, this old thing. :-) Just in case you missed it the first half-dozen times I mentioned it.
October 8, 2012
It's still true
You know,
greek_amazon
made this icon for me, and I never end up using it. Because the stuff I wait on? Is stuff I end up not wanting to talk about where people can see. Not exactly because I'm afraid I'll jinx it; rather that I dislike publicly showing my hopes in the event that the thing I'm hoping for falls through. It would be more crushing to me then. Better if I can just be crushed to a lesser degree in private.
The alternative, of course, is to make cryptic posts like this one. I'm waiting on something! But I won't tell you what! Just, y'know, keep your fingers generically crossed! I promise I'm not waiting on the completion of my death ray to kill you all!
Yeah. This is why I end up not using this icon, even though it is so very, very true.
greek_amazon
made this icon for me, and I never end up using it. Because the stuff I wait on? Is stuff I end up not wanting to talk about where people can see. Not exactly because I'm afraid I'll jinx it; rather that I dislike publicly showing my hopes in the event that the thing I'm hoping for falls through. It would be more crushing to me then. Better if I can just be crushed to a lesser degree in private.The alternative, of course, is to make cryptic posts like this one. I'm waiting on something! But I won't tell you what! Just, y'know, keep your fingers generically crossed! I promise I'm not waiting on the completion of my death ray to kill you all!
Yeah. This is why I end up not using this icon, even though it is so very, very true.
Suspension
I've noticed an interesting pattern in the responses to "Waiting for Beauty." (Unfortunately, the story is no longer free on Apex's site; sorry about that.) Multiple people have said something to the effect of "I could tell where it was going, but I enjoyed it anyway." And this has inspired Thinky Thoughts about predictability in fiction.
Normally my metaphors for writing tend to revolve around textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing, etc), but I've been having misadventures in piano lately, so this time I'm going to go with music. There's a thing called a suspension, which you've heard many times even if you don't know that's the term for it. You know how sometimes, before a piece settles into the final chord, it hangs there for a moment being not-quite-right? That's a suspension: a note from a different chord persisting before at last resolving into the sound you expect.
Suspension works because you do expect the resolution. You hear it before it happens; you know where the music is going. Resolving into another chord entirely might be a clever trick, but it isn't "better," and if you use that trick too often you'll annoy a lot of your audience.
We tend to talk about predictability in fiction as if it's a bad thing. The word itself has a negative connotation -- and heck, some writers decry "resolution" as being the cheap and easy way out of a story in the first place. But we crave resolution; we derive satisfaction from that feeling of knowing where the music is going, and following it to the end. And it's true in fiction, too. Predictability is only a bad thing when it's done badly.
Okay, tautologies are tautological. What's the difference between doing it badly and doing it well? If I knew that for sure, I'd be selling my wisdom to the masses. But I can suss out three factors, at least, the first of which is that the suspense (in the musical sense of the word, more than the thriller one, though the breathless anticipation of the camera panning around to show the murderer is often suspense of the music-analogous variety as well) -- right, that parenthetical got too long. Let’s start over: suspense should not overstay its welcome. "Waiting for Beauty" is less than eight hundred words long because its central conceit can't bear a heavier weight than that. If I wanted a five-thousand-word story, I'd have to bring in other material, delay for as long as possible the introduction of that element -- and that still might not work, because whatever filled the first 4500 or so would have to be substantial enough that it would probably take over the story.
The second factor is that the material of the suspension has to be worthwhile in its own right. "Waiting for Beauty" depends heavily on the specificity of the details along the way, the image it builds up, brick by brick. If that doesn't work for a given reader (as it hasn't, for some), the story itself will fall apart on the spot. For other stories, it might be the vivid emotion leading up to the revelation of what the reader has seen all along. Or the clockwork precision of disparate plot elements falling into place. The point is, the general point of "the writing has to be good" becomes critically true when the unexpected ceases to be one of your selling points: you need the reader to admire the journey for its own sake.
And the third, of course, is that the final chord -- the thing the reader is anticipating -- has to be something they want. One of the things that makes M. Night Shyamalan’s later movies not work for me is that when I see where they’re going, I really, really wish they would go somewhere else. To some extent this ties into the issue of cliches: suspension turns into predictability (in the negative sense) when the thing you’re making the reader wait for is a thing they’ve seen a bazillion times. But it’s possible to be not a cliche, and still undesirable. The Sixth Sense is arguably more cliched than Shyamalan’s subsequent films, but I like the former and dislike the latter because of where he’s leading me in each one.
As obvious as it seems to say that predictability is okay -- even beneficial! -- if you do it well, I feel like sometimes we lose sight of that in our rush to condemn "easy" storytelling. Some of Shakespeare’s plays start with a prologue that spoils the entire plot; we still keep watching. Uncertainty is not the only thing that can create suspense; sometimes, in a different way, certainty can do the same.
Normally my metaphors for writing tend to revolve around textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing, etc), but I've been having misadventures in piano lately, so this time I'm going to go with music. There's a thing called a suspension, which you've heard many times even if you don't know that's the term for it. You know how sometimes, before a piece settles into the final chord, it hangs there for a moment being not-quite-right? That's a suspension: a note from a different chord persisting before at last resolving into the sound you expect.
Suspension works because you do expect the resolution. You hear it before it happens; you know where the music is going. Resolving into another chord entirely might be a clever trick, but it isn't "better," and if you use that trick too often you'll annoy a lot of your audience.
We tend to talk about predictability in fiction as if it's a bad thing. The word itself has a negative connotation -- and heck, some writers decry "resolution" as being the cheap and easy way out of a story in the first place. But we crave resolution; we derive satisfaction from that feeling of knowing where the music is going, and following it to the end. And it's true in fiction, too. Predictability is only a bad thing when it's done badly.
Okay, tautologies are tautological. What's the difference between doing it badly and doing it well? If I knew that for sure, I'd be selling my wisdom to the masses. But I can suss out three factors, at least, the first of which is that the suspense (in the musical sense of the word, more than the thriller one, though the breathless anticipation of the camera panning around to show the murderer is often suspense of the music-analogous variety as well) -- right, that parenthetical got too long. Let’s start over: suspense should not overstay its welcome. "Waiting for Beauty" is less than eight hundred words long because its central conceit can't bear a heavier weight than that. If I wanted a five-thousand-word story, I'd have to bring in other material, delay for as long as possible the introduction of that element -- and that still might not work, because whatever filled the first 4500 or so would have to be substantial enough that it would probably take over the story.
The second factor is that the material of the suspension has to be worthwhile in its own right. "Waiting for Beauty" depends heavily on the specificity of the details along the way, the image it builds up, brick by brick. If that doesn't work for a given reader (as it hasn't, for some), the story itself will fall apart on the spot. For other stories, it might be the vivid emotion leading up to the revelation of what the reader has seen all along. Or the clockwork precision of disparate plot elements falling into place. The point is, the general point of "the writing has to be good" becomes critically true when the unexpected ceases to be one of your selling points: you need the reader to admire the journey for its own sake.
And the third, of course, is that the final chord -- the thing the reader is anticipating -- has to be something they want. One of the things that makes M. Night Shyamalan’s later movies not work for me is that when I see where they’re going, I really, really wish they would go somewhere else. To some extent this ties into the issue of cliches: suspension turns into predictability (in the negative sense) when the thing you’re making the reader wait for is a thing they’ve seen a bazillion times. But it’s possible to be not a cliche, and still undesirable. The Sixth Sense is arguably more cliched than Shyamalan’s subsequent films, but I like the former and dislike the latter because of where he’s leading me in each one.
As obvious as it seems to say that predictability is okay -- even beneficial! -- if you do it well, I feel like sometimes we lose sight of that in our rush to condemn "easy" storytelling. Some of Shakespeare’s plays start with a prologue that spoils the entire plot; we still keep watching. Uncertainty is not the only thing that can create suspense; sometimes, in a different way, certainty can do the same.
October 6, 2012
DYW
Signups haven't opened yet, but since I already have this written (heck, much of it is copy-pasted from previous letters) I might as well post it.
Hello, Yulemouse! I know you haven't written a word yet, but I already want to thank you. I’ve done Yuletide twice before, and had a blast both times, which means I'm already happy because I know how awesome it is to have somebody write a fic for me. This year, that's you, and I want you to know I appreciate it.
The optional details below are optional; they are also, ummm, long. Please do not be intimidated. The length comes from me talking about what I like about the sources, and offering a variety of suggestions as to what kinds of stories would interest me; you're welcome to use any of them, or to springboard off of them into something else you think I'd like. Basically, I'm just trying to feed the plotbunnies. (There are also more general notes about my tastes at the bottom.)
My username on AO3 is russian_blue, and you can check out the fics I’ve written and received there.
***
Fandom: Gabriel Knight
Characters: Gabriel Knight, Grace Nakimura
This is the one I keep asking for, and will continue to ask for until I get it. :-) If you didn’t match with me on it you probably aren’t going to write it, but juuuuust in case, I should mention that you can now buy all three games on GOG.com, in case you're interested in the old Sierra point-and-click style adventure games. This series is really good! (And not as horror-ish as the descriptions would have you believe.)
What I love about the source: The balance of humour and darkness, the way the stories made use of real-world history and folklore, and the sense that Gabriel was a flawed but still basically good man.
What I'd love to get: All right, I admit it -- I'm still sore we never got a fourth game. :-) That's the problem with having a game series with actual character development arcs; when those get cut off short, it leaves me unsatisfied!
Which is by way of saying that what I would really love here is a story giving closure (of some generally upbeat kind) to the relationship between Gabe and Grace. They slept together in Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, then never really talked about it, and then Grace bailed out and we didn't even get to read her note and auuuuuuuggggggggggggggh.
The closure could take whatever form you like (and be from whichever point of view you like, or both). Grace, presumably, was going to talk to that guy in India she'd been e-mailing, about fighting supernatural evil in her own right. Maybe Gabe goes after her. Maybe he doesn't, and she shows up again a few years later, after becoming some kind of full-blown Schattenjäger equivalent herself. Maybe they run into each other without warning when they both go after the same supernatural beastie. I'd love to see Grace treated as Gabe's professional equal (I think she's always been his equal in personal terms), rather than a sidekick, and for him to accept her as such -- which is not to say he should have a personality transplant and suddenly be without flaws or blind spots, but I feel like he's been struggling with a lot of issues there, and it would nice to see him continue to grow.
As I said, I'd like there to be a happy ending eventually -- get your mind out of the gutter! I mean happy emotions! -- but I don't mind angst along the way. (Where "happy endings" are concerned, wink wink nudge nudge -- eh, I really care more about the emotional resolution. They can sleep together or not, as you like, but I'm not looking for smut.) If you have the time and energy, I would ADORE something plotty, with a supernatural threat they have to take care of. (Flavor of threat is entirely up to you. Rumour had it the fourth game would have taken place in Scotland and dealt with ghosts; run with that if you want, or grab any cool bit of folklore and history that you know and want to play with.)
If, on the other hand, you detest that entire relationship, then I could also be fine with a story that is just about Grace doing something cool, post-canon, without Gabriel appearing. You don't have to be a Ritter and the Schattenjäger to fight supernatural evil, after all.
***
Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera
Characters: Magdalene Defoe (Blind Mag), the GraveRobber
Another repeat request, and I'll admit that I'm crossing my fingers for a crossover. My first year I requested one and lucked out (I actually got two stories for it), but I do recognize that such things are even more optional than the usual optionality of details. If you can't or don't want to do the crossover, I do have other suggestions.
What I love about the source: The weird dystopian aspects (which didn't get explored enough for my taste), the grit vs. glamour, and the GraveRobber, whose voice is goddamn hot. :-)
What I'd love to get: The crossover idea is based on the fact that Blind Mag is played by Sarah Brightman . . . who also originated the role of Christine Daae in Phantom of the Opera. And, y'know, both characters are singers. So the idea is some kind of story wherein Blind Mag is Christine Daae. How and why this happened, not to mention how she's around instead of being dead and gone a century past, is up to you; I'd like it to involve the GraveRobber (maybe he dug up Christine's grave, and for some reason she wasn't dead/came back to life?), but whatever idea fires your imagination, go for it. Compliance with actual Repo! canon is totally your choice, with regard to her friendship with Marni, etc.
If you don't want to do the crossover, then Blind Mag is optional; I'd be interested in a story about her (especially the eyes -- those are really cool; what kinds of things have they recorded?), but really, let's face it, I am shallow, and the GraveRobber is hot. :-) Anything focusing on his work would be cool, and if you write about both of them, maybe they're friends for some reason? My GK request above notwithstanding, I'm a sucker for good platonic friendships between men and women.
***
Fandom: Elfquest
Characters: none
Another repeat request -- yes, there's a theme here. :-) This one actually got fulfilled last year, but the nature of what I want is such that it's possibly for lots of different people to write lots of totally different fills. And as I said in the comments to last year's fic, it really made me want to ask for this again and see what I get.
What I love about the source: Oh god, where do I start? This was, for many years, the only comic book I had ever read. It's still one of the deep foundational stories in my mind. I love how well-realized the characters are, and the capacity for the narrative to be about the ensemble and subsets thereof, rather than being just Cutter's story with everybody else playing bit parts. I love the way conflict is handled, never being casually dismissed, or treated as if violence is a get-out-of-jail-free card for everything. I love the consequences, and the fact that the characters experience both real losses and real victories.
What I'd love to get: This request is stupidly open-ended, and I admit it. If that's a problem, feel free to contact
teleidoplex
and she'll serve as a go-between for questions -- but really, there are so many things I could be happy with, you should be safe.
I really just want an expansion of the universe. I've read possibly everything there is -- certainly I've read most of it, including the far-future Jink stuff -- though nothing after Kings of the Broken Wheel quite hit me the same way, as the world started being farmed out to other writers. But there's so much richness there, and also so much open space to develop new things. Possible angles include:
1) A tribe of your own devising, either meeting one of the canonical groups or off doing their own thing. This could explore an environment not already covered (last year I got subterranean volcanic elves!), or be your own take on something the canon already touched on. (I love the idea of sea elves, for example, but the actual canonical Wavedancers didn't really do it for me.) My academic background is in anthropology, so elves adapting socially and physically to different environments is really interesting to me -- which sounds high-falutin', but really what I mean is make cool shit up!
2) History for any of the canonical groups. Life under a past Wolfrider chief, early days of the Sun Village, Go-Backs vs. trolls, the Gliders before they fell into decadence and apathy -- any of those would be cool. The High Ones right after the fall. Etc. Whatever strikes your fancy.
3) Backstory for a canonical character, in case you'd prefer to stick closer to the actual series rather than haring off into the wild blue yonder with your own ideas. If you're like me and get neurotic when you don't know what your recipient might be looking for, I can say that Clearbrook is probably my favorite female character and Strongbow my favorite male, but I like most of 'em: Nightfall and Redlance, Skywise, Rayek (ohhh, thirteen-year-old me has a soft spot for angsty Rayek), Venka, Dart and his pack of jackwolf-riders, etc. You could probably even sell me on Winnowill backstory if you have a cool idea for that, though I'd prefer nothing future, i.e. The Further Adventures of How Winnowill Is the Problem That Keeps on Giving. She played the role of central villain enough already in the series for my taste.
4) Human contact. This one could combine with practically any of the above. Maybe your invented tribe runs into humans, or has even learned to co-exist with them in (non-warped-Glider-style) peace. Or maybe there were other contacts that we haven't been told about, for the canonical tribes or individual characters therefrom. We've already had a few examples of how that could go, but there's room for a lot more variety.
Really, I just want MOAR ELFQUEST DAMMIT, whether it's following the existing material into the past or exploring new ground. (And yes, I'm aware of the new series, which is not "final" in the way the title would have you believe. But it's publishing too slowly! One page a week?! <makes grabby hands>)
***
Fandom: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
Characters: Milady Clarick de Winter
And here we have one I would have asked for last year (and thought about asking for the year before that), but Milady wasn't on the list of nominated characters. <shakes fist at new limitations on nominations>
The easiest way to approach this one is probably to quote my own comments after I finally got around to reading the book for the first time:
I would love any sort of "apology for Milady" tale, that shows us the story from her perspective. Not necessarily her actual point of view; it would be entirely fitting to write it in a more nineteenth-century omniscient-narrator voice. But a perspective that is sympathetic to her. I don't think Milady is a good person by the time she shows up in the book, and I'm not at all asking for her flaws to be hand-waved away. I do think, though, that it's understandable how she acquired those flaws, and want something that doesn't treat her as a villain.
You can take whatever angle you like on that: one or more episodes from her documented backstory, an incident from the book's actual plot, some scene of your own invention. All I ask is that it feature Milady and show some understanding of her life.
***
More generally: I love stuff with actual plot in, but since I know that can be a lot of work, I would also be very happy with something that really examines the characters or world. I prefer stories that stay close to the characters as written, respecting canon relationships, working with flaws rather than sweeping them under the rug, etc. Apart from the crackiness of the Repo!/Phantom crossover, I'd rather the fic be presented as something that could fit into the the canon, rather than something that blatantly ignores the existing narrative. Go ahead and include any characters I've not listed that might be useful to you, or invent OCs to serve your narrative needs.
I adore drama; I also like humour, especially when it's of the "witty" variety rather than physical comedy or gross-out excess, but I love it best when it's used as leavening for the more serious stuff, or as the jab to set up the dramatic roundhouse that follows. (The kind of thing Joss Whedon excels at, if you want an example.) I don't like humiliation, or characters being flat-out stupid -- which is not the same thing as their flaws getting in the way of good decisions. :-) Not really looking for smut. I don't mind violence, as long as it doesn't cross the line into splatterpunk gore, but I don't like torture. Especially against women: by all means let them fight, but please don't victimize them, or refrigerator them, or push canonical women to the sidelines of the story.
As mentioned before, I'm russian_blue on AO3, so feel free to rummage around in the entrails of what I’ve got there if you need more data on what I like.
Hello, Yulemouse! I know you haven't written a word yet, but I already want to thank you. I’ve done Yuletide twice before, and had a blast both times, which means I'm already happy because I know how awesome it is to have somebody write a fic for me. This year, that's you, and I want you to know I appreciate it.
The optional details below are optional; they are also, ummm, long. Please do not be intimidated. The length comes from me talking about what I like about the sources, and offering a variety of suggestions as to what kinds of stories would interest me; you're welcome to use any of them, or to springboard off of them into something else you think I'd like. Basically, I'm just trying to feed the plotbunnies. (There are also more general notes about my tastes at the bottom.)
My username on AO3 is russian_blue, and you can check out the fics I’ve written and received there.
***
Fandom: Gabriel Knight
Characters: Gabriel Knight, Grace Nakimura
This is the one I keep asking for, and will continue to ask for until I get it. :-) If you didn’t match with me on it you probably aren’t going to write it, but juuuuust in case, I should mention that you can now buy all three games on GOG.com, in case you're interested in the old Sierra point-and-click style adventure games. This series is really good! (And not as horror-ish as the descriptions would have you believe.)
What I love about the source: The balance of humour and darkness, the way the stories made use of real-world history and folklore, and the sense that Gabriel was a flawed but still basically good man.
What I'd love to get: All right, I admit it -- I'm still sore we never got a fourth game. :-) That's the problem with having a game series with actual character development arcs; when those get cut off short, it leaves me unsatisfied!
Which is by way of saying that what I would really love here is a story giving closure (of some generally upbeat kind) to the relationship between Gabe and Grace. They slept together in Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, then never really talked about it, and then Grace bailed out and we didn't even get to read her note and auuuuuuuggggggggggggggh.
The closure could take whatever form you like (and be from whichever point of view you like, or both). Grace, presumably, was going to talk to that guy in India she'd been e-mailing, about fighting supernatural evil in her own right. Maybe Gabe goes after her. Maybe he doesn't, and she shows up again a few years later, after becoming some kind of full-blown Schattenjäger equivalent herself. Maybe they run into each other without warning when they both go after the same supernatural beastie. I'd love to see Grace treated as Gabe's professional equal (I think she's always been his equal in personal terms), rather than a sidekick, and for him to accept her as such -- which is not to say he should have a personality transplant and suddenly be without flaws or blind spots, but I feel like he's been struggling with a lot of issues there, and it would nice to see him continue to grow.
As I said, I'd like there to be a happy ending eventually -- get your mind out of the gutter! I mean happy emotions! -- but I don't mind angst along the way. (Where "happy endings" are concerned, wink wink nudge nudge -- eh, I really care more about the emotional resolution. They can sleep together or not, as you like, but I'm not looking for smut.) If you have the time and energy, I would ADORE something plotty, with a supernatural threat they have to take care of. (Flavor of threat is entirely up to you. Rumour had it the fourth game would have taken place in Scotland and dealt with ghosts; run with that if you want, or grab any cool bit of folklore and history that you know and want to play with.)
If, on the other hand, you detest that entire relationship, then I could also be fine with a story that is just about Grace doing something cool, post-canon, without Gabriel appearing. You don't have to be a Ritter and the Schattenjäger to fight supernatural evil, after all.
***
Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera
Characters: Magdalene Defoe (Blind Mag), the GraveRobber
Another repeat request, and I'll admit that I'm crossing my fingers for a crossover. My first year I requested one and lucked out (I actually got two stories for it), but I do recognize that such things are even more optional than the usual optionality of details. If you can't or don't want to do the crossover, I do have other suggestions.
What I love about the source: The weird dystopian aspects (which didn't get explored enough for my taste), the grit vs. glamour, and the GraveRobber, whose voice is goddamn hot. :-)
What I'd love to get: The crossover idea is based on the fact that Blind Mag is played by Sarah Brightman . . . who also originated the role of Christine Daae in Phantom of the Opera. And, y'know, both characters are singers. So the idea is some kind of story wherein Blind Mag is Christine Daae. How and why this happened, not to mention how she's around instead of being dead and gone a century past, is up to you; I'd like it to involve the GraveRobber (maybe he dug up Christine's grave, and for some reason she wasn't dead/came back to life?), but whatever idea fires your imagination, go for it. Compliance with actual Repo! canon is totally your choice, with regard to her friendship with Marni, etc.
If you don't want to do the crossover, then Blind Mag is optional; I'd be interested in a story about her (especially the eyes -- those are really cool; what kinds of things have they recorded?), but really, let's face it, I am shallow, and the GraveRobber is hot. :-) Anything focusing on his work would be cool, and if you write about both of them, maybe they're friends for some reason? My GK request above notwithstanding, I'm a sucker for good platonic friendships between men and women.
***
Fandom: Elfquest
Characters: none
Another repeat request -- yes, there's a theme here. :-) This one actually got fulfilled last year, but the nature of what I want is such that it's possibly for lots of different people to write lots of totally different fills. And as I said in the comments to last year's fic, it really made me want to ask for this again and see what I get.
What I love about the source: Oh god, where do I start? This was, for many years, the only comic book I had ever read. It's still one of the deep foundational stories in my mind. I love how well-realized the characters are, and the capacity for the narrative to be about the ensemble and subsets thereof, rather than being just Cutter's story with everybody else playing bit parts. I love the way conflict is handled, never being casually dismissed, or treated as if violence is a get-out-of-jail-free card for everything. I love the consequences, and the fact that the characters experience both real losses and real victories.
What I'd love to get: This request is stupidly open-ended, and I admit it. If that's a problem, feel free to contact
teleidoplex
and she'll serve as a go-between for questions -- but really, there are so many things I could be happy with, you should be safe.I really just want an expansion of the universe. I've read possibly everything there is -- certainly I've read most of it, including the far-future Jink stuff -- though nothing after Kings of the Broken Wheel quite hit me the same way, as the world started being farmed out to other writers. But there's so much richness there, and also so much open space to develop new things. Possible angles include:
1) A tribe of your own devising, either meeting one of the canonical groups or off doing their own thing. This could explore an environment not already covered (last year I got subterranean volcanic elves!), or be your own take on something the canon already touched on. (I love the idea of sea elves, for example, but the actual canonical Wavedancers didn't really do it for me.) My academic background is in anthropology, so elves adapting socially and physically to different environments is really interesting to me -- which sounds high-falutin', but really what I mean is make cool shit up!
2) History for any of the canonical groups. Life under a past Wolfrider chief, early days of the Sun Village, Go-Backs vs. trolls, the Gliders before they fell into decadence and apathy -- any of those would be cool. The High Ones right after the fall. Etc. Whatever strikes your fancy.
3) Backstory for a canonical character, in case you'd prefer to stick closer to the actual series rather than haring off into the wild blue yonder with your own ideas. If you're like me and get neurotic when you don't know what your recipient might be looking for, I can say that Clearbrook is probably my favorite female character and Strongbow my favorite male, but I like most of 'em: Nightfall and Redlance, Skywise, Rayek (ohhh, thirteen-year-old me has a soft spot for angsty Rayek), Venka, Dart and his pack of jackwolf-riders, etc. You could probably even sell me on Winnowill backstory if you have a cool idea for that, though I'd prefer nothing future, i.e. The Further Adventures of How Winnowill Is the Problem That Keeps on Giving. She played the role of central villain enough already in the series for my taste.
4) Human contact. This one could combine with practically any of the above. Maybe your invented tribe runs into humans, or has even learned to co-exist with them in (non-warped-Glider-style) peace. Or maybe there were other contacts that we haven't been told about, for the canonical tribes or individual characters therefrom. We've already had a few examples of how that could go, but there's room for a lot more variety.
Really, I just want MOAR ELFQUEST DAMMIT, whether it's following the existing material into the past or exploring new ground. (And yes, I'm aware of the new series, which is not "final" in the way the title would have you believe. But it's publishing too slowly! One page a week?! <makes grabby hands>)
***
Fandom: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
Characters: Milady Clarick de Winter
And here we have one I would have asked for last year (and thought about asking for the year before that), but Milady wasn't on the list of nominated characters. <shakes fist at new limitations on nominations>
The easiest way to approach this one is probably to quote my own comments after I finally got around to reading the book for the first time:
Has anybody published a revisionist retelling of this story, from Milady's point of view? The thing practically writes itself. Her original crime (breaking her holy vows) can easily be written off as youthful stupidity followed by a badly-conceived attempt to escape the consequences; making that sympathetic would be a piece of cake. But said attempt doesn't work out (I admit I've forgotten the details of this transition), and she ends up falling in love with the Comte de la Fère. The movie [i.e. the Disney one, which I saw long before reading the book] predisposed me to believe she actually did love him, but there's no particular reason to believe she didn't; the novel at one point talks about her going from "the man she had ruined to the man she was about to ruin," but what ruin was that? I don't recall any evidence she was planning to help the Comte off this mortal coil, or otherwise mess up his life. The eventual ruin went the other way: having discovered the brand, he saw no better course of action than to string her up from the nearest tree.
'Cause, y'know, that's what you do with the wife you supposedly love.
Okay, sure, Dumas was writing in the nineteenth century, when that is what you did. She was a criminal, ergo a subhuman and inherently untrustworthy being incapable of redemption. One line from the film stuck in my head, leaping to mind every time I think of their Milady: "I have become the monster you once thought me to be." Yes, she undoubtedly commits crimes later -- horrific ones -- but after what happened to her, I can sympathize. Not approve, but sympathize. She had to make her way in the world somehow, and the somehow she found involved the Cardinal -- who has at least a modicum of respect for her brains and her skills. The way she got out of prison in England was a masterwork of manipulation, and if it had been a man doing all the things she did, I doubt Dumas would have criticized that character a tenth so much. Half of his description of her evil centers on things like her (unnatural and unfeminine) rage, which a modern audience is more likely to admire than to deplore.
I would love any sort of "apology for Milady" tale, that shows us the story from her perspective. Not necessarily her actual point of view; it would be entirely fitting to write it in a more nineteenth-century omniscient-narrator voice. But a perspective that is sympathetic to her. I don't think Milady is a good person by the time she shows up in the book, and I'm not at all asking for her flaws to be hand-waved away. I do think, though, that it's understandable how she acquired those flaws, and want something that doesn't treat her as a villain.
You can take whatever angle you like on that: one or more episodes from her documented backstory, an incident from the book's actual plot, some scene of your own invention. All I ask is that it feature Milady and show some understanding of her life.
***
More generally: I love stuff with actual plot in, but since I know that can be a lot of work, I would also be very happy with something that really examines the characters or world. I prefer stories that stay close to the characters as written, respecting canon relationships, working with flaws rather than sweeping them under the rug, etc. Apart from the crackiness of the Repo!/Phantom crossover, I'd rather the fic be presented as something that could fit into the the canon, rather than something that blatantly ignores the existing narrative. Go ahead and include any characters I've not listed that might be useful to you, or invent OCs to serve your narrative needs.
I adore drama; I also like humour, especially when it's of the "witty" variety rather than physical comedy or gross-out excess, but I love it best when it's used as leavening for the more serious stuff, or as the jab to set up the dramatic roundhouse that follows. (The kind of thing Joss Whedon excels at, if you want an example.) I don't like humiliation, or characters being flat-out stupid -- which is not the same thing as their flaws getting in the way of good decisions. :-) Not really looking for smut. I don't mind violence, as long as it doesn't cross the line into splatterpunk gore, but I don't like torture. Especially against women: by all means let them fight, but please don't victimize them, or refrigerator them, or push canonical women to the sidelines of the story.
As mentioned before, I'm russian_blue on AO3, so feel free to rummage around in the entrails of what I’ve got there if you need more data on what I like.
DYT
Signups haven't opened yet, but since I already have this written (heck, much of it is copy-pasted from previous letters) I might as well post it.
Hello, Yulemouse! I know you haven't written a word yet, but I already want to thank you. I’ve done Yuletide twice before, and had a blast both times, which means I'm already happy because I know how awesome it is to have somebody write a fic for me. This year, that's you, and I want you to know I appreciate it.
The optional details below are optional; they are also, ummm, long. Please do not be intimidated. The length comes from me talking about what I like about the sources, and offering a variety of suggestions as to what kinds of stories would interest me; you're welcome to use any of them, or to springboard off of them into something else you think I'd like. Basically, I'm just trying to feed the plotbunnies. (There are also more general notes about my tastes at the bottom.)
My username on AO3 is russian_blue, and you can check out the fics I’ve written and received there.
***
Fandom: Gabriel Knight
Characters: Gabriel Knight, Grace Nakimura
This is the one I keep asking for, and will continue to ask for until I get it. :-) If you didn’t match with me on it you probably aren’t going to write it, but juuuuust in case, I should mention that you can now buy all three games on GOG.com, in case you're interested in the old Sierra point-and-click style adventure games. This series is really good! (And not as horror-ish as the descriptions would have you believe.)
What I love about the source: The balance of humour and darkness, the way the stories made use of real-world history and folklore, and the sense that Gabriel was a flawed but still basically good man.
What I'd love to get: All right, I admit it -- I'm still sore we never got a fourth game. :-) That's the problem with having a game series with actual character development arcs; when those get cut off short, it leaves me unsatisfied!
Which is by way of saying that what I would really love here is a story giving closure (of some generally upbeat kind) to the relationship between Gabe and Grace. They slept together in Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, then never really talked about it, and then Grace bailed out and we didn't even get to read her note and auuuuuuuggggggggggggggh.
The closure could take whatever form you like (and be from whichever point of view you like, or both). Grace, presumably, was going to talk to that guy in India she'd been e-mailing, about fighting supernatural evil in her own right. Maybe Gabe goes after her. Maybe he doesn't, and she shows up again a few years later, after becoming some kind of full-blown Schattenjäger equivalent herself. Maybe they run into each other without warning when they both go after the same supernatural beastie. I'd love to see Grace treated as Gabe's professional equal (I think she's always been his equal in personal terms), rather than a sidekick, and for him to accept her as such -- which is not to say he should have a personality transplant and suddenly be without flaws or blind spots, but I feel like he's been struggling with a lot of issues there, and it would nice to see him continue to grow.
As I said, I'd like there to be a happy ending eventually -- get your mind out of the gutter! I mean happy emotions! -- but I don't mind angst along the way. (Where "happy endings" are concerned, wink wink nudge nudge -- eh, I really care more about the emotional resolution. They can sleep together or not, as you like, but I'm not looking for smut.) If you have the time and energy, I would ADORE something plotty, with a supernatural threat they have to take care of. (Flavor of threat is entirely up to you. Rumour had it the fourth game would have taken place in Scotland and dealt with ghosts; run with that if you want, or grab any cool bit of folklore and history that you know and want to play with.)
If, on the other hand, you detest that entire relationship, then I could also be fine with a story that is just about Grace doing something cool, post-canon, without Gabriel appearing. You don't have to be a Ritter and the Schattenjäger to fight supernatural evil, after all.
***
Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera
Characters: Magdalene Defoe (Blind Mag), the GraveRobber
Another repeat request, and I'll admit that I'm crossing my fingers for a crossover. My first year I requested one and lucked out (I actually got two stories for it), but I do recognize that such things are even more optional than the usual optionality of details. If you can't or don't want to do the crossover, I do have other suggestions.
What I love about the source: The weird dystopian aspects (which didn't get explored enough for my taste), the grit vs. glamour, and the GraveRobber, whose voice is goddamn hot. :-)
What I'd love to get: The crossover idea is based on the fact that Blind Mag is played by Sarah Brightman . . . who also originated the role of Christine Daae in Phantom of the Opera. And, y'know, both characters are singers. So the idea is some kind of story wherein Blind Mag is Christine Daae. How and why this happened, not to mention how she's around instead of being dead and gone a century past, is up to you; I'd like it to involve the GraveRobber (maybe he dug up Christine's grave, and for some reason she wasn't dead/came back to life?), but whatever idea fires your imagination, go for it. Compliance with actual Repo! canon is totally your choice, with regard to her friendship with Marni, etc.
If you don't want to do the crossover, then Blind Mag is optional; I'd be interested in a story about her (especially the eyes -- those are really cool; what kinds of things have they recorded?), but really, let's face it, I am shallow, and the GraveRobber is hot. :-) Anything focusing on his work would be cool, and if you write about both of them, maybe they're friends for some reason? My GK request above notwithstanding, I'm a sucker for good platonic friendships between men and women.
***
Fandom: Elfquest
Characters: none
Another repeat request -- yes, there's a theme here. :-) This one actually got fulfilled last year, but the nature of what I want is such that it's possibly for lots of different people to write lots of totally different fills. And as I said in the comments to last year's fic, it really made me want to ask for this again and see what I get.
What I love about the source: Oh god, where do I start? This was, for many years, the only comic book I had ever read. It's still one of the deep foundational stories in my mind. I love how well-realized the characters are, and the capacity for the narrative to be about the ensemble and subsets thereof, rather than being just Cutter's story with everybody else playing bit parts. I love the way conflict is handled, never being casually dismissed, or treated as if violence is a get-out-of-jail-free card for everything. I love the consequences, and the fact that the characters experience both real losses and real victories.
What I'd love to get: This request is stupidly open-ended, and I admit it. If that's a problem, feel free to contact [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<lj-user="teleidoplex">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]
Signups haven't opened yet, but since I already have this written (heck, much of it is copy-pasted from previous letters) I might as well post it.
<lj-cut text="Dear Yuletide Writer">
Hello, Yulemouse! I know you haven't written a word yet, but I already want to thank you. I’ve done Yuletide twice before, and had a blast both times, which means I'm already happy because I know how awesome it is to have somebody write a fic for me. This year, that's you, and I want you to know I appreciate it.
The optional details below are optional; they are also, ummm, long. Please do not be intimidated. The length comes from me talking about what I like about the sources, and offering a variety of suggestions as to what kinds of stories would interest me; you're welcome to use any of them, or to springboard off of them into something else you think I'd like. Basically, I'm just trying to feed the plotbunnies. (There are also more general notes about my tastes at the bottom.)
My username on AO3 is <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/russ..., and you can check out the fics I’ve written and received there.
***
<b>Fandom: Gabriel Knight</b>
Characters: Gabriel Knight, Grace Nakimura
This is the one I keep asking for, and will continue to ask for until I get it. :-) If you didn’t match with me on it you probably aren’t going to write it, but <i>juuuuust</i> in case, I should mention that you can now buy <a href="http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/gabrie... <a href="http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/gabrie... <a href="http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/gabrie... on GOG.com, in case you're interested in the old Sierra point-and-click style adventure games. This series is really good! (And not as horror-ish as the descriptions would have you believe.)
<i>What I love about the source:</i> The balance of humour and darkness, the way the stories made use of real-world history and folklore, and the sense that Gabriel was a flawed but still basically good man.
<i>What I'd love to get:</i> All right, I admit it -- I'm still sore we never got a fourth game. :-) That's the problem with having a game series with actual character development arcs; when those get cut off short, it leaves me unsatisfied!
Which is by way of saying that what I would really love here is a story giving closure (of some generally upbeat kind) to the relationship between Gabe and Grace. They slept together in <i>Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned</i>, then never really talked about it, and then Grace bailed out and we didn't even get to read her note and auuuuuuuggggggggggggggh.
The closure could take whatever form you like (and be from whichever point of view you like, or both). Grace, presumably, was going to talk to that guy in India she'd been e-mailing, about fighting supernatural evil in her own right. Maybe Gabe goes after her. Maybe he doesn't, and she shows up again a few years later, after becoming some kind of full-blown Schattenjäger equivalent herself. Maybe they run into each other without warning when they both go after the same supernatural beastie. I'd love to see Grace treated as Gabe's professional equal (I think she's always been his equal in personal terms), rather than a sidekick, and for him to accept her as such -- which is not to say he should have a personality transplant and suddenly be without flaws or blind spots, but I feel like he's been struggling with a lot of issues there, and it would nice to see him continue to grow.
As I said, I'd like there to be a happy ending eventually -- get your mind out of the gutter! I mean happy emotions! -- but I don't mind angst along the way. (Where "happy endings" are concerned, wink wink nudge nudge -- eh, I really care more about the emotional resolution. They can sleep together or not, as you like, but I'm not looking for smut.) If you have the time and energy, I would ADORE something plotty, with a supernatural threat they have to take care of. (Flavor of threat is entirely up to you. Rumour had it the fourth game would have taken place in Scotland and dealt with ghosts; run with that if you want, or grab any cool bit of folklore and history that you know and want to play with.)
If, on the other hand, you detest that entire relationship, then I could also be fine with a story that is just about Grace doing something cool, post-canon, without Gabriel appearing. You don't have to be a Ritter and the Schattenjäger to fight supernatural evil, after all.
***
<b>Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera</b>
Characters: Magdalene Defoe (Blind Mag), the GraveRobber
Another repeat request, and I'll admit that I'm crossing my fingers for a crossover. My first year I requested one and lucked out (I actually got two stories for it), but I do recognize that such things are even more optional than the usual optionality of details. If you can't or don't want to do the crossover, I do have other suggestions.
<i>What I love about the source:</i> The weird dystopian aspects (which didn't get explored enough for my taste), the grit vs. glamour, and the GraveRobber, whose voice is goddamn hot. :-)
<i>What I'd love to get:</i> The crossover idea is based on the fact that Blind Mag is played by Sarah Brightman . . . who also originated the role of Christine Daae in <i>Phantom of the Opera</i>. And, y'know, both characters are singers. So the idea is some kind of story wherein Blind Mag <i>is</i> Christine Daae. How and why this happened, not to mention how she's around instead of being dead and gone a century past, is up to you; I'd like it to involve the GraveRobber (maybe he dug up Christine's grave, and for some reason she wasn't dead/came back to life?), but whatever idea fires your imagination, go for it. Compliance with actual <i>Repo!</i> canon is totally your choice, with regard to her friendship with Marni, etc.
If you don't want to do the crossover, then Blind Mag is optional; I'd be interested in a story about her (especially the eyes -- those are really cool; what kinds of things have they recorded?), but really, let's face it, I am shallow, and the GraveRobber is hot. :-) Anything focusing on his work would be cool, and if you write about both of them, maybe they're friends for some reason? My GK request above notwithstanding, I'm a sucker for good platonic friendships between men and women.
***
Fandom: Elfquest
Characters: none
Another repeat request -- yes, there's a theme here. :-) This one actually got fulfilled last year, but the nature of what I want is such that it's possibly for lots of different people to write lots of totally different fills. And as I said in the comments to last year's fic, it really made me want to ask for this again and see what I get.
<i>What I love about the source:</i> Oh god, where do I start? This was, for many years, the only comic book I had ever read. It's still one of the deep foundational stories in my mind. I love how well-realized the characters are, and the capacity for the narrative to be about the ensemble and subsets thereof, rather than being just Cutter's story with everybody else playing bit parts. I love the way conflict is handled, never being casually dismissed, or treated as if violence is a get-out-of-jail-free card for everything. I love the consequences, and the fact that the characters experience both real losses and real victories.
<i>What I'd love to get:</i> This request is stupidly open-ended, and I admit it. If that's a problem, feel free to contact <lj-user="teleidoplex"> and she'll serve as a go-between for questions -- but really, there are so many things I could be happy with, you should be safe.
I really just want an expansion of the universe. I've read possibly everything there is -- certainly I've read most of it, including the far-future Jink stuff -- though nothing after <i>Kings of the Broken Wheel</i> quite hit me the same way, as the world started being farmed out to other writers. But there's so much richness there, and also so much open space to develop new things. Possible angles include:
1) A tribe of your own devising, either meeting one of the canonical groups or off doing their own thing. This could explore an environment not already covered (last year I got subterranean volcanic elves!), or be your own take on something the canon already touched on. (I love the idea of sea elves, for example, but the actual canonical Wavedancers didn't really do it for me.) My academic background is in anthropology, so elves adapting socially and physically to different environments is really interesting to me -- which sounds high-falutin', but really what I mean is <i>make cool shit up!</i>
2) History for any of the canonical groups. Life under a past Wolfrider chief, early days of the Sun Village, Go-Backs vs. trolls, the Gliders before they fell into decadence and apathy -- any of those would be cool. The High Ones right after the fall. Etc. Whatever strikes your fancy.
3) Backstory for a canonical character, in case you'd prefer to stick closer to the actual series rather than haring off into the wild blue yonder with your own ideas. If you're like me and get neurotic when you don't know what your recipient might be looking for, I can say that Clearbrook is probably my favorite female character and Strongbow my favorite male, but I like most of 'em: Nightfall and Redlance, Skywise, Rayek (ohhh, thirteen-year-old me has a soft spot for angsty Rayek), Venka, Dart and his pack of jackwolf-riders, etc. You could probably even sell me on Winnowill backstory if you have a cool idea for that, though I'd prefer nothing future, i.e. The Further Adventures of How Winnowill Is the Problem That Keeps on Giving. She played the role of central villain enough already in the series for my taste.
4) Human contact. This one could combine with practically any of the above. Maybe your invented tribe runs into humans, or has even learned to co-exist with them in (non-warped-Glider-style) peace. Or maybe there were other contacts that we haven't been told about, for the canonical tribes or individual characters therefrom. We've already had a few examples of how that could go, but there's room for a lot more variety.
Really, I just want MOAR ELFQUEST DAMMIT, whether it's following the existing material into the past or exploring new ground. (And yes, I'm aware of the <a href="http://www.elfquest.com/comic_viewer.... series</a>, which is not "final" in the way the title would have you believe. But it's publishing too slowly! One page a week?! <makes grabby hands>)
***
<b>Fandom: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas</b>
Characters: Milady Clarick de Winter
And here we have one I would have asked for last year (and thought about asking for the year before that), but Milady wasn't on the list of nominated characters. <shakes fist at new limitations on nominations>
The easiest way to approach this one is probably to quote my own comments after I finally got around to reading the book for the first time:
<blockquote>Has anybody published a revisionist retelling of this story, from Milady's point of view? The thing practically writes itself. Her original crime (breaking her holy vows) can easily be written off as youthful stupidity followed by a badly-conceived attempt to escape the consequences; making that sympathetic would be a piece of cake. But said attempt doesn't work out (I admit I've forgotten the details of this transition), and she ends up falling in love with the Comte de la Fère. The movie [i.e. the Disney one, which I saw long before reading the book] predisposed me to believe she actually did love him, but there's no particular reason to believe she didn't; the novel at one point talks about her going from "the man she had ruined to the man she was about to ruin," but what ruin was that? I don't recall any evidence she was planning to help the Comte off this mortal coil, or otherwise mess up his life. The eventual ruin went the other way: having discovered the brand, he saw no better course of action than to <i>string her up from the nearest tree</i>.
'Cause, y'know, that's what you do with the wife you supposedly love.
Okay, sure, Dumas was writing in the nineteenth century, when that <i>is</i> what you did. She was a criminal, ergo a subhuman and inherently untrustworthy being incapable of redemption. One line from the film stuck in my head, leaping to mind every time I think of their Milady: "I have become the monster you once thought me to be." Yes, she undoubtedly commits crimes later -- horrific ones -- but after what happened to her, I can sympathize. Not approve, but sympathize. She had to make her way in the world somehow, and the somehow she found involved the Cardinal -- who has at least a modicum of respect for her brains and her skills. The way she got out of prison in England was a masterwork of manipulation, and if it had been a man doing all the things she did, I doubt Dumas would have criticized that character a tenth so much. Half of his description of her evil centers on things like her (unnatural and unfeminine) rage, which a modern audience is more likely to admire than to deplore.</blockquote>
I would love any sort of "apology for Milady" tale, that shows us the story from <i>her</i> perspective. Not necessarily her actual point of view; it would be entirely fitting to write it in a more nineteenth-century omniscient-narrator voice. But a perspective that is sympathetic to her. I don't think Milady is a good person by the time she shows up in the book, and I'm not at all asking for her flaws to be hand-waved away. I do think, though, that it's understandable how she acquired those flaws, and want something that doesn't treat her as a villain.
You can take whatever angle you like on that: one or more episodes from her documented backstory, an incident from the book's actual plot, some scene of your own invention. All I ask is that it feature Milady and show some understanding of her life.
***
<i>More generally:</i> I love stuff with actual plot in, but since I know that can be a lot of work, I would also be very happy with something that really examines the characters or world. I prefer stories that stay close to the characters as written, respecting canon relationships, working with flaws rather than sweeping them under the rug, etc. Apart from the crackiness of the Repo!/Phantom crossover, I'd rather the fic be presented as something that could fit into the the canon, rather than something that blatantly ignores the existing narrative. Go ahead and include any characters I've not listed that might be useful to you, or invent OCs to serve your narrative needs.
I adore drama; I also like humour, especially when it's of the "witty" variety rather than physical comedy or gross-out excess, but I love it best when it's used as leavening for the more serious stuff, or as the jab to set up the dramatic roundhouse that follows. (The kind of thing Joss Whedon excels at, if you want an example.) I don't like humiliation, or characters being flat-out stupid -- which is not the same thing as their flaws getting in the way of good decisions. :-) Not really looking for smut. I don't mind violence, as long as it doesn't cross the line into splatterpunk gore, but I don't like torture. Especially against women: by all means let them fight, but please don't victimize them, or <a href="http://www.swantower.com/essays/craft... them</a>, or push canonical women to the sidelines of the story.
As mentioned before, I'm <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/russ... on AO3, so feel free to rummage around in the entrails of what I’ve got there if you need more data on what I like.</lj-cut>
Hello, Yulemouse! I know you haven't written a word yet, but I already want to thank you. I’ve done Yuletide twice before, and had a blast both times, which means I'm already happy because I know how awesome it is to have somebody write a fic for me. This year, that's you, and I want you to know I appreciate it.
The optional details below are optional; they are also, ummm, long. Please do not be intimidated. The length comes from me talking about what I like about the sources, and offering a variety of suggestions as to what kinds of stories would interest me; you're welcome to use any of them, or to springboard off of them into something else you think I'd like. Basically, I'm just trying to feed the plotbunnies. (There are also more general notes about my tastes at the bottom.)
My username on AO3 is russian_blue, and you can check out the fics I’ve written and received there.
***
Fandom: Gabriel Knight
Characters: Gabriel Knight, Grace Nakimura
This is the one I keep asking for, and will continue to ask for until I get it. :-) If you didn’t match with me on it you probably aren’t going to write it, but juuuuust in case, I should mention that you can now buy all three games on GOG.com, in case you're interested in the old Sierra point-and-click style adventure games. This series is really good! (And not as horror-ish as the descriptions would have you believe.)
What I love about the source: The balance of humour and darkness, the way the stories made use of real-world history and folklore, and the sense that Gabriel was a flawed but still basically good man.
What I'd love to get: All right, I admit it -- I'm still sore we never got a fourth game. :-) That's the problem with having a game series with actual character development arcs; when those get cut off short, it leaves me unsatisfied!
Which is by way of saying that what I would really love here is a story giving closure (of some generally upbeat kind) to the relationship between Gabe and Grace. They slept together in Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, then never really talked about it, and then Grace bailed out and we didn't even get to read her note and auuuuuuuggggggggggggggh.
The closure could take whatever form you like (and be from whichever point of view you like, or both). Grace, presumably, was going to talk to that guy in India she'd been e-mailing, about fighting supernatural evil in her own right. Maybe Gabe goes after her. Maybe he doesn't, and she shows up again a few years later, after becoming some kind of full-blown Schattenjäger equivalent herself. Maybe they run into each other without warning when they both go after the same supernatural beastie. I'd love to see Grace treated as Gabe's professional equal (I think she's always been his equal in personal terms), rather than a sidekick, and for him to accept her as such -- which is not to say he should have a personality transplant and suddenly be without flaws or blind spots, but I feel like he's been struggling with a lot of issues there, and it would nice to see him continue to grow.
As I said, I'd like there to be a happy ending eventually -- get your mind out of the gutter! I mean happy emotions! -- but I don't mind angst along the way. (Where "happy endings" are concerned, wink wink nudge nudge -- eh, I really care more about the emotional resolution. They can sleep together or not, as you like, but I'm not looking for smut.) If you have the time and energy, I would ADORE something plotty, with a supernatural threat they have to take care of. (Flavor of threat is entirely up to you. Rumour had it the fourth game would have taken place in Scotland and dealt with ghosts; run with that if you want, or grab any cool bit of folklore and history that you know and want to play with.)
If, on the other hand, you detest that entire relationship, then I could also be fine with a story that is just about Grace doing something cool, post-canon, without Gabriel appearing. You don't have to be a Ritter and the Schattenjäger to fight supernatural evil, after all.
***
Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera
Characters: Magdalene Defoe (Blind Mag), the GraveRobber
Another repeat request, and I'll admit that I'm crossing my fingers for a crossover. My first year I requested one and lucked out (I actually got two stories for it), but I do recognize that such things are even more optional than the usual optionality of details. If you can't or don't want to do the crossover, I do have other suggestions.
What I love about the source: The weird dystopian aspects (which didn't get explored enough for my taste), the grit vs. glamour, and the GraveRobber, whose voice is goddamn hot. :-)
What I'd love to get: The crossover idea is based on the fact that Blind Mag is played by Sarah Brightman . . . who also originated the role of Christine Daae in Phantom of the Opera. And, y'know, both characters are singers. So the idea is some kind of story wherein Blind Mag is Christine Daae. How and why this happened, not to mention how she's around instead of being dead and gone a century past, is up to you; I'd like it to involve the GraveRobber (maybe he dug up Christine's grave, and for some reason she wasn't dead/came back to life?), but whatever idea fires your imagination, go for it. Compliance with actual Repo! canon is totally your choice, with regard to her friendship with Marni, etc.
If you don't want to do the crossover, then Blind Mag is optional; I'd be interested in a story about her (especially the eyes -- those are really cool; what kinds of things have they recorded?), but really, let's face it, I am shallow, and the GraveRobber is hot. :-) Anything focusing on his work would be cool, and if you write about both of them, maybe they're friends for some reason? My GK request above notwithstanding, I'm a sucker for good platonic friendships between men and women.
***
Fandom: Elfquest
Characters: none
Another repeat request -- yes, there's a theme here. :-) This one actually got fulfilled last year, but the nature of what I want is such that it's possibly for lots of different people to write lots of totally different fills. And as I said in the comments to last year's fic, it really made me want to ask for this again and see what I get.
What I love about the source: Oh god, where do I start? This was, for many years, the only comic book I had ever read. It's still one of the deep foundational stories in my mind. I love how well-realized the characters are, and the capacity for the narrative to be about the ensemble and subsets thereof, rather than being just Cutter's story with everybody else playing bit parts. I love the way conflict is handled, never being casually dismissed, or treated as if violence is a get-out-of-jail-free card for everything. I love the consequences, and the fact that the characters experience both real losses and real victories.
What I'd love to get: This request is stupidly open-ended, and I admit it. If that's a problem, feel free to contact [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<lj-user="teleidoplex">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]
Signups haven't opened yet, but since I already have this written (heck, much of it is copy-pasted from previous letters) I might as well post it.
<lj-cut text="Dear Yuletide Writer">
Hello, Yulemouse! I know you haven't written a word yet, but I already want to thank you. I’ve done Yuletide twice before, and had a blast both times, which means I'm already happy because I know how awesome it is to have somebody write a fic for me. This year, that's you, and I want you to know I appreciate it.
The optional details below are optional; they are also, ummm, long. Please do not be intimidated. The length comes from me talking about what I like about the sources, and offering a variety of suggestions as to what kinds of stories would interest me; you're welcome to use any of them, or to springboard off of them into something else you think I'd like. Basically, I'm just trying to feed the plotbunnies. (There are also more general notes about my tastes at the bottom.)
My username on AO3 is <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/russ..., and you can check out the fics I’ve written and received there.
***
<b>Fandom: Gabriel Knight</b>
Characters: Gabriel Knight, Grace Nakimura
This is the one I keep asking for, and will continue to ask for until I get it. :-) If you didn’t match with me on it you probably aren’t going to write it, but <i>juuuuust</i> in case, I should mention that you can now buy <a href="http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/gabrie... <a href="http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/gabrie... <a href="http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/gabrie... on GOG.com, in case you're interested in the old Sierra point-and-click style adventure games. This series is really good! (And not as horror-ish as the descriptions would have you believe.)
<i>What I love about the source:</i> The balance of humour and darkness, the way the stories made use of real-world history and folklore, and the sense that Gabriel was a flawed but still basically good man.
<i>What I'd love to get:</i> All right, I admit it -- I'm still sore we never got a fourth game. :-) That's the problem with having a game series with actual character development arcs; when those get cut off short, it leaves me unsatisfied!
Which is by way of saying that what I would really love here is a story giving closure (of some generally upbeat kind) to the relationship between Gabe and Grace. They slept together in <i>Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned</i>, then never really talked about it, and then Grace bailed out and we didn't even get to read her note and auuuuuuuggggggggggggggh.
The closure could take whatever form you like (and be from whichever point of view you like, or both). Grace, presumably, was going to talk to that guy in India she'd been e-mailing, about fighting supernatural evil in her own right. Maybe Gabe goes after her. Maybe he doesn't, and she shows up again a few years later, after becoming some kind of full-blown Schattenjäger equivalent herself. Maybe they run into each other without warning when they both go after the same supernatural beastie. I'd love to see Grace treated as Gabe's professional equal (I think she's always been his equal in personal terms), rather than a sidekick, and for him to accept her as such -- which is not to say he should have a personality transplant and suddenly be without flaws or blind spots, but I feel like he's been struggling with a lot of issues there, and it would nice to see him continue to grow.
As I said, I'd like there to be a happy ending eventually -- get your mind out of the gutter! I mean happy emotions! -- but I don't mind angst along the way. (Where "happy endings" are concerned, wink wink nudge nudge -- eh, I really care more about the emotional resolution. They can sleep together or not, as you like, but I'm not looking for smut.) If you have the time and energy, I would ADORE something plotty, with a supernatural threat they have to take care of. (Flavor of threat is entirely up to you. Rumour had it the fourth game would have taken place in Scotland and dealt with ghosts; run with that if you want, or grab any cool bit of folklore and history that you know and want to play with.)
If, on the other hand, you detest that entire relationship, then I could also be fine with a story that is just about Grace doing something cool, post-canon, without Gabriel appearing. You don't have to be a Ritter and the Schattenjäger to fight supernatural evil, after all.
***
<b>Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera</b>
Characters: Magdalene Defoe (Blind Mag), the GraveRobber
Another repeat request, and I'll admit that I'm crossing my fingers for a crossover. My first year I requested one and lucked out (I actually got two stories for it), but I do recognize that such things are even more optional than the usual optionality of details. If you can't or don't want to do the crossover, I do have other suggestions.
<i>What I love about the source:</i> The weird dystopian aspects (which didn't get explored enough for my taste), the grit vs. glamour, and the GraveRobber, whose voice is goddamn hot. :-)
<i>What I'd love to get:</i> The crossover idea is based on the fact that Blind Mag is played by Sarah Brightman . . . who also originated the role of Christine Daae in <i>Phantom of the Opera</i>. And, y'know, both characters are singers. So the idea is some kind of story wherein Blind Mag <i>is</i> Christine Daae. How and why this happened, not to mention how she's around instead of being dead and gone a century past, is up to you; I'd like it to involve the GraveRobber (maybe he dug up Christine's grave, and for some reason she wasn't dead/came back to life?), but whatever idea fires your imagination, go for it. Compliance with actual <i>Repo!</i> canon is totally your choice, with regard to her friendship with Marni, etc.
If you don't want to do the crossover, then Blind Mag is optional; I'd be interested in a story about her (especially the eyes -- those are really cool; what kinds of things have they recorded?), but really, let's face it, I am shallow, and the GraveRobber is hot. :-) Anything focusing on his work would be cool, and if you write about both of them, maybe they're friends for some reason? My GK request above notwithstanding, I'm a sucker for good platonic friendships between men and women.
***
Fandom: Elfquest
Characters: none
Another repeat request -- yes, there's a theme here. :-) This one actually got fulfilled last year, but the nature of what I want is such that it's possibly for lots of different people to write lots of totally different fills. And as I said in the comments to last year's fic, it really made me want to ask for this again and see what I get.
<i>What I love about the source:</i> Oh god, where do I start? This was, for many years, the only comic book I had ever read. It's still one of the deep foundational stories in my mind. I love how well-realized the characters are, and the capacity for the narrative to be about the ensemble and subsets thereof, rather than being just Cutter's story with everybody else playing bit parts. I love the way conflict is handled, never being casually dismissed, or treated as if violence is a get-out-of-jail-free card for everything. I love the consequences, and the fact that the characters experience both real losses and real victories.
<i>What I'd love to get:</i> This request is stupidly open-ended, and I admit it. If that's a problem, feel free to contact <lj-user="teleidoplex"> and she'll serve as a go-between for questions -- but really, there are so many things I could be happy with, you should be safe.
I really just want an expansion of the universe. I've read possibly everything there is -- certainly I've read most of it, including the far-future Jink stuff -- though nothing after <i>Kings of the Broken Wheel</i> quite hit me the same way, as the world started being farmed out to other writers. But there's so much richness there, and also so much open space to develop new things. Possible angles include:
1) A tribe of your own devising, either meeting one of the canonical groups or off doing their own thing. This could explore an environment not already covered (last year I got subterranean volcanic elves!), or be your own take on something the canon already touched on. (I love the idea of sea elves, for example, but the actual canonical Wavedancers didn't really do it for me.) My academic background is in anthropology, so elves adapting socially and physically to different environments is really interesting to me -- which sounds high-falutin', but really what I mean is <i>make cool shit up!</i>
2) History for any of the canonical groups. Life under a past Wolfrider chief, early days of the Sun Village, Go-Backs vs. trolls, the Gliders before they fell into decadence and apathy -- any of those would be cool. The High Ones right after the fall. Etc. Whatever strikes your fancy.
3) Backstory for a canonical character, in case you'd prefer to stick closer to the actual series rather than haring off into the wild blue yonder with your own ideas. If you're like me and get neurotic when you don't know what your recipient might be looking for, I can say that Clearbrook is probably my favorite female character and Strongbow my favorite male, but I like most of 'em: Nightfall and Redlance, Skywise, Rayek (ohhh, thirteen-year-old me has a soft spot for angsty Rayek), Venka, Dart and his pack of jackwolf-riders, etc. You could probably even sell me on Winnowill backstory if you have a cool idea for that, though I'd prefer nothing future, i.e. The Further Adventures of How Winnowill Is the Problem That Keeps on Giving. She played the role of central villain enough already in the series for my taste.
4) Human contact. This one could combine with practically any of the above. Maybe your invented tribe runs into humans, or has even learned to co-exist with them in (non-warped-Glider-style) peace. Or maybe there were other contacts that we haven't been told about, for the canonical tribes or individual characters therefrom. We've already had a few examples of how that could go, but there's room for a lot more variety.
Really, I just want MOAR ELFQUEST DAMMIT, whether it's following the existing material into the past or exploring new ground. (And yes, I'm aware of the <a href="http://www.elfquest.com/comic_viewer.... series</a>, which is not "final" in the way the title would have you believe. But it's publishing too slowly! One page a week?! <makes grabby hands>)
***
<b>Fandom: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas</b>
Characters: Milady Clarick de Winter
And here we have one I would have asked for last year (and thought about asking for the year before that), but Milady wasn't on the list of nominated characters. <shakes fist at new limitations on nominations>
The easiest way to approach this one is probably to quote my own comments after I finally got around to reading the book for the first time:
<blockquote>Has anybody published a revisionist retelling of this story, from Milady's point of view? The thing practically writes itself. Her original crime (breaking her holy vows) can easily be written off as youthful stupidity followed by a badly-conceived attempt to escape the consequences; making that sympathetic would be a piece of cake. But said attempt doesn't work out (I admit I've forgotten the details of this transition), and she ends up falling in love with the Comte de la Fère. The movie [i.e. the Disney one, which I saw long before reading the book] predisposed me to believe she actually did love him, but there's no particular reason to believe she didn't; the novel at one point talks about her going from "the man she had ruined to the man she was about to ruin," but what ruin was that? I don't recall any evidence she was planning to help the Comte off this mortal coil, or otherwise mess up his life. The eventual ruin went the other way: having discovered the brand, he saw no better course of action than to <i>string her up from the nearest tree</i>.
'Cause, y'know, that's what you do with the wife you supposedly love.
Okay, sure, Dumas was writing in the nineteenth century, when that <i>is</i> what you did. She was a criminal, ergo a subhuman and inherently untrustworthy being incapable of redemption. One line from the film stuck in my head, leaping to mind every time I think of their Milady: "I have become the monster you once thought me to be." Yes, she undoubtedly commits crimes later -- horrific ones -- but after what happened to her, I can sympathize. Not approve, but sympathize. She had to make her way in the world somehow, and the somehow she found involved the Cardinal -- who has at least a modicum of respect for her brains and her skills. The way she got out of prison in England was a masterwork of manipulation, and if it had been a man doing all the things she did, I doubt Dumas would have criticized that character a tenth so much. Half of his description of her evil centers on things like her (unnatural and unfeminine) rage, which a modern audience is more likely to admire than to deplore.</blockquote>
I would love any sort of "apology for Milady" tale, that shows us the story from <i>her</i> perspective. Not necessarily her actual point of view; it would be entirely fitting to write it in a more nineteenth-century omniscient-narrator voice. But a perspective that is sympathetic to her. I don't think Milady is a good person by the time she shows up in the book, and I'm not at all asking for her flaws to be hand-waved away. I do think, though, that it's understandable how she acquired those flaws, and want something that doesn't treat her as a villain.
You can take whatever angle you like on that: one or more episodes from her documented backstory, an incident from the book's actual plot, some scene of your own invention. All I ask is that it feature Milady and show some understanding of her life.
***
<i>More generally:</i> I love stuff with actual plot in, but since I know that can be a lot of work, I would also be very happy with something that really examines the characters or world. I prefer stories that stay close to the characters as written, respecting canon relationships, working with flaws rather than sweeping them under the rug, etc. Apart from the crackiness of the Repo!/Phantom crossover, I'd rather the fic be presented as something that could fit into the the canon, rather than something that blatantly ignores the existing narrative. Go ahead and include any characters I've not listed that might be useful to you, or invent OCs to serve your narrative needs.
I adore drama; I also like humour, especially when it's of the "witty" variety rather than physical comedy or gross-out excess, but I love it best when it's used as leavening for the more serious stuff, or as the jab to set up the dramatic roundhouse that follows. (The kind of thing Joss Whedon excels at, if you want an example.) I don't like humiliation, or characters being flat-out stupid -- which is not the same thing as their flaws getting in the way of good decisions. :-) Not really looking for smut. I don't mind violence, as long as it doesn't cross the line into splatterpunk gore, but I don't like torture. Especially against women: by all means let them fight, but please don't victimize them, or <a href="http://www.swantower.com/essays/craft... them</a>, or push canonical women to the sidelines of the story.
As mentioned before, I'm <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/russ... on AO3, so feel free to rummage around in the entrails of what I’ve got there if you need more data on what I like.</lj-cut>
October 5, 2012
more at Book View Cafe
Banned Books Week is wrapping up at BVC, with some posts on sensitive topics:
The "N" Word
Not Even Mein Kampf: Why Hateful Books Should Not Be Banned
"The First Thing a Principle Does Is Kill Somebody"
We Only Read One Book in Our House
Censoring Comics
A Banned Comic and the Guy Who Bought It
And, this being Friday and two weeks since my last post there, I'm back with something completely unrelated to Banned Books Week: "A Good Saxon Compound," talking about the origin of the word "folklore" and the field's concern with nationalism and identity. Comment over there!
The "N" Word
Not Even Mein Kampf: Why Hateful Books Should Not Be Banned
"The First Thing a Principle Does Is Kill Somebody"
We Only Read One Book in Our House
Censoring Comics
A Banned Comic and the Guy Who Bought It
And, this being Friday and two weeks since my last post there, I'm back with something completely unrelated to Banned Books Week: "A Good Saxon Compound," talking about the origin of the word "folklore" and the field's concern with nationalism and identity. Comment over there!
October 4, 2012
Thirteen years ago today . . . .
. . . I finished writing my first novel.
It seems an appropriate date to put up an Open Book Thread for Lies and Prophecy , the much-revised descendant of the book I completed that day.
The floor here is open for questions, comments, etc on the novel and related topics (including "Welcome to Welton"). Needless to say, this will involve spoilers, so you have been warned.
Now if you'll follow me behind the cut, I'll talk a bit about how the novel came to be.
It was almost an accident.
Of course, nobody trips and falls and spits out a hundred thousand words. But I got halfway through writing the book before it really became apparent that hey, I'd written half a book, and at that point there seemed no good reason not to write the other half.
The first half came about like this. I had loved Pamela Dean's Tam Lin for years, and then at one point during high school I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's Witchlight, about which I remember nothing whatsoever save that it involved a semi-scientific attitude toward magic. These combined in my brain to give me the notion of writing about people studying magic at college. I noodled around with random scenes -- in fact, I think I found them in the depths of my files; I'll post 'em if anybody's interested -- establishing a host of factors right from the start that, surprisingly, have stayed with the book all these years. Wilders. Kim's lack of skill with pyrokinesis. Guardians. The Krauss test. None of it was really going anywhere; it was me narratively lecturing myself on the world, figuring out what was in it.
That changed very rapidly one night, when I was sitting in the back of the car on my way either to or from some evening event with my father and somebody from his workplace. I was not in a mood to talk, so I stared out the window and thought, and an image came to me out of nowhere: the attack on Julian at Samhain. Suddenly, I had a plot.
Mind you, I had no idea what that plot meant. Who was attacking him, and why? I had no more clue than my characters did. I had to write it to find out.
My freshman year at college, I was poking alternately at this project (known then by the evocative moniker "the college story") and another one (which showed up with a title in hand: Doppelganger), still bouncing around writing scenes as they came to me. This was when the Tower incident showed up, Kim's weirdness with her tarot cards. I had a goodly chunk of text by then, fallout from Samhain and the characters trying to figure out what was going on, but as my college crit group pointed out to me, the pacing was terrible and the characters really undeveloped. And, in the way that so often happens with crit groups, I realized they were right, but that none of them had correctly pointed at the root cause:
This wasn't the beginning of the book.
I'd leapt in mid-stream, with a couple of infodumpy scenes and then suddenly PLOT FROM LEFT FIELD. I needed to write an actual beginning.
Doing so was kind of a nightmare, and by "was" I mean it in the sense of "continued to be so for years to come." It took four tries before I got a beginning I could proceed with, and it isn't the one the book has now; there were something like three other openings in between the two, scattered across many revisions. But I finally got something I could roll with, at least, and so I made a list of everything that needed to get explained or established or set up before I got to the bit I already had, and proceeded to come up with scenes that would do the job.
For those of you who are fans of Tam Lin, this was by far the most Tam Lin-ish draft. The characters spent a lot of time faffing about being college students. There were worldbuilding details that have since fallen by the wayside: M&D classes, for example, short for "Meditation and Discipline," which were mandatory junior high/high school courses for kids with manifested sidhe blood. (Or rather, sidhe Blood -- the italics and capital letter got ditched later on.) Or magical names, which I think get mentioned in passing in the actual book; that used to be a standard thing in the setting, and there was a whole strand about Kim's and how she shares it with the Circle and then somehow Falcon knows it implying Julian had found out but it never got explained how, leaving it as just "woooo look at Julian being mysterious." (You see why it went away.)
So I had my list, and I wrote my way through it, and when I'd done all my establishing work I chopped off those first few infodumpy scenes, joined the new material to the old . . . and had half a book. Plus a clear sense of where it was going next, and a burning desire to find out what happened after that. So there was really no excuse not to finish.
It's changed a lot since then. Not just M&D and magical names and unnecessary italics and capital letters going away. There is vastly less faffing about now than before, and more conflict, and depth to the worldbuilding that doesn't even all fit into this book; I've spent thirteen years pondering wilders and their situation, and while the deep shield was always a part of the story, there's a whole lot more there that will only come out if I get to write the sequels. My prose is better -- though it's funny, glancing at those early scenes, and noticing little phrases that appear to have survived thirteen years of reconstruction. But it is still, at its heart, the same story. And so I am pleased as hell to have it out in the world at last.
Anything you want to know or respond to? The comment thread is yours!
It seems an appropriate date to put up an Open Book Thread for Lies and Prophecy , the much-revised descendant of the book I completed that day.
The floor here is open for questions, comments, etc on the novel and related topics (including "Welcome to Welton"). Needless to say, this will involve spoilers, so you have been warned.
Now if you'll follow me behind the cut, I'll talk a bit about how the novel came to be.
It was almost an accident.
Of course, nobody trips and falls and spits out a hundred thousand words. But I got halfway through writing the book before it really became apparent that hey, I'd written half a book, and at that point there seemed no good reason not to write the other half.
The first half came about like this. I had loved Pamela Dean's Tam Lin for years, and then at one point during high school I read Marion Zimmer Bradley's Witchlight, about which I remember nothing whatsoever save that it involved a semi-scientific attitude toward magic. These combined in my brain to give me the notion of writing about people studying magic at college. I noodled around with random scenes -- in fact, I think I found them in the depths of my files; I'll post 'em if anybody's interested -- establishing a host of factors right from the start that, surprisingly, have stayed with the book all these years. Wilders. Kim's lack of skill with pyrokinesis. Guardians. The Krauss test. None of it was really going anywhere; it was me narratively lecturing myself on the world, figuring out what was in it.
That changed very rapidly one night, when I was sitting in the back of the car on my way either to or from some evening event with my father and somebody from his workplace. I was not in a mood to talk, so I stared out the window and thought, and an image came to me out of nowhere: the attack on Julian at Samhain. Suddenly, I had a plot.
Mind you, I had no idea what that plot meant. Who was attacking him, and why? I had no more clue than my characters did. I had to write it to find out.
My freshman year at college, I was poking alternately at this project (known then by the evocative moniker "the college story") and another one (which showed up with a title in hand: Doppelganger), still bouncing around writing scenes as they came to me. This was when the Tower incident showed up, Kim's weirdness with her tarot cards. I had a goodly chunk of text by then, fallout from Samhain and the characters trying to figure out what was going on, but as my college crit group pointed out to me, the pacing was terrible and the characters really undeveloped. And, in the way that so often happens with crit groups, I realized they were right, but that none of them had correctly pointed at the root cause:
This wasn't the beginning of the book.
I'd leapt in mid-stream, with a couple of infodumpy scenes and then suddenly PLOT FROM LEFT FIELD. I needed to write an actual beginning.
Doing so was kind of a nightmare, and by "was" I mean it in the sense of "continued to be so for years to come." It took four tries before I got a beginning I could proceed with, and it isn't the one the book has now; there were something like three other openings in between the two, scattered across many revisions. But I finally got something I could roll with, at least, and so I made a list of everything that needed to get explained or established or set up before I got to the bit I already had, and proceeded to come up with scenes that would do the job.
For those of you who are fans of Tam Lin, this was by far the most Tam Lin-ish draft. The characters spent a lot of time faffing about being college students. There were worldbuilding details that have since fallen by the wayside: M&D classes, for example, short for "Meditation and Discipline," which were mandatory junior high/high school courses for kids with manifested sidhe blood. (Or rather, sidhe Blood -- the italics and capital letter got ditched later on.) Or magical names, which I think get mentioned in passing in the actual book; that used to be a standard thing in the setting, and there was a whole strand about Kim's and how she shares it with the Circle and then somehow Falcon knows it implying Julian had found out but it never got explained how, leaving it as just "woooo look at Julian being mysterious." (You see why it went away.)
So I had my list, and I wrote my way through it, and when I'd done all my establishing work I chopped off those first few infodumpy scenes, joined the new material to the old . . . and had half a book. Plus a clear sense of where it was going next, and a burning desire to find out what happened after that. So there was really no excuse not to finish.
It's changed a lot since then. Not just M&D and magical names and unnecessary italics and capital letters going away. There is vastly less faffing about now than before, and more conflict, and depth to the worldbuilding that doesn't even all fit into this book; I've spent thirteen years pondering wilders and their situation, and while the deep shield was always a part of the story, there's a whole lot more there that will only come out if I get to write the sequels. My prose is better -- though it's funny, glancing at those early scenes, and noticing little phrases that appear to have survived thirteen years of reconstruction. But it is still, at its heart, the same story. And so I am pleased as hell to have it out in the world at last.
Anything you want to know or respond to? The comment thread is yours!
Twenty-five years of my life
It's the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Princess Bride (the film; the book had its anniversary a while ago). I, of course, celebrated by watching it again.
I had things I needed to do tonight, and I figured I could do them while the movie was on. More fool me: it's been a while since I sat down and watched it, and I quickly realized I really just had to give it my full attention -- mouthing, as I usually do, all the quotable lines* as they were said.
I can't pick my favorite book, or my favorite song, or my favorite food. But I can pick my favorite movie. The Princess Bride is the reason I studied fencing; it's also the reason I studied Spanish. (Can you tell which character I imprinted on?) I don't know if it's the first movie I saw in a theater, but it's the first one I remember seeing. It's one of the few fantasies from the '80s that I would say is genuinely good, instead of just lovably cheesy.
It is, now that I watch it with a professional eye, a fantastic example of good storytelling. I could go on for a good half-hour at least about all the intelligent decisions Goldman made with the script, the elegance of the structure, all the places where the dialogue leads you perfectly along its path. It strikes that beautiful balance between comedy and drama, where the laughter makes the occasional punch land all that much harder. (Inigo's storyline as a whole -- which gained extra impact when I found out about his father dying of cancer, and Patinkin channeling his grief from that into the final confrontation with Count Rugen.) There are almost no wasted lines in this film, no random chatter to fill the time. Every bit pulls its weight.
I don't know anymore how many times I've seen it. I used to keep count; I started when I could still remember all the occasions, and I kept a record on our old VHS box -- the one taped off TV, eventually replaced by an official copy, eventually replaced by a DVD, eventually replaced by the Dread Pirate edition that has
d_aulnoy
in one of the special features. But somewhere along the line, I lost my record of the count. The last time I was sure of it, it was in the low 60s.
There is no movie in the world I love as much. They'll never see these lines, but to William Goldman, Rob Reiner, Mandy Patinkin, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Andre the Giant, Wallace Shawn, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Fred Savage, Peter Falk, Carol Kane, Billy Crystal, Bob Anderson, and all the other cast and crew of this marvelous film: thank you.
*Approximately seventy-five percent of the script
I had things I needed to do tonight, and I figured I could do them while the movie was on. More fool me: it's been a while since I sat down and watched it, and I quickly realized I really just had to give it my full attention -- mouthing, as I usually do, all the quotable lines* as they were said.
I can't pick my favorite book, or my favorite song, or my favorite food. But I can pick my favorite movie. The Princess Bride is the reason I studied fencing; it's also the reason I studied Spanish. (Can you tell which character I imprinted on?) I don't know if it's the first movie I saw in a theater, but it's the first one I remember seeing. It's one of the few fantasies from the '80s that I would say is genuinely good, instead of just lovably cheesy.
It is, now that I watch it with a professional eye, a fantastic example of good storytelling. I could go on for a good half-hour at least about all the intelligent decisions Goldman made with the script, the elegance of the structure, all the places where the dialogue leads you perfectly along its path. It strikes that beautiful balance between comedy and drama, where the laughter makes the occasional punch land all that much harder. (Inigo's storyline as a whole -- which gained extra impact when I found out about his father dying of cancer, and Patinkin channeling his grief from that into the final confrontation with Count Rugen.) There are almost no wasted lines in this film, no random chatter to fill the time. Every bit pulls its weight.
I don't know anymore how many times I've seen it. I used to keep count; I started when I could still remember all the occasions, and I kept a record on our old VHS box -- the one taped off TV, eventually replaced by an official copy, eventually replaced by a DVD, eventually replaced by the Dread Pirate edition that has
d_aulnoy
in one of the special features. But somewhere along the line, I lost my record of the count. The last time I was sure of it, it was in the low 60s.There is no movie in the world I love as much. They'll never see these lines, but to William Goldman, Rob Reiner, Mandy Patinkin, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Andre the Giant, Wallace Shawn, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Fred Savage, Peter Falk, Carol Kane, Billy Crystal, Bob Anderson, and all the other cast and crew of this marvelous film: thank you.
*Approximately seventy-five percent of the script
October 2, 2012
Books read, September 2012
I should totally have a "Piano Pieces Played" list to explain where the rest of my month went, except that it would get really boring as I listed "Solfeggietto" and "Roslin and Adama" over and over and overandoverandover again. (I've been practicing.)
Blackwood, Gwenda Bond. Picked this one up on the basis of her "Big Idea" feature on Scalzi's blog. Roanoke disappearances! History tying into the present! Alchemy! John Dee! It had so many elements I love . . . but it turns out the problem with that is, I have Opinions on the elements, and get increasingly ticked off when I think they're being used badly. I don't want to spoil this for anybody who'd prefer to avoid spoilers, so I'll rot13 my rant:
Wbua Qrr vf gur ivyynva. V pbhyq cbgragvnyyl pbcr jvgu gung, ohg hasbeghangryl, uvf ivyynval nyfb vaibyirf uvz npgvat ZNFFVIRYL BHG BS PUNENPGRE. Gur Ebnabxr pbybal nccneragyl pbafvfgrq bs n ohapu bs nypurzvpny phygvfgf naq jnf Qrr'f fpurzr gb znxr uvzfrys vzzbegny, naq ur jnagrq gb qb guvf fb gung ur pbhyq bireguebj Ryvmnorgu (hu, juhg) naq gnxr bire gur jbeyq be fbzrguvat. Vg snvyrq orpnhfr ur tbg orgenlrq, juvpu erfhygrq va uvf phygvfgf orvat guebja vagb fbzr xvaq bs nygreangr cynar, naq abj gurl'er onpx naq cbffrffvat crbcyr ba Ebnabxr vfynaq gb svavfu gurve arsnevbhf fpurzr, juvpu vf nyfb xvyyvat nyy gur jvyqyvsr va beqre gb znvagnva Qrr'f haangheny yvsr.
V pbhyq unir tbar nybat jvgu guvf vs Qrr jrer abg n) zrtnybznavnpnyyl cybggvat gb gnxr bire Ratynaq naq o) fubjrq erzbefr bire gur pbfg bs uvf npgvbaf; vg pbhyq unir orra cerfragrq nf uvz oryvrivat gung vzzbegnyvgl jbhyq or fb tbbq sbe gur jbeyq, gur pbfg (gubhtu erterggnoyr) vf jbegu vg. Hasbeghangryl, vg srryf yvxr Obaq, be znlor ure ntrag be rqvgbe, qrpvqvat gur nagntbavfg arrqrq gb or chapurq hc gb jbeyq-guerngravat fgnghf. Gur fgbel jbhyq unir orra orggre jvgubhg gung.
Right. Disappointing. I finished the book, but only through sheer bloody-mindedness (it's a quick read). There were other flaws, too, but I've ranted for long enough, so I'll leave it at that.
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean. Re-read, as a treat to myself on the publication of Lies and Prophecy (which, as I've mentioned before, was partially inspired by this book). I hadn't read it in a number of years, so it was interesting going back through it this time: I noticed so many details that had slipped past me before, like why Nick's and Robin's accents shift when they recite. This is very much a comfort book for me, so I'm not sure what I can say about it to people who don't already know and love it, but short form is: my favorite ballad, retold in the context of a 1970s Minnesota liberal arts college. With lots of excessively literate and well-spoken characters, and some phrases that have stayed with me for near on twenty years now.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print, Renni Browne and Dave King.
maratai
offered this free to the first person who asked for it a while ago, so I asked. I was sad when her marginal comments petered out, because those were entertaining me. :-) As for the book itself, it's trying to be a 200-level-ish "how to write" type thing -- going beyond the basic platitudes of writing books and into things like proportion (paying attention to, and trying to appropriately scale, how much attention you devote to certain things) or breaks (sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters). That part is good; the part where the authors seem to think absolutely everything should be done via dialogue was less so. (They are rather anti-description, anti-dialogue tags, anti-"beats" -- by which they mean descriptions of movement used to break up dialogue -- etc.) And then I got to the chapter on "voice" and ranted on Twitter about the meaninglessness of that word the way most writing books, this one included, tend to use it. Augh nonsensical platitudes aaaaaaaaugh.
So, very much a mixed bag.
The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Discussed elsewhere and else-elsewhere.
Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Yeah, I went ahead and read this one, even though I won't be blogging about it until November and December. I wanted to be able to read things like the wiki and Leigh Butler's recaps without hitting spoilers, and I was having a bad week where I really just wanted a GIANT BOOK I could trust to entertain me without requiring much from my brain. (That part kicks in when I do the analysis, later.) Also? I really just wanted to know what happens next. Which is a good feeling to have, going into the end of the series. Anyway, commentary will come later.
Blackwood, Gwenda Bond. Picked this one up on the basis of her "Big Idea" feature on Scalzi's blog. Roanoke disappearances! History tying into the present! Alchemy! John Dee! It had so many elements I love . . . but it turns out the problem with that is, I have Opinions on the elements, and get increasingly ticked off when I think they're being used badly. I don't want to spoil this for anybody who'd prefer to avoid spoilers, so I'll rot13 my rant:
Wbua Qrr vf gur ivyynva. V pbhyq cbgragvnyyl pbcr jvgu gung, ohg hasbeghangryl, uvf ivyynval nyfb vaibyirf uvz npgvat ZNFFVIRYL BHG BS PUNENPGRE. Gur Ebnabxr pbybal nccneragyl pbafvfgrq bs n ohapu bs nypurzvpny phygvfgf naq jnf Qrr'f fpurzr gb znxr uvzfrys vzzbegny, naq ur jnagrq gb qb guvf fb gung ur pbhyq bireguebj Ryvmnorgu (hu, juhg) naq gnxr bire gur jbeyq be fbzrguvat. Vg snvyrq orpnhfr ur tbg orgenlrq, juvpu erfhygrq va uvf phygvfgf orvat guebja vagb fbzr xvaq bs nygreangr cynar, naq abj gurl'er onpx naq cbffrffvat crbcyr ba Ebnabxr vfynaq gb svavfu gurve arsnevbhf fpurzr, juvpu vf nyfb xvyyvat nyy gur jvyqyvsr va beqre gb znvagnva Qrr'f haangheny yvsr.
V pbhyq unir tbar nybat jvgu guvf vs Qrr jrer abg n) zrtnybznavnpnyyl cybggvat gb gnxr bire Ratynaq naq o) fubjrq erzbefr bire gur pbfg bs uvf npgvbaf; vg pbhyq unir orra cerfragrq nf uvz oryvrivat gung vzzbegnyvgl jbhyq or fb tbbq sbe gur jbeyq, gur pbfg (gubhtu erterggnoyr) vf jbegu vg. Hasbeghangryl, vg srryf yvxr Obaq, be znlor ure ntrag be rqvgbe, qrpvqvat gur nagntbavfg arrqrq gb or chapurq hc gb jbeyq-guerngravat fgnghf. Gur fgbel jbhyq unir orra orggre jvgubhg gung.
Right. Disappointing. I finished the book, but only through sheer bloody-mindedness (it's a quick read). There were other flaws, too, but I've ranted for long enough, so I'll leave it at that.
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean. Re-read, as a treat to myself on the publication of Lies and Prophecy (which, as I've mentioned before, was partially inspired by this book). I hadn't read it in a number of years, so it was interesting going back through it this time: I noticed so many details that had slipped past me before, like why Nick's and Robin's accents shift when they recite. This is very much a comfort book for me, so I'm not sure what I can say about it to people who don't already know and love it, but short form is: my favorite ballad, retold in the context of a 1970s Minnesota liberal arts college. With lots of excessively literate and well-spoken characters, and some phrases that have stayed with me for near on twenty years now.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print, Renni Browne and Dave King.
maratai
offered this free to the first person who asked for it a while ago, so I asked. I was sad when her marginal comments petered out, because those were entertaining me. :-) As for the book itself, it's trying to be a 200-level-ish "how to write" type thing -- going beyond the basic platitudes of writing books and into things like proportion (paying attention to, and trying to appropriately scale, how much attention you devote to certain things) or breaks (sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters). That part is good; the part where the authors seem to think absolutely everything should be done via dialogue was less so. (They are rather anti-description, anti-dialogue tags, anti-"beats" -- by which they mean descriptions of movement used to break up dialogue -- etc.) And then I got to the chapter on "voice" and ranted on Twitter about the meaninglessness of that word the way most writing books, this one included, tend to use it. Augh nonsensical platitudes aaaaaaaaugh.So, very much a mixed bag.
The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Discussed elsewhere and else-elsewhere.
Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Yeah, I went ahead and read this one, even though I won't be blogging about it until November and December. I wanted to be able to read things like the wiki and Leigh Butler's recaps without hitting spoilers, and I was having a bad week where I really just wanted a GIANT BOOK I could trust to entertain me without requiring much from my brain. (That part kicks in when I do the analysis, later.) Also? I really just wanted to know what happens next. Which is a good feeling to have, going into the end of the series. Anyway, commentary will come later.
