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you'll see the sun come shining through
meme from, like, everybody:
I currently have 75 works at AO3. Pick a number between 1 and 75 and I'll tell you three things I currently like about that story.
eta: so that this entry contains more than a meme - the more I hear about the Amazon Kindle Worlds mess, the more it reminds me of what I've read about the early days of the Pocket Books Star Trek tie-in novels, which I gather fans were initially excited about as a way to professionalize/monetize but later pretty much abandoned once the level of creative bankruptcy necessary for participation became clear. Plus ca change, neh?
I currently have 75 works at AO3. Pick a number between 1 and 75 and I'll tell you three things I currently like about that story.
eta: so that this entry contains more than a meme - the more I hear about the Amazon Kindle Worlds mess, the more it reminds me of what I've read about the early days of the Pocket Books Star Trek tie-in novels, which I gather fans were initially excited about as a way to professionalize/monetize but later pretty much abandoned once the level of creative bankruptcy necessary for participation became clear. Plus ca change, neh?
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To the other stuff:
I'm going to make a donation to AO3/OTW out of the next paycheck because that's my first reasoned response to the Kindle thing--that we need to support the fan sites.
And I imagine that's true--I heard some great presentations on the Trek media tie in stuff in the 90s at Pop Culture--including how Paramount slammed down hard after the inadvertent release of Della Van Hise's novel that had some pretty clear slashy elements (and that there were some fan writers doing some tie-in with fanfiction elements). It's hard to know how much of that is unsubstantiated/overinflated rumors, though.
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Three things I currently like about We murmur first moonwords:
-I feel like it does a good job of accomplishing my primary goal: to work through the violence and conflict present in both movies. The story originally came out of my frustration, as a Viking-descended pagan, with the pro-Christian aspects of The Secret of Kells. Even though it does to some degree address Christian suppression of pagan cultures through Aisling, and the monks' unfounded fear of the woods, the Vikings stay silent cutout killers throughout, and I'll admit that in the historical struggle of Vikings v. Christians part of me is always going to be kind of cheering for the Vikings because I think they were kickass. There's something fascinating about a culture that operates on a religious myth of their own eventual defeat and destruction, you know? That's something I feel like HTTYD always kind of got - the mixture of violence and gentleness that seems to me very characteristic of northern mythology.
-I really like the tonal balance of the story. I tried to stick to Hiccup's very postmodern teenager style in his dialogue, but it was fun to be able to contextualize that dialogue through the more stylized fairy-tale mode of The Secret of Kells. It puts HTTYD back into the realm of the magical/epic, which is very fun.
-I like the parallelism of the scenes of both boys watching each other work: Hiccup fascinated by the Book of Kells, Brendan enthralled by Hiccup's smithing. They're both such adorably enthusiastic geek characters; I think it works really well to show the connections and encounters that are prevented by cross-cultural violence.
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Three things I like right now about Put to Sleep My Mother's Curse:
-One of the things White doesn't do with Mordred, but that would be very characteristic of his work, is to humanize him (instead, White ends up making him a metonym for all of fascism, essentially blanked of characterization). But I've always thought it was odd that people ascribed such weird and supernatural motives and capacities to Mordred, when he seems to me a very familiar human type: the abused child who grows up nasty, who engenders both pity and harsh judgment or moral revulsion. The bullied child who becomes a bully. There's nothing supernatural about Mordred's nastiness; it's cold and calculating, but also human and so essentially born out of need and pain. So that's what I wanted to do here: to let Mordred be a nasty little boy who's maybe almost in love, but doesn't have a lot of knowledge about what love is or how it works. But I also really wanted to give Gaheris some power, because I think we tend to undervalue steady caretaking types; it was important to me that Mordred's belief in his absolute control over his older, stronger brother read somewhat hollow.
-this story kind of caught the thing that's always haunted me about White's Orkney clan, and that's very cool. The title comes from White's epigraph to the second book; on the opposite page my favorite chapter of the whole book starts, the one where the Orkney brothers recount the family story of their ancient wrongs, and their mother boils a cat for an invisibility spell downstairs. The Orkneys are simultaneously very lovely in their family loyalty, in the depths of their response to the story of their grandmother's abuse, in their clannish connectedness to one another - but simultaneously horrifying because of how far they'll go in order to advance their cause, and how well they hold their grudges, and how their personal loyalties allow them to excuse cruelty and abusive behavior in one another.
-it's weird, but I often feel like the stories I write in half an hour, like this one, handle and display my prose style much better than the ones I labor over for months. I tend to be elaborate and imagery-packed, sometimes overly so, but here I think the balance holds; it's all pretty, but clear and solid too, and that's why it manages some impact.
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I find myself hoping that Kindle Worlds will crash and burn.
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Three things I like right now about Teethed on a crucifix and cradled underwater:
-the title! It comes from one of my very favoritest Edna St. Vincent Millay poems, and it was great to be able to tie it to one of my stories. I like the way the two things are in opposition but also not.
-it's a sort of story I wish I did more of: a fairly immediate post-ep, directly responsive to the show in a pretty straightforward way. I didn't like that they made the weird girl normal; I HATE stories where (girls especially) have to give up fairyland because real life is somehow better or more important. So I fixed it.
-for some reason, I really like the passage that lists all of Elena's cosmetics. I do that sort of thing kind of a lot, but I really let it go to the max here; I think because it's King Arthur-adjacent, and T.H. White, my first Arthurian, does the medieval listing thing all. the. time. I like that the passage feminizes the trope, though - when White does it he's usually listing armor or falconry gear, whereas I think listing women's tools has the additional impact of drawing attention to the sheer effort that women put into living up to cultural standards of beauty.
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-I like the way I kept the power dynamics of the survivors' group loose and shifting, and kept them from settling back into any configuration of a nuclear or patriarchal family. The Baker is never going to hold much authority over Red, no matter how you slice it :)
-I like the babyfic aspect. I really enjoy writing this kind of babyfic, about the adults' experiences of infant chatter and baby things, and in a way I got to do it more purely here, because the baby-loving isn't contextualized as the apex of a ship.
-I like the abstraction of a lot of imagery. Fairy tales are traditionally a very psychologically flat form, and while I did psychological realism here I tried to balance that out with metaphoric flatness, so Cinderella's mouth tastes like babies and the Baker talks to Jack about love, trust, and biology. Really straight-up, but also both nondescript and summary. I think it's a cool effect.