Podfic - "This Bitter Earth"

[art_savage]

For those of y'all into that newfangled podfic stuff, waiting4rain42 has kindly recorded my SPN/Criminal Minds crossover, "This Bitter Earth." You can find links to m4b, m4a, wma, and mp3 formats here

Comments

[art_savage]

Ah, crap, here I was thinking of gutting as "ooh, the first step toward fixing things!" I didn't even think about all the stuff left behind. Christ, that would be depressing.

I do have plenty of questions, if you're willing to share. (God, I feel like kind of a douche, an information vulture. Really, I hope you don't mind.) You didn't say specifically, but were you in New Orleans proper? One neighborhood in particular? And when? And what businesses and services were up and running at that point? (I've driven myself crazy trying to put together timelines...)

Man, I could probably think of more, but I'm already bugging you enough. And really, I've probably over-researched already, but I'm super paranoid about getting everything right for this fic, or at least not wrong. Seriously, I spent an hour with my therapist a few weeks ago, angsting and weeping about the whole thing. What right do I have, as an outsider who wasn't there, to appropriate this tragedy for something as trivial as fanfic? If I weren't writing from outsiders' POV, I don't think I'd attempt it at all.

Uh. Okay, enough angst. Please forgive both my melodrama and bottomless well of questions!

[roque_clasique]

I don't mind answering questions at all. And I know exactly exactly exactly where your points of trauma come from, having struggled with the same thing a million times -- am I "allowed" to write about this? Am I authorized? etc. But you know, I really do think that NOT writing about Katrina is just as harmful, in a way -- it's continuing the trend of keeping things quiet, of not talking about preventable tragedy, of un-acknowledgment. This was a huge fucking deal for our country, and it damn well SHOULD be in fanfiction! We write about every other freakin' thing, we can't tiptoe around truth, you know? If you do it with awareness and respect, you have as much right to write about it as anyone else.

Anyway, to answer your questions, I was in New Orleans for one week with an organization called Common Ground, stationed at that time in an abandoned school in the lower Ninth Ward. This was, wow, three years ago... the spring of 2007. I was twenty, it was my spring break. The funny thing is, it was a LOT of people's spring breaks, and Common Ground was stuffed-full with college kids -- some who were there to help, some who were kind of there to party on Bourbon Street. A very weird dynamic. I was supposed to go with my best friend but at the last minute things fell through for her (another weird story) and so I went alone.

Things were kind of hard for me -- as you probably know by now, I'm kind of emotional, and it was really difficult to dig out the remains of someone's life from mold-infested, destroyed houses. The majority of the work was shoveling, really -- filling wheelbarrows full of soaked-unified things that were foot-deep on the floor. Then we took out a lot of nails and dismantled the insides. We found wedding albums, old clothes, pillows, beds, dog toys... we found a whole, unblemished bottle of jack daniels, which none of us could bring ourselves to drink...

the dynamic of the neighborhood was strange too, because most of us in aid organizations were white, and the neighborhoods were predominantly black. I got some pretty awful stuff screamed at me, but I also had some people say some pretty amazing things. A dumbass kid got pistol-whipped walking along the tracks at night, because he tried to scam some kid selling weed. he was okay but had to get his jaw set. We all had to have numbers of a lawyer written on our bodies at all times, in case we got taken to jail -- police are fucked-up in that city.

I didn't really feel "authorized" to be there, you know -- why the hell do I think I can waltz in and try to "fix" all these unfixable things, but like I said, that attitude is as dangerous as the idea that I DO have a right and that I can "fix". I don't know what the happy medium is...

Let me know if you want to know more, or if you want pictures, LOL. I have some lovely ones of myself in a hazard suit. I really am excited to read this fic -- I haven't ever read a katrina fic before.

[art_savage]

Damn, it's crazy how long after Katrina things were - and still are - fucked up. Of course, here in Ohio a lot of people had (relatively minor) damage from Hurricane Ike in 2008, and you still see some blue tarps and roof damage that was never fixed.

I can definitely see how your experience would have been tough to handle, and that's got nothing to do with your being "emotional." Anybody who claims to dig through the ruins of someone else's life without feeling something is either not human or just way better at compartmentalizing than you and I. Hell, I've been a mess just reading about this stuff. I couldn't get through the prologue of 1 Dead in Attic without getting all weepy.

The bitch of it is, I have no idea how much Katrina-related material will even make it into this fic. Originally I thought this would be a fairly simple story: Sam & Dean go to New Orleans on a hunt, mid- to late-Season 5, and stuff from Dean's previous hunt there keeps coming up. I wanted to do back-and-forth scenes alternating past and present. It's coming out sort of like that, but not exactly. I started to think that if I spent too much time with the past, it would kill the momentum of the present. Now it's looking like there will be several flashback-type scenes interspersed throughout, but it's a pain in the ass trying to figure out where they might fit, and how much is too much.

Really, I have no idea whether I can still pull this thing together. I've got these crazy amounts of research floating around in my head - architecture, historic preservation, post-K life, New Orleans dialect, folk Catholicism - not to mention bits of my personal SPN canon I'm trying to work in. Suffice it to say I've been going through quite a bit of Excedrin.

I definitely appreciate your sharing your knowledge - and if I ever get this thing into readable shape, I hope you'll smack me upside the head if you notice things I've fucked up!