Worlds More Full Of Weeping - Notes
Wow. It's posted. This is the first long story (defined as "over 5000 words") that I've ever posted... or finished, for that matter. As a somewhat wise man once said: "Endings are hard."
First, I must thank:
- My artist, odysseaia, for the fantastic accompanying art (Go check it out!). A nicer person you will not find. Not only was her art stunning and perfect, but I have no idea how she got it done as quickly as she did. Nevermind the fact that she signed up for two other stories! Girl, I hope you stick around SPN fandom for a good long time.
- My beta-reader, creepylicious. Having never done a long story before, I'd never really used a beta. She was fantastic, getting me through both the silly mistakes and the fic-writing jitters. There may be mistakes in the final product (I can't help but tweaking things last minute), but none of them are her fault. This wouldn't be even half the story that it is without her.
- wendy and thehighwaywoman for running this whole Big Bang. I have no idea how they managed to coordinate such a huge effort and pull it off so flawlessly, but they did. I was so happy to be able to participate.
Notes on the Story
This thing took on quite the life of its own. Back whenever I started thinking about doing the Big Bang, I had no idea what story I wanted to write. In the end I decided on a preseries fic because I wanted something kinda simple for my first long story. Not that it was simple, but that was the idea. Sometime around February I read the entire Percy Jackson series for fun and I think the style of those stories affected my final output, because it ended up being closer to a Young Adult type of story than anything else.
Being the type of story that it is, it has its roots in a lot of places. I spent a month fiddling around with research, trolling Wikipedia, reading random Native American myths, etc. Google got quite the workout. I wanted most of the monsters/events/locations to be real(ish) and inherently American. Having no budget to travel the backroads of America, I am sure there are quite a few errors in geography and such, which I'm hoping you'll kindly overlook. I also had to fiddle with a few of the legends to make them more appropriate for a SPN fic, which I'm also hoping you don't mind.
The title is from The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats. Yes, I went trolling through an English literature anthology for fic title inspiration, but the quote was perfect.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
The "normal" humans in this story (such as Pat, Evan from the train, and various other bit parts) were just my creation not based on anything in particular. Everything else has a story.
Meriden, Connecticut is where the story begins and also the origin of the 'Black Dog of Hanging Hills' myth. The Black Dog is mostly a death omen. If you see it once, you have good luck, twice is bad luck, and three times means death. The Winchesters obviously never found this Black Dog, just the dead hikers that saw it.
The Jersey Devil (link) is also known as the Leeds Devil. The story goes that after 12 kids, Mother Leeds said that if she had another, the devil could take it. Child thirteen came out looking like the pictures. Though the pictures of the creature were probably horrifying to people fifty years ago, I thought he was kind of cute.
Auntie was based on this story about Aunty Greenleaf, a witch who supposedly lived in New York and was killed. I had the idea that she probably faked her death (hello? witch) and moved to a more remote location. The magical egg thing was not something I came up with, but instead a reference to the story that she and her witch friends traveled in an egg to "frolic with the witches of England".
Weysa is, of course, the Wampus Cat. The myth is pretty much how she tells it in my story. "We'sa", according to the internet, is the Cherokee word for "cat". I'm very clever like that (that was sarcasm).
By now you have all heard about Stull, Kansas, which was where the final showdown in 5.22 took place. (here are pics of the real one) I'd just like to note that I had it in my story long before that episode aired (making my fic practically canon. Again, kidding) It is supposed to be a gateway to hell or where the devil's son is buried or something.
The baykok is a real creature from Ojibwe legend. In the original myth, the baykok knocks people out and steals their liver, causing them to die at a later date. I made the threat seem a bit more immediate than that, if only because Sam-without-a-liver would have lead to a very different fic.
The Thunder Beings in the sycamore tree that Weysa calls to in order to save her and Sam are a Cherokee myth. They're called the "Ani Hyuntikwalaski" and cause lightning/fire in hollow sycamore trees.
The train ghost is based loosely on this story about a friendly ghost that haunted the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe rail line. The information about Amtrak and the BN/ATSF merger is all accurate, though I doubt it pissed off any spirits.
The pooka is an Irish legend, which means that it breaks my nice streak of American monsters. It's a shapeshifter that often appears as a black horse with yellow eyes. There are stories about it being helpful and it being dangerous, but it was known to select certain special people to ride it and give them advice.
The demon, as I'm hoping at least a few people guessed, was none other than our good friend Meg, though of course this isn't Meg Masters' body. I was pretty pumped when 5.22 hinted that demons had been spying on Sam his whole life, because I already had Meg doing the same, albeit with her usual lack of subtlety.
The old man on the mountain was intended to be the god Kwatee (or Kvati) from the American Indian people of the Puget Sound in Washington. He was somewhat of a trickster god, though he tried to create positive change in the world. When he decided to call it quits, he turned himself into a mountain, which I imagine is the mountain that Sam ended up on, which is how Kwatee "found" him.
The Winchester Mystery House is a real place, supposedly haunted by the ghost of Sarah Winchester. It is massive. It was under construction for 38 years, until Sarah died. There are about 160 rooms (including 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms), 47 fireplaces (and yet only 17 chimneys), 10,000 window panes, 2 basements and 3 elevators. I badly want to take a tour.
The memorial at Stanford also exists, though it was moved to a different location a few years after Sam's trip in order to build some apartments. That poem is really written on it, which is a little creepy if you ask me.
The woman from the sea is intended to be Sedna, an Inuit goddess. Don't ask what an Inuit goddess was doing in California... vacation, perhaps? In my mind, she was attracted to the pen that Sam threw into the ocean, sensing some of its power. Sedna was the Goddess of the Sea and Queen of the Inuit Underworld. If fishing was scarce, shamen would go into a trance, descend into the depths of the ocean, and comb and braid her hair to please her.
Phew, that is a lot of somewhat random stuff. I enjoyed the researching about as much as I liked writing the actual story, even though I barely even used half of what I looked up. As I told my beta, my goal was to write a story that could be assimilated into canon without much conflict, and perhaps explain a few things in the process. Namely, Sam's views on his family and how they changed from A Very Supernatural Christmas to After School Special.
Also, I wanted to create a foundation for Sam's somewhat unorthodox (as far as Winchesters go) views on good and evil, especially early in the series. Sam often seems to play the devil's advocate in those early episodes for many "monsters". He's the one who argued to not kill Lenore (the vegetarian vampire), tried to reason with Max Miller, and let Jake live. The contrast between his views on the supernatural world and Dean's or John's opinions is often a source of conflict. Now, that is obviously part of Sam's character, but it's interesting that it developed in the face of John's somewhat overwhelming single-mindedness on the matter. I doubt that John allowed Sam the time to converse with any of the monsters they hunted as children. So I wanted a story that explored how Sam could've formed his own, independent, and practically blasphemous viewpoints on the world.
Wow, that was rambly. Uh, I tried to make it readable. *nod* Thanks for reading, folks!