[Fic] "To Calormen and the South" -- Chronicles of Narnia
It's NFE reveal day! So I can now say that I wrote two stories: my original assignment and a pinch hit. I will talk about each in a separate post.
-----
To Calormen and the South (1207 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sallowpad (Narnia), Susan Pevensie, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Golden Age (Narnia), Calormen, Spies & Secret Agents
Summary: How Sallowpad came to travel in the lands south of Narnia.
-----
This was my original assignment, written for
marmota_b. As I said in the author's note, I basically threw up my hands and gave up on anonymity for this one, because it gets really tiring to reinvent the wheel and also this was a great way to work in some backstory for the original character mentioned in the tags... who is, of course, the Lady Eena Flyflick first encountered in The Courting Dance as the junior ambassador to Archenland, but whose other role is basically coordinating Narnian intelligence about Calormen.
I am very pleased with what I wrote! I think it works well. :)
What I am less pleased about is how short the posted story is. It wanted to be a novelette, or perhaps a novella, but I could not make the necessary plot points between this opening and a couple of later scenes (mentioned in the concluding author's note) come clear between the posting deadline and when the archive opened. Sometimes my brain just refuses to cooperate, and I have learned over the years that not all stories can be forced with a judicious application of deadline adrenaline. (When that trick works, it works amazingly. When it fails... well, the results, shall we say, are not pretty.)
But anyway, I do like Sallowpad's decision to set out on a scouting (*cough* spying *cough*) mission, Susan's approval and choice to maintain plausible deniability, and Eena's own motivations for joining the expedition. And someday, fingers crossed, I will return to this setup and figure out how to get from point B to point K, as it were. If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
-----
To Calormen and the South (1207 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sallowpad (Narnia), Susan Pevensie, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Golden Age (Narnia), Calormen, Spies & Secret Agents
Summary: How Sallowpad came to travel in the lands south of Narnia.
-----
This was my original assignment, written for
marmota_b. As I said in the author's note, I basically threw up my hands and gave up on anonymity for this one, because it gets really tiring to reinvent the wheel and also this was a great way to work in some backstory for the original character mentioned in the tags... who is, of course, the Lady Eena Flyflick first encountered in The Courting Dance as the junior ambassador to Archenland, but whose other role is basically coordinating Narnian intelligence about Calormen.
I am very pleased with what I wrote! I think it works well. :)
What I am less pleased about is how short the posted story is. It wanted to be a novelette, or perhaps a novella, but I could not make the necessary plot points between this opening and a couple of later scenes (mentioned in the concluding author's note) come clear between the posting deadline and when the archive opened. Sometimes my brain just refuses to cooperate, and I have learned over the years that not all stories can be forced with a judicious application of deadline adrenaline. (When that trick works, it works amazingly. When it fails... well, the results, shall we say, are not pretty.)
But anyway, I do like Sallowpad's decision to set out on a scouting (*cough* spying *cough*) mission, Susan's approval and choice to maintain plausible deniability, and Eena's own motivations for joining the expedition. And someday, fingers crossed, I will return to this setup and figure out how to get from point B to point K, as it were. If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)