Remix Fic (B5) & Fic Recs, Book Review (The Blind Assassin) & Old Multiverse Fic (FF/BSG)
It's reveal day at the remix house! *dances* Firstly, a great big THANK YOU!!! to selenak who was my remixer, and wrote the splendiferous Burial Ground (The Rambaldi Remix), which gave me shivers. I sorta guessed it was her, actually, 'cause, well, it sounded like her (& how many other people are gonna play with Sloadney??), so, clearly I am win.
Things to cover in this v. exciting post: many things. Many, many things. get a cup of tea, for I shall be waffling for a bit. Nay, a lot. Comfy? Then let us begin:
REMIX REVEAL
My Remix: Frame of Mind (The Eye of the Storm Remix)
| part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 |
Summary: After a dig at Syria Planum goes awry, IPX dispatches a team from its New Technologies division to investigate.
Original Story: Before Any Coming Storms by aris_writing
Why I wrote it:
I wasn't going to write this fic. I was going to write a Soul Hunter origin story, remixing a fic during the episode 'Soul Hunter'. I tried on three separate occasions to start that story, and it finally dawned on me that there wasn't anything more to say that the original fic didn't already say in a succinct manner. Plus, it had an ending that raised a smile - and remixing it would take that smile away. So.
'Before Any Coming Storms' worked on the idea that Morden had contact with the Shadows prior to Z'ha'dum, and that he had a nice life at that time. The contact wasn't strong - he worked on the Ikaaran dig, the race that we met during the horrible 'Infection' - and the focus was on the fact that, actually, he was a pretty average guy. Of course, I wanted to mess with that. It struck me that there were two approaches to the story: a ficlet, that gave us a glimpse, or a novella, that did the whole shebang from initial contact to the Zha'dum mission. The fic wasn't really about anything other than Morden, so it wouldn't really fall out as a mid-sized fic; it was glimpse or novel. Which was… daunting.
I suppose that the remix factor would be that I switched the POV, and did everything from Morden's POV, but that's not how I think of it. I viewed the original fic as being on a curve, an upward-movement in Morden's life. I wanted to take that upward movement and then, well, ruin it for him, by taking him over the peak and all the way back down again
How I wrote it:
The bit about digging under Mars? I'd had that in my head for a while, and was contemplating writing an original fic about it. Or, rather, about the original London experiment referenced in the council meeting, and what came of it. I even had a name picked out. (It was going to be called 'Hollow London' - original, huh?) Anyway, I soon came to my sense and realised that I just don't have the time to develop the idea, let alone turn it into a book. At about the same time, I realised that writing a Soul Hunter origin story wasn't working for me. I ended up writing an argument between Denni and Morden, set during one of the building phases on Mars (I was originally going to base the entire thing there, so have him be Mars-born). That didn't make the final cut, but it sorta helped me start going in roughly the right direction. So, back to the underground I went, and wrote a good twelve-fifteen pages on the engineering project that Denni is called to. I managed to set it before the Ikaaran dig (which would let Morden go to Mars and meet an engineer and then have babies), and then realised that I didn't have time to get through all the usual courtship bits, and, plus, Morden would have to be about twelve during the Martian dig. So, that went a bit kablooey.
Back to Mars, then, and taking the original story's set-up. I picked wingsmith's brain shamelessly during this, trying to figure out in what direction (time-wise) I wanted to go. Basically, I sat down with a bit of paper and a pen and a ruler, and started plotting out the timeline. Initially I had a hell of a lot of other things happening, but it was pushing beyond a novel into a freaking trilogy by that point, so a lot of stuff got cut at this planning point. I was going to look at Mars some more, and also do some stuff on Garibaldi and the Psi Corps, who would be there at roughly the same time. The psi cop that Morden speaks to (Kelsey) is one of the few remnants of that plotline. The sole mention of Garibaldi that survived the first draft (he was in the spaceport when Morden first arrived on Mars) didn't make it past the second.
Anna Sheridan was also supposed to come into the story a lot earlier, and the councillors introduced in the council meeting scene would have played a much bigger role. Politics, as an entity, would have played a bigger role. Sheridan was to have been involved from the early inception of the project, right through to being there with Morden as it disintegrated. That thread came out early when I realised that it was non-canon compliant.
Actually, side-bar, on canon-compliance: I did my best. Some things doubtless slipped through (one occurs to me immediately: the original dig was only supposed to be two weeks, according to Anna's recorded message, not two months, as I misremembered), but I did try to stay within canon. I didn't, however, use the books, mainly because I haven't read them. I figured that if I approached it as a novelisation of the pre-Zha'dum Shadow events, that would keep me relatively on track.
As a consequence, that meant some changes to the tone of the story. For one thing, there was no point in building up tension about what would happen to Morden, because we already know. What was interesting was his mental change from the guy we see in 'Before Any Coming Storms' to 'In the Shadow of Zha'dum'. So, anything not immediately related to Morden's mental deteriorating had to go. The council scene was decimated, and the issues with post-war rebuilding shelved (I may do that story at one point, and bore you all to death with it). The Martian independence bit was shelved. Denni's arc was shelved, and her presence was seriously cut. Mary Kirkish's role was expanded to take over the role of many characters that were initially introduced for later politicking through brief interactions with Morden. ( e.g. someone else was supposed to meet Morden at the spaceport, and it wasn't Kirkish that stood with Morden by the dig, watching the ship wake). Derek Holtz and Elena Yan were supposed to be major characters with their own arcs, and that got cut.
The first draft was written - sort of. I still had some scenes missing, with brief descriptions covering what would happen. Some issues immediately became apparent. It was in four sections, covering four different time-zones. Except, when I wrote it and handed it in to erykah101 for comments and thoughts, she read it through and pointed out that the first two sections had Morden as sane, and the third section had him as a bit weird, and the fourth had him as nuts. What wasn't in the first draft was the progression from one state to the other. In essence, I'd forgotten to write the actual point to the story.
Back I went, with the red pen of doom my own recourse. The story was split into twelve, and slowly, very slowly, it started to shape up. Something still wasn't working for me, and it took wingsmith to point it out - Morden was a confident, strong man all the way through. That made it all the harder to make him break a little bit by the end, and I'd had to really push him from the mid-point onwards. The first half, then, he was mostly (emotionally) static. That worked great when I had a whole bunch of other characters to introduce and three other plots to launch, but wasn't so great when everything was through his eyes and this was a story about his own mental instability. Once more unto the breach with the big red pen of doom.
And again. And again. And again.
The problem with a long fic that's about character development and has little to no plot (Morden arrives, Morden obsesses, ship leaves, Morden follows) is that it's actually quite difficult to edit. I had a great deal of trouble picking up on the things that weren't in the correct 'voice' and that didn't move his characterisation in the right way. Some were easy enough - Morden was initially supposed to want to go to Ikaara, and Denni didn't want him to go, so they rowed. The dig fell through, which put a stop to that, but the point was the row. So, out that came, and all associated emotional fall-out. Out came Morden talking with the border guard at the spaceport, and putting his foot down with Aspen later on. The conversations that did remain were toned down considerably. I still see issues with the flow of the story - it could stand to use a couple more edits - but given what it started out as, I'm quite pleased.
Total number of drafts: 8.
Total number of words: c. 30k
Final thoughts: This fic just about killed me, and was useful in reminding me to not sign up for multiverse2004, the west wing AU ficathon, next year's remix or the hundreds of other ficathons I would have otherwise committed to. Not because I didn't enjoy writing it, because I did, but because it was so emotionally and physically draining. The first draft was written in under a week, which meant about six hours of writing each day. That's... quite a lot. Also, I like the universe I came up with, especially the parts that I didn't get to use. 'The Whore of Babylon' was initially going to feature the Psi Corps, you see, so I did quite a bit of prep work on setting up the training facilities etc. And now this fic let me work on some more of the telepath stuff (even if it didn't quite make it in there!). So, I am tempted to actually write a little bit more about that, rather than skip across fandoms again.
One final thing - writing this has made me a lot less fearful of going back to work on some of my lengthier fics. In particular, I wrote most of the third part of the 1602/angelverse fic, and have also been working on a few others. So, starting new lengthy fics = no. Completing old lengthy fics = yes.
BOOK REVIEW
The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
page count: 637 pages
Oh, now, this is Atwood in her stride, isn't it? Fifty years ago, Laura Chase drove her car off a bridge. Old & close to death, her sister Iris starts piecing together everything that happened those many years ago to lead to her little sister's death. We have your postmodern stand-bys: unreliable first person narration, secondary (unreliable) evidence, a secondary text woven through that may or may not overlap with the first text, etc. We also have the universe's whiniest girl-child ever in the form of Laura Chase, who, in my honest opinion, needed a good smack every day from about birth onwards. She was just so weak and needy and CRAP, basically. Everyone had to look after her, and entire universe had to change to accommodate her delicacy, and she had SPECIAL PACTS WITH GOD. The fun part is, this Mary Sue is related to us from the POV of her sister, who saw her as the clumsy, self-centred little airhead that she really was. So, we push beyond the perfection of novelist-Laura into the helplessness of child-Laura.
Admittedly, Laura suffers a lot during this book, but because it's from Iris's (mostly clueless) POV, we don't really see it, or hear, merely infer it. Iris suffers too, but in different ways. The monstrosity she marries - and the one pretending to be her sister-in-law - are all the more horrible for the lack of description, as if the only was she could cope with it all is by simply not paying any attention to it. Young Iris struck me as an empty vessel, having things poured into her only to pour them right out again.
Laura falls in love with a Communist - Alex Thomas - and the novel trundles along, giving us every reason to indicate that the two end up having an affair. Of course, things aren't that simple. I caught all of the twists before they happened, I think, which was quite gratifying (well, catching things twenty pages before their occur always is, because it means that the author has laid the groundwork properly and the reader has been paying attention). Interspersed with the main text is a secondary story - Alex narrating a story about a blind assassin boy and his mute girl, and their attempts to escape the ill-fated city that had planned to slaughter them. That story, too, drew me in, and I was heart-broken that we never got see the finish.
All in all, I greatly enjoyed The Blind Assassin. I think that it was damaged a little from Atwood's tendency to make her characters suffer so much at the hands of men - even the ones that don't appear to have suffered have, in fact, suffered greatly (tm) - which dulled me empathy after a while. But, other than that, I liked this book a lot - certainly a lot more than the other things I've read of her.
MULTIVERSE FIC
Nope, I'm not doing Multiverse this year. But you should, 'cause it's great fun. Instead, I took one of the unfulfilled requests from previous years and wrote a quick ficlet for it. Just 'cause I can.
Title: Object Recognition
Request: #122 River Tam (Firefly) & Sharon Valerii (BSG 2003)
Summary: She's one of the old models, River can tell that much from sight alone.
Read the fic
I've really disappointed at the low volume of feedback for remix this year, with most stories barely registering as a blip. Come people, get out there and comment!
Harry Potter:
- Dudley Dursley and the Hogwarts Letter (the Top of the Pops Remix) by kindkit
I think I'm a little in love with this story. I like HP stories looking at some of the forgotten, ignored characters, and this one presents a really interesting look at Dudley. It's an AU - a 'what if it was the Dursleys who died, not the Potters' - and it's fabulous.
Babylon 5:
- Love (The Many Splendoured Mix) by leyenn
I guessed it was leyenn! *g* The I/T gave it away. This is wonderful, a very fun outsider POV looking at love in its many forms on B5.
ST:VOY:
- Power Corrupts (The Absolute Absolution Remix) by alara_r
Kes is on trial before the Continuum for an act - of revenge? Or self-protection? Or something else entirely... This story is fabulous, completely in character, and made my P/Q-loving heart jump for joy.
The X-Files:
- All in the Waiting (The Silent Funeral Overture) by rynne
Mulder/Scully, post-Requiem. He wills her to wait for him. Soft and lovely.
All done! *falls over*
Things to cover in this v. exciting post: many things. Many, many things. get a cup of tea, for I shall be waffling for a bit. Nay, a lot. Comfy? Then let us begin:
REMIX REVEAL
My Remix: Frame of Mind (The Eye of the Storm Remix)
| part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 |
Summary: After a dig at Syria Planum goes awry, IPX dispatches a team from its New Technologies division to investigate.
Original Story: Before Any Coming Storms by aris_writing
Why I wrote it:
I wasn't going to write this fic. I was going to write a Soul Hunter origin story, remixing a fic during the episode 'Soul Hunter'. I tried on three separate occasions to start that story, and it finally dawned on me that there wasn't anything more to say that the original fic didn't already say in a succinct manner. Plus, it had an ending that raised a smile - and remixing it would take that smile away. So.
'Before Any Coming Storms' worked on the idea that Morden had contact with the Shadows prior to Z'ha'dum, and that he had a nice life at that time. The contact wasn't strong - he worked on the Ikaaran dig, the race that we met during the horrible 'Infection' - and the focus was on the fact that, actually, he was a pretty average guy. Of course, I wanted to mess with that. It struck me that there were two approaches to the story: a ficlet, that gave us a glimpse, or a novella, that did the whole shebang from initial contact to the Zha'dum mission. The fic wasn't really about anything other than Morden, so it wouldn't really fall out as a mid-sized fic; it was glimpse or novel. Which was… daunting.
I suppose that the remix factor would be that I switched the POV, and did everything from Morden's POV, but that's not how I think of it. I viewed the original fic as being on a curve, an upward-movement in Morden's life. I wanted to take that upward movement and then, well, ruin it for him, by taking him over the peak and all the way back down again
How I wrote it:
The bit about digging under Mars? I'd had that in my head for a while, and was contemplating writing an original fic about it. Or, rather, about the original London experiment referenced in the council meeting, and what came of it. I even had a name picked out. (It was going to be called 'Hollow London' - original, huh?) Anyway, I soon came to my sense and realised that I just don't have the time to develop the idea, let alone turn it into a book. At about the same time, I realised that writing a Soul Hunter origin story wasn't working for me. I ended up writing an argument between Denni and Morden, set during one of the building phases on Mars (I was originally going to base the entire thing there, so have him be Mars-born). That didn't make the final cut, but it sorta helped me start going in roughly the right direction. So, back to the underground I went, and wrote a good twelve-fifteen pages on the engineering project that Denni is called to. I managed to set it before the Ikaaran dig (which would let Morden go to Mars and meet an engineer and then have babies), and then realised that I didn't have time to get through all the usual courtship bits, and, plus, Morden would have to be about twelve during the Martian dig. So, that went a bit kablooey.
Back to Mars, then, and taking the original story's set-up. I picked wingsmith's brain shamelessly during this, trying to figure out in what direction (time-wise) I wanted to go. Basically, I sat down with a bit of paper and a pen and a ruler, and started plotting out the timeline. Initially I had a hell of a lot of other things happening, but it was pushing beyond a novel into a freaking trilogy by that point, so a lot of stuff got cut at this planning point. I was going to look at Mars some more, and also do some stuff on Garibaldi and the Psi Corps, who would be there at roughly the same time. The psi cop that Morden speaks to (Kelsey) is one of the few remnants of that plotline. The sole mention of Garibaldi that survived the first draft (he was in the spaceport when Morden first arrived on Mars) didn't make it past the second.
Anna Sheridan was also supposed to come into the story a lot earlier, and the councillors introduced in the council meeting scene would have played a much bigger role. Politics, as an entity, would have played a bigger role. Sheridan was to have been involved from the early inception of the project, right through to being there with Morden as it disintegrated. That thread came out early when I realised that it was non-canon compliant.
Actually, side-bar, on canon-compliance: I did my best. Some things doubtless slipped through (one occurs to me immediately: the original dig was only supposed to be two weeks, according to Anna's recorded message, not two months, as I misremembered), but I did try to stay within canon. I didn't, however, use the books, mainly because I haven't read them. I figured that if I approached it as a novelisation of the pre-Zha'dum Shadow events, that would keep me relatively on track.
As a consequence, that meant some changes to the tone of the story. For one thing, there was no point in building up tension about what would happen to Morden, because we already know. What was interesting was his mental change from the guy we see in 'Before Any Coming Storms' to 'In the Shadow of Zha'dum'. So, anything not immediately related to Morden's mental deteriorating had to go. The council scene was decimated, and the issues with post-war rebuilding shelved (I may do that story at one point, and bore you all to death with it). The Martian independence bit was shelved. Denni's arc was shelved, and her presence was seriously cut. Mary Kirkish's role was expanded to take over the role of many characters that were initially introduced for later politicking through brief interactions with Morden. ( e.g. someone else was supposed to meet Morden at the spaceport, and it wasn't Kirkish that stood with Morden by the dig, watching the ship wake). Derek Holtz and Elena Yan were supposed to be major characters with their own arcs, and that got cut.
The first draft was written - sort of. I still had some scenes missing, with brief descriptions covering what would happen. Some issues immediately became apparent. It was in four sections, covering four different time-zones. Except, when I wrote it and handed it in to erykah101 for comments and thoughts, she read it through and pointed out that the first two sections had Morden as sane, and the third section had him as a bit weird, and the fourth had him as nuts. What wasn't in the first draft was the progression from one state to the other. In essence, I'd forgotten to write the actual point to the story.
Back I went, with the red pen of doom my own recourse. The story was split into twelve, and slowly, very slowly, it started to shape up. Something still wasn't working for me, and it took wingsmith to point it out - Morden was a confident, strong man all the way through. That made it all the harder to make him break a little bit by the end, and I'd had to really push him from the mid-point onwards. The first half, then, he was mostly (emotionally) static. That worked great when I had a whole bunch of other characters to introduce and three other plots to launch, but wasn't so great when everything was through his eyes and this was a story about his own mental instability. Once more unto the breach with the big red pen of doom.
And again. And again. And again.
The problem with a long fic that's about character development and has little to no plot (Morden arrives, Morden obsesses, ship leaves, Morden follows) is that it's actually quite difficult to edit. I had a great deal of trouble picking up on the things that weren't in the correct 'voice' and that didn't move his characterisation in the right way. Some were easy enough - Morden was initially supposed to want to go to Ikaara, and Denni didn't want him to go, so they rowed. The dig fell through, which put a stop to that, but the point was the row. So, out that came, and all associated emotional fall-out. Out came Morden talking with the border guard at the spaceport, and putting his foot down with Aspen later on. The conversations that did remain were toned down considerably. I still see issues with the flow of the story - it could stand to use a couple more edits - but given what it started out as, I'm quite pleased.
Total number of drafts: 8.
Total number of words: c. 30k
Final thoughts: This fic just about killed me, and was useful in reminding me to not sign up for multiverse2004, the west wing AU ficathon, next year's remix or the hundreds of other ficathons I would have otherwise committed to. Not because I didn't enjoy writing it, because I did, but because it was so emotionally and physically draining. The first draft was written in under a week, which meant about six hours of writing each day. That's... quite a lot. Also, I like the universe I came up with, especially the parts that I didn't get to use. 'The Whore of Babylon' was initially going to feature the Psi Corps, you see, so I did quite a bit of prep work on setting up the training facilities etc. And now this fic let me work on some more of the telepath stuff (even if it didn't quite make it in there!). So, I am tempted to actually write a little bit more about that, rather than skip across fandoms again.
One final thing - writing this has made me a lot less fearful of going back to work on some of my lengthier fics. In particular, I wrote most of the third part of the 1602/angelverse fic, and have also been working on a few others. So, starting new lengthy fics = no. Completing old lengthy fics = yes.
BOOK REVIEW
The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
page count: 637 pages
Oh, now, this is Atwood in her stride, isn't it? Fifty years ago, Laura Chase drove her car off a bridge. Old & close to death, her sister Iris starts piecing together everything that happened those many years ago to lead to her little sister's death. We have your postmodern stand-bys: unreliable first person narration, secondary (unreliable) evidence, a secondary text woven through that may or may not overlap with the first text, etc. We also have the universe's whiniest girl-child ever in the form of Laura Chase, who, in my honest opinion, needed a good smack every day from about birth onwards. She was just so weak and needy and CRAP, basically. Everyone had to look after her, and entire universe had to change to accommodate her delicacy, and she had SPECIAL PACTS WITH GOD. The fun part is, this Mary Sue is related to us from the POV of her sister, who saw her as the clumsy, self-centred little airhead that she really was. So, we push beyond the perfection of novelist-Laura into the helplessness of child-Laura.
Admittedly, Laura suffers a lot during this book, but because it's from Iris's (mostly clueless) POV, we don't really see it, or hear, merely infer it. Iris suffers too, but in different ways. The monstrosity she marries - and the one pretending to be her sister-in-law - are all the more horrible for the lack of description, as if the only was she could cope with it all is by simply not paying any attention to it. Young Iris struck me as an empty vessel, having things poured into her only to pour them right out again.
Laura falls in love with a Communist - Alex Thomas - and the novel trundles along, giving us every reason to indicate that the two end up having an affair. Of course, things aren't that simple. I caught all of the twists before they happened, I think, which was quite gratifying (well, catching things twenty pages before their occur always is, because it means that the author has laid the groundwork properly and the reader has been paying attention). Interspersed with the main text is a secondary story - Alex narrating a story about a blind assassin boy and his mute girl, and their attempts to escape the ill-fated city that had planned to slaughter them. That story, too, drew me in, and I was heart-broken that we never got see the finish.
All in all, I greatly enjoyed The Blind Assassin. I think that it was damaged a little from Atwood's tendency to make her characters suffer so much at the hands of men - even the ones that don't appear to have suffered have, in fact, suffered greatly (tm) - which dulled me empathy after a while. But, other than that, I liked this book a lot - certainly a lot more than the other things I've read of her.
MULTIVERSE FIC
Nope, I'm not doing Multiverse this year. But you should, 'cause it's great fun. Instead, I took one of the unfulfilled requests from previous years and wrote a quick ficlet for it. Just 'cause I can.
Title: Object Recognition
Request: #122 River Tam (Firefly) & Sharon Valerii (BSG 2003)
Summary: She's one of the old models, River can tell that much from sight alone.
Read the fic
I've really disappointed at the low volume of feedback for remix this year, with most stories barely registering as a blip. Come people, get out there and comment!
Harry Potter:
- Dudley Dursley and the Hogwarts Letter (the Top of the Pops Remix) by kindkit
I think I'm a little in love with this story. I like HP stories looking at some of the forgotten, ignored characters, and this one presents a really interesting look at Dudley. It's an AU - a 'what if it was the Dursleys who died, not the Potters' - and it's fabulous.
Babylon 5:
- Love (The Many Splendoured Mix) by leyenn
I guessed it was leyenn! *g* The I/T gave it away. This is wonderful, a very fun outsider POV looking at love in its many forms on B5.
ST:VOY:
- Power Corrupts (The Absolute Absolution Remix) by alara_r
Kes is on trial before the Continuum for an act - of revenge? Or self-protection? Or something else entirely... This story is fabulous, completely in character, and made my P/Q-loving heart jump for joy.
The X-Files:
- All in the Waiting (The Silent Funeral Overture) by rynne
Mulder/Scully, post-Requiem. He wills her to wait for him. Soft and lovely.
All done! *falls over*