FIC: The Sangata, Book 1 (Stargate SG-1)
My remix can be found here: The Sangata, Book 1. I would just like to point out that this is the second time my involvement in a ficathon has gone something like this:
ME: Ehhhh... I shouldn't... ehhhh...
nandamai POSTS: Everyone should do this ficathon!
ME: Ehhhh... yeah, okay.
ME: (is assigned to write for Nanda)
ME: Gah!
One or the other of us is cursed. (I like both Nanda and her writing a lot! But, you know, I wanna get assigned to a bad writer one of these days. That would be less intimidating. Should I say that? Eh, whatever.)
I ended up remixing her story Creak, which is a really interesting little bad dream of a story, all about Sam stripped down to her core. Because of the way it's written, it has a lot of room to work; I found that the majority of her stories, I didn't really have a hook, because I looked at them and said "no, actually, I think it should stay just like that." With Creak, because so much is left unsaid, I was willing to give it a shot.
I decided on the poetry thing fairly early on, because a) fun and b) not likely to devolve into an enormous plot that I wouldn't be able to finish before the deadline. Of course it tried anyway--ficathon stories always do--but I promised Sangeeta that she got to write the rest of the thing, just I was not transcribing it for her, and cut it off basically at the end of the original story. (Bad remixer: I actually finished this the morning of, and it was, er, not betaed. I know, I know. I figured it wasn't the kind of story where I would have to worry too much about unfortunate canon mistakes, etc., and promptly ended up making two errors RE the original story toward the end there. I am blaming this on an unreliable narrator. Yeah, that's the ticket!)
I really did want to write on into the future originally--what the four of them did after their escape, the threads of memory that led them to the Stargate, the Serious Disagreement about whether to go through or not... but that was just leading to a need to have a coherent backstory too, and a motivation for the camps, and yada yada, and I just didn't have that much in me. So I'll never know how they pulled it off, though I believe afterwards, there was hugging. Because I like hugging, dammit.
I had a brief, mad plan where I was going to try to actually work with an Indian form of epic poetry, but then I realized that given that I know nothing about Indian epic poetry, that mostly went by the wayside. The opening invocation is cribbed loosely from I believe a translation of the Ramayana (though it could have been the Mahabharata; I looked at both) and so I kept the subtitle, because it was alliterative and I liked it. What I ended up with feels Biblical as much as anything, so apparently that's my backbrain's answer to long-form verse. Every time I thought to myself what am I doing, I'm sure there are rules about this, I suck, I told myself sternly that Sangeeta hadn't done this before either, and besides, who am I to say what poetic forms in Parashbun are like?
The last plan that went by the wayside: Sangeeta was originally going to be motivated on a much more broadly historical scale--she was going to be telling their story, the stories of all of the people from Hetep-Wotwosen who weren't able to go home, and ended up forming a new society of their own. Except it turned out that she wasn't really into that. She wanted to talk about her story, and where it intersected with others' that was great, but she was damned if she was going to be objective about it. She was, in fact, still really pissed off. And that was kind of fun to write, actually.
Anyway, interesting experience. I kept finding myself wanting to write AUs, which is of course not the point of the challenge, but I'm pleased with the idea I ended up with and reasonably pleased with the execution, given that I'd never done anything like this before. Next up: gateverse_remix. (C'mon, it'll be fun!)
ETA: I knew I forgot something! The story written for me is called Teetering on the Edge, a remix of a drabble I wrote about Daniel viewing the security camera footage of his death and ascension. I honestly hadn't even considered the possibility that someone would choose one of my drabbles to do, but of course it makes perfect sense once I think about it, and more Fallen-fic is always good.
ME: Ehhhh... I shouldn't... ehhhh...
nandamai POSTS: Everyone should do this ficathon!
ME: Ehhhh... yeah, okay.
ME: (is assigned to write for Nanda)
ME: Gah!
One or the other of us is cursed. (I like both Nanda and her writing a lot! But, you know, I wanna get assigned to a bad writer one of these days. That would be less intimidating. Should I say that? Eh, whatever.)
I ended up remixing her story Creak, which is a really interesting little bad dream of a story, all about Sam stripped down to her core. Because of the way it's written, it has a lot of room to work; I found that the majority of her stories, I didn't really have a hook, because I looked at them and said "no, actually, I think it should stay just like that." With Creak, because so much is left unsaid, I was willing to give it a shot.
I decided on the poetry thing fairly early on, because a) fun and b) not likely to devolve into an enormous plot that I wouldn't be able to finish before the deadline. Of course it tried anyway--ficathon stories always do--but I promised Sangeeta that she got to write the rest of the thing, just I was not transcribing it for her, and cut it off basically at the end of the original story. (Bad remixer: I actually finished this the morning of, and it was, er, not betaed. I know, I know. I figured it wasn't the kind of story where I would have to worry too much about unfortunate canon mistakes, etc., and promptly ended up making two errors RE the original story toward the end there. I am blaming this on an unreliable narrator. Yeah, that's the ticket!)
I really did want to write on into the future originally--what the four of them did after their escape, the threads of memory that led them to the Stargate, the Serious Disagreement about whether to go through or not... but that was just leading to a need to have a coherent backstory too, and a motivation for the camps, and yada yada, and I just didn't have that much in me. So I'll never know how they pulled it off, though I believe afterwards, there was hugging. Because I like hugging, dammit.
I had a brief, mad plan where I was going to try to actually work with an Indian form of epic poetry, but then I realized that given that I know nothing about Indian epic poetry, that mostly went by the wayside. The opening invocation is cribbed loosely from I believe a translation of the Ramayana (though it could have been the Mahabharata; I looked at both) and so I kept the subtitle, because it was alliterative and I liked it. What I ended up with feels Biblical as much as anything, so apparently that's my backbrain's answer to long-form verse. Every time I thought to myself what am I doing, I'm sure there are rules about this, I suck, I told myself sternly that Sangeeta hadn't done this before either, and besides, who am I to say what poetic forms in Parashbun are like?
The last plan that went by the wayside: Sangeeta was originally going to be motivated on a much more broadly historical scale--she was going to be telling their story, the stories of all of the people from Hetep-Wotwosen who weren't able to go home, and ended up forming a new society of their own. Except it turned out that she wasn't really into that. She wanted to talk about her story, and where it intersected with others' that was great, but she was damned if she was going to be objective about it. She was, in fact, still really pissed off. And that was kind of fun to write, actually.
Anyway, interesting experience. I kept finding myself wanting to write AUs, which is of course not the point of the challenge, but I'm pleased with the idea I ended up with and reasonably pleased with the execution, given that I'd never done anything like this before. Next up: gateverse_remix. (C'mon, it'll be fun!)
ETA: I knew I forgot something! The story written for me is called Teetering on the Edge, a remix of a drabble I wrote about Daniel viewing the security camera footage of his death and ascension. I honestly hadn't even considered the possibility that someone would choose one of my drabbles to do, but of course it makes perfect sense once I think about it, and more Fallen-fic is always good.