Fic: A Fairer House than Prose (Alias, Irina Derevko)

[pellucid]

I'm pretty sure Saturday evening is one of the worst times to post fic, but I'm feeling impatient. The long-advertised Irina Derevko fic (and the first "real" fic I've written in over a year) is finally as complete as it's going to be, so now seems like as good a time as any

Comments

[pellucid]

The funny thing is that I never meant to criticize Keats because I'd list negative capability pretty high on my list of "ideas I try to live by," at least in the "being in uncertainty" sense. I do think it's tremendously important to be comfortable with ambiguity and to know how to exist in the gray areas, and Keats formulates it as well as anyone I've found. But I've tended to think of it only in the "most scholars, when they lecture or write about negative capability" sense, and it was an interesting thought experiment for me to play with it in this way instead. (I think I said something to you, early in the drafting, that I thought I might be crazy because I was putting one of my most cherished ideals in the hands of a sociopath. Both of which were slight exaggerations--I wouldn't hold too firmly to Keats, per se, and although I think there's an argument to be made that Irina is a sociopath, I've decided that she's not--but still.)

But is poetry or espionage worth the outcome? There's the old adage about genius and insanity, after all, and maybe the same is true of very good spies--especially those, like Irina, who don't have much they can really hold on to ground them, except the work of another mad genius. On the other hand, where would we be without mad geniuses, and while I might like for Irina to have had a happier life (see the above comment about the "what if they had just met as themselves when they were young" AU), part of what makes her so amazing as a character is all of this mad genius spy stuff. So. :)

At any rate, thank you once again for the beta, and I'm so pleased you liked the story!