Yuletide Reveals
I wrote six stories this Yuletide, which is my record; however, they are all short, so it's not the most words I've ever written.
Don't need to know canon
Riders of the Purring Sage. EDS Cat Herders Commercial. Written in the style of Louis L'Amour, if he wrote about cowboys herding cats. Or should I say catboys?
Read the author's notes; they're part of the story (and by the way, I had trim down my initial, much longer list of cat westerns to just six. The Manx With No Name. Butch Calico and the Sundance Kit. The Ocicat Josey Wales. Catfight at the O. K. Corral. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Kitten Robert Ford. For a Few Collars More. The Good, the Bad, and the Furry. Okay, I'll stop now.) No cats are harmed, though many humans are scratched. Some cats are briefly endangered, and there are references to famous cats who are deceased by the time of the story.
Spoilery notes: My recipient mentioned ghost cats, and also liking unusual formats. Hence the mini-story in the author's notes.
The Extraordinary Egg. Corfu Trilogy - Gerald Durrell. This is marginal in terms of need to know canon: I think you don't have to, but it's funnier if you do. It's based on a series of hilarious memoirs by Gerald Durrell, a noted zookeeper and conservationist, of his animal-obsessed childhood with his eccentric family on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. Aurilly had the charming prompt that the family should encounter a creature from Greek myth.
She even specifically mentioned a phoenix, so I can't take credit for that. I was additionally inspired by the Phoenix in E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet.
Need to know canon
You Take Your Choice At This Time. Dark Tower - Stephen King. A very short canon AU. I was really happy with how this came out, so I hope you check it out if you know the series. It will make no sense if you haven't read the series through Wizard in Glass.
HUGE spoilers for the story below, please don't read unless you've already read the story (which is only 500 words).
Scioscribe had a number of great prompts for Susan Delgado, many of which were canon AUs - something one naturally thinks of for this canon in general and for Susan in particular. The two I used were "What if Susan became a gunslinger?" and "What if Roland died in Mejis?"
I spent a lot of time on this story, considering how short it is, trying to pack the most implication into the fewest words. I probably cut down on my own readership by not listing characters in the tags and with the generic summary, but I really wanted the surprises to be surprising, which I could only do if the reader isn't expecting any surprise at all. I figured Scioscribe would guess from the start that the gunslinger was Susan, given her prompts and requested character, but I wanted that to surprise other readers-- and to lull her and them into the belief that the story's twist was the gunslinger's identity, and therefore there wouldn't be any more twists.
I dropped a little early hint of Susan's identity in the baking sheet metaphor, which would be more likely to come to her than to Roland, and a bigger one right before the reveal of her name, which is that rather than pursing the Tower and the man in black, she's pursuing the rose and the witch. With the rose, I was just going for something a little different in what Susan had seen rather than a huge cosmological change; the Tower and the rose are still in essence the same thing. But I did intend the witch to be Rhea, or rather for Rhea to be the equivalent of Marten Broadcloak and the witch to be the equivalent of the man in black, an eternal force with many names and faces.
The song is a warped version of the Rolling Stones' "Can You See Your Mother, Baby (Standing in the Shadow)?" The title is taken from that. I still remember how "Hey Jude" blew my mind when I first encountered it in Dark Tower, so I wanted to riff on that. Traditionally the meaning of Beatles vs. Stones is innocence vs. experience, so the more experienced and world-weary Susan gets the Stones.
I wanted the song lyrics and the reference to Susan losing her baby (also Roland's baby) to both reflect on her near-miss at motherhood (paralleling Roland's near-miss at fatherhood) and to be another, probably subconscious-level, mislead for the readers: if they're already guessing who the child is, they should be guessing either a younger version of Jake, or else Susan and Roland's stillborn child somehow living again (because it's a series where that could happen.) Also foreshadowing that she's about to get involved in a mother-child type relationship.
The reason Odetta/Detta/Susannah is five is that that's the age when Jack Mort dropped the brick on her head. I'm not sure if this came through in the story, but the idea I had is that it killed her, and she arrived in Mid-World the same way Jake arrived after dying in our world.
This isn't in the story at all, but I was thinking that after my story ends, Susan goes through the door to our world and saves her, like Roland saves Jake. But because it splits the timeline, Odetta/Detta starts to lose her mind just like Jake does, but isn't brought back into Mid-World as soon as he is. (Because no way can a five-year-old be a gunslinger, so she'd have to be minimum Jake's age and possibly the same age she is in canon.) Her personality doesn't split because of the brick (which in that timeline never hit her at all), but splits to save as much of her sanity as possible: Detta remembers the timeline where she died, Odetta remembers the timeline where nothing happened, and neither of them remembers both.
She is Large, She Contains Multitudes. Blade Runner 2049. A short focusing on Joi, the virtual reality girlfriend, about programming, free will, and what it means to be a real girl.
And finally, two from The Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander.
The Hands of an Enchantress. An introspective story from Achren's POV about her relationship with Eilonwy, set during the brief period while Achren has enchanted her.
Taking Flight. A pre-series story about Eilonwy and Achren, this time from Eilonwy's POV. She's a really fun character to write; characters who think very fast always are. She's clearly thinking at great speed and making a lot of associations very quickly, which is why when she talks, a lot of the connections are left out and the other characters are left scrambling to keep up.
Notes are spoilery; please read the story first if you're interested.
I was brainstorming story ideas with Sholio, and she suggested that Eilonwy free an animal Achren was going to use as a spell ingredient. I went with a different take on that general idea.
In the first Prydain book, Eilonwy frees Taran from a dungeon, and in doing so, frees herself. This reminded me of The Tombs of Atuan ("Who saved who from the labyrinth, Ged?") and so I decided to have Achren teach Eilonwy to call down a hawk. This also echoes something else in Prydain, when Taran briefly cares for an injured gwythaint. And, of course, Eilonwy's relationship with the hawk parallels Achren's relationship with her.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2177997.html. Comment here or there.
Don't need to know canon
Riders of the Purring Sage. EDS Cat Herders Commercial. Written in the style of Louis L'Amour, if he wrote about cowboys herding cats. Or should I say catboys?
Read the author's notes; they're part of the story (and by the way, I had trim down my initial, much longer list of cat westerns to just six. The Manx With No Name. Butch Calico and the Sundance Kit. The Ocicat Josey Wales. Catfight at the O. K. Corral. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Kitten Robert Ford. For a Few Collars More. The Good, the Bad, and the Furry. Okay, I'll stop now.) No cats are harmed, though many humans are scratched. Some cats are briefly endangered, and there are references to famous cats who are deceased by the time of the story.
Spoilery notes: My recipient mentioned ghost cats, and also liking unusual formats. Hence the mini-story in the author's notes.
The Extraordinary Egg. Corfu Trilogy - Gerald Durrell. This is marginal in terms of need to know canon: I think you don't have to, but it's funnier if you do. It's based on a series of hilarious memoirs by Gerald Durrell, a noted zookeeper and conservationist, of his animal-obsessed childhood with his eccentric family on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. Aurilly had the charming prompt that the family should encounter a creature from Greek myth.
She even specifically mentioned a phoenix, so I can't take credit for that. I was additionally inspired by the Phoenix in E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet.
Need to know canon
You Take Your Choice At This Time. Dark Tower - Stephen King. A very short canon AU. I was really happy with how this came out, so I hope you check it out if you know the series. It will make no sense if you haven't read the series through Wizard in Glass.
HUGE spoilers for the story below, please don't read unless you've already read the story (which is only 500 words).
Scioscribe had a number of great prompts for Susan Delgado, many of which were canon AUs - something one naturally thinks of for this canon in general and for Susan in particular. The two I used were "What if Susan became a gunslinger?" and "What if Roland died in Mejis?"
I spent a lot of time on this story, considering how short it is, trying to pack the most implication into the fewest words. I probably cut down on my own readership by not listing characters in the tags and with the generic summary, but I really wanted the surprises to be surprising, which I could only do if the reader isn't expecting any surprise at all. I figured Scioscribe would guess from the start that the gunslinger was Susan, given her prompts and requested character, but I wanted that to surprise other readers-- and to lull her and them into the belief that the story's twist was the gunslinger's identity, and therefore there wouldn't be any more twists.
I dropped a little early hint of Susan's identity in the baking sheet metaphor, which would be more likely to come to her than to Roland, and a bigger one right before the reveal of her name, which is that rather than pursing the Tower and the man in black, she's pursuing the rose and the witch. With the rose, I was just going for something a little different in what Susan had seen rather than a huge cosmological change; the Tower and the rose are still in essence the same thing. But I did intend the witch to be Rhea, or rather for Rhea to be the equivalent of Marten Broadcloak and the witch to be the equivalent of the man in black, an eternal force with many names and faces.
The song is a warped version of the Rolling Stones' "Can You See Your Mother, Baby (Standing in the Shadow)?" The title is taken from that. I still remember how "Hey Jude" blew my mind when I first encountered it in Dark Tower, so I wanted to riff on that. Traditionally the meaning of Beatles vs. Stones is innocence vs. experience, so the more experienced and world-weary Susan gets the Stones.
I wanted the song lyrics and the reference to Susan losing her baby (also Roland's baby) to both reflect on her near-miss at motherhood (paralleling Roland's near-miss at fatherhood) and to be another, probably subconscious-level, mislead for the readers: if they're already guessing who the child is, they should be guessing either a younger version of Jake, or else Susan and Roland's stillborn child somehow living again (because it's a series where that could happen.) Also foreshadowing that she's about to get involved in a mother-child type relationship.
The reason Odetta/Detta/Susannah is five is that that's the age when Jack Mort dropped the brick on her head. I'm not sure if this came through in the story, but the idea I had is that it killed her, and she arrived in Mid-World the same way Jake arrived after dying in our world.
This isn't in the story at all, but I was thinking that after my story ends, Susan goes through the door to our world and saves her, like Roland saves Jake. But because it splits the timeline, Odetta/Detta starts to lose her mind just like Jake does, but isn't brought back into Mid-World as soon as he is. (Because no way can a five-year-old be a gunslinger, so she'd have to be minimum Jake's age and possibly the same age she is in canon.) Her personality doesn't split because of the brick (which in that timeline never hit her at all), but splits to save as much of her sanity as possible: Detta remembers the timeline where she died, Odetta remembers the timeline where nothing happened, and neither of them remembers both.
She is Large, She Contains Multitudes. Blade Runner 2049. A short focusing on Joi, the virtual reality girlfriend, about programming, free will, and what it means to be a real girl.
And finally, two from The Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander.
The Hands of an Enchantress. An introspective story from Achren's POV about her relationship with Eilonwy, set during the brief period while Achren has enchanted her.
Taking Flight. A pre-series story about Eilonwy and Achren, this time from Eilonwy's POV. She's a really fun character to write; characters who think very fast always are. She's clearly thinking at great speed and making a lot of associations very quickly, which is why when she talks, a lot of the connections are left out and the other characters are left scrambling to keep up.
Notes are spoilery; please read the story first if you're interested.
I was brainstorming story ideas with Sholio, and she suggested that Eilonwy free an animal Achren was going to use as a spell ingredient. I went with a different take on that general idea.
In the first Prydain book, Eilonwy frees Taran from a dungeon, and in doing so, frees herself. This reminded me of The Tombs of Atuan ("Who saved who from the labyrinth, Ged?") and so I decided to have Achren teach Eilonwy to call down a hawk. This also echoes something else in Prydain, when Taran briefly cares for an injured gwythaint. And, of course, Eilonwy's relationship with the hawk parallels Achren's relationship with her.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2177997.html. Comment here or there.