Story time
I've been trying to write this since authors were revealed and totally failing, so here we go again. Maybe now I will be able to work on the damn dragonfic comment meme!
My remix was The Loudest Noise (affannato, affettuoso, agitato) which was based on an untitled scene by gogollescent/possibly-thrice. Both stories are Gaila&Uhura Academy era stories.
The hardest part of this remix was picking a damn story to remix. Usually my remixes come from one of three places:
Basically, when I write a remix, I'm trying to dialogue with the original story, to say, "Meanwhile, back on the ranch" or, "NO, the world doesn't work like that!" or, "Yes, but wouldn't it all be better with vampires?"
The hardest times to pick a story to remix are, absolutely, the times when my remixee's work doesn't speak to me: the author is picking at parts of canon I don't care about, making interpretations of the original which, in my disinterest, seem neither egregiously bad nor interesting.
There's nothing wrong with possibly-thrice's work, not at all. I just don't care about Pike getting it on with any of the Kirks, and my heartstrings are not plucked by emotional word pictures where nothing happens.
(This happened, in a much less disinterested form, the year I got
fox1013 as my remixee. I liked her stories, but I didn't have anything to say about them or to them. I didn't feel the need to discuss anything she'd said in her fiction, and the stories seemed sufficiently complete in themselves that they didn't need a missing scene. So, I instead used her story structure to discuss what was going on in the show at the time, namely the Callie/George/Izzy triangle and its fallout.)
So, I took a word picture of Gaila from Uhura's POV, and wrote, not exactly a sequel to my Whore remix, but a re-dress of some of the same issues that prompted that story, the idea that humans dominate Starfleet but that the non-humans are fundamentally viewed as people and not aliens, and people with their own history and slang and injokes and other cultural/biological artifacts, in a way that Star Trek itself often fails to acknowledge, let alone the fan writing.
Which, you know, is a great theme, but pulling a plot out of someone else's plotless vignette…it didn't actually drive me to tears or to drink, but that was the second most difficult part of the whole thing. Because one of the things I appreciate so much about remix is that I don't have to decide what happened next, I can just follow the course of the original story.
But! People liked it! That's always awesome. I know that people always say, "Oh, Remix Redux is a low feedback challenge," but I usually get more comments for it than for anything else I post all year. So, I really enjoy that part.
Original post at Dreamwidth. Read (
) comments or reply there using Open ID.
My remix was The Loudest Noise (affannato, affettuoso, agitato) which was based on an untitled scene by gogollescent/possibly-thrice. Both stories are Gaila&Uhura Academy era stories.
The hardest part of this remix was picking a damn story to remix. Usually my remixes come from one of three places:
- SIWOTI
- Bizarro/tangential reinterpretation to make the story more relevant to my interests
- I approve of this story and wish to explore an untold aspect of it
Basically, when I write a remix, I'm trying to dialogue with the original story, to say, "Meanwhile, back on the ranch" or, "NO, the world doesn't work like that!" or, "Yes, but wouldn't it all be better with vampires?"
The hardest times to pick a story to remix are, absolutely, the times when my remixee's work doesn't speak to me: the author is picking at parts of canon I don't care about, making interpretations of the original which, in my disinterest, seem neither egregiously bad nor interesting.
There's nothing wrong with possibly-thrice's work, not at all. I just don't care about Pike getting it on with any of the Kirks, and my heartstrings are not plucked by emotional word pictures where nothing happens.
(This happened, in a much less disinterested form, the year I got
fox1013 as my remixee. I liked her stories, but I didn't have anything to say about them or to them. I didn't feel the need to discuss anything she'd said in her fiction, and the stories seemed sufficiently complete in themselves that they didn't need a missing scene. So, I instead used her story structure to discuss what was going on in the show at the time, namely the Callie/George/Izzy triangle and its fallout.)
So, I took a word picture of Gaila from Uhura's POV, and wrote, not exactly a sequel to my Whore remix, but a re-dress of some of the same issues that prompted that story, the idea that humans dominate Starfleet but that the non-humans are fundamentally viewed as people and not aliens, and people with their own history and slang and injokes and other cultural/biological artifacts, in a way that Star Trek itself often fails to acknowledge, let alone the fan writing.
Which, you know, is a great theme, but pulling a plot out of someone else's plotless vignette…it didn't actually drive me to tears or to drink, but that was the second most difficult part of the whole thing. Because one of the things I appreciate so much about remix is that I don't have to decide what happened next, I can just follow the course of the original story.
But! People liked it! That's always awesome. I know that people always say, "Oh, Remix Redux is a low feedback challenge," but I usually get more comments for it than for anything else I post all year. So, I really enjoy that part.
Original post at Dreamwidth. Read (
) comments or reply there using Open ID.