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edenfallingToday is Ouroboros Mix reveal day, hurrah!
I wrote Maid of Life and Death (Her Every Breath a Blade): In the Furthest Ring, Skaia's light is a distant, faint blue dot, barely enough for Jane to see the contours of the rocks she threads her way between. Now and again metal structures gleam like the edge of a blade reflecting starlight, but there are no stars in this ebon sky. Before her lies nothing but nightmare.
It is still better than what she leaves behind.
Jane isn't made to be alone.
(4,600 words, remix of Bend Around The Blades by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
lantadyme)
---------------
I was both happy and slightly nervous when I got the email informing me that I would be remixing lantadyme. Happy because she is one of my favorite Homestuck writers and her stories almost always give me the feeling that there is more world lurking around the edges of the narrative (and that is useful for remixing!)... but also nervous, because she is one of my favorite Homestuck writers and her stories lean more toward subtle layers and things unsaid than my usual style. (Unless I am playing around or being showy for effect, I default to a "get out of the way and just say what happened" sort of plainspoken narrative. I don't really do layers and allusions -- particularly not literary allusions. I have tried upon occasion, but it never seems to work the way other people can make it work. Ah well, such is life.)
I originally planned to remix Spectrum Influence, which is a short and largely plotless Karkat-and-John species swap genfic, because species swap is just neat. I spent weeks trying to work out the world-building necessary to make that scene possible. I have diagrams and everything. But I couldn't make all that background development turn into a story, so a couple days before the deadline I took another look at "Bend Around The Blades" and was luckily hit by an idea: clearly the Alpha kids had been caught in a doomed timeline (since the events of the session in lantadyme's story are incompatible with the way everyone after Jane actually entered the Medium), and I could tell those events backward until I hit the split point, whereupon the horrorterrors would accept Jane's bargain and rewind the session. This would also neatly explain why Jane's Lifey Thing works a bit differently in canon and in lantadyme's story -- lantadyme's supercharged version was the price for the timeline patch, which had to be paid because the Alpha kids don't have a Time player to correct things the normal way.
"Maid of Life and Death" is kind of a horror story, I guess, but no more so than the original fic. And the horror comes from a different angle: character death and the creeping knowledge that the world has gone subtly askew, rather than looped memories and Lovecraftian monsters. There's a lot of isolation in both stories, though. That's a running theme.
I did end up using a lightly stylized narrative voice -- it's nothing blatant, but I paid more attention to the rhythm of words and phrases than I often do, and consciously left out conjunctions in strategic places. A little bit of that was an attempt to better blend my voice with lantadyme's, since I copypasted her closing paragraphs as my opening paragraphs (it seemed less awkward than trying to paraphrase them while keeping the words and actions exactly the same), but some of it was simply a vague attempt at atmospheric writing. Playing, in other words. :-)
Anyway, I finished the rough draft just under the deadline, despite a maddening struggle to convince AO3 that I was trying to create a new work skin rather than a site skin (and for the sake of one line of horrorterror dialogue, ye gods)... after which I suddenly realized that I was missing an entire scene -- the one with Jane and Dirk on LOPAN -- which I needed to write and insert to smooth the time jump, give them some interaction, and make explicit that the Alpha kids were caught in a doomed timeline. So I did.
The other scene that gave me problems was the entry scene with Jane on Derse. The first version was entirely in pesterlog form and opened with Jane safely hiding in Dirk's dream bedroom. Chat logs weren't necessarily a mistake (you will note that the revised version of the scene includes two short ones), but the second point was a killer. The lack of immediate threat meant the conversation rambled on and on and on, and no matter what I did, I couldn't get the mood and tone to gel with the rest of the story. The sense of pressure flat out wasn't there. So eventually I just ripped that version out and did my damndest to kill Jane with earthquakes, falling rocks, and super deadly red shit, which worked much better. (Sorry, Jane!)
Then I jammed a title and summary onto the fic (I had been using lantadyme's title and summary as placeholders) and hoped for the best. :-)
I wrote Maid of Life and Death (Her Every Breath a Blade): In the Furthest Ring, Skaia's light is a distant, faint blue dot, barely enough for Jane to see the contours of the rocks she threads her way between. Now and again metal structures gleam like the edge of a blade reflecting starlight, but there are no stars in this ebon sky. Before her lies nothing but nightmare.
It is still better than what she leaves behind.
Jane isn't made to be alone.
(4,600 words, remix of Bend Around The Blades by
---------------
I was both happy and slightly nervous when I got the email informing me that I would be remixing lantadyme. Happy because she is one of my favorite Homestuck writers and her stories almost always give me the feeling that there is more world lurking around the edges of the narrative (and that is useful for remixing!)... but also nervous, because she is one of my favorite Homestuck writers and her stories lean more toward subtle layers and things unsaid than my usual style. (Unless I am playing around or being showy for effect, I default to a "get out of the way and just say what happened" sort of plainspoken narrative. I don't really do layers and allusions -- particularly not literary allusions. I have tried upon occasion, but it never seems to work the way other people can make it work. Ah well, such is life.)
I originally planned to remix Spectrum Influence, which is a short and largely plotless Karkat-and-John species swap genfic, because species swap is just neat. I spent weeks trying to work out the world-building necessary to make that scene possible. I have diagrams and everything. But I couldn't make all that background development turn into a story, so a couple days before the deadline I took another look at "Bend Around The Blades" and was luckily hit by an idea: clearly the Alpha kids had been caught in a doomed timeline (since the events of the session in lantadyme's story are incompatible with the way everyone after Jane actually entered the Medium), and I could tell those events backward until I hit the split point, whereupon the horrorterrors would accept Jane's bargain and rewind the session. This would also neatly explain why Jane's Lifey Thing works a bit differently in canon and in lantadyme's story -- lantadyme's supercharged version was the price for the timeline patch, which had to be paid because the Alpha kids don't have a Time player to correct things the normal way.
"Maid of Life and Death" is kind of a horror story, I guess, but no more so than the original fic. And the horror comes from a different angle: character death and the creeping knowledge that the world has gone subtly askew, rather than looped memories and Lovecraftian monsters. There's a lot of isolation in both stories, though. That's a running theme.
I did end up using a lightly stylized narrative voice -- it's nothing blatant, but I paid more attention to the rhythm of words and phrases than I often do, and consciously left out conjunctions in strategic places. A little bit of that was an attempt to better blend my voice with lantadyme's, since I copypasted her closing paragraphs as my opening paragraphs (it seemed less awkward than trying to paraphrase them while keeping the words and actions exactly the same), but some of it was simply a vague attempt at atmospheric writing. Playing, in other words. :-)
Anyway, I finished the rough draft just under the deadline, despite a maddening struggle to convince AO3 that I was trying to create a new work skin rather than a site skin (and for the sake of one line of horrorterror dialogue, ye gods)... after which I suddenly realized that I was missing an entire scene -- the one with Jane and Dirk on LOPAN -- which I needed to write and insert to smooth the time jump, give them some interaction, and make explicit that the Alpha kids were caught in a doomed timeline. So I did.
The other scene that gave me problems was the entry scene with Jane on Derse. The first version was entirely in pesterlog form and opened with Jane safely hiding in Dirk's dream bedroom. Chat logs weren't necessarily a mistake (you will note that the revised version of the scene includes two short ones), but the second point was a killer. The lack of immediate threat meant the conversation rambled on and on and on, and no matter what I did, I couldn't get the mood and tone to gel with the rest of the story. The sense of pressure flat out wasn't there. So eventually I just ripped that version out and did my damndest to kill Jane with earthquakes, falling rocks, and super deadly red shit, which worked much better. (Sorry, Jane!)
Then I jammed a title and summary onto the fic (I had been using lantadyme's title and summary as placeholders) and hoped for the best. :-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-30 02:24 pm (UTC)I am so happy to see you enjoying yourself, and this fandom.
Homestuck really seems to have you engaged and enthusiastic!
C
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-30 08:46 pm (UTC)