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edenfallingToday is NFE reveal day! I wrote two fics this year: one assignment and one pinch hit. I will talk about each in a separate post.
The Vastness of the Sky: Digory Kirke invites Polly Plummer to watch the 1912 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race with him, intending merely to catch up with his oldest friend. But lives once touched by magic never return altogether to normal, and when both crews sink in adverse weather, Digory and Polly stumble into a strange new world in search of a missing rower. (8,250 words, written for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
FiKate)
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This was my assignment! It is also absolutely not the story I intended to write, as is sadly standard for me with exchanges.
FiKate made two prompts: one about Cor, Corin, and Aravis figuring out their new roles in Archenland, possibly with Lune and/or Edmund as secondary characters, and one extremely open-ended request for a story about Digory. As I mentioned previously, I have already written that first fic. There's These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, dealing with Aravis and Cor settling into Anvard; there's Any Sentry from His Post, wherein Cor talks to Edmund about what it means to be a king and how to cope with unexpected life changes; and there's The Courting Dance (still sadly unfinished), which can be summarized as "Aravis and Cor have a little argument with Archenland over their Calormene backgrounds and their right to get married." So it seemed redundant to write a fourth variation on that theme... but I have never been very interested in the England side of the canon, nor did Digory especially grab me as a protagonist. I figured I'd stick with what I knew I could pull off, and started working on a story where Lune decides to send his sons and Aravis to Narnia to attend the Summer Festival* that Tumnus mentions to Shasta in Tashbaan.
That fic proved harder to write than I expected. Luckily, while I was failing to make progress, I went wiki-walking for unrelated reasons, landed on an article about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, and thought to myself, "What if Digory attended one of those and there was some business with a magic portal?" I decided that that would require too much research, and also didn't have a proper plot, but as the deadline drew close and the other story utterly failed to catch fire, I gave in, did a bunch of hasty googling, tossed Polly into the mix because I think both she and Digory work best with each other to play off of, and basically winged it at great speed and to the tune of about 6,500 words.
The floating islands in the unnamed world beyond the portal are a little bit inspired by Cloud City on Bespin (from The Empire Strikes Back) -- that influence shows largely in the way the atmosphere thickens at lower depths so there is no visible planetary surface -- but more so by the floating islands of Arianus from Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle. (And now you know one thing I was really into when I was, hmm, eleven to twelve? *wry* I got into them by way of my friend Cat's obsession with Dragonlance, and stayed up to 3am to finish the later books as they were published.) I think floating islands are inherently cool, so when I needed a quick way to distinguish a new world (and also keep Digory and Polly from wandering away from the portal), I threw that in and then had great fun elaborating on the concept.
The story never stops to explain what keeps the islands or the skyships aloft, but Polly is right to sum it up as "magic." Basically there is a certain type of stone that holds that levitational power, and little chunks of it are embedded in the framework of each skyship. That's about the only mining anyone does, though, because when your solid ground is so fragile, you can't afford to chew up vast swathes of it in search of smeltable minerals.
Anyway, The Vastness of the Sky was greatly improved by my three betas:heliopausa, ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
hypotheticalanomaly, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sablin27. In particular, Sablin and hypotheticalanomaly pushed me to think more about the implications of my world-building, and heliopause helped me identify what I was doing wrong in my portrayal of Digory and Polly. The story is much better (and about 2,000 words longer) for their help. :)
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*Side note: Lewis never specifies one way or the other, but in my world, Calormen holds four great seasonal festivals on the solstices and equinoxes. Narnia and Archenland, in contrast, hold their seasonal festivals halfway between each solar landmark, more like the Celtic cycle of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, and Samhain. That assumption places the bulk of HHB somewhere in July, between the Calormene and Narnian summer festivals -- which aligns nicely with the Narnians' comments about the weather heating up in Tashbaan.
The Vastness of the Sky: Digory Kirke invites Polly Plummer to watch the 1912 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race with him, intending merely to catch up with his oldest friend. But lives once touched by magic never return altogether to normal, and when both crews sink in adverse weather, Digory and Polly stumble into a strange new world in search of a missing rower. (8,250 words, written for
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This was my assignment! It is also absolutely not the story I intended to write, as is sadly standard for me with exchanges.
FiKate made two prompts: one about Cor, Corin, and Aravis figuring out their new roles in Archenland, possibly with Lune and/or Edmund as secondary characters, and one extremely open-ended request for a story about Digory. As I mentioned previously, I have already written that first fic. There's These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, dealing with Aravis and Cor settling into Anvard; there's Any Sentry from His Post, wherein Cor talks to Edmund about what it means to be a king and how to cope with unexpected life changes; and there's The Courting Dance (still sadly unfinished), which can be summarized as "Aravis and Cor have a little argument with Archenland over their Calormene backgrounds and their right to get married." So it seemed redundant to write a fourth variation on that theme... but I have never been very interested in the England side of the canon, nor did Digory especially grab me as a protagonist. I figured I'd stick with what I knew I could pull off, and started working on a story where Lune decides to send his sons and Aravis to Narnia to attend the Summer Festival* that Tumnus mentions to Shasta in Tashbaan.
That fic proved harder to write than I expected. Luckily, while I was failing to make progress, I went wiki-walking for unrelated reasons, landed on an article about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, and thought to myself, "What if Digory attended one of those and there was some business with a magic portal?" I decided that that would require too much research, and also didn't have a proper plot, but as the deadline drew close and the other story utterly failed to catch fire, I gave in, did a bunch of hasty googling, tossed Polly into the mix because I think both she and Digory work best with each other to play off of, and basically winged it at great speed and to the tune of about 6,500 words.
The floating islands in the unnamed world beyond the portal are a little bit inspired by Cloud City on Bespin (from The Empire Strikes Back) -- that influence shows largely in the way the atmosphere thickens at lower depths so there is no visible planetary surface -- but more so by the floating islands of Arianus from Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle. (And now you know one thing I was really into when I was, hmm, eleven to twelve? *wry* I got into them by way of my friend Cat's obsession with Dragonlance, and stayed up to 3am to finish the later books as they were published.) I think floating islands are inherently cool, so when I needed a quick way to distinguish a new world (and also keep Digory and Polly from wandering away from the portal), I threw that in and then had great fun elaborating on the concept.
The story never stops to explain what keeps the islands or the skyships aloft, but Polly is right to sum it up as "magic." Basically there is a certain type of stone that holds that levitational power, and little chunks of it are embedded in the framework of each skyship. That's about the only mining anyone does, though, because when your solid ground is so fragile, you can't afford to chew up vast swathes of it in search of smeltable minerals.
Anyway, The Vastness of the Sky was greatly improved by my three betas:
heliopausa, sablin27. In particular, Sablin and hypotheticalanomaly pushed me to think more about the implications of my world-building, and heliopause helped me identify what I was doing wrong in my portrayal of Digory and Polly. The story is much better (and about 2,000 words longer) for their help. :)-----
*Side note: Lewis never specifies one way or the other, but in my world, Calormen holds four great seasonal festivals on the solstices and equinoxes. Narnia and Archenland, in contrast, hold their seasonal festivals halfway between each solar landmark, more like the Celtic cycle of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, and Samhain. That assumption places the bulk of HHB somewhere in July, between the Calormene and Narnian summer festivals -- which aligns nicely with the Narnians' comments about the weather heating up in Tashbaan.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-17 02:24 am (UTC)Finding out that Digs and Polly went to Oxbridge but at rival schools was pretty funny, but I think it suits their somewhat competitive nature pretty well. I thought you did a good job writing these two (I think they would hard to write) and I like how they stumbled into another adventure in the middle of the boat race.
When I first saw mention of the floating island, I was thinking this would be a steampunk story. I enjoy seeing the islands, the sky ships and how awesome that the captain is not only a woman but she and the priestess' daughter are the ones who actually came up with the escape plan from the pirates.
And Christopher seems to have managed to survive remarkably well in the two years the was in this strange land, and spent his time wisely learning the language and culture. I do wonder if he kept his promise to the Captain after he returned to England. At least he can talk to Polly and Digory about his adventures and knowing there other people who have traveled to other worlds like he did.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-18 05:20 am (UTC)The annoying thing about the Oxbridge setup is that I couldn't get Polly an official degree. She's just barely too young to miss the temporary loophole where women who studied at Cambridge could then travel to Trinity in Dublin and get a "you studied elsewhere but we will now give you our own certificate because parochialism!" type of degree, and neither Oxford nor Cambridge started giving women actual degrees until, IIRC, after WWI. But I wanted Digory at Oxford because that was Lewis's university, and I figured if I couldn't get Polly an Oxbridge degree, it would at least be amusing to give her and Digory a school rivalry. And it did create an obvious source of dialogue before they found the portal.
The thing about Christopher Tannen is that he could so easily have fallen into the old White Man's Burden trope, particularly considering the time-and-place he calls home. So I worked deliberately to avoid that, by making sure Captain Tsindi and Lady Oboja were the ones primarily responsible for their own rescue. I also wanted to make clear that he's not a leader on Ngirupinda, just a personal friend of Lady Oboja and someone who happens to have a useful skill because of his medical studies. I suspect he did keep his promise as best he could -- Digory may have introduced him to a linguist or two, to help him record Andjangibu before he forgot it through lack of a conversational partner. And I'm sure it helped to know he wasn't the only person who'd stepped out of the everyday world for a while.