![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingToday is also NFE Madness day! I wrote three extra gifts this year, and will talk about each in a separate post.
How the Skeleton Aches: Two days after Polly returned from Germany, she appeared at Digory's doorstep with no prior warning. (1,100 words, written for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
rthstewart, Heliopause, FiKate, redsnake05, and Moriwen)
-----
All five of the people listed above requested stories about what Digory and/or Polly did after MN. So I wrote one. It is, as I said in the accompanying note, darker and less fantastical than I think most people were looking for, but it examines an era of history they had to live through and deal with before LWW.
The plot, insofar as it exists, is an outgrowth of my decision to make Polly a journalist in The Vastness of the Sky. It's also heavily inspired by In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larson. The title is actually a chapter heading from that book.
And the historical notes: Geoffrey Dawson was editor of The Times from 1923 to 1941; he was a supporter of appeasement policies and refused to publish anything about German anti-Semitism during the pre-war years. Humphrey S. Milford was publisher to the University of Oxford and head to the OUP's London operations from 1913 to 1945. As of 1933, Sigrid Schultz was the Chicago Tribune's correspondent in chief for Central Europe, based out of Berlin. Ernst Röhm, the co-founder and head of the Nazi SA, was killed as part of a 1934 purge that ran from June 30th to July 2nd. This story is set shortly thereafter.
How the Skeleton Aches: Two days after Polly returned from Germany, she appeared at Digory's doorstep with no prior warning. (1,100 words, written for
-----
All five of the people listed above requested stories about what Digory and/or Polly did after MN. So I wrote one. It is, as I said in the accompanying note, darker and less fantastical than I think most people were looking for, but it examines an era of history they had to live through and deal with before LWW.
The plot, insofar as it exists, is an outgrowth of my decision to make Polly a journalist in The Vastness of the Sky. It's also heavily inspired by In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larson. The title is actually a chapter heading from that book.
And the historical notes: Geoffrey Dawson was editor of The Times from 1923 to 1941; he was a supporter of appeasement policies and refused to publish anything about German anti-Semitism during the pre-war years. Humphrey S. Milford was publisher to the University of Oxford and head to the OUP's London operations from 1913 to 1945. As of 1933, Sigrid Schultz was the Chicago Tribune's correspondent in chief for Central Europe, based out of Berlin. Ernst Röhm, the co-founder and head of the Nazi SA, was killed as part of a 1934 purge that ran from June 30th to July 2nd. This story is set shortly thereafter.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-07 01:59 pm (UTC)I'm not sure if I said this in my AO3 response to the story, but I much appreciated the historical notes, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-07 05:41 pm (UTC)It's fairly superficial history, and I glossed several things -- I couldn't find the editorial policies of the other British broadsheets toward 1930s Germany (toward the Spanish Civil War, sure! but not toward Hitler pre-1939), and I have no idea what the employment terms of American foreign correspondents were (particularly with regard to reprint rights and possible Associated Press complications) -- but I did want to provide a veneer of verisimilitude. Actually, what surprised me most was how old the term "tabloid" for condensed, schlocky/sensational newspapers is -- it's been in use since at least WWI, and the phrase "tabloid journalism" dates all the way back to 1901!
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-08 02:38 am (UTC)I get a kick out of how long-standing modern-sounding phrases are, too! :) I'm reading Bleak House in bits and pieces at the moment, and was surprised at the Inspector/detective saying about a suspect's bad acting that she "overdid it".