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edenfallingRemix reveal day!
Here is my story: Seasons of Cloud and Shadow (Like the Deserts Miss the Rain) [Cross-posted here on ff.net]
[A fragmentary draft that went nowhere -- Seasons of Cloud and Shadow (In a Dry and Thirsty Land) -- is also available for comparison purposes.]
Summary: Many waters cannot quench love; neither can the floods drown it. Love is as strong as death. Shikamaru/Temari, PG-13, light lime, death.
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I remixed Seasons of Cloud and Shadow, by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
everysecondtues, also known as manicjoy. Her story is beautiful, and also linear and single-POV, whereas mine kind of jumps around in time, switches POV and tense from section to section, and is weirdly thematic rather than a straight-up narrative.
I found remixing interesting, for the same reason I found it interesting in 2006 -- I was assigned a person whose fic-writing tastes don't really overlap mine at all. This is not to say that I dislike any ofeverysecondtues's stories -- they're well written, and the crackfic is a lot of fun -- just that I'm not particularly interested in the characters, pairings, and situations that seem to interest her... at least not enough to write about them.
I kind of latched onto Seasons of Cloud and Shadow with both hands and said "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" because it hit me like a punch to the gut and the imagery is so beautiful, and I actually have thoughts about Temari as a character, and the second I read the story I wanted to pull it apart and see if I could put the pieces back together into something that would do it justice.
(In retrospect, I think I could also have worked quite happily with one of her short Hikaru no Go fics -- Like Sharpened Feathers, It Falls -- but while I've read some of the manga, and a fair amount of fic, I didn't trust my grasp of canon for that series. And it probably would have been an interesting challenge to rewrite a fic more out of my comfort range -- say, Gai/Kakashi, which is a pairing whose attraction I have never understood -- but I am lazy and went for the path of least resistance.)
As soon as I finished the rough draft of my remix, I looked at it and thought that I'd essentially smashed together two of my previous stories -- Drought, for the Temari characterization, and Samsara, for the non-linear portrayal of a doomed relationship (the second is a Saiyuki fic) -- and I winced a bit. So I went back, pulled it apart a little more... and what I ended up doing was weaving in a lot of stuff about storytelling and the nature of truth, which is one of my little obsessions that creeps into a lot of my work. There are reasons I like fairy-tales a lot, and why they echo through my stories.
Also, I put in Biblical quotations. The Ecclesiastes quote I used at the end sort of jumped into my mind and screamed "Use me, you idiot!" After that, I spent a couple hours combing through the internet and my Bible (yes, I own a Bible, and have read at least two thirds of it, which seems, oddly enough, to be more than many self-professed Christians have done) in search of similar water-related Biblical verses, thinking that I might use one to head each section, but that didn't pan out. They didn't feel thematically differentiated enough, mostly, and I grew uncomfortable with the religious overtones that would have produced.
Instead, I used a couple lines from Song of Songs as the summary -- which actually works really well, I think! -- and put the Ecclesiastes verses at the end, to sort of sum up the idea of Shikamaru and Temari as one iteration of a greater story that's always playing out around us, until the end of the universe. Or something like that. It felt right, but I'm never completely sure what my motives are for most of my writing -- I can give you an educated guess, but it's hard to see your own subconscious mind with complete clarity. :-)
Here is my story: Seasons of Cloud and Shadow (Like the Deserts Miss the Rain) [Cross-posted here on ff.net]
[A fragmentary draft that went nowhere -- Seasons of Cloud and Shadow (In a Dry and Thirsty Land) -- is also available for comparison purposes.]
Summary: Many waters cannot quench love; neither can the floods drown it. Love is as strong as death. Shikamaru/Temari, PG-13, light lime, death.
---------------
I remixed Seasons of Cloud and Shadow, by
everysecondtues, also known as manicjoy. Her story is beautiful, and also linear and single-POV, whereas mine kind of jumps around in time, switches POV and tense from section to section, and is weirdly thematic rather than a straight-up narrative.I found remixing interesting, for the same reason I found it interesting in 2006 -- I was assigned a person whose fic-writing tastes don't really overlap mine at all. This is not to say that I dislike any of
everysecondtues's stories -- they're well written, and the crackfic is a lot of fun -- just that I'm not particularly interested in the characters, pairings, and situations that seem to interest her... at least not enough to write about them.I kind of latched onto Seasons of Cloud and Shadow with both hands and said "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" because it hit me like a punch to the gut and the imagery is so beautiful, and I actually have thoughts about Temari as a character, and the second I read the story I wanted to pull it apart and see if I could put the pieces back together into something that would do it justice.
(In retrospect, I think I could also have worked quite happily with one of her short Hikaru no Go fics -- Like Sharpened Feathers, It Falls -- but while I've read some of the manga, and a fair amount of fic, I didn't trust my grasp of canon for that series. And it probably would have been an interesting challenge to rewrite a fic more out of my comfort range -- say, Gai/Kakashi, which is a pairing whose attraction I have never understood -- but I am lazy and went for the path of least resistance.)
As soon as I finished the rough draft of my remix, I looked at it and thought that I'd essentially smashed together two of my previous stories -- Drought, for the Temari characterization, and Samsara, for the non-linear portrayal of a doomed relationship (the second is a Saiyuki fic) -- and I winced a bit. So I went back, pulled it apart a little more... and what I ended up doing was weaving in a lot of stuff about storytelling and the nature of truth, which is one of my little obsessions that creeps into a lot of my work. There are reasons I like fairy-tales a lot, and why they echo through my stories.
Also, I put in Biblical quotations. The Ecclesiastes quote I used at the end sort of jumped into my mind and screamed "Use me, you idiot!" After that, I spent a couple hours combing through the internet and my Bible (yes, I own a Bible, and have read at least two thirds of it, which seems, oddly enough, to be more than many self-professed Christians have done) in search of similar water-related Biblical verses, thinking that I might use one to head each section, but that didn't pan out. They didn't feel thematically differentiated enough, mostly, and I grew uncomfortable with the religious overtones that would have produced.
Instead, I used a couple lines from Song of Songs as the summary -- which actually works really well, I think! -- and put the Ecclesiastes verses at the end, to sort of sum up the idea of Shikamaru and Temari as one iteration of a greater story that's always playing out around us, until the end of the universe. Or something like that. It felt right, but I'm never completely sure what my motives are for most of my writing -- I can give you an educated guess, but it's hard to see your own subconscious mind with complete clarity. :-)
