[Fic] "Turn the Page (Don't Fear the Ending)" -- Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Remix reveal day! I wrote Turn the Page (Don't Fear the Ending) for gramarye.

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Turn the Page (Don't Fear the Ending): Sometimes, when a storyteller tries to wring every last drop of Stories out of themself before ever coming to an ending, the storyteller is not the only one squeezed dry. (1,500 words, remixed from The Monster at the End of This Book, by Gramarye)

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So, funny story: in 2015, I adjusted my "willing to write" choices near the end of the Remix Redux signup period so as to match fandoms that currently had no offers. And because of that, I got matched to Gramarye. I did the same thing this time, for the same fandom (Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence), and had a feeling this might end up generating the same match.

I was right. *wry*

I wanted to try doing something different this time, though, so while I dug up the couple drabbles I'd marked as potential remixes (but not wound up using) the last time around, I also poked through the rest of Gramarye's archive to see if we had any other fandoms in common. The answer, mostly, is no... except for a couple one-offs. And one of those was "The Monster at the End of This Book," a gorgeous Yuletide fic for Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

My remix does not have anything to do with Gramarye's story on a plot level. Instead, what I ended up doing was taking a couple of key lines and writing something completely different based around those themes: the power of storytelling, the importance of endings, and how those are both vital and dangerous channels of power and control.

I also continued what has become a bit of an accidental pattern that might be described as "taking your story and making it about women," which I swear to god is not intended in any way as criticism of the stories I keep doing it to. I just have some issues that keep expressing themselves through this particular outlet. *hands* And also Rushdie's treatment of Soraya Khalifa has always annoyed me -- it is a slightly flat/sour note in an otherwise wonderful gem of a book -- so I wanted to give her control of her own story and see what happened.

Random trivia note: I gave Soraya the maiden name of Khan both because it's a Muslim-associated name rather than a Hindu one (to go with the Khalifas' general theme), and because khans arguably outrank caliphs, or at the very least are temporally equal. So that is symbolically important and was absolutely on purpose. :)

[Fic] "An Outstretched Hand" -- Chronicles of Narnia

Today is NFE reveal day! I wrote An Outstretched Hand for redsnake05.

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An Outstretched Hand: The giants came in the summer of the seventh year, in the long golden days between planting and harvest, when the people of Narnia worked to lay the bones of their new land: roads and wells, fords and harbors, and towers along the borders for they knew that an Evil walked abroad and their protection would not last forever. (1,825 words)

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redsnake05 asked for a story about Frank, Helen, and/or Fledge, either in England or in the early years of Narnia, and for once I managed to fill a prompt pretty much exactly as intended. *wry*

You can tell this is my work because it's mostly about worldbuilding, and also all the OCs are female. It also fits neatly into my established timeline about Jadis's actions between MN and LWW, wherein she starts by going north and messing about with various tribes/clans of giants she finds there.

Joyous Gard is a bit of headcanon that I don't think ever made it into any of my stories before. To summarize, I am a little ambivalent about Cair Paravel. See, I sort of loosely headcanon Narnia as being a semi-sentient extension of the Deep Magic, and the four thrones at Cair Paravel are a manifestation of that magic. I am less sure if the castle itself is entirely a magical creation, though I am sure parts of it were not built entirely naturally. (I have a partially-written story exploring some of that, which has stalled out mostly because I need to solidify the worldbuilding before I can write the actual people-doing-stuff elements.) Anyway, whatever Cair Paravel's exact origins, I figure Frank and Helen's castle was somewhere else, probably inland, closer to the geographic center of Narnia. And I further figure they named it after a famous magical castle from England, because why not.

Also Joyous Gard is just a really great name and I steal really great names when I can. :)

Anyway, I wanted this story to be a little longer, and maybe get into some of the actual negotiations for the giants' settlement in Narnia, and a discussion of Helen and Frank's desire for children, and some more of Frank and Helen's personal history with England's wars and colonial empire and stuff, but, you know, depression. *sigh* So it's shorter and brighter than it might otherwise have been, but I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing or just a difference between intention and result. There is, after all, just as much need for hope and light as for explorations of shadow.

And nothing says I can't write more about this area some other day...