[Meme] fic snippet DVD commentary

[edenfalling]

Gacked from, oh, everybody and their dog, it feels like:

Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.


Every piece of fiction I have ever posted online can be found via my master fiction directory post. (You can ask me about original fiction as well, though I warn you that such questions might result in unexpected world-building infodumps. *grin*)

Comments

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

Before anyone could warn him, he reached down to tickle it -- so! -- and the frog exploded. This is because it was a Tri-Colored-Kamikaze-Tree-Frog, and they protect their families by making anything that eats them very unhappy.

...because 'SPLODEY. ^_^

[edenfalling]

Well, I needed to get exploding frogs into the story somehow, and it's not a huge leap from 'Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake' to 'Tri-Colored-Kamikaze-Tree-Frog.' Then I started wondering what evolutionary purpose exploding would serve for a frog, and group predator deterence came to mind. It's like poisonous monarch butterflies; a bird eats one, gets sick, and then leaves all the other butterflies alone. Only we are dealing with humorously exaggerated fiction -- and ninjas -- so in this case sometimes the bird dies. *grin* Of course, this being a children's story (well, nominally), I couldn't say "and they protect their families by blowing the throats and torsos of their predators into bloody shreds." One must observe some standards of taste and discretion, after all. *wider grin*

I also like the "reached down to tickle it -- so!" part, because that's a narrated stage direction for a person reading the story aloud to a child. There are several points like that in the Just So Stories, and I have always greatly admired Kipling's skill at writing tales that read well both on the page and aloud. It is a much harder trick than many people think.

[edenfalling]

Incidentally, your story is now 4,475 words. I'm in the process of ripping up the opening and redoing it to include three extra characters, some ideas from my 'cry for help' post, and a few random universe background details I learned from Memory Alpha.

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

*blinks*

*pulls out his own NaNo project*

*does a -global- word count*

*blinks again, having expected maybe 3500 rather than 4751*

*gets back on topic*

Oooh. I'll look forward to it. ^_^