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edenfallingRemix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: A History of Handcrafts (Because a Sweater Equals Love) and In Foreign Tongues (Been All Over You) for ![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
melayneseahawk, and Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here) for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sour_idealist.
I am going to talk about each in a separate post.
---------------
Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here): 5,300 words, May 2011. In the months after the inception job, Ariadne slips from one life to another.
Remixed from With Thanks to Apollo, a fic by Sour_Idealist.
At some point in mid-to-late March, I fell into Inception fandom. Then I bought and watched a copy of the movie. (Yes, I do these things backwards. Don't argue with me about it. You will get nowhere.) And I read even more fic.
On... hang on, let me go find the date on my review... March 27th, I readsour_idealist's wonderful story With Thanks to Apollo. When Remix Madness was announced, I signed up even though I was visiting family for the weekend (because hey, why not?), and noticed that sour_idealist had also signed up. And I remembered that I'd loved her fic and her take on Ariadne's family, and I thought, "Why not?"
This is the sum total of my background work for the story, scribbled on a piece of notepaper at work Sunday evening: Story as a series of photographs -- one incident for each snapshot -- and Ariadne wondering what her sister would think of her new life. Then finish with a photo of her family? Then I went home and wrote the story. It got away from me a bit. *wry*
The section titles are either taken directly fromsour_idealist's story or were things I made up to label photos she'd mentioned or implied... except for the last two, which are entirely my own invention. The dates of the photos involving Ariadne's grad school friends are May 18th and June 6th, if you are curious; I decided that the inception job ran from March to early May, and this story runs from May to late November.
Other stuff:
1. The only actual research I did was a quick Google search on Paris's international airports, which gave me the common name "Roissy" for the Charles de Gaulle airport and told me that American Airlines flies into and out of Terminal 2.
2. The bit about Ariadne getting stranded on the side of a road when she forgets that her new car takes diesel instead of gas is directly modeled on my family's hilarious-in-retrospect misadventure in Spain this past Christmas.
3. I wanted to look up an actual Bollywood movie for Yusuf to mention when talking about soundtracks and films, but A) I had no time, and B) I didn't have a clue where to start. So I fudged. Alas.
4. Hydraulic fracturing (also known as hydrofracking, or just fracking) is a very real process and is the subject of a lot of debate in western New York and northern Pennsylvania, which sit over a geological formation called the Marcellus Shale. Extracting the gas in the shale would create a lot of jobs and reduce American dependence on foreign fuel, but hydrofracking could also all too easily wreak utter havoc on the local environment and on the water supplies for millions of people from the Finger Lakes to New York City. It's a big issue where I live.
5. OmniTel and its concern about European Union bandwidth regulations, on the other hand, have no basis whatsoever in reality, though I suspect I picked up the word "Eurocrats" from years of reading The Economist. Eames's gibe about committees being the only form of life with multiple appendages and no brain is a loose paraphrase of a real insult I heard somewhere ages ago and have forgotten the exact wording of.
6. Ariadne's eye shadow and bracelets are fromsour_idealist's story. The reasons behind them are my own invention.
7. I completely lost track of Ariadne's totem after the first section, which annoys me. Properly she ought to check it when she goes to visit her family, given that she started checking it to deal with feelings of displacement. That kind of slip is what hasty writing leads to. :-(
8. I think I ended up with a bit of unintentional Arthur/Ariadne subtext -- they're the two characters who interact most, he seems to keep checking up on her, and she pays a slightly suspicious amount of attention to his dimples and forearms -- but mostly the story is about friendship and family, which is what I meant it to be.
For something written in about six hours, I think it works pretty well. :-)
sour_idealist.I am going to talk about each in a separate post.
---------------
Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here): 5,300 words, May 2011. In the months after the inception job, Ariadne slips from one life to another.
Remixed from With Thanks to Apollo, a fic by Sour_Idealist.
At some point in mid-to-late March, I fell into Inception fandom. Then I bought and watched a copy of the movie. (Yes, I do these things backwards. Don't argue with me about it. You will get nowhere.) And I read even more fic.
On... hang on, let me go find the date on my review... March 27th, I read
sour_idealist's wonderful story With Thanks to Apollo. When Remix Madness was announced, I signed up even though I was visiting family for the weekend (because hey, why not?), and noticed that sour_idealist had also signed up. And I remembered that I'd loved her fic and her take on Ariadne's family, and I thought, "Why not?"This is the sum total of my background work for the story, scribbled on a piece of notepaper at work Sunday evening: Story as a series of photographs -- one incident for each snapshot -- and Ariadne wondering what her sister would think of her new life. Then finish with a photo of her family? Then I went home and wrote the story. It got away from me a bit. *wry*
The section titles are either taken directly from
sour_idealist's story or were things I made up to label photos she'd mentioned or implied... except for the last two, which are entirely my own invention. The dates of the photos involving Ariadne's grad school friends are May 18th and June 6th, if you are curious; I decided that the inception job ran from March to early May, and this story runs from May to late November.Other stuff:
1. The only actual research I did was a quick Google search on Paris's international airports, which gave me the common name "Roissy" for the Charles de Gaulle airport and told me that American Airlines flies into and out of Terminal 2.
2. The bit about Ariadne getting stranded on the side of a road when she forgets that her new car takes diesel instead of gas is directly modeled on my family's hilarious-in-retrospect misadventure in Spain this past Christmas.
3. I wanted to look up an actual Bollywood movie for Yusuf to mention when talking about soundtracks and films, but A) I had no time, and B) I didn't have a clue where to start. So I fudged. Alas.
4. Hydraulic fracturing (also known as hydrofracking, or just fracking) is a very real process and is the subject of a lot of debate in western New York and northern Pennsylvania, which sit over a geological formation called the Marcellus Shale. Extracting the gas in the shale would create a lot of jobs and reduce American dependence on foreign fuel, but hydrofracking could also all too easily wreak utter havoc on the local environment and on the water supplies for millions of people from the Finger Lakes to New York City. It's a big issue where I live.
5. OmniTel and its concern about European Union bandwidth regulations, on the other hand, have no basis whatsoever in reality, though I suspect I picked up the word "Eurocrats" from years of reading The Economist. Eames's gibe about committees being the only form of life with multiple appendages and no brain is a loose paraphrase of a real insult I heard somewhere ages ago and have forgotten the exact wording of.
6. Ariadne's eye shadow and bracelets are from
sour_idealist's story. The reasons behind them are my own invention.7. I completely lost track of Ariadne's totem after the first section, which annoys me. Properly she ought to check it when she goes to visit her family, given that she started checking it to deal with feelings of displacement. That kind of slip is what hasty writing leads to. :-(
8. I think I ended up with a bit of unintentional Arthur/Ariadne subtext -- they're the two characters who interact most, he seems to keep checking up on her, and she pays a slightly suspicious amount of attention to his dimples and forearms -- but mostly the story is about friendship and family, which is what I meant it to be.
For something written in about six hours, I think it works pretty well. :-)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-09 04:15 am (UTC)Interestingly, I come from an area where the top three or four state industries are fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal with wind and water power started to be developed more..). Shale oil is a big topic, though I think the technology for that is further out in the future. I wonder how similar the two are?...Science was never my big point.... Anyway, rambling on to say, love the detail and how you worked to make it factual/accurate.
Since this remix was based off of such a short little note to yourself, do you normal do more pre-writing things, or is that the normal process for planning out stories for you?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-09 04:50 am (UTC)I think I ended up using hydrofracking because it was already near the top of my mind, because it was energy-related (and thus of interest to Saito), and because I didn't have time to think of a more glamorous job.
For a story this length, I would normally do more planning -- I would have made a list of character arc incidents or photographs to use, for example -- but since I had
1. There's a lot of pictures of Nina and Marie and Danielle [...] Ariadne's in a lot of the pictures too, and they're pretty much what they were the last time Cassandra did this, various combinations of the four of them with their arms around each other, pulling silly faces and toasting the camera, all titled with places and dates.
2. One prim-looking man in a nice vest is bent over a table, apparently arguing with a laughing guy in a hideous mustard shirt, while a curly-haired guy in glasses watches with a grin over the top of a newspaper. All of them look like they're at least thirty, and the room doesn't look anything like the pictures of the college that Ariadne sent home.
3,4,5. It's Mustard, not actually wearing the color but definitely recognizable; he's standing in front of a chalkboard, glancing over his shoulder in surprise. Probably Ariadne pulling a candid camera moment; she does that. The next picture is Prim, leaning back in a chair and trying to look disapproving; then it's Curly presenting the camera with a giant grin and a thumbs-up.
6. There's a couple more pictures of the girls after that
7. Ariadne and Prim standing arm in arm in front of an unfamiliar storefront, labeled finallyshegetshimtopose.jpg
8. Curly bent over some kind of lab equipment with a 'Kick Me' sign on his back (victoryatlast.jpg)
9. Prim and an Asian man who looks to be almost fifty, both bent over a game of chess (epicbattlecommences.jpg)
10. Prim and Mustard asleep in the back of a car, Prim's head on Mustard's shoulder (BLACKMAIL.jpg)
11. Mustard and Curly at an unfamiliar beach throwing water at each other (yeswereinthirdgrade.jpg).
12. Ariadne is wearing eye makeup, which is new, as are the neckerchiefs (which she's mentioned) and the treasure-trove of bracelets jangling on her right wrist. Cassandra wonders vaguely where she picked those up, whether they were a present from someone or a discovery in some dusty thrift shop or something else altogether. [[My theory here is that she wears the bracelets to cover the needle marks of long term PASIV use.]]
13. Returning to Paris?
And then I wrote what happened around each photograph. Some sections ended up being directly about the pictures, while others are more about points in Ariadne's character arc with the pictures basically serving as a continuity marker.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-09 07:30 pm (UTC)It's always a strange sensation when you realize what was home no longer is; it kinda feels like a dream, only it doesn't ever end. @_@
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-10 04:15 am (UTC)It's a very weird feeling, indeed.