edenfalling: headshot of a raccoon, looking left (raccoon)
[personal profile] edenfalling
Today is NFE reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: one assignment, one pinch hit, and one tiny Madness ficlet. I will talk about each in a separate post.

The Mystery of Mount Pire: Aravis joins Lucy and Susan on a winter exploration of Archenland. (2,600 words, written for [archiveofourown.org profile] Heliopause)

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Then I wrote a pinch hit!

I jumped on this one because I desperately wanted to write Susan and Lucy having an adventure. It is an idea which is near and dear to my heart, but which I had only treated glancingly in the past. Alas, events conspired against me -- the day after I claimed the pinch hit I was laid low by a nasty cold, slept thirteen hours a day until the weekend and was afflicted by sludge-brain while awake, and thus had only Saturday afternoon and evening to write -- and so I have still only treated the idea in a glancing fashion... but dammit, before this year is over I am going to pick up the loose threads I laid out and do something with them. Or else!

To partially make up for ending before the actual adventure part of this adventure tale, I threw in a nod to one of Heliopause's other prompts, about characters who are only mentioned in passing in canon, such as the Lady Liln. I have long been of the opinion that a giant turning into a mountain makes no logistical sense whatsoever, and also that Olvin 'winning' Liln as a prize for killing Pire is a horrible and sexist trope, so I gave Liln a bit of actual background as a half-dryad Narnian judge and am going to give Olvin and Pire similar treatment once I get my explorers up on top of that mysterious frozen waterfall.

The theme of Aravis adjusting to life in Archenland was not a conscious choice on my part; it happened organically as I wrote. But I am glad that it gave the fic a coherent character arc to make up for the way I chopped the plot arc off just as it was getting started.

I did not try very hard to be anonymous in this story, given that I reused both the idea of Susan and Lucy being trouble magnets when they're together anywhere but Cair Paravel (that is from Interesting Times), and the character of Catchlight the Raven (who appears in an unfinished fragment about Cor and Aravis going to Narnia for the Summer Festival). I did make a token stab toward passing those off as a reference to 'someone else's work' by making a genuine (and heartfelt) tip of the hat toward [personal profile] rthstewart's work in Susan's line about Llamas not being the most reliable storytellers, and Otters and Hummingbirds not using very polite language, but by that point in the writing process I was more concerned with getting the thing done than anything else.

(I ran too close to the deadline to get this beta-read. Again. One of these years I really must learn better time management skills.)
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edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer

May 2025

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