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edenfallingToday is NFE reveal day! I wrote two stories this year: my assignment and one tiny Madness ficlet. I will talk about each in a separate post.
A High and Lonely Destiny: All the stories Jadis knows begin with Lilith. Dark. (3,375 words, written for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Komadori)
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This was my assignment!
As I said in my post when the collections opened, I didn't even try for anonymity this year. I had sort of wanted to write a Lucy/Sea Girl story (which is a concept I clearly like or I wouldn't keep asking people to write it for me!) but that required a lot more creativity than I could dredge up over the past few months, so I went with something that I already had mostly laid out... which is also not what I ended up writing. (The story of my creative life could probably be summarized as follows: 'That was not what I meant to write, but I think it came out okay despite that.')
See, back in 2009 I was going to write a story interspersing scenes from Jadis's childhood with the last days of Charn -- specifically the three days of battle when the river ran red, before Jadis and her sister had their last face-to-face meeting -- for Femgenficathon. That never quite coalesced, though I did write a different Jadis-centric story (Little Sister) for the ficathon and I later cannibalized one of the childhood scenes as a separate ficlet (Parallel). But I still have the opening scene of Jadis looking out over her sister's approaching army floating around in my documents folder, and I thought I might repurpose it by using scenes from Cynara's POV instead of the childhood flashbacks.
Obviously that didn't happen. But once I'd decided to write about Jadis and Charn, I figured anonymity was already out the window so I then threw it even more out the window by going for storytelling as a motif, and then sprinkling in a subtheme about mortals defeating gods (however temporarily). One might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, right? *wry*
I suspect the end result is a bleaker fic than Komadori was looking for. It is also not as good a fic as I wanted to write, though I think it is serviceable as it stands. I wanted to get some more details into the narrative bits that frame each story people tell Jadis, and I wanted to be clearer on the fact that the stories themselves have changed through the years -- the interpretation of Lilith and her philosophy that Charn holds in its last days is not the one they started with, though there are obviously commonalities.
Unfortunately, it's hard to write through depression, so I was only able to manage the bare bones sketch of what I wanted to do. But I did get all six necessary scenes in, which is something. My rough draft only had three -- the nursemaid entertaining a toddler, Cynara reading from the book, the creepy scholar using Jadis as a piece in her own game -- and those aren't enough to really be coherent as a story, let alone clearly express the theme. Over the next week I shoved through until I completed the scenes with Mordan failing to intimidate Jadis as a child, Acernos failing to intimidate Jadis as a teen, and Nekoris failing to give wise deathbed advice. You will note that those are also the ones with the repeated phrase, 'Who follows me must bow to none,' which is of course at the heart of the story.
A High and Lonely Destiny: All the stories Jadis knows begin with Lilith. Dark. (3,375 words, written for
-----
This was my assignment!
As I said in my post when the collections opened, I didn't even try for anonymity this year. I had sort of wanted to write a Lucy/Sea Girl story (which is a concept I clearly like or I wouldn't keep asking people to write it for me!) but that required a lot more creativity than I could dredge up over the past few months, so I went with something that I already had mostly laid out... which is also not what I ended up writing. (The story of my creative life could probably be summarized as follows: 'That was not what I meant to write, but I think it came out okay despite that.')
See, back in 2009 I was going to write a story interspersing scenes from Jadis's childhood with the last days of Charn -- specifically the three days of battle when the river ran red, before Jadis and her sister had their last face-to-face meeting -- for Femgenficathon. That never quite coalesced, though I did write a different Jadis-centric story (Little Sister) for the ficathon and I later cannibalized one of the childhood scenes as a separate ficlet (Parallel). But I still have the opening scene of Jadis looking out over her sister's approaching army floating around in my documents folder, and I thought I might repurpose it by using scenes from Cynara's POV instead of the childhood flashbacks.
Obviously that didn't happen. But once I'd decided to write about Jadis and Charn, I figured anonymity was already out the window so I then threw it even more out the window by going for storytelling as a motif, and then sprinkling in a subtheme about mortals defeating gods (however temporarily). One might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, right? *wry*
I suspect the end result is a bleaker fic than Komadori was looking for. It is also not as good a fic as I wanted to write, though I think it is serviceable as it stands. I wanted to get some more details into the narrative bits that frame each story people tell Jadis, and I wanted to be clearer on the fact that the stories themselves have changed through the years -- the interpretation of Lilith and her philosophy that Charn holds in its last days is not the one they started with, though there are obviously commonalities.
Unfortunately, it's hard to write through depression, so I was only able to manage the bare bones sketch of what I wanted to do. But I did get all six necessary scenes in, which is something. My rough draft only had three -- the nursemaid entertaining a toddler, Cynara reading from the book, the creepy scholar using Jadis as a piece in her own game -- and those aren't enough to really be coherent as a story, let alone clearly express the theme. Over the next week I shoved through until I completed the scenes with Mordan failing to intimidate Jadis as a child, Acernos failing to intimidate Jadis as a teen, and Nekoris failing to give wise deathbed advice. You will note that those are also the ones with the repeated phrase, 'Who follows me must bow to none,' which is of course at the heart of the story.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-09-20 01:50 pm (UTC)(The other death of a nursemaid I've written so far -- even more dramatic than the one in "A High and Lonely Destiny" -- is in "The Beginning of Wisdom," which also showcases how awful a parent Acernos is... though in a twisted way, he is trying to make sure his children have the tools and mindset to survive and thrive in the cutthroat world of Charn's royal court.)