the deep moans round with many voices

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: Sacrifices (Backwards and in High Heels) for aviss, Problems and Solutions (All Things in Time) for cofax, and Down in the Deep (The Index of Refraction) for significantowl.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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Down in the Deep (The Index of Refraction): 450 words, April 2012. Now her breath is water. And they are still not the same. Freya/Merlin.

Remixed from Down in the Deep, a fic by significantowl.

Confession: I have only ever seen four episodes of Merlin, and they were the first four of series one. So I have never actually seen Freya. But! significantowl's fic is so lovely, and I wanted to say thank you for her beta job on my assigned remix, so I dashed this off in a hurry.

It's about miscommunication, I think, between two people who genuinely care about and for each other but who come from different backgrounds and don't see the world the same way even when they use the same words. It's also an excuse to play with language and elemental symbolism and stuff -- sometimes, I just want to write something pretty. Hopefully I succeeded!

(The remix subtitle is something I am very happy about in this case, because I spent about half an hour trying to think of some water-related quote before I finally hit on the idea that miscommunication is similar to the way objects appear to disjoint and bend at the interface between water and air. Hence refraction. *grin*)

Remix reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: Sacrifices (Backwards and in High Heels for aviss, Problems and Solutions (All Things in Time) for cofax, and Down in the Deep (The Index of Refraction) for significantowl.

I am going to talk about each in a separate post.

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Sacrifices (Backwards and in High Heels): 1,850 words, April 2012. Barbara Kean has been making sacrifices for a very long time. Her marriage and her children are the latest tithe to the city that owns her heart. Barbara Kean-Gordon/Jim Gordon.

Remixed from Sacrifices, a fic by aviss.

Aviss and I matched on Inception and Naruto. You will notice I failed to write in either of those fandoms. This is partly because she is a strong KakaIru shipper, and as I have said before and will doubtless say again, the logic of that pairing escapes me (though I love both characters individually!), and because she is also an Arthur/Eames shipper and... I don't know, I just wasn't feeling romantic when I first looked through her stories and particularly not slash romantic. I was feeling very, very gen, and also very female-centric. This was almost certainly a reaction to my Narnia Big Bang fic, which I was fighting at the time -- it only has three female characters and they don't even meet each other, let alone talk, and I just really, really wanted to write something that wasn't all about men.

This is in no way a negative comment on Aviss's work! It's just the mood I was in for reasons completely external to Remix.

And I happened to open Aviss's one Nolanverse Batman fic while in that mood, and Barbara Kean-Gordon practically leaped off the page, grabbed me, shook me, and said, "Write MY story, dammit!"

So I did.

At first I thought I'd keep the story the same and write Barbara's perspective on the divorce, and what it felt like to have Jim abandon her for Gotham and for Batman, but I didn't start remixing immediately. (As I said, I was busy fighting my Narnia Big Bang, which was due first.) And when I came back, I was even more preoccupied with the limitations of gender roles and stuff, and I thought to myself, "What if Barbara was the police commissioner, and Jim was the civilian spouse? What would that do to the implications of their marriage and their divorce?"

So I wrote that instead.

Because I was switching something as major as basic story roles, I kept pretty much everything else exactly the same, just expanded a bit and altered where I thought the gender of the POV character would change things. So Barbara thinks about Rachel Dawes and about her daughter, as well as about Harvey Dent, Jim, and the Batman. And she's clearly had more opposition in her rise to power than Jim did, and has more understanding of what it's like to play the role of scapegoat -- because that is what happens to women in positions of power, more so than to men. Which sucks.

In retrospect, this was a mean thing to write as a remix. My story carries the implication that I disliked Aviss's work and wanted to 'fix' it. Which is not true! Her story is a very good character study! I just, for unrelated reasons, was in a mood where I really needed to say things about women in power and gender roles and I used her story as a vehicle for my own issues.

Sorry about that. :-(

And here is the fic someone wrote for Remix Madness 2012! It is based on No Illusions, a not-quite-three-sentence ficlet about Mal setting the scene for her suicide.

Come Upon Me (Like a Debt Remix): Dom lives the same mistake over and over again. [ETA: by lady_krysis aka lady_krysis]

Like many Inception fics, it is eerie and haunting and deliberately blurs the line between waking life, memories, and dreams. Go read it and praise the author!

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I ended up writing a second Remix Madness fic myself last night, for a total of one assigned remix and two bonus stories. They are all in different fandoms and for different writers. One is a crossover. Two of the four fandoms involved are ones in which I had not previously written, one is something for which I'd only previously written one ficlet, and the fourth is something I write in a lot.

If you guess any of them before names are revealed, I will write you a ficlet of your choice. :-)

Remix Madness is open!

This is a subsidiary part of Remix Redux wherein anyone can play! You do not have to have written in any qualifying fandoms, and the story/stories you produce do not need any minimum wordcounts. All you have to do is post your name and a link to your own work on the opt-in post so other people also have the chance to remix you. (You can choose one safe story that you don't want other people to touch, if you like.)

It's fun! Last year I wrote Postcards from Naxos (You Don't Have To Go Home, but You Can't Stay Here) for Remix Madness, just because I was in love with With Thanks to Apollo by sour_idealist.

I have not picked out anything to try playing with this year, but you never know what might happen. :-)

What I did tonight: wrote 200 more words of the Hinata fic. Man, this is like pulling teeth. But I will get through it! I want to know how it ends!

...

Also, I wrote my remix. Yes, all of it.

In a way, I cheated -- the form of what I wrote is almost a paragraph for paragraph retread of the original (plus some expansion and extrapolation) -- but I needed to keep that aspect the same because of the other thing I changed. You don't get the right funhouse mirror effect without the pattern mimicking. (This is definitely a remix where, while it works in its own right, you really need to read the original to get the full impact.)

Hey, is anyone willing to beta read the remix for me? It's between 1,000 and 3,000 words, in a fandom I have talked about before on my journal but never posted any fics in. I don't think you need much canon knowledge; everything is fairly self-explanatory. Also, the original fic it's based on is under a thousand words, so it shouldn't be too hard to read that in order to tell me if my story works as a remix as well as working in its own right.

Remixes are due Sunday night, so I would like this story back on Saturday evening, if possible.