the deep moans round with many voices

Remix reveal day! I wrote two stories this year: In the Absence of Sun (The Grief Inside Your Bones) for templemarker and Sword and Stake (Hath Yet Her Honor and Her Toil) for rthstewart. I'm going to talk about each in a separate post.

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Sword and Stake (Hath Yet Her Honor and Her Toil): 625 words, May 2014. The new Council hires Lucy Pevensie to train novice Watchers. Dawn enrolls in her class.

Remixed from Sword and stake by rthstewart.

I hadn't really been planning to write anything for Remix Madness, since it took me such a long time to finish my assigned remix, but rth had not yet received her assigned remix (you can check these things from your AO3 dashboard), and she is a wonderful person who deserves all the gifts. So I wrote her one. :-)

It didn't hurt that the concept in her three-sentence ficlet is inherently awesome. I mean, Lucy Pevensie vs. the forces of evil! Lucy Pevensie, training up the next generation! Dawn recognizing a new role model! What's not to love? I just elaborated a little on rth's foundation.

(...I am now trying very hard to resist elaborating on my own elaboration, and writing the incident where the old Watchers' Council tried to discourage Lucy from hunting vampires, on the grounds that she wasn't a Slayer or even a Potential, and Lucy firmly put her foot down and told them what was what. I rather suspect she was persona non grata to the Council hierarchy for decades, though field Watchers often sought her advice in secret. I'm also not certain what her siblings' roles were in the battle against demons and vampires and repeated apocalyptic threats, but I'm certain it would make an epic tale... that someone else should write so I can read it. *wry*)

The subtitle is a gender-flipped line from Tennyson's Ulysses, which you may have noticed -- I use another one of its lines as my journal header, after all -- is one of my favorite poems.

I took a brief nap to recover after a busy visit from my parents, and woke up to a wonderful surprise: both the RemixRedux 11 and Remix Madness 2014 archives are now live! Anonymously, of course, so my own work will remain a mysterious subject of mystery for another week, but in the meantime I highly recommend you go read the three (!!!) stories that have been written using my old stories as a springboard.

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Overground (The Rat Without A Maze Remix): [ETA: by qwerty] Sarah might have left the Goblin King, but she never meant to leave the Labyrinth. (1,025 words)

This is based on Balance, a Sara/Jareth story I wrote back in 2006. "Balance" was a reworking and extension of an even earlier work -- "Running from Her Shadow" -- that was itself an extension and fictionalization of a tiny irritated/outraged meta essay I wrote to and for myself back in 2001 directly after watching Labyrinth for the first time and reading it as a story about the rejection of female sexuality. (Which is kind of a funny response in retrospect, coming from someone who is thoroughly asexual and aromantic, but eh, I am large; I contain multitudes. *wry*)

Anyway! My remixer has taken the basic premise behind "Running from her Shadow" (which is the first chapter of "Balance") and elaborated on it wonderfully, bringing in rich details about both the Labyrinth denizens Sara slowly outgrows, and the normal life and people she fails to fit in with. I glossed over most of that, so it's very cool to get to feel Sara's growing sense of dislocation instead of just being told what the problem is. Go tell my remixer they're awesome!

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Where The Wood Drake Flies (The Squirrel With The Table Remix): [ETA: by Estirose] Amanda is still learning control, but at least she has Sarek. (300 words)

This is based on Penelope, Weaving, which is a little Amanda/Sarek 15-minute ficlet I wrote as a first toe-dipping venture into Star Trek fandom after the 2009 reboot movie. Both my story and the remix are character studies of Amanda, centered on how and why she agreed to be (at least superficially) a housewife on Vulcan. The remix, though, has a more sensual way with words, and casts a tighter focus on Amanda's love for Sarek and how much their relationship means to her. Go read it!

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Turbulence (The Storm Warning Remix): [ETA: by Gehayi] Before her descendant Jadis was brought to Narnia, before she herself came to Charn, Lilith was a Carrionite, and her people had been banished by the Eternals to the Deep Darkness. (3,450 words)

This is a remix of Storm Warning, which is not actually a three-sentence ficlet despite being written for the 2011 Three Sentence Ficathon. (I am not always very good at structural restrictions, alas.) My ficlet is about Jadis discovering the secret tale of how Lilith came to Charn via tricking the Doctor into giving her passage in the TARDIS, and how the Doctor tricked Lilith in turn by stranding her on an empty world that circled a dying sun.

The remix tells Lilith's story. The author neatly and brilliantly weaves Lilith into Doctor Who canon, with its insistance on science over magic, its plethora of ancient universe-spanning powers and wars, and its cavalcade of alien refugees on Earth... while simultaneously working in all the Middle Eastern mythology that surrounds Lilith, and giving Aslan an ominous cameo. It is a tour de force and you should read it immediately!

The trouble with starting to write a porn-centric story at, um, shall we say a certain point in a female hormonal cycle, is that once your body has stopped sending "yes, yes, go sex, much yay, hubba hubba hubba!" signals to your brain, it's kind of hard to work up the necessary motivation to write the second half of the porn in question. Or at least it is if you are my particular brand of asexual.

*sigh*

My life. So hard.

...

I am definitely past the halfway point of the story, though, and probably past the halfway point of the sex too. I have also made some judicious edits and additions to previous scenes to highlight the theme of this piece, insofar as it has one beyond "wow, sex," and will do another pass-through to that effect once I have typed "the end" or words to that general effect. So yeah. Progress!

FYI, Remix Madness is now open for signups. The rules and FAQ are here, and there is a signup link on the side of that page.

Basically what you are doing with Remix Madness is giving blanket permission for other Remix Madness participants to pick one or more of your stories (except a designated "safe" story and WIPs) and write their own version of it. You also get the chance to do the same to as many other participants as you wish. (Well, as many as you can write stories for between now and Sunday, anyway.) There are no minimum eligibility requirements, and you do not have to have participated in the regular Remix Redux exchange to participate in Remix Madness. There is also no pressure -- you don't need to write a story -- and no minimum word count.

I have signed up, but I need to finish fixing my regular remix before I get ambitious and try writing anything else. So it's back to the porn mines for me, I guess. *rueful sigh*

ETA: Wrote more porn, still not done. Oh well, tomorrow!

Today I did a bunch of things:

1. Got a haircut
2. Posted the two Cotton Candy Bingo fics I finished on Thursday and Friday
3. Bought groceries
4. Brought my resume up to date and emailed it to Vicky for feedback
5. Crossposted almost all of my Inception and Star Trek: AOS fic backlog to AO3
6. Tentatively applied for a very part-time job at my church starting in August
7. Started writing my remix fic

Which is enough for any day, I think.

In other news, all but three of my thirteen pepper seeds have now sprouted. It's interesting to see them in such dramatically varied stages of development -- one or two days makes a huge difference at this point. I will probably take another picture Sunday evening, to have a visual record.

Right now, though, I am going to take a shower (to clear out tiny, itchy hair-clipping residue) and go to bed.