Authors were revealed for the main Remix collection today; the Remix Madness collection will be revealed tomorrow.

Anyway, let me tell you about the story I wrote!

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Doxa/Episteme (The Fate and Free Will Remix) (1219 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cassandra & Helen of Troy (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Characters: Helen of Troy (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Cassandra (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Additional Tags: Female Friendship, Gods, Fate & Destiny, Grief/Mourning, Trojan War, Remix

Summary: In the early days of the siege of Ilium, Helen and Cassandra meet.

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This is a remix of Nemainofthewater's story Doxa/Episteme, which is amusing to me because I remixed Nemainofthewater last year as well. I suspect we matched on the same fandom this year (Rusty Quill Gaming), but I wanted to do something different and Doxa/Episteme snagged in my mind and kept rattling around, which is generally a good sign of a story that wants to happen. *wry*

This is a pretty straightforward remix, stylistically -- it's a basic POV flip, so we're following Helen's thoughts instead of Cassandra's. The thing is, though, that changes a lot of the interactions because Helen is A) not a seer, and B) just as caught by Cassandra's curse as everyone else, so she assumes Cassandra can't actually predict anything and is instead reacting based on extrapolation and emotion. The funny thing is that Helen is just as fatalistic in her own way. Both women are playthings of the gods, after all -- tossed about by whim, and seen more as sexual objects than as whole people with their own hopes and goals and needs. They are also both very isolated figures.

I also had a minor bit of fun with bronze-based imagery, and Helen's understanding of the power of surfaces/images to smooth over harder truths, both for good and ill.

...

On another note, writing this story is what finally moved me to read the Iliad in full poetic translation rather than the abridged prose passages from Lattimore that I think we read in 7th or 8th grade English. (Unless that was the Odyssey? It might have been the Odyssey, come to think of it. Or perhaps both. It was definitely an abridged version of Lattimore, though.)

The Iliad is an astonishingly violent poem, but also surprisingly ambivalent toward that violence -- there's a lot of glorification of courage and slaughter, but also a lot of dwelling on the pain and horror of wounds, and the cost to families of dead fathers, brothers, and sons. It is also surprisingly ambivalent toward the gods. There's a lot of respect for their power, and a textual attitude that what the gods do is by definition right, but also... hmm... a definite sense that having a god take interest in one's life is a dicey proposition at best, and some of the textual stance that the gods are definitionally in the right is undercut (deliberately?) by their obviously conflicting, selfish, and underhanded actions.

Then again, some of that may be me bringing my own cultural baggage and assumptions as a 21st century CE American rather than a 5th century BCE Greek.

It's an interesting work. I am glad I read it. I think it will repay a lot more thought.

Hello all! Today the RemixRevival 2021 archive has opened, and I would like to tell you about the fic someone wrote for me. :D

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A Magical Mishap (or, Nephews and Nieces; the Aunts and Uncles remix) (1349 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Polly Plummer, Digory Kirke, Letitia "Letty" Ketterley
Additional Tags: Book: The Magician's Nephew, Magic, Remix

Summary: "As so many things did, it all began with Polly and Digory quarrelling." The tale of how Aunt Letty acquired two new apprentices.

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This is based on Aunts and Uncles, a tiny ficlet I wrote for this year's Three Sentence Ficathon. My mystery remixer has taken my idea and run with it to glorious effect!

I have many and various things to do today (not to mention I am still making my slow way through this year's NFE archive), but I poked at the Remix archive a little. There are dozens of excellent stories from a vast array of fandoms, and you should go check them out.

Both the Remix Revival 2019 archive and the Remix Madness 2019 archive have gone live, and I want to tell you about my two wonderful gifts!

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As The Morning And The Night (The Rockabye Remix) (2055 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Edmund Pevensie & Lucy Pevensie & Peter Pevensie & Susan Pevensie, Edmund Pevensie & Peter Pevensie, Aslan & Peter Pevensie
Characters: Peter Pevensie, Susan Pevensie, Lucy Pevensie, Edmund Pevensie
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Siblings, Family Dynamics

Summary: Mary Pevensie, in word and deed. (For a female Peter Pevensie, Narnia is when everything falls into place.)

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This is a remix of The Spell Begins To Break, which is part of my As the Morning and the Night gender change AU, in which I flipped all four Pevensies' sex and gender to see what effects that would have on their basic characterizations and the plot of LWW, since C. S. Lewis relies so heavily on gender assumptions as a shorthand in that book. My remixer has also included elements from some of the other fics in the AU, which focus more on the interpersonal family dynamics between the Pevensies, but the plot is firmly anchored in "The Spell Begins To Break," which is where Mary receives her sword and shield from Father Christmas.

As I said in my comment, if I ever write further in this AU, I'm going to have a lot to live up to, in the very best of ways! ♥

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A Perfectly Good Monarch (252 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Patricia Wrede
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cimorene/Mendanbar
Characters: Cimorene (Enchanted Forest)
Additional Tags: Magic, Kings & Queens

Summary: Mendanbar also had excellent taste in choosing his Queen.

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This is a lovely remix of my tiny three-sentence ficlet a real magic, in which Cimorene has a somewhat overwhelming first day as Queen of the Enchanted Forest. My remixer wrote from the Forest's own perspective, and captures Wrede's tone delightfully! :D

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And now I'm going to attempt answering comments on my NFE fic. Here's hoping I won't run out of either spoons or coherent words. *crosses fingers*

Remix reveal day! I wrote SPNstuck (And Sit Them Down for Thanksgiving Dinner) for maypop.

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SPNstuck (And Sit Them Down for Thanksgiving Dinner) (2126 words)
Fandom: Homestuck
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Roxy Lalonde, Dave Strider, Dirk Strider, Rose Lalonde, Kanaya Maryam, Karkat Vantas, Sollux Captor, Feferi Peixes, Terezi Pyrope
Additional Tags: Remix, Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Thanksgiving Dinner, Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Family Drama, Roxy Lalonde Is So Done, Rose Lalonde Gets All The Girls, Background Relationships, Background Poly, Strilondes

Summary: You still aren't entirely sure how your family got designated as hosts for the great angel/demon peace summit of 2018. The demons are obviously in it for the chaos, flames and shouting that might as well be your family's trademark. The angels make much less sense. Like, seriously, what kind of celestial morons think you and your siblings are any kind of diplomatic? And why pick Thanksgiving dinner when none of them need to eat in the first place? It's completely absurd and will only end in tears.

(Oddly, the day winds up being the most successful infernal/celestial summit anyone can ever remember.)

[Remixed from SPNstuck, by maypop]

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As maypop says, Per tumblr user isozyme: "So the theory of supernaturalstuck is to take SPN, retain all the good setting shit, scoop out all the tragic manpain, and fill the void with tragic Rose Lalonde pain. In practice it is about how hot Rose is with really short hair and a lot of magic tattoos, and making fun of Sollux's butt, and what happens when you give all eight Strider-Lalondes a lot of weapons and extra battle trauma and sit them down for Thanksgiving dinner."

I went with four Strilondes rather than eight, but otherwise, yeah, that's the basic plan for this fic. :)

( further thoughts )

Remix reveal day! I wrote Turn the Page (Don't Fear the Ending) for gramarye.

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Turn the Page (Don't Fear the Ending): Sometimes, when a storyteller tries to wring every last drop of Stories out of themself before ever coming to an ending, the storyteller is not the only one squeezed dry. (1,500 words, remixed from The Monster at the End of This Book, by Gramarye)

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So, funny story: in 2015, I adjusted my "willing to write" choices near the end of the Remix Redux signup period so as to match fandoms that currently had no offers. And because of that, I got matched to Gramarye. I did the same thing this time, for the same fandom (Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence), and had a feeling this might end up generating the same match.

I was right. *wry*

I wanted to try doing something different this time, though, so while I dug up the couple drabbles I'd marked as potential remixes (but not wound up using) the last time around, I also poked through the rest of Gramarye's archive to see if we had any other fandoms in common. The answer, mostly, is no... except for a couple one-offs. And one of those was "The Monster at the End of This Book," a gorgeous Yuletide fic for Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

My remix does not have anything to do with Gramarye's story on a plot level. Instead, what I ended up doing was taking a couple of key lines and writing something completely different based around those themes: the power of storytelling, the importance of endings, and how those are both vital and dangerous channels of power and control.

I also continued what has become a bit of an accidental pattern that might be described as "taking your story and making it about women," which I swear to god is not intended in any way as criticism of the stories I keep doing it to. I just have some issues that keep expressing themselves through this particular outlet. *hands* And also Rushdie's treatment of Soraya Khalifa has always annoyed me -- it is a slightly flat/sour note in an otherwise wonderful gem of a book -- so I wanted to give her control of her own story and see what happened.

Random trivia note: I gave Soraya the maiden name of Khan both because it's a Muslim-associated name rather than a Hindu one (to go with the Khalifas' general theme), and because khans arguably outrank caliphs, or at the very least are temporally equal. So that is symbolically important and was absolutely on purpose. :)

This morning I 'and then'ed my way through more of the space battle -- the Enterprise has just arrived in-system!

I have also been working on the first of the mini-ficlet prompt meme fills, which... uh... has gotten slightly out of hand and also seems to bear less and less relation to the bingo square part of the prompt, whoops. But I persevere!

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In other news, I signed up for the Narnia Fic Exchange (narniaexchange) and you should too!

I am also seriously considering signing up for Remix Revival (remixrevival), which is running this year as a fill-in for the tragically defunct Remix Redux. I mean, on the one hand, REMIX!!! On the other, oh god time management... *dithers*

The Ladystuck Remix collection is open! Sixty-two remixed female-centric Homestuck fanworks, plus two more in the Treats collection.

Main collection / Treats collection

And what did I get, you may ask? I got this:

The Time-Traveler's Kismesis: Counterthesis (The Troll Out Of Time Remix): Meetings between the Demoness and her kismesis, the Dolorosa, who refuses to give up hope in a world the Demoness knows is doomed. (1,863 words, by a currently anonymous writer)

This takes my short, fragmentary work The Time-Traveler's Kismesis: Counterthesis and not only flips the POV to show Damara's view of that meeting, it extends both forward and backward in time to encompass the whole story of their relationship and is framed by two excellently deployed quotations from Alternian romantic poetry. ;) It is gorgeous and bleak and hopeful all at once, and I love it to pieces, and you should go read it right now and tell the author they're brilliant! ♥

Things done recently:

1. Got around to seeing Captain America: Civil War on Wednesday. That was not really a Cap movie; that was an Avengers movie... which is not inherently a bad thing (I like big team movies), but is annoying because Steve should not get upstaged by Tony in his own damn movie. Also holy shit the writers have no idea how international diplomacy and treaties work, do they? The logistics on that broke my suspension of disbelief so badly that I spent the rest of the story with a little section of my mind just spinning its wheels trying to think of some way to handwave that mess that made even a token 5% gesture at real-world logic.

(I am still working on that, btw.)

But it was fun, and I'm glad I saw it on the big screen.

2. Drove to NJ on Friday, after which I spent the evening hanging out with Susan -- by which I mean we ordered a pizza and talked about nothing in particular for a few hours, and then my parents and aunt arrived home from their trip and all five of us talked about nothing in particular for another hour and a half. Sometimes it's nice to just be around someone without pressure to be Doing A Thing, you know?

3. Went over to Susan's on Sunday afternoon, where we watched Deadpool (we had both missed it in theaters, which is much more explicable in my case) and agreed that it was pretty much exactly what we'd wanted out of a Deadpool movie. I would definitely be interested in a sequel. :)

4. Washed a lot of laundry.

5. Not written any fiction since Thursday evening. Traveling is a little disruptive that way. *shrug*

6. Signed up for Ladystuck Remix, because I love remix challenges and I love Ladystuck, and while two great things do not always and necessarily taste great together, in this case, I am pretty sure they will. :)

7. Despite not actually writing, I did make a firmer outline for the rest of "The Courting Dance," which became possible once I finally figured out how to approach Peridan's POV chapter. (In summary, I'd been starting in entirely the wrong place and being too narrative instead of focusing on his own preoccupations.) Previously my 'outline' could be summarized as, "And then politics, return to Archenland, Great Council session, maybe another wedding, the end. Remember [redacted argument point] and [redacted physical prop]." Which is not wrong, but is not terribly useful either. Now I know whose POV I'll be in for each chapter, and have at least a one-sentence summary of what should be happening. I have also decided not to actually write the second, northern-style wedding, because while the fact that Aravis and Cor agree to put on that show is important, the show itself is irrelevant to the story I am telling.

Remix reveal day! I wrote two stories this year: They Have To Take You In (A Sheepish Story) for Gramarye and Follow the Story (One Queen, Bearing Gifts) for rthstewart. I'm going to talk about each in a separate post.

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They Have To Take You In (A Sheepish Story): 1,700 words, June 2015. After the events of The Dark Is Rising, the Black Rider calls the White Rider for help. This is only amusing for one of them.

Remixed from Strategic Sheep Purposes, by Gramarye.

Toward the end of the remix signup period, I took a look at the signup summary page to see if there were any requested fandoms (aka, fandoms in which people had already written stuff) that could use more offers to ease the matching process. Most of the unloved fandoms were things I either don't know at all, know only vaguely through internet osmosis, and/or have no interest in writing, but there was one request for Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising sequence. Which is not a fandom I have ever felt impelled to write in of my own accord, but is certainly one I love and know fairly well, and for which I'm more than willing to write responses to other people's Yuletide or Three Sentence Ficathon prompts.

So I said hey, why not... and of course that's where I was matched. *wry*

It was also where I was pretty much stuck writing, because all of Gramarye's other fandoms fall into my "don't know" and/or "don't care" categories. Which is how it goes, sometimes! The world would be a very boring place if we all loved exactly the same things.

Anyway, I read through Gramarye's DIR works, rapidly concluded that I had no business trying to write about Welsh politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and decided to elaborate on one of the many drabbles instead. Then the trick was choosing which drabble. I copypasted several of them to a brainstorming file and spent the next three and a half weeks looking at them occasionally and sort of vaguely weighing options in the back of my mind.

Strategic Sheep Purposes is, oddly enough, the first drabble that really caught my imagination and the one I tentatively settled on as my target when I first read through Gramarye's archive. My usual fic exchange pattern calls for my first idea to get unceremoniously trampled by a later, more insistent plot bunny, but while I do still have half a notion to poke at the Jane-centric plot bunnies inspired by two of Gramarye's other drabbles, in the event I could not resist the sheep jokes, nor the chance to explain to my own satisfaction a question that began to bother me when I reread all five books in rapid succession: namely, what did the White Rider think of the Black Rider's dramatics in the first two books of the sequence, given that she apparently stayed well out of those disasters? (And in fact may have persuaded him to do likewise for a while thereafter, given the low level of the antagonist in Greenwitch.)

Also, the idea of two ageless personifications of darkness and evil acting as bickering siblings tickles the hell out of me. This may be a flaw in my character. *grin*

I feel that this was probably an obvious story to anyone who's read my other DIR work, considering my established interest in the White Rider and the way she balances her two lives/selves, but we love what we love and there's not much use pretending otherwise.

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And now I'm just going to blather about the DIR sequence in general, because I have been sitting on these random observations for over a week now!

When I decided to refresh my familiarity with the series, it turned out to be cheaper to buy a complete box set than to simply fill in the missing books in my collection. This is weird and silly! Also, in theory I should only have needed to buy TWO missing books, but my copy of The Dark Is Rising was eaten by book gremlins lo these dozen years ago and I kept forgetting to replace it, so in practice I had three titles to purchase. I never actually owned Over Sea, Under Stone or Greenwitch until now. The first omission never bothered me, but I do dearly love Greenwitch and am glad to have had an excuse to fill that hole in my personal library.

On another side note, reading all five books in fairly rapid succession makes their time discrepancies screamingly obvious. In-universe, the sequence plays out over a period of not quite two years: the Drews find the grail in late summer of Year One, Will joins the Signs over the Christmas season that links Year One and Year Two, Jane gets the translation key from the Greenwitch around Easter of Year Two, Will and Bran claim and use the harp around Halloween of Year Two, and the final battle happens shortly after summer solstice in Year Three. Which is all well and good.

EXCEPT!

In the first book, copyright 1965, the Drews use pre-decimal currency, meaning the book must be set pre-1971. By the second book, copyright 1973, there's a specific mention of a Mrs. Horniman "coolly disregarding changes in the currency" and handing out silver sixpences to the caroling Stanton children, which sets it firmly post-decimalization. And then by the fifth book, copyright 1977, Bran casually refers to Snowdonia as the "only place that didn't die of the drought, back in nineteen seventy-six," which means they are in 1977 at the very earliest, and quite possibly a few years further on given the phrasing. We've somehow stretched two years of events over at least seven years of real time. Even for the Old Ones, that's flatly impossible.

So when do the events of the sequence take place? I think the best way to rationalize them is to handwave the pre-decimal currency in book one as an artefact of Early Installment Weirdness -- after all, that book was written as a standalone, and has some other oddities like Mr. Hastings (aka the Black Rider, one of the greatest Lords of the Dark) not being able to use a spell to breathe underwater, though Will can pull that trick easily in book three and he's far from the most powerful of the Old Ones -- and work backwards from book five, on the assumption that it's set somewhere between 1977 and 1980. But not much later than that, or you'd start running into Margaret Thatcher's fights with the unions, and I think that would've altered Mr. Stanton's dialogue in the opening section of book five.

...

Okay, I'm done babbling now. *wry*

Hey everyone! Remix Redux 12 is live, and I would like to make you aware of my gift!

Skies of Summer (Dare to Hope Remix): [ETA: by katilara] Ariadne seems to have an innate talent for building in dreams, but Arthur knows there are other virtues she'll need to be truly successful. (2,600 words)

This is based on Skies of Summer, a Cotton Candy Bingo fill I wrote last year. It's an Ariadne & Arthur friendship fic, and also a little exploration into the practicalities of building a convincing and stable dreamworld. The remix shifts into Arthur's POV to show that he's studying Ariadne as much as she's studying him, and also details the picnic dream that I skipped over in my own fic.

Go read it; it's lovely! ♥♥♥