#remixredux

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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Follow the Story (One Queen, Bearing Gifts): 1,825 words, June 2015. On Ramandu's island, Lucy and the Star's daughter speak of stories, choices, and new beginnings. 

Remixed from Follow the Star, by rthstewart. 

I told rthstewart that I'd write her a Madness fic, and then I did. :-) 

This remix is a little unusual in that the main change was to its canon. In other words, I took a story that was written for the Disney film version of VDT and stuck it into book!verse. This required a fair bit of conceptual mangling, given how different the plots of the book and movie apparently are! (Full disclosure: I have never actually seen that movie.) I had to change the topic of the entire first half of the conversation, but I hope I kept the general sense of two girls talking about their futures and reaffirming each other's hope and faith. 

The story is also an excuse to patch two minor continuity holes in VDT. First, what became of the sailors who accompanied the sleeping lords to Ramandu's island? Second, what is the origin of Ramandu's daughter, and what is she, metaphysically speaking, since she doesn't give off light like non-disgraced Stars all seem to do? I feel that my answer to the second question renders my authorship blindingly obvious, considering it's a variation of my origin story for the siren in Into Something Rich and Strange -- or more accurately, the siren's origin is a variation of this theory, because I came up with this one first. It just took me two years to find a story where I could use it. Victory!  \o/ 

Rth's story also includes some dialogue about Lucy's name and its meaning, which struck me as a perfect segue into the odd namelessness of the other main character, who is only ever identified by her relationships with men: Ramandu's daughter, Caspian's wife, Rilian's mother. You can judge for yourself whether my attempt to address that situation worked. 

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!