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Reveals post!
Feb. 26th, 2018 09:50 pmI wrote If You See Her, Say Hello for the book Carrie by Stephen King. It was pretty successful as far as my fic goes - double figures for comments! I guess this is what happens when I do not write crossovers between tiny or nonexistent fandoms :D
Carrie is the first Stephen King book I read, as well as his first published novel; I read it standing up in a department store, racing through to finish before my mother came and found me and insisted we go home. Some parts are too on-the-nose and the found documents format doesn't always work, but it holds up; a key part of this is Carrie herself, who is deliberately average in many ways - yes, she's bullied and she's a target, but part of the tragedy is that this was never inevitable. She is average and a victim and a monster all at once, which is a lot more than most horror protagonists get. I've never watched the film of The Shining because one of the things I like most about the book is that Jack is also a loving father and a monster simultaneously, inextricable, and from what I've heard the film makes it an either/or; I hadn't realised until re-reading this time how much of that is in Carrie as well.
I had trouble tracking down the book. I found - with some difficulty - my own copy, got about 70 pages into it and then lost it completely. I then borrowed the library's copy, got about 100 pages in and lost it as well. I was about to grudgingly buy an ebook version when I finally located the library copy wrapped in a duvet in the boot of my car, and was at last able to finish it.
I then started writing Carrie pov with multiple AUs and got totally stuck. I had a lot of ideas but nothing was working at all, so I went back through all the Sue bits of the book, many of which are extracts from her book My Name is Susan Snell, and that knocked something free. Reworking the Carrie pov stuff from Sue's perspective worked a lot better, but I'd still like to try giving Carrie herself a better ending.
I also need to fix the summary (my bête noir). The book has two Dylan songs quoted in it, Just Like a Woman and Tombstone Blues (I think. Definitely the latter, and I still haven't found my copy of the book to check). When this was in draft I was using a later Dylan song as a placeholder title, Changing of the Guard, a song I still feel has at least one story for me in there, but it wasn't right for this one; I went looking at what he had out in 1975/76, the time Carrie is set, and found the title song in Blood on the Tracks.
For Chocolate Box I wrote Once a Shield Maiden in Rohan... a Narnia/Lord of the Rings crossover. This was the last pairing I added to my sign-up and the one I felt least sure of, mainly because I've never written in Lord of the Rings and it's such a epic fandom in all senses, as well as being a book I've loved for years. Naturally I matched on it.
Initially I wanted to do something set during the years that Lucy is Queen in Narnia, and I wrote a few openings trying to work out what she would be like; I also wanted to do something with Éowyn's ability to fight, and contrast that with the Narnian approach ("Battles are ugly when women fight," Father Christmas tells Lucy when he gives her her present; but although it's the healing cordial that has pride of place in the book, she also gets a dagger - and Susan a bow & arrows). I hadn't really worked out what I wanted to say, though, and setting events in Rohan made me anxious about getting something wrong - I've always been more a fan of the hobbits than the humans - and I was also trying to put in references to Tolkien and Lewis in real life, and it was all feeling far too forced. So I wrote this instead.
Apparently Rohan is based linguistically on Mercia, but when I looked up their word for sheep it was shep. With a long e. So I went for Old English instead, with the help of my beta who'd conveniently studied it...
Carrie is the first Stephen King book I read, as well as his first published novel; I read it standing up in a department store, racing through to finish before my mother came and found me and insisted we go home. Some parts are too on-the-nose and the found documents format doesn't always work, but it holds up; a key part of this is Carrie herself, who is deliberately average in many ways - yes, she's bullied and she's a target, but part of the tragedy is that this was never inevitable. She is average and a victim and a monster all at once, which is a lot more than most horror protagonists get. I've never watched the film of The Shining because one of the things I like most about the book is that Jack is also a loving father and a monster simultaneously, inextricable, and from what I've heard the film makes it an either/or; I hadn't realised until re-reading this time how much of that is in Carrie as well.
I had trouble tracking down the book. I found - with some difficulty - my own copy, got about 70 pages into it and then lost it completely. I then borrowed the library's copy, got about 100 pages in and lost it as well. I was about to grudgingly buy an ebook version when I finally located the library copy wrapped in a duvet in the boot of my car, and was at last able to finish it.
I then started writing Carrie pov with multiple AUs and got totally stuck. I had a lot of ideas but nothing was working at all, so I went back through all the Sue bits of the book, many of which are extracts from her book My Name is Susan Snell, and that knocked something free. Reworking the Carrie pov stuff from Sue's perspective worked a lot better, but I'd still like to try giving Carrie herself a better ending.
I also need to fix the summary (my bête noir). The book has two Dylan songs quoted in it, Just Like a Woman and Tombstone Blues (I think. Definitely the latter, and I still haven't found my copy of the book to check). When this was in draft I was using a later Dylan song as a placeholder title, Changing of the Guard, a song I still feel has at least one story for me in there, but it wasn't right for this one; I went looking at what he had out in 1975/76, the time Carrie is set, and found the title song in Blood on the Tracks.
For Chocolate Box I wrote Once a Shield Maiden in Rohan... a Narnia/Lord of the Rings crossover. This was the last pairing I added to my sign-up and the one I felt least sure of, mainly because I've never written in Lord of the Rings and it's such a epic fandom in all senses, as well as being a book I've loved for years. Naturally I matched on it.
Initially I wanted to do something set during the years that Lucy is Queen in Narnia, and I wrote a few openings trying to work out what she would be like; I also wanted to do something with Éowyn's ability to fight, and contrast that with the Narnian approach ("Battles are ugly when women fight," Father Christmas tells Lucy when he gives her her present; but although it's the healing cordial that has pride of place in the book, she also gets a dagger - and Susan a bow & arrows). I hadn't really worked out what I wanted to say, though, and setting events in Rohan made me anxious about getting something wrong - I've always been more a fan of the hobbits than the humans - and I was also trying to put in references to Tolkien and Lewis in real life, and it was all feeling far too forced. So I wrote this instead.
Apparently Rohan is based linguistically on Mercia, but when I looked up their word for sheep it was shep. With a long e. So I went for Old English instead, with the help of my beta who'd conveniently studied it...
