The Middle Distance

...and I need to pat myself on the back a little these days.

Cut because, damn, can I ramble.



Five Favorite Stories meme

In no particular order:

The Ring and the Crown (Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion, NC-17, winter/spring/summer 2002) This story was written as a birthday fic for tyellas, who wanted Silmarillion villain stories. Although the story takes place during the time frame of the Silmarillion—Second Age—both its characters play much bigger roles in LOTR than in the Silm. I didn’t think this story would get a big readership for several reasons: (1) its obscure time period (2) it’s very dark and grim and violent, both sexually and otherwise. (3) I was reluctant to list the pairing because it’s a bit of a spoiler (I wanted to reader to gradually realise that in submitting both sexually and spiritually to the shape-shifting “Wolf-Lord” and accepting his gift—of a Ring and a kind of immortality—the protagonist was signing on to become the being we’ll know later as the Witch-king of Angmar. My premise was that he was the only one of the Nazgûl who was not deceived about what Sauron’s promise might entail; he was messed-up enough to want power and immortality at any price, which is why he got to be more equal than the others.) (4) its language—the prose is stiff, purple, and painfully grandiose, on purpose. It’s in the first person, and the protagonist is what we might call in modern terms a narcissistic sociopath, in addition to being a royal Black Numenorean. He doesn’t have a conversational bone in his body. Why did I write it in first person? Because Tolkien never gave this character’s human self a name, and I wasn’t about to. It wound up being the biggest writing challenge I’ve ever undertaken even though the story is not particularly long. I figured maybe 10 people would read this. But Tyellas loved it so I was happy, and it seemed like other people who like it really passionately loved it, and told me so. (maureenlycaon also correctly surmised I listened to a fuckload of black metal while writing it.) So with knowing that this was a hardcore specialty item, you can imagine how I felt when it somehow managed to win a Mithril Award in 2003. I’m still fascinated by the Nazgûl. Orcs are one thing, but the Nine have such a sense of Gothic grandeur and tragedy about them, and they’re so mysterious, and they’re scary as fuck—I read a lot of Stephen King as a kid, and he never wrote anything that chilled me as much as the chapters of LOTR where the Black Riders are hunting the hobbits through the forest. Which is also probably why I’m so fond of writing them into comedies.

Breathless Mouths May Summon (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, NC-17, summer/fall 2005) I labored long and hard over whether to choose this or "The Phoenix and the Turtle ("Amid the Sacred Wreck" was an option too from that same series, but it’s short and I wrote it in three hours!)—I finally went with this one, because it’s the first time quantum_witch and I worked together as collaborators from the start, and it’s the first time I did a historical story with so much immersion in research. I also remember writing a lot of it while on a visit to my parents’ house in Virginia, where it’s very cool and green and at times too humid to take a laptop out safely for long, and feeling utterly absorbed in the desert of the Holy Land and the sunshine of the Bosporus. And Crowley’s account of his encounter with—and escape from—the never-named Hassan-I-Sabbah set the groundwork for more freewheeling play with historical figures later on: Crowley’s outrageous flirtation with Giordano Bruno and Aziraphale’s awkward conversation with John Dee about angelic contacts in P&T, for example. I really also started to let myself sprawl out stylistically too. This story is weirdly structured; in its two parts it’s almost two different stories. The first part, in Constantinople, is pretty much a straight-up hurt-comfort tale, and I was going for a blend of lingering angst and lush sensuality; the second, in Jerusalem, is pure blasphemous sex farce complete with a bit of Monty Python homage. Pratchett famously never writes sex scenes, but I decided to let the language rip in an attempt at imagining what he might sound like if he were as filthy-minded as I am. I don’t know how much the results sound like him, but I’m still pretty happy with the way they sound like me (anachronistic Iggy Pop quote, no less) not to mention that it was the first time I heard what it sounds like when Aziraphale decides to talk dirty, which is something a girl does not forget. As far as the collaboration factor goes, this is the first time I saw QW’s drawings unfold as I worked, seeing my imaginings coming to life through her imagination and her pencil, trading research notes, envisioning scenes together, and it was a mind-blowing experience. (The very original kernel of smut-bunny that started it all was hers—Crowley’s negligent outcry of “Oh GOD yes” while getting rapaciously nailed, and the aftershocks thereof. What inspired me to set this in a brothel in Jerusalem during the Crusades? That’s ineffable, sorry! But it’s also what gave me the pornographer’s courage for the spiky banter and the brothel scene in "Compromising Positions” a few months later.)

Brag It Out With a Card of Ten (Good Omens, Brian/Wensleydale, Aziraphale/Crowley, Adam/Pepper, other pairings, R, fall 2006). This is the only story on my list that doesn’t have explicit sex in it. It could have been written as gen. In fact, I deliberately slightly gratuitously winched up the language and the violence and threw in unnecessary references to wet dreams and wanking to get the rating up, because I wanted a proper aaaRRR rating. It is, after all, a piratefic. (But it did spawn two “deleted scene” smutcakes. Am I the only person in the fandom who’s ever written explicit Pepper/Crowley? I think I may be.) This one made my list for being insanely fun to write. Again, research out the yinyang—endangered my eyesight rereading Treasure Island online in tiny type, bought tons of books on pirates, listened to nautical music, immersed myself, dithered, daydreamed, stressed about the Swashbucklathon deadline…and once I sat down to write it poured from my fingers like slime out of the Kraken. It just happened; the story unfolded and it all fit together and all I had to do was keep track of it; I was a stowaway on my own ship. The characters were my guides, and they knew where they were going, even if they didn’t know in the story. GODS, I love it when that happens. I still think this story is a hell of a good read, and it helped me prove to myself I can do plotty action/adventure romps—I’d been doubting that.

Pursuit of the Last Lantern (LOTR, Dernhelm/Merry, NC-17...summer 2004?) A little while back, stultiloquentia had a fantastic discussion on “queer het” and all the things that can possibly mean. This story hinges on a joke about identity, about the reader knowing something one of the characters doesn’t (which is why it’s pure bookverse—in the book, Éowyn’s male disguise when she rides to battle fools both Merry and the reader). But, although this story is pretty much a PWP, there’s more to it than that; there’s the idea that Éowyn needed not just boy’s clothes but a disguise of male identity, and maintains it well enough to have a sort of warrior-comfort sex without betraying the identity she’s left behind. She believed she was going to die anyway: what is gender but more painful baggage when her very life is forfeit? I’ve written meta at some length about how het is problematic to me even though I enjoy it, because in fanfic at large I see so much uncritical reinforcement of stereotypes that horrify me (see HP fen deriding Ginny as a “slut” because, gods forbid, she’s had more than one boyfriend). But even more than desire to avoid that, I have to say that as a bi woman of toppish leanings who’s very in touch with her animus, but who is comfortable in female identity and attracted primarily to men, I am ALL about “queer het” and I wish more hetfic was a little more queer. And I think this story is far more than a PWP; especially in the way that Merry is concerned about Dernhelm’s youth, only to be pwned with “If I am old enough to die, I am old enough to live!” ,,,and the fact that these are two people looking at each other across the brink of death, and so all conventional bets are off. Besides, as I told S, it was rejected from both a slash-only AND a het-only archive for being a bit too much of the dreaded Other Thing, so I must have been doing something right.

Tree of Knowledge (Good Omens; Adam/Adam, Crowley/Aziraphale, Aziraphale/Crowley/Adam, NC-17, November 2006). This story was written for waxbean in the 2006 GO Holiday Exchange, and I joked it was really rated NC-35; I’m just barely old enough to get away with writing it; she’s just barely young enough to get the thrill from reading something forbidden. It is the filthiest thing I’ve ever written in fandom and so deserves consideration for a spot here on that alone. But the reason I’m still so gorram proud of this story is that it was a response to a challenging string of (plot?what)plot elements suggested by W, and as I was writing it I found the metaphysical dimensions falling into place with a shocking neatness. This is a Joseph Campbell-esque Hero’s Journey for Adam, complete with mentors and challengers and revelations of the self’s limits and strengths—the fact that he has a hard-on the whole time is a matter of form, not of substance. I extracted and literalised the Jungian concept of the Shadow that’s alluded to in the book, that’s all…except with rimming. (which I don’t warn for: deal.) And yes, I do believe that when Aziraphale and Crowley are playing D/s power games, they very well might determine who’s on top by flipping a coin. (Crowley is “tails” because in some forms, he has one.) This is also the story that made me realise my spellchecking was lax, because my Word had not yet been taught to recognise either “ayahuasca” or “cocksucker.” Oh yes, and there’s metafiction; stories with Antichrist voyeurism always bring that out.


You may notice there are no HP stories. That's because the stories in that fandom I love most, the SS/HG "Ravenous" series, are marred by my lingering shame at leaving the series unfinished before they were hopelessly jossed.



There. That helps, to remind myself of what I've done that I'm proud of. They may be trifles, but they're my trifles and I love them.