How I Spent My Yuletide Vacation, er, Challenge

[graycardinal]

So this is a trifle belated...but here's the scoop on my contribution to Yuletide 2010: I wrote just one story, but it was a fairly long one.  The House on the Hilltop, for philosapphic came in at a little over 6100 words.

The fandom is L. J. Smith's The Night of the Solstice -- or more accurately, the two-book sequence of which The Night of the Solstice is the first; the sequel is Heart of Valor, and the author's Web site indicates that a third book, though yet unwritten, may yet see the light of day.  Smith is better known as the author of the Vampire Diaries novels (from which the current TV series of that title has been adapted) and the YA paranormal/horror series Night World.  The Solstice sequence is pitched a little younger than her various YA series, and is children's fantasy in the American classic mode.  In the first book, we meet the four Hodges-Bradley children -- Alys, Janie, Charles, and Claudia -- who live in a pocket neighborhood-city in Orange County, California, and are unexpectedly recruited to save Earth from devastation by a dangerous sorcerer from the Wildworld.  They succeed, and Janie proves talented (or possibly dangerous) enough for their neighbor, sorceress Morgana Shee, to take her on as an apprentice.  Heart of Valor picks up the story a year and a half later when an old enemy of Morgana's turns up again, threatening both Morgana and the children -- and in the course of dealing with the newly arisen threat, Alys acquires a sword called Caliborn and learns more than she bargained for about Morgana's past dealings with the legendary Arthur and Merlin.

The story: Aside from a brief framing sequence, "The House on the Hilltop" is a prequel to the series proper, focusing on Morgana and how she migrated from England to southern California (and built a house there several decades before Europeans are supposed to have first set foot in that part of North America).  While those familiar with the source canon will definitely get much more out of the story, I think it ought to be at least broadly readable whether or not one has read Smith's original novels, and there are no explicit spoilers for either of the published books.  One point may be worth mentioning to help supply context: Morgana in the books is of mixed ancestry.  Her mother was Quislai -- faerie nobility, native to the Wildworld (aka Findahl) -- while her father was human, born of Earth (aka the Stillworld).

For those who have read Smith -- as I indicated in the post-story notes, the story represents a fairly elaborate attempt to reconcile and/or retcon what the source canon says about Morgana and Fell Andred.  I could go on at considerable length about the issues involved (and will be happy to if prompted).  For the present bit of "DVD commentary", I'll attempt a quick run-through of the high points.

The biggest issue: Solstice says, quite specifically, that Morgana has not actively practiced magic for half a millennium (that is, 500 years) at the time the novel takes place.  We also get just enough of her back story to discern that she built her house -- Fell Andred -- some time prior to abandoning sorcery, and enough of arch-villain Cadal Forge's to place him in early Renaissance Italy some time before that.  The chief difficulty with this is that both the rise of the Catholic Inquisition(s) and the first reported European explorations of southern California date to the first half of the 1500s...but Morgana's self-imposed 500-year vacation means that Fell Andred must have been built in the late 1400s (specifically, probably in the 1480s, and so Cadal Forge's Italian adventure (and its consequences) must also have occurred around that decade. 

This is not wholly impossible, but it requires a degree of historical tap-dancing to reconcile.  The events in Europe are described vaguely enough that pushing them back to the 1480s is not beyond reason, but Morgana's arrival in California is trickier.  First, it puts her there before any other European is known to have visited (at least so far as my very hurried research suggests).  Second, it puts her in a very specific location in southern California -- because as it turns out, the modern "city" of Villa Park really exists in central Orange County, and parts of Smith's descriptions map quite closely to real streets and landmarks.  On one hand, the degree of precision is wonderfully helpful in establishing where Fell Andred must be located.  But...while Morgana's young husband in the books is carefully identified as a Yuma Indian, Villa Park is considerably west and north of the Yuma's traditional territory.  And there's some question as to whether the Yuma as such would actually have existed in the 1480s; at least one source I checked suggests that in that period, the native population of the whole region was chiefly made up of a more primitive precursor-culture.

While I tried to account for the geographical issue, I punted the precursor-culture issue entirely; the story also almost entirely glosses over the non-trivial issue of how Morgana would have dealt with matters of food, clothing, and home repair over her 500-year tenancy (especially the first half-century, when her only neighbors would have been the natives, and they'd likely have been pretty thin on the ground).  In this regard, I note with some amusement that I don't think the books ever actually mention what Morgana's kitchen looks like -- but one of the very first acts the kids perform on entering the house for the first time is to flip on an electric light switch, so Fell Andred must necessarily be wired for electricity....