As the Cardinal Flies

Fic: Remix Revival 2017 - Hunting the Lion (Harry Potter)

2017-09-25T08:51:39Z

A little late to the party with this -- very busy Sunday, so that I'm only now getting keyboard time -- but here's my Remix Revival story, which is definitely not one I expected to write when I signed up. Nonetheless, I'm happy with the results and pleased with the response to this point.

Hunting the Lion (The "Truth in Fiction is Strange" Remix) (5369 words)
Inspired by Hermione Granger and the Amazing Outfits of Luna Lovegood by likeadeuce
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Words: ~ 5400
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Luna Lovegood
Characters: Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood, Harry Potter, Minerva McGonagall, Parvati Patil, Ginny Weasley
Additional Tags: Lions, Remix, POV Luna Lovegood, characters reading comics

In which Luna Lovegood prowls through darkest Hogwarts with wand and costume(s), hunting a very particular lion.

The actual assigned match was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with several other fandoms listed in the request, but a quick look through the available Buffyverse material didn't reveal any particular piece that spoke to me. The other officially offered fandom I thought I could write was Shakespeare's Henry IV -- I saw a fascinating staging of Part I this past summer, and likeadeuce has rung some very intriguing changes on the play in several different works. However, my reference copy of Shakespeare is still awaiting unpacking (which is, in turn, awaiting the promise of built-in bookcases -- must remember to follow up on that this week), and I didn't feel up to reworking Shakespeare -- especially Shakespeare already re-visioned as thoughtfully as is done in these stories -- without my library in proper hand.

So I started spelunking through a large swath of other material, pausing briefly in a couple of parts of the MCU -- when I happened across the above-referenced Harry Potter story. And I was immediately both charmed and inspired; the author's hand with the core relationship was light but sure, the story was ideally suited for a POV flip -- and Luna happens to be one of my favorite of Rowling's secondary characters. Never mind that the only other core Potterverse fic I'd written was a tiny comic ficlet (featuring Hermione and Ron), unless one counted a brief Stargate SG-1 remix set in the Potterverse. Never mind that I mostly write in smallish fandoms or on the fringes of larger ones. Luna was calling me, and this was a remix that felt both worthwhile and entertaining.

I set out, initially, to do the story as a fairly close scene-for-scene POV reversal. Which was fine as far as it went, but became more challenging as matters progressed. I did a good bit of Web-crawling when I got to the scene at Professor Slughorn's party, in order to keep myself as canon-compliant as possible. I made a deliberate nod to one of the commenters on the original story during Luna's appearance costumed as Wonder Woman; of course she included a tiara and a golden lasso -- which in turn introduced a new plot point that proved absolutely essential to the remixed climax. The additional detail also tilted certain other aspects of the relevant scene in a different direction from that of the original story, which in turn rippled forward into later sequences. As a result, the back end of "Hunting the Lion" is markedly more direct about its characters' intentions than its source tale...which is, I suppose, part of what makes it a remix.

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Meme (Round Robin): Fic-Writer's Book of Questions

2014-08-26T05:24:55Z

This one's a more introspective meme than I've seen in awhile, picked up from aris_tgd. I'm going to inject a little more structure in hopes of making it look a little less intimidating (from both sides of the desk). So:

Below (and I'm putting these under a cut, because it's a long list) is a series of questions about aspects of one's writing process and one's body of work (both existing and prospective). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do any or all of the following:

Comment on this post, choosing up to five of the lettered questions for me to answer.
Comment on this post, either offering to answer up to five questions of my choice from the list or choosing your own list of up to five questions to answer (in either case, you should post the answers in your own journal and provide a link)
Post the full meme to your own journal, thereby encouraging your own friends-list to play (and to keep on passing the meme around)

Note that many of the questions are specifically fanfic-oriented, though many might also be answerable with non-fanfic examples. Anyone choosing to participate should feel free to answer in whatever context they feel is most appropriate for their own process and body of work. Also: if you are asked to respond to a question you feel uncomfortable answering, you are not obligated to respond to that question.

Now, the questions:
( Now, the questions: )

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Yuletide: What I Wrote

2014-01-04T10:00:01Z

My Yuletide match this year was on a particularly esoteric micro-fandom -- and in mystery, rather than SF/fantasy. This is the story I wrote:

A Matter of Delicacy
Judge Dee mysteries - Robert van Gulik
G • gen • ~3000 words
Dee Jen-djieh | Di Renjie, Miss Violet Liang, Tao Gan, First Lady, Second Lady, Third Lady, Original Characters

When a memorable figure from Judge Dee's past turns up on the doorstep of the Metropolitan Court, the Lord Chief Justice is confronted with a puzzle whose unraveling may call for a particularly subtle approach -- and whose solution may pose its own challenges for the judge's visitor.

The Judge Dee series takes place in seventh-century China; Robert van Gulik wrote a total of sixteen novels and one set of short stories that are a rather odd mix of historical fact and fiction. There was a genuine historical "Judge Dee", on whom van Gulik's character is based, and there's a lot of legitimate period detail in the books. But while the individual mystery scenarios are almost all taken from authentic Chinese sources, van Gulik creates a wholly fictional career for Judge Dee, and the novels' storylines have no basis in specific events. Also, van Gulik incorporates a degree of deliberate anachronism into the texts, describing cultural elements from the much later Ming dynasty as opposed to those prevalent in seventh-century Tang China.

Yet anachronisms notwithstanding, the series -- originally published in the 1960s and '70s, but still in print today (!) -- makes for fascinating reading. Van Gulik was a native Dutchman who served as his country's ambassador to China, and published a fair bit of (somewhat esoteric) scholarly writing on Chinese culture in addition to his fiction, but it's the Judge Dee stories for which he remains best known.

My own story, at its recipient's suggestion, picks up on the status of a character featured in one of the series' middle books -- a female wrestler and martial-arts tutor from Mongolia -- and looks in on that character again about a decade later. In the course of developing the story, I reread the whole canon (some volumes more than once), and consulted a variety of printed and online reference material -- establishing, in the process, that most of what I knew about Chinese history I'd originally learned from reading the Judge Dee books. (Heh.)

Not surprisingly, the story has picked up a fairly small number of hits and garnered little to no notice in the wider Yuletide gossip mill. Which is just fine; that's why it's called a micro-fandom. (I write in a lot of these....) The important bit is that my recipient is happy -- which she is, judging by the comment in response -- and thus I am well satisfied.

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How I Spent My Yuletide Vacation, er, Challenge

2011-01-07T10:58:25Z

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 story: Aside from a brief framing sequence, "The House on the Hilltop" is ( a prequel to the series proper, )

( The DVD Extras: )

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Yuletide 2010 - It's Aliiiive!

2010-11-22T05:45:15Z

And I have my assignment, which matches neither the most obscure fandom I offered nor the least -- but definitely on a fandom I like and should be able to write. Both of the other requests are intriguing as well -- but one would involve more research than I suspect I have time for, and the second, while very tempting in some ways, would also be tricky to pull off in the Yuletide time frame.

Must review canon RSN....

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