the deep moans round with many voices

Today is NFE reveal day! I wrote two fics this year: one assignment and one pinch hit. I will talk about each in a separate post.

The Vastness of the Sky: Digory Kirke invites Polly Plummer to watch the 1912 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race with him, intending merely to catch up with his oldest friend. But lives once touched by magic never return altogether to normal, and when both crews sink in adverse weather, Digory and Polly stumble into a strange new world in search of a missing rower. (8,250 words, written for FiKate)

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This was my assignment! It is also absolutely not the story I intended to write, as is sadly standard for me with exchanges.

FiKate made two prompts: one about Cor, Corin, and Aravis figuring out their new roles in Archenland, possibly with Lune and/or Edmund as secondary characters, and one extremely open-ended request for a story about Digory. As I mentioned previously, I have already written that first fic. There's These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, dealing with Aravis and Cor settling into Anvard; there's Any Sentry from His Post, wherein Cor talks to Edmund about what it means to be a king and how to cope with unexpected life changes; and there's The Courting Dance (still sadly unfinished), which can be summarized as "Aravis and Cor have a little argument with Archenland over their Calormene backgrounds and their right to get married." So it seemed redundant to write a fourth variation on that theme... but I have never been very interested in the England side of the canon, nor did Digory especially grab me as a protagonist. I figured I'd stick with what I knew I could pull off, and started working on a story where Lune decides to send his sons and Aravis to Narnia to attend the Summer Festival* that Tumnus mentions to Shasta in Tashbaan.

That fic proved harder to write than I expected. Luckily, while I was failing to make progress, I went wiki-walking for unrelated reasons, landed on an article about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, and thought to myself, "What if Digory attended one of those and there was some business with a magic portal?" I decided that that would require too much research, and also didn't have a proper plot, but as the deadline drew close and the other story utterly failed to catch fire, I gave in, did a bunch of hasty googling, tossed Polly into the mix because I think both she and Digory work best with each other to play off of, and basically winged it at great speed and to the tune of about 6,500 words.

The floating islands in the unnamed world beyond the portal are a little bit inspired by Cloud City on Bespin (from The Empire Strikes Back) -- that influence shows largely in the way the atmosphere thickens at lower depths so there is no visible planetary surface -- but more so by the floating islands of Arianus from Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle. (And now you know one thing I was really into when I was, hmm, eleven to twelve? *wry* I got into them by way of my friend Cat's obsession with Dragonlance, and stayed up to 3am to finish the later books as they were published.) I think floating islands are inherently cool, so when I needed a quick way to distinguish a new world (and also keep Digory and Polly from wandering away from the portal), I threw that in and then had great fun elaborating on the concept.

The story never stops to explain what keeps the islands or the skyships aloft, but Polly is right to sum it up as "magic." Basically there is a certain type of stone that holds that levitational power, and little chunks of it are embedded in the framework of each skyship. That's about the only mining anyone does, though, because when your solid ground is so fragile, you can't afford to chew up vast swathes of it in search of smeltable minerals.

Anyway, The Vastness of the Sky was greatly improved by my three betas: heliopausa, hypotheticalanomaly, and sablin27. In particular, Sablin and hypotheticalanomaly pushed me to think more about the implications of my world-building, and heliopause helped me identify what I was doing wrong in my portrayal of Digory and Polly. The story is much better (and about 2,000 words longer) for their help. :)

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*Side note: Lewis never specifies one way or the other, but in my world, Calormen holds four great seasonal festivals on the solstices and equinoxes. Narnia and Archenland, in contrast, hold their seasonal festivals halfway between each solar landmark, more like the Celtic cycle of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, and Samhain. That assumption places the bulk of HHB somewhere in July, between the Calormene and Narnian summer festivals -- which aligns nicely with the Narnians' comments about the weather heating up in Tashbaan.

Today is also NFE Madness day! I wrote three extra gifts this year, and will talk about each in a separate post.

Start of Line: Lucy looks around, wondering what makes the Professor's workshop so dangerous. At first glance, she can't see anything special: just a bunch of computers on a rack and a half-dozen monitors scattered about to no apparent plan, each surrounded by drifts of notepaper and graph paper. But then one monitor switches from its screensaver -- snow falling onto pine trees -- to a black screen with a single line of text.

Lucy steps closer, curious.

<Hello?> the computer says again. The cursor blinks in silent invitation. (2,550 words, written for songsmith)

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Songsmith requested alternate Narnias. Her suggestions included steampunk, space opera, and superhero AUs, but I went for a Tron fusion instead. Well, okay, I did initially want to do a WWII Tron fusion, with the conceit that Uncle Andrew had built a working Babbage difference engine, or analytical engine, to sort of bring in the steampunk aspect, but those machines just aren't the right kind of computer, and I couldn't think of a smooth way to integrate magic to paper over that problem. So I went for a ten-minutes-in-the-future AU instead.

The chief problem here was figuring out where the story ought to end. I thought initially I could cut off right after Lucy enters the Grid and meets Tumnus, but I really wanted to get some more exposition in there, and also make Tumnus a little more sympathetic than his actions would otherwise paint him. (He does essentially kidnap Lucy into a war-zone, after all.) On the flipside of that issue, Lucy needed some agency to counteract that inadvertent victim role. So I kept going until she makes her own choice to stay and help. It's still kind of sketchy, but honestly, Tumnus IS fairly sketchy early on in canon, so I figure it's a plausible extrapolation to new circumstances.

The title is a silly reference to "end of line," which is a programming command that appears with varying significance in Tron and its related canons.

Today is also NFE Madness day! I wrote three extra gifts this year, and will talk about each in a separate post.

A boat, beneath a sunny sky: At the Lake of Mezreel, Lasaraleen distracts Aravis from her father's impending remarriage. (1,025 words, written for rthstewart)

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Rth asked for a story about Aravis, with anyone, and in her Dear NFE Writer letter mentioned that she enjoys banter and friendship and stories that make her laugh at least once. So I tried my best to write something cheerful and silly, between two girls who don't have much in common but get on fairly well despite that... provided they aren't forced to remain in close proximity for too long. *wry*

Some details from this are drawn from an unfinished and unpublished fic about Aravis and her brother at Mezreel, and how their father comes to marry his second wife (who takes a dislike to Aravis and later maneuvers her into the arranged marriage with Ahoshta). But the story should stand on its own without any context beyond canon itself.

The title is a line from the poem that closes Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll.