Seeking Ferret

The Enchanted Island at the Met last night. I made plans with Mark, but he bailed on me the morning of the show, so I lined up my old college classmate Roger to go with me. And then I realized that I'd somehow bought four tickets instead of two, so there was more frantic calling to find other people to go with me, but that failed.

Luckily, it was a completely sold out show and I had little trouble scalping them outside the Met to two nice, older Russian ladies who spent the whole show giving Roger candy.

The show itself was lovely, beautifully sung, lots of great Handel arias, familiar characters, and a really, really stupid plot with a lame libretto failing to support it. Prospero tries to do his thing, but Sycorax disrupts Ariel's spell so that she summons the wrong ship to the island- a ship that instead carries the four lovers from A Midsummer Night's Dream on their honeymoon. So now, instead of Puck and Oberon fucking with their minds for inexplicable reasons, Prospero and Ariel (And Prospero was sung by David Daniels, who of course has sung Oberon many times) fuck with their minds for inexplicable reasons. And then Neptune (sung by Placido Domingo, in a small role that nevertheless filled me with pleasure) deliver the Duke and Ferdinand to Prospero already repentant, so all of the drama of forgiveness that drives The Tempest was neutered. The one good thing in the plot is a scene where Prospero tries to boss around Sycorax and Neptune shows up, to great cheers from the audience, and tells Prospero to give the damned island back to Sycorax and Caliban and he'd damned well better apologize, too. That was awesome.

Um... I kind of want all of the Ariel/Prospero fic now? Does that make me a bad person? I know the power dynamic is fucked up to all hell, but Danielle DiNiese and David Daniels played off each other wonderfully. I also want Miranda/Caliban, which I'm pretty sure doesn't make me a bad person, and which apparently already exists on AO3! And I think I'd love stories about Hermia, Helena, Lysander, and Demetrius working through the emotional traumas of getting their minds fucked with again and again by supernatural beings.

Um... Holy Fuck the Giants game!!!!!

I should probably say more than that, but really, that's all there is to say. I listened to the post-game show on WFAN and Roman Oben totally shut down a guy who called in to shout about it, begging for intelligent conversation, but really, that's all there is to say. Holy Fuck the Giants game! And really, what a great football weekend altogether.

I was down at Penn on Saturday night for Alai's movie night. We watched the De Niro film "Ronin", which is interesting but kind of slowly-paced in a way that at times made it feel padded. We watched "Danger 5", which is still the coolest thing ever. And we watched the DS9 episode "Our Man Bashir", which is never not hilarious. Being in Philly made it easy to drive down to Baltimore Sunday morning to watch the games at Steve's. He's a big Raven's fan; I'm a big Giants fan. It seemed like it'd be fun to root for both our teams to make the Super Bowl.

Unfortunately, the Ravens lost in brutal fashion, which knocked the wind out of Steve's sails for much of the Giants game, but both the Ravens-Pats and Giants-Niners games were amazing examples of why football is so compelling (as well as full of reminders of why football is so problematic.)

I kept thinking about the Giants-Packers game from the last time we went to the Super Bowl. It was me, Soctt, and Belle in a Cambridge bar, having ditched the Dr. Awkward Mystery Hunt for the game. And there was a puzzle in the Hunt called Giant Game, which as I recall was a Princess Bride puzzle, but after the game we called HQ and said "We know the answer to Giant Game. It's Super Bowl." And we spelled it out, S-U-P-E-R etc.. and I was dizzy with glee and I didn't even know that the best was yet to come. Hopefully the big game will bring more of the same this year. Pats be going down!

naraht and I have been discussing a fanfic meta challenge to write forewords for other peoples' fic, analogous to the way a novel might open with a foreword by an editor or fellow author or fan.

Forewords can serve a lot of functions for a story. They can introduce a new reader to the story, providing context or explaining why the reader should even bother. They can offer critical insight into parts of the story that prime the reader's expectations in a particular way. There might be biographical or historical information a reader might want to know.

I think forewords for fic is a really neat idea and I'd love to see the kind of things that could be written. I'm sure it would introduce me to stories I otherwise wouldn't read or wouldn't understand if I read. And it seems like a really fun way to recognize stories that have affected us.

Where we're stuck at the moment is on how to structure the challenge. My first impulse was to a Remix-style exchange where authors of fic offer their whole body of work and are matched to write a foreword for a story by another offer. The advantages of this are that it guarantees that someone will write a foreword for one of your stories, which is a nice inducement to participate, and it takes some of the decision-making out by narrowing down your field of choices. The major downside is that if you get a bad match I'm not sure how to deal with it. I think it's harder to write a critical essay on a story you're not interested in than it is to write a remix of a story you're not interested in, because with the remix you can always add more of your own fiction. I think exchanges also skew the field away from authors who aren't comfortable writing meta and meta writers who aren't comfortable writing fic. This leads to making it a challenge instead of an exchange, to open up the field of eligible participants.

One thing that Remix-style exchanges also short-circuit is the permission aspect. I wouldn't want to run this without getting author permission for their stories to be written about, but if we don't do it exchange-style, the challenge will have to involve writers in some fashion soliciting fic authors' permission in some fashion. Either we have to solicit blanket permission ahead of time from anyone who wants their stories to be eligible, which I'm hesitant to do because whenever that kind of challenge happens I'm always reluctant to surrender blanket permission, and also because I haven't seen a challenge that did a good job of making it easy for potential participants to browse the eligible authors' stories, or perhaps more pertinently, motivating participants to brose the eligible authors' stories. Or we have to provide resources to make it as painless as possible to individually ask authors for permission. I was thinking that we could provide a form letter to participants to send to authors, so all they'd have to do is copy/paste and fill in a few blanks with details about the story. Alternately, maybe mods could assume the responsibility of contacting authors. From a Ferret's Weird Issues point of view, I would have a lot easier time contacting random authors with my mod hat on than I would as just a random author. In general I don't have the same social anxiety when it comes to making phone calls for professional reasons that I do with potentially touchy personal phone calls. Is that true of other people?

Anyway, I want to gauge interest in this and see if you folk have suggestions about how to run it.

I had to hold in all the music I wanted to share with people over the last month and a half, because it would have spoiled my Yuletide story. So here, have a music post.

My single favorite discovery from the past two months was Maurice Ravel's "Kaddish", from "Two Hebraic Songs". Neither of these songs is in Hebrew, mind. "Kaddish" is in Aramaic, the other song is a setting of a Yiddish folksong. But "Kaddish" is an incredible setting of a powerful prayer. It's my second favorite setting of those words now, after Leonard Bernstein's untoppable version. Ravel's is so fluid, so sensual, and grounded in the disappointments of the real world. The shipper in me imagines it as his tribute to the Jewess Emma Bardac, Debussy's second wife. The litgeek in me sets it beside Ravel's "5 Greek Songs" and envisions it as Ravel's struggle with Hegelian dialectic. (The shipper in me sees "5 Greek Songs" as a pretty blatant confession about sexuality) And the practicing Jew in me just sits back in astonishment and listens to passages in the song that just feel so, so right, from a composer who admits in a letter I read that he didn't even know enough of the language to know whether his singer was singing the Aramaic competently.

Other songs, more well known, that I listened to constantly include Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," whose glissandi drew goosebumps and inspired me to exact the same response from the reader of my fic; Ravel's "Bolero", with Ravel beating time in his famously exacting way (He apparently screamed at Toscanini for adding an accelerando to the conclusion); Both of their string quartets, which each play with the formality and rigidity of the string quartet form with playfulness and bursts of imagination; Debussy's "Petite Suite", especially "En Bateau", whose perfectly formed four handed piano structure enchanted me for about six consecutive repetitions.

Ravel and Debussy are composers I've enjoyed in the past, certainly that I knew enough about that contemplating writing RPF for them for Yuletide wasn't rejected out of hand, but they're not composers I was deeply familiar with. I've always kept French classical music at arms length because my childhood was all about Italian and German classical music and French classical music sounded different enough to sound unfamiliar and a bit intimidating.

But... as music that is unmistakably Modernist without entirely rejecting tonality, there is a major attraction here to this music now. It's a powerful companion to Berg and Schoenberg and Strauss, roughly Ravel's contemporaries: Obviously both sides of the Maginot Line were influencing each other, yet these musical traditions evolved in different directions. I think it's a useful observation to link those evolutions to the differences between French and German visual arts in the same period: Unquestionably one of the links between Schoenberg and Debussy and Ravel is the influence of painting on their music. I think this also links them to their Russian forbears like Mussorgsky, whose "Pictures at an Exhibition" was obviously championed by Ravel. But looking forward instead of backward, this explains the continued French emphasis on harmony as the Germans were lured toward more elusive, more meta-analytic approaches to art.

The other thing that stands out to me in Debussy and Ravel is orchestral color. Ravel was the genius orchestrator, but Debussy was no slouch at it either. It's not easy to do this right, and the story of 19th century classical music is a drift toward bigger and bigger orchestras that drowned out the voices of individual instruments in less expert hands. The 20th century saw, in people from Britten to Bernstein the return of smaller ensembles and focused attention on individuating timbre. I think we need to point to Debussy as one of the most important inspirations for this trend. And I should say that this trend is one of the reasons I don't warm to much of 19th century classical music and greatly prefer the music of the 18th and 20th centuries.

So yeah, Ravel and Debussy are awesome and I was bursting to tell you guys that last month, but I guess now will have to do.

So for Yuletide this year I wrote "The Music Speaks for Itself", a nonlinear multimedia narrative about the twisted relationships of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Emma Bardac. It was a tough nut to crack and it's not at all the story I would have wanted it to be if I'd had a few months to throw at it, but I think it does work pretty well.

I knew instantly what I wanted the story to be- jumpy, impressionistic, and all about the intersection of music and kink. I just didn't know how to get there and have a story that made sense. So I started outlining. The last day of NaNo, after I'd thrown in the towel, I sat in a Barnes and Noble with other WriMos for several hours and wrote out three different outlines, trying things out. One designed the piece as a rondo on three key moments in the relationship of Ravel and Debussy, but it just wasn't coming together right. Another idea built it based on the stuctured cycling of three sensations- sight, hearing, and touch, but it didn't seem substantial enough of a form. I played with going straight through and it didn't feel like the characters made sense.

And then I called mithrigil and we talked about the piece for half an hour and she said "Maybe you should try using a da capo structure. And listen to Debussy's piano miniatures to hear what I mean." And I played with that and soon I had an outline that seemed to work, an outline that let me write with a little more confidence that the scenes I wrote wouldn't go straight to the discard pile. I still ended up with a massive discard pile, though. "The Music Speaks for Itself" left a lot of deleted scenes on the cutting room floor.

This was writing by trial and error. It was writing by gut feeling. I tried to make second person work several times, sometimes for just as short as two or three sentences, but they all ended up cut. I tried every kind of third person narrator I could think of. I wrote internal monologues and internal dialogues. I wrote from the perspective of an ant on the ground, I wrote from Claude's perspective and Maurice's perspective and from the point of view of numerous outsiders. I played with simulating glissandi by manipulating font size. No idea was too crazy. And I discovered a really neat trick for organizing a story like this: I highlighted passages in my Word document in different colors based on theme, and used that to look at the story and visually see if I had spent enough time on a theme, if the thematic passages segued correctly, if my arrangements made sense. I don't usually use a word processor when I write fiction, (I usually use a text editor and LaTeX, because I'm a nerd) but it was helpful here.

But what I'm most proud of on this piece is my restraint. Unlike "The Petro Dynamo", which I wrote unrestrainedly and filled with all of my pet obsessions, I threw ideas out there and then knew to get rid of them. I got Mithrigil to talk me down when I fixated on Emma Bardac's Judaism. I got some perspective from Alai after I contemplated the visual glissandi and kept them out of the story. This story had the potential to be a mess of ideas, and instead it's a pretty tightly controlled story with a clear set of narrative directions, and that is a major step forward for me as a writer. That's what allowed me to use images and embedded sounds in a way that I think enhanced the story instead of distracted from it, and I know from experience how fine a line that is.

In any case, this is not a story I would have imagined writing for Yuletide. I'm not sure what possessed me to even offer the characters, other than an assumption that I wouldn't have to write them together, but I pulled my act together, crammed a lot of research into a small amount of time, and really fell not just for Ravel and Debussy but for the whole scene they were part of. My major regret on this story is that I didn't have time or space for Gabriel Faure, Mary Garden, Lilly Texier, Ricardo Vines, Robert Casadesus, Pierre Lalo, and all of the other fascinating people involved with the Paris music scene of the 20th century's first decade. This story wanted to be a lot bigger than it was: again, restraint prevailed, miraculously.

But Emma Bardac... Oh man, Emma Bardac, I have the hugest crush on her now. She was not part of the original request, but I couldn't keep her out of the story, not only because I don't like the kind of slash where you write out canonical SOs without giving them any thought, bu also because she's so fucking amazing. She's gorgeous, but she's not as gorgeous as Lilly Texier, whose body was so amazing that straight women stared at her chest in awe*. But she was brilliant, independent, and incredibly chutzpahdic, and that combination was enough to move Debussy away from the most beautiful woman in Paris. She had to be part of the story. Any attempt to look at the way Debussy engaged in relationships of the mind and body had to examine the way he fell for Emma Bardac. And any attempt to slash Ravel and Debussy had to look at how Emma and Maurice felt about each other as much as it looked at how Emma and Claude looked at each other.

Anyway, that's the story. I'm incredibly grateful to Mithrigil, without whose guidance this story is nowhere. And I'm pleased to have tackled a scary and foreign fandom and emerged with something this singular and unique. yuletide is a pretty amazing event.



Also, it would appear that my gift was by peroxidepirate, so thank you so much for giving me a beautiful Marriage of Figaro story. This seriously was exactly the story I've been asking for for the past three years and I was so excited to get it, and have read it numerous times in the past week .




*This was the best thing I read as part of my research. Mary Garden, the original Melisande, wrote a tell-all biography in the late '50s where she wrote this about Debussy's first wife Lily, from when she visited her after Lily had attempted suicide: "the surgeon came in to dress her wound... and opened her nightdress, and in my life I have never seen anything so beautiful as Lilly Debussy from the waist up. It was just like a glorious marble statue, too divine for words! Debussy had always said to me, 'Mary, there's nothing in the world like Lilly's body.' Now I knew what he meant." Um... yes, I read divas' tell-alls as part of the research for this. Obsessive about research- who, me?

An observation on this year's Yuletide wank: Yuletide is really badly designed to be an anonymous gift exchange.

Think about how you would go about setting up, say, an office Secret Santa exchange. You'd put a ten dollar limit on gifts, you'd make sure everyone got the same number of gifts, if it involved people who don't each other that well you'd mandate letters that clearly spell out what gifts a person wants and doesn't want to get. If you don't do these things, you're guaranteeing yourself drama. But Yuletide doesn't. (Other fanfic exchanges do. Purimgifts has a cap on story length and doesn't encourage treats.)

Features of Yuletide:
-Short time frame makes it tricky for many people to tailor their story to the recipient
-Insistence on optional details are optional makes it clear to their writers they don't have to try to fulfill their recipient's requests
-Treats and extra stories are often explicitly encouraged, setting up numerous potential situations of jealousy and rivalry between gifters
-There's no cap on story length, meaning one person could receive a 20,000 word story and another could receive one that seems padded at 1,000 words.


On the other hand, Yuletide is set up well as a rare fandom challenge. AO3 makes tagging for rare fandoms easy. Optional details are optional frees up writers to explore anything they want to. Encouraging treats brings in even more stories in these tiny, rare fandoms.

This is what Yuletide is optimized for- maximizing the number of stories written in rare fandoms. Yuletide is not optimized for the most drama-free exchange of anonymous gifts. This seems obvious to me. To me the gift I expect on Yuletide morning is a new story in a fandom that doesn't get much fic. That is gift enough, and expecting anything more out of Yuletide is expecting a system to do something it's not geared toward doing. That would be bad engineering. Or wanking.

I'm not trying to say that Purimgifts is superior to Yuletide. I'm trying to say that they're designed differently and they have different goals and people need to stop misunderstanding the goals of Yuletide. And I think it's awesome that Yuletide exists because it means that great fic like the things I highlighted in my last post exist. It's awesome that Yuletide is around because the stories it produces give pleasure to more than just one person. I still get kudoses on the story I wrote for Yuletide '09, and the hitcount on that story keeps climbing, and that's what makes me happy, because the point is to produce stories in rare fandoms, so that those stories exist to be read. The gift part of Yuletide is just a bonus, and as I've argued above, a somewhat tacked on one at that.

So for Yuletide this year I got the story I've been requesting for three years now. It is approximately as awesome as I'd hoped.

Soldiers and Goat Girls, Marriage of Figaro, Rosina/Susanna/Cherubino, post-canon, hijinks ensue.

Rosina is still outsmarting her husband, Susanna is still helping her, Cherubino is still kind of redeemably obnoxious and Figaro has no clue what's going on as usual, but he puts on a good front anyway, as usual. It is awesome. All of my favorite characters put through their paces again and proven just as capable as ever.

My point is, HIJINKS ENSUE.


Anyway, Christmas Eve was spent at a Jewish jazz concert at 6th Street Shul. John Zorn, Frank London, and Greg Wall playing "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." Rashanim with Greg Wall and Frank London playing Reb Shlomo Carlebach/Fela Kuti crossover fusion. The Klezmer-inspired big band Ain Sof Arkestra. Whatever the fuck Cyro Baptista's Banquet of the Spirits is- all I know is there was an oud and it was mesmerizing.

It was a pretty great night.

Today I have no plans. Thus far, that has meant reading through the Yuletide archives, eating pretzels, drinking good beer, and watching the Knicks. Oh yes, and to top off the day the Knicks are back. And not terrible, for the first time in my adult life.

I'll be running a short D&D adventure next week. Fourth Edition, level 4 or so...

I'll be setting it in real medieval Europe, in a shtetl. All of the characters will have divine classes- cleric, invoker, avenger, paladin. Which we'll be renaming something like magid, kabbalist, and warrior of the magen david. That's right, I'm finally running my Jewish D&D session. Wheefun!



Thanks to help from mithrigil my mess of a Yuletide has taken a completely new shape, which I think I'm a little more comfortable with than the last shape. I think we're on the fifth version of an outline and the third different story shape. This story will either be something I'm immensely proud of and can point to as a calling card or a total disaster that will make me long for Yuletide's anonymity to be prolonged. At the moment, I'm slightly more optimistic than pessimistic.

I flamed out on NaNo pretty spectacularly this year. Just over 16,000 words, none written in the last week and a half. Considering I was trying to write excruciatingly dense fanfiction for an extraordinarily complicated postmodern novel I only finished reading in October while work exploded around me, I don't feel terrible about my failure. Also, I've stopped caring about NaNo as an excuse to write novels and pretty much only regard the writing of the novel as the buy-in for getting to hang out with interesting people and write and talk about writing. So there's that.

Given that, I went to November 30th's last-minute write-in despite not wanting to work on my NaNo novel. It was a nice crowd, I got to cheer on a thirteen year old as he worked his way from 48,500 to 50,000, and I poked at Yuletide for a while (net increase in wordcount of 300 words over two and a half hours, though I wrote and deleted another thousand words) and then we went out to eat cake and celebrate the successes of this year's NaNo.


Whilst eating cake, we kept checking on cyannas's NaNo profile. Despite giving birth in the first week of November, despite not having any words written until the midway point of the month, she rallied and as we refreshed the NaNo site we watched as her wordcount for the day climbed above 17,000 words and she hit 50,000 six minutes before midnight. It was really exciting.

For Kaleidoscope, I wrote what I've been calling my Epistolary Lesbian Steampunk Voodoo Frankenstein story. (Alai told me it sounded like I was going for geek bingo) It is the Ferretiest story ever, despite my doubts that I could make the whole thing work. It's also the first story I wrote entirely to an outline in a very, very long time. I had to plan this thing out, the story beats were complicated and I didn't trust myself with the details.

The Petro Dynamo, prequelfic for NK Jemisin's "The Effluent Engine", which is steampunk set in 1840s New Orleans.

I'm quite pleased with the story. I vowed to Alai when I first got the prompt that it would be the hardest science he'd ever seen in a steampunk story, as I grappled with the fact that I had to write steampunk, horror of horrors. I'm pretty sure I've succeeded.

sanguinity wrote something about the cargo-cultyness of steampunk, which was a sentiment I largely agreed with before starting to write the story, but I think I found the virtues of steampunk in writing this story. It's a mode for telling stories about the past that are also stories about the future, and that's a useful thing. It's also a way to ask questions about what might have been- that chief question of historical research- about scientific history. For as long as I've been studying history I've been poking at the hidden ways in which science has been pushing and prodding politics and culture. Belle and I, among others, have had long, loud arguments about the extent to which social developments can be attributes to technological change. Steampunk is centrally about litigating those questions, about pushing science to the forefront of our past. At least when it's done right.

I think I once told someone that if I were to become a mad scientist, I would want to be either an 18th century vivisectionist or a 14th century alchemist. There's a little bit of both in this story. There, that's the best enticement I can offer to read this story.

Thanks go to paxpinnae for reviewing my outline and to Alai and Lee for last minute reading and commenting that helped polish the final version that went live. I was really nervous about writing this story and having smart people to check me was a tremendous help.

Lastly, a thousand thanks to rhi for writing "Optic/Nerve". My ridiculous Dhalgren crackfic is still out there waiting to be written, but I am immensely pleased with the tiny yet enormous snapshot of Bellona that you shared with me.