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Jan. 1st, 2014 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretIf ever a post deserved my Reasons I'm a Bad Person tag, it's this one.
For Yuletide, I was assigned to write Henry Reed fic. I did.
The Glass and Reed Advertising Agency
Um... Henry Reed, for those who don't know, is a series of children's adventure books that were seminal in my childhood. Henry is the son of an American diplomat who is sent to summer in Grover's Corner, New Jersey, to experience what life is like for the average American teenager, since his globetrotting life in Naples, Manila, and other outposts of American post-war soft power is atypical and his parents worry that he won't fit in with other Americans later. He makes friends with Midge, one of the neighborhood kids, and together they engage in capitalist adventures.
Grover's Corner is a fictional unincorporated town near Princeton, New Jersey that is roughly based on Grover's Mill, NJ. Grover's Mill, NJ, of course, is famous as the site where the Martians landed in Orson Welles's radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. The whole area where the Henry Reed lives is about twenty minutes from where I grew up, and consequently Henry Reed and the War of the Worlds radio broadcast are both important parts of my canon of formative New Jersey stories, alongside Mallrats and Clerks and the Hoboken Chicken Emergency and Goodbye, Columbus, and a handful of other random things nobody has ever heard of. For as long as I have known Henry Reed, I have wanted the crossover where Henry's Grover's Corner is invaded by the War of the Worlds Martians. Because I am a bad person. So I have finally done it. YES. SPOILER ALERT. MIDWAY THROUGH MY CHILDREN'S BOOK PASTICHE THE TOWN IS INVADED BY ALIENS.
Structurally,sanguinity and I have consistently spoken of the story as consisting of two parts, even though my actual outline was somewhat more granular: The Bait, and the Switch. This is an evil story to give as a Yuletide gift, especially without tagging for the crossover, and considerable deliberation was given to how to balance reader expectations appropriately. On the one hand, this is the obvious crossover for Henry Reed and I don't know any fans of the series who haven't at least contemplated it for a quick giggle. On the other hand, to move from a Henry Reed story about a goofy business venture into a story where people we know and love are dying at the hands of tentacled monsters is narratively cruel, and definitely the riskiest Yuletide move I've ever made. I leaned heavily on the flexibility in my recipient's letter, and I hope that I did not overstep the flexibility granted to me. I would have been unsurprised, if disappointed, if my story had ended up on the anon memes as "This author was asked to write a fluffy adventure story based on a children's novel, and instead they added in an unsolicited crossover without tagging it, killed off an important supporting character, and just generally ruined Yuletide."
I wrote it despite this fear, for a few reasons. The first is that this was the story I have wanted to write for years, and I always believe you're likelier to write a good story when you're excited to write it. Second, because the bait and switch structure meant that at any time I could decide against it, if the fusion wasn't working, and just give the first half of the story as my Yuletide fic. If the story ended at the barbecue, I am sure my recipient would also have been quite happy. But third, I wrote it because I believe deeply in fanfiction's ability to do things that canon is unable to do. Robertson could never have written this story, because he created his story's genre conventions and then he lived within them. Because I am not beholden to his conventions, I can do things his stories can't, and that is an incredible power worthy of being exercised thoughtfully. My Henry Reed is, barring the differences in interpretation that are always inherent in translation, the same as Robertson's, but my Henry is in a situation that tests his mettle in a whole new way. The thing that makes Henry so charming is that the struggles he has are so very low stakes, but he takes them seriously anyway, so putting him in a situation where the stakes are genuinely high is, I think, a really interesting kind of rulebreaking.
And fourth, this was a story worth telling because being from New Jersey is a thing you take a weird sort of pride in. Our greatest musical talent made his career by singing songs about escaping to New York as soon as possible. We have the densest population in the country, and all sorts of related statistics about pollution and car usage and traffic and high rents that flow from that fact, and yet we are still the Garden State and we have not completely abandoned our farming roots. Two governors ago, our governor put his lover on the payroll and tried to distract attention away from his corruption by publicly announcing "I am a gay American"- and he is still beloved in our state as the man who fixed the DMV. New Jersey is a weird state, and I have a lot of genuine affection for its weirdness.
My parents are inveterate New Yorkers who came out to the suburbs to raise kids, as part of the 1970s/80s wave of sprawl that literally transformed the landscape of the state. There is a part of me that is not proud of this. I grew up at some unconscious level with an ingrained sense that the pre-1970s New Jerseyans who remembered when all of the subdevelopments were farms and Jews only lived in Newark and Hoboken were the real New Jerseyans. Henry Reed is, almost accidentally, a document of the last moments of this Real New Jersey, and that is definitely a major reason I always loved reading the books growing up. It let me read about places I'm familiar with, back in the days when you could safely bike across the highway without fear of getting clobbered by a truck. This crossover, perversely by connecting Robertson's fictional New Jersey to a different fictional New Jersey, let me stake a claim for Grover's Corner as a real place and a place that is important to me. That's why the short photo tour at the back of the fic is essential to my concept of the story, that I actually invested several hours over two weekends in driving around Princeton's environs in search of the shots I needed: it proves the reality of the story.
Which of course is the joke behind the other half of the crossover. Orson Welles would have never used a fictional town name. The obsessive verisimilitude of his War of the Worlds broadcast is one of its hallmark features. I had a debate withfreeradical42 about whether I should name the town in my story Grover's Corner or Grover's Mill, given the conflict in the crossover, but ultimately I decided on Grover's Corner at least partially because it let me dissect the fake reality of Welles's story, divorce it from the ideal of verisimilitude, claim it as a piece of fiction. A good portion of WotW-inspired fiction is centered around the idea that the hoax story is a cover story for an actual alien invasion of some kind, and I wanted to steer away from that and just work with the other hallmark of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds- that it is an emotional, dramatic story, told really, really well.
One last observation on the crossover: Several commenters pointed to the first half of the fic as 'a perfectly normal Henry Reed story' or words to that effect. I think what makes the crossover work is that there is no such thing as a normal Henry Reed story. Strange happenings are always happening when Henry's around, an excitement that I use for ironic foreshadowing throughout my story. Oh, how we chortled after I shared my favorite line in the story withsanguinity: Uncle Al looked at me strangely. "Any other time of the year, I would have said that surely aliens could have found any other place on Earth to be a more suitable landing ground. But these summers..." he trailed off thoughtfully. The key behind this story is that having Martians land is exactly what you'd expect when Henry's around, because Henry is a force of nature.
Anyway, this story is utterly weird and features a jarring tonal switch, but I believe it works anyway, and I hope you enjoy. Very little canon knowledge necessary, Henry Reed is the kind of children's book series where all the important details of the premise are reiterated at the beginning of each new book to catch up new readers, and I mimicked that style relentlessly.
And of course, thanks tosanguinity for great beta help.
For Yuletide, I was assigned to write Henry Reed fic. I did.
The Glass and Reed Advertising Agency
Um... Henry Reed, for those who don't know, is a series of children's adventure books that were seminal in my childhood. Henry is the son of an American diplomat who is sent to summer in Grover's Corner, New Jersey, to experience what life is like for the average American teenager, since his globetrotting life in Naples, Manila, and other outposts of American post-war soft power is atypical and his parents worry that he won't fit in with other Americans later. He makes friends with Midge, one of the neighborhood kids, and together they engage in capitalist adventures.
Grover's Corner is a fictional unincorporated town near Princeton, New Jersey that is roughly based on Grover's Mill, NJ. Grover's Mill, NJ, of course, is famous as the site where the Martians landed in Orson Welles's radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. The whole area where the Henry Reed lives is about twenty minutes from where I grew up, and consequently Henry Reed and the War of the Worlds radio broadcast are both important parts of my canon of formative New Jersey stories, alongside Mallrats and Clerks and the Hoboken Chicken Emergency and Goodbye, Columbus, and a handful of other random things nobody has ever heard of. For as long as I have known Henry Reed, I have wanted the crossover where Henry's Grover's Corner is invaded by the War of the Worlds Martians. Because I am a bad person. So I have finally done it. YES. SPOILER ALERT. MIDWAY THROUGH MY CHILDREN'S BOOK PASTICHE THE TOWN IS INVADED BY ALIENS.
Structurally,
sanguinity and I have consistently spoken of the story as consisting of two parts, even though my actual outline was somewhat more granular: The Bait, and the Switch. This is an evil story to give as a Yuletide gift, especially without tagging for the crossover, and considerable deliberation was given to how to balance reader expectations appropriately. On the one hand, this is the obvious crossover for Henry Reed and I don't know any fans of the series who haven't at least contemplated it for a quick giggle. On the other hand, to move from a Henry Reed story about a goofy business venture into a story where people we know and love are dying at the hands of tentacled monsters is narratively cruel, and definitely the riskiest Yuletide move I've ever made. I leaned heavily on the flexibility in my recipient's letter, and I hope that I did not overstep the flexibility granted to me. I would have been unsurprised, if disappointed, if my story had ended up on the anon memes as "This author was asked to write a fluffy adventure story based on a children's novel, and instead they added in an unsolicited crossover without tagging it, killed off an important supporting character, and just generally ruined Yuletide." I wrote it despite this fear, for a few reasons. The first is that this was the story I have wanted to write for years, and I always believe you're likelier to write a good story when you're excited to write it. Second, because the bait and switch structure meant that at any time I could decide against it, if the fusion wasn't working, and just give the first half of the story as my Yuletide fic. If the story ended at the barbecue, I am sure my recipient would also have been quite happy. But third, I wrote it because I believe deeply in fanfiction's ability to do things that canon is unable to do. Robertson could never have written this story, because he created his story's genre conventions and then he lived within them. Because I am not beholden to his conventions, I can do things his stories can't, and that is an incredible power worthy of being exercised thoughtfully. My Henry Reed is, barring the differences in interpretation that are always inherent in translation, the same as Robertson's, but my Henry is in a situation that tests his mettle in a whole new way. The thing that makes Henry so charming is that the struggles he has are so very low stakes, but he takes them seriously anyway, so putting him in a situation where the stakes are genuinely high is, I think, a really interesting kind of rulebreaking.
And fourth, this was a story worth telling because being from New Jersey is a thing you take a weird sort of pride in. Our greatest musical talent made his career by singing songs about escaping to New York as soon as possible. We have the densest population in the country, and all sorts of related statistics about pollution and car usage and traffic and high rents that flow from that fact, and yet we are still the Garden State and we have not completely abandoned our farming roots. Two governors ago, our governor put his lover on the payroll and tried to distract attention away from his corruption by publicly announcing "I am a gay American"- and he is still beloved in our state as the man who fixed the DMV. New Jersey is a weird state, and I have a lot of genuine affection for its weirdness.
My parents are inveterate New Yorkers who came out to the suburbs to raise kids, as part of the 1970s/80s wave of sprawl that literally transformed the landscape of the state. There is a part of me that is not proud of this. I grew up at some unconscious level with an ingrained sense that the pre-1970s New Jerseyans who remembered when all of the subdevelopments were farms and Jews only lived in Newark and Hoboken were the real New Jerseyans. Henry Reed is, almost accidentally, a document of the last moments of this Real New Jersey, and that is definitely a major reason I always loved reading the books growing up. It let me read about places I'm familiar with, back in the days when you could safely bike across the highway without fear of getting clobbered by a truck. This crossover, perversely by connecting Robertson's fictional New Jersey to a different fictional New Jersey, let me stake a claim for Grover's Corner as a real place and a place that is important to me. That's why the short photo tour at the back of the fic is essential to my concept of the story, that I actually invested several hours over two weekends in driving around Princeton's environs in search of the shots I needed: it proves the reality of the story.
Which of course is the joke behind the other half of the crossover. Orson Welles would have never used a fictional town name. The obsessive verisimilitude of his War of the Worlds broadcast is one of its hallmark features. I had a debate with
freeradical42 about whether I should name the town in my story Grover's Corner or Grover's Mill, given the conflict in the crossover, but ultimately I decided on Grover's Corner at least partially because it let me dissect the fake reality of Welles's story, divorce it from the ideal of verisimilitude, claim it as a piece of fiction. A good portion of WotW-inspired fiction is centered around the idea that the hoax story is a cover story for an actual alien invasion of some kind, and I wanted to steer away from that and just work with the other hallmark of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds- that it is an emotional, dramatic story, told really, really well.One last observation on the crossover: Several commenters pointed to the first half of the fic as 'a perfectly normal Henry Reed story' or words to that effect. I think what makes the crossover work is that there is no such thing as a normal Henry Reed story. Strange happenings are always happening when Henry's around, an excitement that I use for ironic foreshadowing throughout my story. Oh, how we chortled after I shared my favorite line in the story with
sanguinity: Uncle Al looked at me strangely. "Any other time of the year, I would have said that surely aliens could have found any other place on Earth to be a more suitable landing ground. But these summers..." he trailed off thoughtfully. The key behind this story is that having Martians land is exactly what you'd expect when Henry's around, because Henry is a force of nature. Anyway, this story is utterly weird and features a jarring tonal switch, but I believe it works anyway, and I hope you enjoy. Very little canon knowledge necessary, Henry Reed is the kind of children's book series where all the important details of the premise are reiterated at the beginning of each new book to catch up new readers, and I mimicked that style relentlessly.
And of course, thanks to
sanguinity for great beta help.
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Date: 2014-01-01 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-02 05:22 pm (UTC)