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For Fic Corner, I wrote "Canning for Our Boys", a Great Brain futurefic for sanguinity.

The original thought that came to me was to write a story titled "Seven Prefigurations of the Christ", in which I told Abie Glassman's story while over-literally pegging it to the Jesus narrative, as a way of biting back at the incredibly. fucking. obnoxious. way that townspeople in Adenville compare Abie to Jesus after his death. But I decided that sanguinity might enjoy it as an expression of my virtuous wrath, she might not like getting all my religious feelings about Christianity all over her gift. So I asked morbane to talk me down and I went searching for another idea.

Here, this is as far as I got in writing that first story. You can get a sense of the rough history I dreamed up for Abie and the shape of the schematic, but that's as far as I'd thought the story out:

1. Nativity

His mother was the daughter of Portuguese cross-Atlantic traders. His father was a German tailor. That made him American. His mother's family hadn't set foot on Portuguese soil since the 15th century. That alone made him Jewish. He was born on a Sunday and circumcised on a Monday, and all of the dignitaries of Jewish Newport brought gifts- the Touros, the Lopezes, the Riveras. His birth was a blessing, for he joined his three older sisters in the Glassman family.

The brainstorming mark II went in all sorts of directions as I tried to figure out what happened to Tom and Dotty after the story. Originally Tom was going to be in Chicago and there was going to be much more of a Tom Fitzgerald, Rookie Reporter vibe to it, but I got the idea of Dotty as war correspondent stuck in my head and then I did a lot of googling and reading about Peggy Hull and I started to wrangle with ideas to figure out how I could make the story work with Dotty as Peggy Hull. Tom had to be aged up a few years to set it during the Great War, so I threw out the Rookie Reporter shtick, and I also threw out this fledgling idea I had of Tom apprenticing himself to Andrew Carnegie or JP Morgan. And as I mused about the war and Tom's place in it (he was just too old to be drafted in the first wave) the idea struck me of Tom using a Great Brain-style scheme to make money on the war- letting me tell a story in the canon's traditional form, but with considerable deconstructive leeway.

The scene where someone describes a situation to Tom and he hears an offhanded detail and is instantly seized with a money making scheme is a classic Great Brain trope and I hope I pulled it off well. The idea that instead of Tom's parents coming in to put the lid on one of his schemes, it's Dotty who does it is pure sanguinity fanservice and I make no apologies for it.

Where I really struggled was in the mechanics of the scheme. I'm sufficiently evil to figure out how Tom would blackmail people into cheating themselves, but I have no idea how canning works. I seized on canning because I vaguely knew that it was important in supplying food for the soldiers, and I knew that in Great Brainland it figures in one story as THE archetypal childhood food memory. I liked the idea of Tom seizing on this positive childhood memory as a way of taking advantage of other peoples' childhood memories... it's just so classic as a representation of the way Tom really should know better but willfully refuses to. So then I had to figure out what supplies he would need and what kind of equipment he would need for this massive canning project, and that's where I ended up glitching badly in the first draft of the story. Hopefully the final version doesn't ping as too badly off to people who actually know how canning works.

My version of Britches Dotty, as I said, is inspired by Peggy Hull, who was from Kansas rather than Utah, but who otherwise could have been the grownup version of Dotty. She really did ride with Pershing in the hunt for Pancho Villa, really did go to France to cover the war and then got kicked out of France by the War Department and waged a lobbying battle that finally got her real credentials as a war correspondent. That whole story is real, and really happened to Peggy Hull rather than Dotty. I just embellished and tweaked the details a little. Unfortunately, Britches Dotty as Peggy Hull was too awesome for me to stop writing, so the section where she tells war stories just kept growing and growing and then I wasn't sure how to get to the actual plot I had outlined, leading to two things that are amusing in retrospect:

1) a delightfully ironically oblique conversation with sanguinity where I wrestled with the fact that my recipient would have no problem whatsoever with me just giving up the main plot and telling more Dotty in Mexico stories. (I'm right about this, aren't I, sanguinity? If I never went back to the canning plot, you wouldn't have complained, right?)

and

2) a series of conversations in #yuletide where I asked desperately for someone to teach me how to segue.

But eventually the segue happened, and I am glad of it. I had things that I wanted to accomplish in the Tom's scheme part of the story that wouldn't have been served if I had made the story ONLY fan-service. I like the way I show Tom as a grownup. There's a sort of running problem in the Great Brain stories in the way Fitzgerald plays off Tom's scams as being childish pranks, because if Tom grows up and never learns that he's only being tolerated because he's a child, he'll just keep doing it. And the problem is, unlike in the Great Brain stories where a parent comes in to rein him in when his plans get too evil, in the real world adults who try scams like this can probably get away with it for quite a while. Unchecked in the world, a person with Tom's cleverness and inclination toward money making schemes can do a lot of harm. And I wanted to wrestle with that, I wanted to show Tom toeing right up to the line of doing something really evil, and self-justifying it even though some part of him still knew it was evil, and then I wanted my fan-service Dotty to swoop in to remind Tom of who he was. So I'm glad I segued, I'm glad I was able to work the canon form into the story. The thing I like about the scheme I came up with is that it really is facially a crime with no victim. Like Tom says, the suppliers were donating to the war effort, so they were aware that they were paying less than market value. The War Department was getting what it contracted for. The troops are getting their treat. You can see how Tom could justify it to himself and even be proud of the good he's doing, even though it's pretty horrible.

(I'm sure subconsciously it's also about my frustration with the idiocy of Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows's war profiteering storyline. Tom Dennis is the face of war profiteering, not fucking Moriarty. War profiteering and merchant of deathing isn't something you do while twirling your mustache, it's something you do with a mixture of good intentions and mis-aimed ambitions. Humanity would be a lot better off if it were really segmented into good people and evil people. Unfortunately we're all a little bit of both. )



And on that note, the gift I received for fic_corner was the astonishing "Selected Letters of Abraham and Fanny Glassman: 1874-1886 ". Which is 10,000 words of epistolary fic that mostly discards all the fail in The Great Brain's portrayal of Jewish people, bickers vigorously with Fitzgerald, and tells an amazing story about life in the Utah Territory.

If you have any interest in Jewish history at all, read this immediately. If you have any interest in the history of the Western US, read this immediately. No knowledge of Great Brain canon required, really, though this is great fanfic too and there are a series of brilliant references and commentaries on the canon.

Well, ok, let me explain the canon a bit. The Great Brain is a set of children's stories about a Catholic family in Mormon Utah in the late 19th century. In one of the first stories, a Jewish traveling peddler named Abie Glassman visits town and is persuaded that because of his age and disability, he would be happier if he settled down, established a store in town, and didn't have to travel so much. Meanwhile, all the Mormons in town refuse to patronize his store, preferring the Mormon-sponsored ZCMI even if the prices weren't as good and the selection more limited, so that Abie slowly loses money on this project. He then tragically dies of malnutrition because as a Jew he couldn't swallow his pride and ask non-Jews for help, teaching everyone in town a valuable lesson that I think even as a child I took as "Nobody cares what happens to the Jews.".

sanguinity took that heap of nonsense and tried to make sense of it, but that project is futile. Eventually she ended up just writing about what the life of a real Jewish merchant in the Utah territory would have been like. She gave him a family, she gave him dreams, she gave him setbacks and mistakes and heartbreaks, she made Abie Glassman live! It's just utterly gorgeous.

Abie's wife Fanny emerges as the star of the story, a fighter of a woman who learns how to fire a pistol and a shotgun, does bucket brigade duty on the town-wide fire while she's pregnant, and rolls with every punch that life tries to throw at her. I have a lot of feelings about Fanny right now. As I was reading, I hadn't realized that sanguinity was going to be rejecting the canon ending, and so I was dreading that Fanny would have to die tragically, because the only way to get the Abie of Fitzgerald's story is to bash the shit out of everything he holds dear and then keep bashing, so I was so relieved that that is not where this version of the story goes. She has children! They are brats and she loves them dearly! And she teaches them what being Jewish means, because holy shit do Fanny and Abie get what being Jewish means.

I just... read the story. It is history porn, it is Judaism porn, it is family and found-family porn, it is all sorts of great things.