hey I just met you and this is crazy
Aug. 22nd, 2012 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenAfter a rather stressful day at work ("Can you spend several hours on the phone with a firm of Scottish engineers? It'll be just like Christmas dinner with your in-laws!") I went to London this evening and had dinner with the South African Siren! For late arrivals to the party of my endlessly fascinating life, I spent a year living abroad some time ago and for all of that period of freezing cold, culture shock and broadening horizons, the Siren was my dearest friend. She's visiting London on holiday before going on Contiki ("I'm shy and socially awkward and spending thirty-three days going around Europe with total strangers! This will end well!") and what with everything else going on, tonight was all we could manage. She and Shim and I ate pizza and drank wine and laughed a lot and talked about nothing and everything, and then we went to Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross and took pictures of ourselves pushing a luggage trolley into the wall. It was such fun, but now I am sad because my friend is gone and I probably won't see her again for another year or years. See, kids, this is why you shouldn't live in other places. You end up leaving bits of yourself strewn all over the place and life becomes, if not a mournful vacuum, at least a study in mournful hoovering.
I did extract a promise from her to attend at least one of the weddings - and as for the rest, I guess I have to go to South Africa, sometime. I do want to. The world seems to get smaller but never quite small enough.
Anyway. Enough mournful. I love this meme so here I am doing it again, now I seem to be writing:
Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
(Viaphilomytha.) Oh I should go to bed.
I did extract a promise from her to attend at least one of the weddings - and as for the rest, I guess I have to go to South Africa, sometime. I do want to. The world seems to get smaller but never quite small enough.
Anyway. Enough mournful. I love this meme so here I am doing it again, now I seem to be writing:
Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
(Via
philomytha.) Oh I should go to bed.
no subject
on 2012-08-23 01:18 pm (UTC)"Anna, what?" He's so gentle, still, and although his movements are cat-like, quiet, she feels him get up and walk across to her, the warmth of his body mutedly vivid and close. "What could you think about?"
"You," she says. She turns around and takes in his expression, laughing a little at his mixture of confusion and care. "Not you, really," she goes on, and it's easier to say this time. "Not you. Hamlet."
She screws her eyes tight shut and says it, get it into the room like a throwing star: "What a piece of work is a man!"
"How noble in reason," he agrees, but the words are quiet, without expression. As though he's handling them delicately, leaving them clean and for her to use. "How infinite in faculty."
"How like a god," she bursts out. "That's it, isn't it? And it wasn't like that. The revolution was important. It was for the good of the people. But each person, each life – they should have been worth something, they should have meant something. It should have been... different."
In the end, she's just shrugging at him. It should have been different. But real life isn't like theatre, and Geoffrey understands that more than most people. He opens the window and flumps back down on the couch. She goes to sit beside him, sinking into the soft cushions with a slight smile. "The Canadian Consulate wanted to send me to Winkler," she says after a while. "I'm not sure how they knew I'm from there. I suppose it must be on my passport. Then they wanted to send me to New Burbage."
"But that would have been in contravention of the Geneva Conventions," says Geoffrey in perfectly expressionless fashion.
She nods. "Right. So I told them I was going to Montreal. And I did."
She arrived in late spring, and Geoffrey picked her up bodily off the doorstep and deposited her in an armchair with a pile of cushions. Ellen ran to make tea. It's a bittersweet memory, tinged with grief, but with also affection. That's what the bubble of something indefinable is, she thinks; simple affection for Geoffrey, whose mind is so dark and complex, and who finds it so easy to find people to love. It was the same in Bolivia, people rushing to meet her and to kiss her hands, the woman from the far north who had been so good to their comrades. There's sweetness in that memory, too.
no subject
on 2012-08-24 10:15 pm (UTC)This story is an odd one - I'd almost forgotten I wrote it until just now, but of course seeing it brings it all back. It's set on a humid, glowering summer night edging into a thunderstorm - and of course, it was written on a night just like that, and here I am re-reading it on a night very similar. Funny how small details bring back a whole world - I was nineteen when I wrote this, living with my parents and rewatching all of S&A in lieu of doing any work.
"Anna, what?" He's so gentle, still, and although his movements are cat-like, quiet, she feels him get up and walk across to her, the warmth of his body mutedly vivid and close. "What could you think about?"
"You," she says. She turns around and takes in his expression, laughing a little at his mixture of confusion and care. "Not you, really," she goes on, and it's easier to say this time. "Not you. Hamlet."
She screws her eyes tight shut and says it, get it into the room like a throwing star: "What a piece of work is a man!"
I absolutely love the idea of Anna being, in her way, as fervent a student of literature as any of the company, and it seems to come up in everything I write about her. Also, Anna. Lovely lovely ANNA.
"How noble in reason," he agrees, but the words are quiet, without expression. As though he's handling them delicately, leaving them clean and for her to use. "How infinite in faculty."
I'm always amazed, in the canon, by how kind Geoffrey is. He really is. He's good to the young company, he's even sweet to Sloane after he's been punched by him! And I was always sorry we never saw more of him and Anna interacting. So here they are, at a time period I also enjoying writing about.
"How like a god," she bursts out. "That's it, isn't it? And it wasn't like that. The revolution was important. It was for the good of the people. But each person, each life – they should have been worth something, they should have meant something. It should have been... different."
In the end, she's just shrugging at him. It should have been different. But real life isn't like theatre, and Geoffrey understands that more than most people. He opens the window and flumps back down on the couch. She goes to sit beside him, sinking into the soft cushions with a slight smile. "The Canadian Consulate wanted to send me to Winkler," she says after a while. "I'm not sure how they knew I'm from there. I suppose it must be on my passport. Then they wanted to send me to New Burbage."
"But that would have been in contravention of the Geneva Conventions," says Geoffrey in perfectly expressionless fashion.
She nods. "Right. So I told them I was going to Montreal. And I did."
She arrived in late spring, and Geoffrey picked her up bodily off the doorstep and deposited her in an armchair with a pile of cushions. Ellen ran to make tea. It's a bittersweet memory, tinged with grief, but with also affection.
It's this image that drove me to write this story in the first place - Anna coming home to Geoffrey and Ellen. Because she would, and they would take her in.
That's what the bubble of something indefinable is, she thinks; simple affection for Geoffrey, whose mind is so dark and complex, and who finds it so easy to find people to love. It was the same in Bolivia, people rushing to meet her and to kiss her hands, the woman from the far north who had been so good to their comrades. There's sweetness in that memory, too.
And again - Geoffrey, who is a complex and difficult person, does love people with the clear innocent devotion. He's loyal to Ellen, he's good to May and Anna. Oh show, I miss you, show.
no subject
on 2012-08-24 10:31 pm (UTC)It's set on a humid, glowering summer night edging into a thunderstorm - and of course, it was written on a night just like that, and here I am re-reading it on a night very similar
Despite the inherent violence, it's in some ways the most luminous and yearning sort of weather, so it's really perfect. Thanks for the commentary!