Et In Arcadia Ego

Further to my previous post, I really am so damn proud of this song I'm going to post it here. Also, to dissuade you from looking out the fic. The odd rhyme looks a bit odd on paper, but read out loud it works. Powerful stuff.

It's only problem for me now is the religious aspect - I'm pretty sure the Numenorians revered the Valar, but I'm not sure whether the terms of address here don't sound too monotheistic. Ulmo is Raging Water, Varda is Starlight, but Earth and Altar and Land and Tower aren't really specified. If I were to revise it, I might replace every "God" with "Lord".

In any case, I won't go through and revise it or I'll probably remove its charm entirely. Verse two is taken from the hymn by G.K. Chesterton on which the whole is based. The rest is mine, all mine, and makes me wonder why the rest of my poetry is so appalling

Oh God of Land and Tower,
Spare now our hidden halls.
Forgive our quest for power,
And strengthen our stone walls.
Let not the sea devour us.
Save Nimloth's sapling seed.
Take not thy thunder from us,
But take away our greed.

Oh God of Earth and Altar,
Bow down and hear our cry.
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die.
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide.
Take not thy thunder from us,
But take away our pride.

Oh Queen of Heaven’s starlight,
Help not just elvenkind.
Your love can’t shine through our night,
To good and right we’re blind.
The quest for life consumes us
-In vain avoid our fate.
Take not thy mercy from us,
But take away our hate.

Oh God of Raging Water,
The elven-lands we claim.
The seas we seek to conquer,
The Western Lords we blame.
For those lands they forbade us,
Their rules we now distrust.
Take not thy thunder from us,
But take away our lust.

Oh Lords of Truth and Glory,
Protect us from the tomb.
Make not our lives a story
Wherein we come to doom.
Remove our Kings from error,
By peace and not the sword.
From our countries rising terror,
Deliver us, good Lords!

Spent half an hour this morning tweaking my Who-fic. Funny, considering how much I loathe fanfiction. I suppose it's easier with Doctor Who - as a 45year old TV show, it's been tampered with by hundreds of people. It makes your own vision of events, characters, scenes as valid as any of theirs - they just happen to be being paid. Far more valid than, say, in Lord of the Rings, where you are working within the vision of a single man. You are not welcome to contribute in quite the same way. Furthermore, its not a finished thing - it will continue to change and grow.

And I did write some LOTR fic, two poems and two short things which (vitally, for me) did not involve established characters, but filled in the gaps and corners. The first was basically a Denethor defence: a regular Minas Tirith soldier, who knows nothing of the ring, is reacting to the king's return - particularly, the news that they are about to do a suicide strike on Mordor. He has no idea it's a diversionary tactic to give Frodo a chance - he's simply bricking it. At the time, someone requested I write a sequel, and I had at least decided where that would be set: when Aragorn gives them a chance to go home. I had not yet decided whether or not he would take the option. The second is a perfect demonstration of what I mean about gaps and corners. The story of Aragorn and Arwen is always held up as a mirror of Beren and Luthien - but what it does not have is Daeron, the minstrel, who loves Luthien and loses her. So the second one was about the "Daeron" in the Arwen story.

Then I wrote a poem about the Ents, mostly because of this brilliant martial rhythm which occured to me one day. And my favourite of all, my Numenor hymn. Oh my! At my previous School and One True Love, we had hymn books, and one day I found a hymn by GK Chesterton and thought "Numenor!" So I wrote four more verses for the Faithful, and I remain in love with it. Best of all, the original hymn has music which needed very little adaption to be Middle Earth-y.

I'm still rather proud of them all, especially the poetry, but I think I'd need to give them a slight brush over to make them palatable to modern-me. I recall with some horror that When the King Returned and The Song of the Faithful can still be found on a certain elite LOTR fic archive. I strongly recommend you go find Song of the Faithful. I'd really rather you didn't look up the other one, because I daren't read it myself. I still defend my original position, but I think the delivery would cause me pain these days.

I did start on another Denethor one, about the palantir - the moment when Sauron won. It had a damn great punchline, but I just couldn't do it.


Well, that's my excuse in any case. I've five things bubbling away, so I do need a jolly good excuse.

>>Top of the pile is my "Master story". Every now and then, the show will have an episode featuring two or more Doctors at the same time. Why not do this with the Master? The simplest answer is the actors keep dying inconveniently, but there's no reason why I couldn't do it in graphic novel form. I've almost finished the script - the first three episodes are virtually done. Episode 4 is causing me trouble, because that's where all the contentious decisions are - I get a feeling my audience (well, Friends 3 and 4) might start objecting to some of my plot twists. I'm also holding back far, far too much. I loathe the amount of violence and angst in Doctor Who novels. Episode 4 needs to be tense, the stakes need to be high - it's the climax - but I'm totally unwilling to go there. An example of both, I've got a scene which basically decends into a fist fight - it works in my head, but it just looks damn weird on paper considering who's involved. Another example: I want the most recent Master to break time by talking about the Time War to a Doctor who's some 400 years before it. Contentious, and angsty. The work continues...

>>That one will probably be finished eventually. The other one which I definitely intend to complete is my Origin story one, to back up my hypothesis that the spare Doctor "10.2" Rose gets fobbed off with will ultimately come back as villainous J.J. Chambers from the 80s. I will finish this one, but the script is very very challenging. It's my fault, I know:

It has to sound like the Doctor, particularly 10. But my theory rests on the basis that 10.2 won't have a happy bliss with Rose, because she's not the Doctor so much as Donna. OK, so it's Ten+Donna. Well, the show managed to do both. I'm doing a fine job so far of expressing sheer identity crisis, because he has memories of two lives, two ways of doing things, two moral compasses which don't understand the other. Anything else I need to know? Yes - when the Doctor dumps him in the paralell universe, he correctly compared 10.2 to his Ninth Incarnation, and my theory argues that while Rose could aid the Doctor in this state, maybe his urge to kill stuff stems from his Donna-ness. I'm throwing in a little Third Doctor because he's stuck on planet Earth, but chief of all (among these things) it also needs to sound like it might evolve into JJ Chambers himself. A man who uses words like "adumbrate" and "ecstopic" in conversation. All this and still seeming like a complete being.

And finally, while I'm letting rip with the self-loathing monologue, it needs to not sound like Rorschach. Incredibly, this is actually the toughest bit.

I know, it's a damn impossible task, but getting that voice right is the key to making it convincing. I'm setting it out with a very regular design - it suits JJ best - and it means that whenever I come up with an idea I can actually draw it on a square of card. I'm sure I came up with this one just post-Watchmen, because of certain elements: the relationship between dialogue and image is Black-Freighter-esque, but it means that they don't necessarily need to be drawn in order. Ultimately I can just rearrange them.

>>The Timelords offer the Doctor the presidency, oooh, at least three times off the top of my head. Every time he refuses - well, except the Fifth Doctor. He does accept, but only as a cover to make a quick getaway. I've an AU bubbling away based on this: the TARDIS malfunctions at just the wrong moment, preventing him from leaving and forcing him to take on the job. It's one of my little fic-lets which shall never be finished, mostly because it would be horribly depressing.
After a few conversations with Friend 4, I've sketched out a broad arc for what would happen. The Doc would keep trying to escape, and being thwarted, and all the time getting sucked deeper and deeper into the role. Turlough would get involved in backhanded Gallifreyan politics, and would be safe as long as no one knew his true Trion origins. Tegan would be kept (purely to keep the President happy) but ultimately got rid of by the Celestial Intervention Agency when they think he's not looking. It's an all-power-corrupts story. I've drawn the first and last pages, and sketched out the odd panel, but basically wallowing in that much pessimism isn't how I want to spend my time. Shame, as it'd make for an interesting read. But ultimately, a soul-destroying one.

>>One I definitely won't finish is my "Short Trips" book. The premise is the Doctor has a house somewhere in England. A collection of some 20 short stories about the house, and the stuff that goes on there, scattered through time. It was based on a dream, but I don't have the persistance to complete it.

>> "Something with the Sixth Doctor", I decided, in a fit of love for Timelash. This is partly because I'm sick of writing for the Fifth Doctor. When deciding on my Master script, I narrowed it down to either the Fifth or Sixth for various Mastery reasons. Ultimately, it was the companions which decided it: it helped for the Doctor to have two companions instead of one, and that one of them was a scientist. And lots of other neat mirrorings have evolved since. I am rather good at it too, but I figure I could do an adequate Six. How near completion is this? Oh my...

Last night I dreamed about lots of things. I dreamed about massive sharks and crocodiles in Venice (probably something to do with reading Batman and Green Lantern before I went to bed: one involved Killer Croc, the other a huge mutated shark). I dreamed about being stranded on a spaceship when my own small craft went missing, and us all just drifting through space (and that is quite possibly a Galactica thing. Disappointingly, in the future, commercial space liners will look like a cross between a shopping mall and an airport duty free lounge). I dreamed about Doctors 5, 6 and 10, concurrent or consecutive, and water, and a city.

But I also dreamed about a hare. I was driving (I can drive, y'know, sort of. No license. But I get the principle), when I saw a hare obviously injured in the road in front of me. I stopped the car, to the irritation of the people following me, picked it up gently - it was in a very bad way - and left it on my lap as I drove away. Curiously, I drive badly in my dreams - uncertainly at least - just like I do in life. The thing could barely move, there was only the slightest flutter to register it was somehow still going. So I started driving to the nearest animal hospital (we've two on Guernsey), but as I drove the hare seemed to get better and better, and by the time we arrived it was happilly hopping around the car. I stopped outside the hospital, and let it out, and it ran off into the forest next door.

The fact it happened that way around is interesting in its own right, as traditional dream logic would suggest things getting increasingly worse for no reason. And the three words in my head when I awoke were: Osatara, Eostre and Easter. Obviously all from the same root, and it reminded me of my favourite Easter story. I've been doing a Wiki-unt, and haven't been able to determine if it's "real" myth or "fake" myth, but I've always been fond of it.

It all starts with the Germanic goddess Eostre, who's all about fertility, flowers and fluffy animals. One day she is walking (do goddesses walk? Glide? Survey?) through a field when she finds a little baby bird with broken wings. In true divine style, she doesn't do anything like y'know fix the wings - instead, she turns him into her patron animal, a spring hare, which goes happily hopping into the woodland. The only problem is - it still lays eggs! And that's the origin of the Easter Bunny.

Cute isn't it? Has anyone else heard this story? My dad is an author, so it's possible he made it up for us as kids. I wonder if there is some divine bureacracy, governing exactly how the gods can interfere in mortal life - perhaps actually mending the problem is forbidden, so Eostre has to think outside the box for a solution? It'd certainly rationalise some of the dafter outings in the Metamorphoses.

And all for saving (sort of) a dream rabbit which could heal itself, I've woken up in rather a good mood.