marmota_b

With the previous reflective post out of the way, here's what I originally wanted to write.

The upcoming chapter of We Can't Fall et cetera* is finally, finally beginning to look like it can be finished. Background: I need to introduce Boba into the story at this point. Specifically, I need to break up the string of Kil-centric chapters to focus on some of my other characters, and for Reasons it needs to be Boba. The trouble was, Boba's introductory chapter categorically refused to come to me in anything but very tiny pieces. It threw three characters I had not intended to include at me, and refused to reveal what the encounter with the one I did intend to include was like before the other three got their say.

They finally have, and the other meeting and the environment have finally begun to take shape.

Despite the difficulties, I really, really like the shape the chapter is taking now; I think it is much better for having revealed its form on its own terms instead of being forced into it. And so will the story be. The chapter needs to carry a lot of weight on its shoulders, what with Kil unexpectedly having gotten a lot more space than originally planned, and I think it did find a very good way to do that. I'll still be chiselling away at it so I cannot promise any posting date because Real Life is Real Life. But soonish.

Am really enjoying finding the right words to say things, too, which is a joy I had lost somewhere in the messiness of the past couple of years.

* 2020 Marmota, why did you give the story such a clumsy name? Probably because you did not realise it would grow EVEN MORE and become A THING.


Also, with more time to reflect on things again, I realised one of my significant stumbling blocks with Narnian fanfiction, both the Choruk'la'kajir universe and (especially) The Peridan Chronicles has been the inability to sandbox my worldbuilding and plots on a map and imagine realistic travel times et cetera. So I googled around, and found this post with a composite map, which I think is an excellent starting point for my own experiments. Pleasant surprise to be told the maps actually are to scale and do more or less match up with travel times mentioned in the books (except for the sea and islands). I had a hard time picturing it, and kept thinking it did not line up, probably because I did not have a clear-to-read map of the whole world at hand.

It's still not quite enough for my needs. I will have to make my own version of the map and place my own inventions on it, like Stormness Fast, to see how exactly they relate to the places we know and where exactly they fit on the map. There are areas where I need more detail than the symbolic features of a fantasy map - especially around Stormness, obviously.

Computers are helpful and open source / community-built free programs are one's best friends for this sort of thing. The author created that map by smushing the existing ones together in GIMP. I think I can easily continue by putting that map in Inkscape, adding a grid, and figuring out the scale of things in specific places, without ever having to go to the trouble of drawing and undoubtedly erasing things by hand. Do something about the questionable location of the islands as mentioned in the post. Probably create a sort of gridded flat blank without the fancy fantasy map details that I can print out and play with further by hand-doodling. I will share it for anyone else's worldbuilding purposes when I do, of course. :-)

 "The Russian system was purposefully designed to be unstable and so that Putin will in the end make all the decisions, and pit everyone against one another. It has kept him in power." (Mark Galeotti in an interview for the Czech news website Aktuálně, referring to the current scrabbling for power inside Russia)

Well well well. If that doesn't sound like Palpatine's strategy and the Empire.
It does leave one wondering what will happen in the inevitable future event of Putin's death.

(Please do not discuss, except as Star Wars meta.)

There's someone on YouTube doing an animated series of the Thrawn trilogy.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DarthAngelus/videos
Sure, it's more like old videogames animation quality but... it looks good nonetheless. I know what I'll be watching over the holidays. :D

I ought to be working on the main story of the AU. I ought to be describing Kir Kanos' experiences in Lord Peridan's household; instead, I ended up writing Boba Fett much further in the story.

I want to write about Kil's training with Corran and Myrtle's training with Kil (I headcanon that Kil is an extremely supportive and warm teacher very generous with praise because he wants to be everything his own Imperial trainers were not).
I want to write about Wedge and Sabine and Hera (I love old EU Wedge but I also love Sabine and Hera and I badly want the EU Wedge to have those early relationships in the Rebellion).
I want to write about Mara in Narnia but have no idea where to even start. Maybe I should put Mara in Calormen and team her up with Lasaraleen instead, somehow that's more promising. Yes, I think basically I want Mara to kick Rabadash's ass, pun not intended but welcome.
I want to write about Myrtle on Endor and Tionne in Narnia. I think somewhere in there I had a brilliant idea about Endor. But I managed to misplace it.

Noooo, instead I keep getting all these ideas about Boba Fett and the Mandalorians and reconciling the canons.

To date, I have the beginnings of:

• the story of Boba Fett's involvement with the Jouneyman Protectors of Concord Dawn and his somewhat rocky mentor-mentee relationship with Fenn Rau
• the story of what Boba Fett did immediately after Narnia and his first (official) meeting with Fenn Shysa (official because just now it occurs to me he held him and Tobbi Dala in high regard before so maybe he'd met them before, maybe during their young days when he was on Concord Dawn?)
• the story of how Boba Fett accidentally recruited the son of a noble family of Kuat for the Stone Table Project and the Mando'ade (well, that one hasn't progressed much beyond the idea but I got the idea and the poor sod already has a name)
• the humorous fluff story of how Boba Fett and Sabine Wren watched a Mandalorian classic with the Wraiths, with running commentary from the latter of course
• the story of how Boba Fett became Mand'alor, which will also feature the story of how his illustrious ancestor Cassus joined the Mando'ade (and, uh, the story of how Fenn Shysa died, not looking forward to that)
• the story of how Boba Fett had it out with Lord Aran of Sundari concerning the New Mandalorian humanocentrism, and how they came to an understanding (that's the latest development)
• the story of how Boba Fett adopted another child (because, you may recall, I hinted in Te Choruk'la'kajir Aka that he adopted more than just Prill...)
• the story(ies?) of Boba Fett in Spare Oom and Oxford which are branching out into its own grand crossover sub-AU as they merge with an old fanfiction idea of mine. Because while pondering Boba's affinity with libraries, I greatly amused myself by the phrase "It wasn't me who let Boba loose in the Bodley!" so now that has to happen. Oh, and Polly never married and is Miss Plummer because she's an academic teacher at the time when female academians were not allowed to marry, and she teaches at Shrewsbury College, duh. So now that also has to happen.

Also, I just burnt some milk on the stove while putting all this down so I'm not lying when I say the shabuir is taking over my life.

I still haven't gotten around to reading all the stories, alas. Plus I'm not going to read all the smut and shippy stuff, which appears to have been in particular demand this year... Not really what I want from Narnia, myself - I don't mind the occasional ship (I'd be a hypocrite because I harbour a cracktastic crossover ship for Susan myself) but, well, for one thing I'm not into interfering with canonical pairings. *shrug*

BUT my gift is everything I wanted plus things I did not know I wanted and... I may have said that before, I've lost track, I love the dialogue, I love the worldbuilding and character interaction, I'm still incapable of coherent comment on that front, Liz wrote Sallowpad for me, Liz wrote Beasts for me, there's a DONKEY. *squee*
(I did not know I wanted a Donkey in this particular prompt. I absolutely wanted a Donkey.)

How Sallowpad came to travel in the lands south of Narnia.

I had to! I had to write something special for Syrena who wrote an absolutely breathtaking story for me last year! (Pretty much literally, as I remember the feeling of reading it.)
And we happen to share love for the X-Wing books, so that had to happen... Things turned out differently from what I intended along the way, the story majorly got away from me, and I ended up with a whole new AU and series on my hands, and the story I ended up publishing has less Narnia and less X-Wing influences in it than the story that did not get published.

It did not hurt that among the things Syrena asked for were languages and things lost in translation which, hey, if you want to get me going that's pretty much 100% guaranteed to succeed... Somewhere along the way of reading up on Mandalorians and reading Mandalorian fics on AO3, I had come to the conclusion that, not having English as my first language and having learned (at least the basics of) several different languages including non-Indo-European ones, I understood how Mando'a could not be approached just from an English-centric dictionary-based point of view much better than a lot of the authors who were peppering their stories with it, so... Mando'a had to happen.
(I mean, Mandalorians call their mates / pals "kids", WHICH IS WHAT MORAVIANS DO! How could I not fall in love with this stub of a conlang then?!)

I can't remember how exactly all the strands of the AU happened to come together; the majority of it actually happened in the scope of a single day and the rest followed that same week after the prompts were sent out! Syrena's prompts and wishes were that perfect for me. The original idea for the crossover, I do remember, was Kir Kanos getting stranded in Narnia after his last canonical (EU) appearance, as a pretext to get the other characters there, and because I have a thing for morally grey characters being dragged further into the Light - more on that in the original story later, of course. And I wanted to include my idea about a Calormene Underground Railroad, which slotted itself into Syrena's suggestion about Aravis and mobile libraries, and her wish for spycraft. And somewhere in there in my Wookieepedia browsings I came across the fact that Boba Fett liked reading books as a child. So bookish Boba Fett had to happen.

Myrtle walked in in the process of welcoming Kanos into Narnia and its cultural idiosyncracies, and then she decided to call Boba Uncle Boba because Boba does deserve to be flustered like that, and the whole Mandalorian family angle happened without my looking for it (but slotting beautifully into another of Syrena's likes). It's not entirely an accident that she's a Mole; while I've never seen a live mole as far as I can remember... it's definitely an archetypal childhood Beast for me, for more than one reason. (That particular reason, though, is totally responsible for Flaxie's name. ;-) )

And then, yes, the whole thing got away from me and I ended up with a whole AU on my hands.

Prill started out as something of a throwaway crack idea when the Wikipedic Effect landed me at the Wookieepedia entry for hoojibs. The crack idea of a cute furry creature that's basically a Star Wars bunny being a Mandalorian because a Mandalorian adopted them and that's how Mandalorian culture works. And because, yeah, I do love giving layers to characters / concepts from canon that tend to appeal to the wannabe macho, so yeah, Boba Fett's son is a bunny, yeah, there's a bunny Mandalorian. :D

Also Mole + Bunny continuing the Project and being holy terrors on slavers, yesss!

So it was, at first, just a throwaway line in the academic text part of the story, but then Prill got angry at me for making just a joke of him, and Tyria demanded a section in her own voice, and that part of the story happened.

Also, to my utter delight, Mando'a is far from a complete language but you can actually translate Stone Table into it. And they really do appear to have some connotations of equality / meeting at equal terms to tables, which nicely met in the middle with some worldbuilding ideas of mine for Narnia and The Order of the Table... once again, more on that later, hopefully.

Plus, yeah, I share Kil's conviction that Fenn Shysa would fit into Narnia.