The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2007-04-19 07:41 am
thewhitelily) wrote2007-04-19 07:41 am
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Orion Awards Results
So, the post you’ve all been waiting for, and the one which Lily’s procrastination of actually starting writing last night has finally made possible: the results for the Orion Awards!
Congratulations to all the the nominees, all the shortlisters, of course to all the winners, and congratulations and thanks to all the judges for having got through a marathon of critique, debates, arguments, and flat out duels to the death. I hope to see you all back again next year. :)
I feel proud and honoured that my fics have done so amazingly well - particularly against some of the competition. I’ve shortlisted fourteen times across four fics, and won four awards across two fics. (NB: None of these stories, with the possible exception of Axiom, will make sense to anyone who has not read Artemis Fowl.)
Lunar Fallacy shortlisted for Best Drabble (under 500 words)
Watching shortlisted for Best Angst, Best Slash Romance, Best Short, and Best/Most Memorable Line (Artemis died young, died suddenly. Geniuses* never live long lives, criminal ones with powerful enemies even less so.)
On Becoming an Axiom shortlisted for Best Overall Characterisation and Best Overall – and won Best Heterosexual Romance and Best Drabble
The Mother of Invention shortlisted for Best Angst, [spoiler removed], and Best Concept/Idea – and won Best Short and Best Overall
Words really can’t express my delight and pride, so I’ll simply say… squeeeeee!
It's not really a surprise – as Judge Coordinator, I have access to see what the judges are saying about my fics, I have warning. The joy of slowly realising something is going to win a category is spread out, and the frustration that a fic is not doing well is spread over a longer time. But while I can eagerly read the criticism, praise, and/or general luke-warm reactions the other judges dole out for my fics, I can’t say anything about it.
If another judge misunderstands a point – or the entire fic – or comes at things from an angle that casts it in a totally different light, we're not allowed to say anything to help keep things unbiassed and at a distance. It's not that I want to shake the person and say they should see it the way I meant it – I should be judged on what I wrote, not what I meant to write – it's just that I want to talk about my fic! I want to sit with the judges across a bottle of red and talk about this line and that line and that plot point and where they got that idea from and where they think I could have trimmed or extended to deal with the misunderstanding or problems they had with it. I love criticism. It's honestly the most amazing thing to receive, because it shows that the reader has really read my story, and thought about it. Someone's showing that kind of attentive deconstruction to my story. Wow.
So, after being gagged for three months while I watched people discuss my stories, I’ve built up a little bit of a head of steam to let off. Now the moment has arrived. Here we are, at last: the results are out, and finally I can speak without either influencing the outcome or being seen to do so. So I’m going to take advantage of the opportunity to rave about them at length, starting with The Mother of Invention. (I was going to do both at once, but… I’ve been stuffing around with the notes for Axiom for almost a month now, because it’s such a personal piece that I keep changing my mind about what to say and where it crosses the line into Too Much Information. :) I’ll probably post them… some time.)
Please don't read on if you haven't read The Mother of Invention - it really will spoil it for you. And you really can’t read MOI without having read Artemis Fowl, because it won't make the least amount of sense without that background. Neither will the authors notes.
Yes, sister dearest, I do mean you, and I know you're tempted, but please go away. :)
The Mother of Invention - winner of Best Short Fic and Best Overall
What can I say? His Son's Father may have ruled my life for two months, but The Mother of Invention owned my soul for six. It would not be exaggerating to say that I spent upwards of four hundred hours working on this fic – which would be averaging less than ten words an hour. Given the number of times I’d looked at each and every word by the time I was finished, that sounds about right.
But first of all, I’d like to make a special apology and thanks to my three (3!) beta readers for this fic, whose thank you note was sadly mislaid in a last minute edit to the story. They took a rough, confusing, and absurdly long sentence filled draft and poked it until it managed to turn it into something I could be truly proud of. I cannot thank them enough. Dim Aldebaran, Kitty Rainbow, and Blue Yeti… thank you. *offers cloned chocolate truffles*
I should also probablythank the Academy acknowledge those elements that came together to inspire me for MOI: Blue Yeti’s Nebula Nostrum, of course, Michi Chu’s in the closet, a mirror!Hermione cookie I read for The Mirror of Maybe that I’ve never found again, and I suppose also Fight Club. (I was horrified, when I went back to reread them all to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently plagiarised anything, to realise that the first two use a similar person, although I’ve never seen anything that uses person in quite the same way MOI did.) The specific inspiration came, however, from the same thread on Criminality that inspired Nebula Nostrum – where Yeti’s noticing the potential of Opal’s line, “Am I really that beautiful?” from the first chapter of TOD, followed by Whistly wondering what the heck they were going to do with the clone after TOD.
I was inspired. There were only three disjointed sentences of wondering, before I got a flash and I was up and running. The conclusion was written first – the last five paragraphs are practically the only words which have survived unaltered for the entire fic. They’re embellished some, but only one or two words I wrote in that first half hour ended up being cut from the final product. By the time I’d come to the line that’s still my favourite – reality is in the mind of the beholder – I knew I’d uncovered the guts of something wonderful. Half an hour later, I was reading a primitive version of the ending out to Hubby, who pronounced it “awesome”, and then I stayed up all night writing.
I had a first draft written within twenty-four hours. When I read back over it, apart from the polishing and the grammatical spasms inherent in writing in an unfamiliar tense and person and the fact that it’s only half as long as the final product, it’s almost exactly what I ended up with. It’s strange to read, though, because for whole sections that first draft goes on with only the first few words of each sentence – I was really flying writing this thing, and I didn’t remotely have time to finish each thought before I moved onto the next one.
There are three things in the final version of MOI that make me particularly proud: the delusional relationship, the identity fraud, and the mechanics. Obviously the three are tightly interrelated, so there’ll be some crossover – but I think I can talk about them separately.
The Delusion/Relationship:
Opal/Opal clonecest is – if not an entirely unique idea – then at least one that hasn’t been done to death. But the really fascinating thing to explore as far as I was concerned was the mental illness – the combination of narcissism and dissociative identity disorder leading to delusions that the comatose clone housed her true self – meaning that an totally selfish character could, in effect, devote herself entirely to selfless love of… herself. Yeah, that’s an idea that was always going to be a lot of fun to play with. :) Originally the clone was going to be fully animated the whole time and the twist was going to be that the clone hadn’t actually developed consciousness and her animation through the entire fic was a delusion – but that idea soon got overtaken by the identity fraud. In my first version, I tried to keep both twists, but that just ended up far too confusing and I decided to make it fairly clear from the start that clone!Opal was comatose, and use her apparent awakening as the cue for how very insane real!Opal had become.
“I”, of course, never actually makes a direct observation of her surroundings – she only narrates what “you” perceives – which is the big stylistic hint that things are not exactly as they seem. It adds another layer of complexity to the lovely paradox about which part of Opal houses her true identity. By the end, “you” is practically a mindless thrall, all the qualities she admires about herself gone and only her obsessive emotions towards “I” remaining – while the disassociated identity “I” embodies all those qualities in their purest form, remaining a perfectly beautiful, well-groomed, rational, and stoic idol, untouched by circumstances. Fairly straightforward, until we add in the contradiction that by far the most used pronoun is “you”, because she can’t completely disassociate – she still perceives things through real!Opal’s body. She still has to use her own eyes, but she’s separated her sense of “self” into another being that can dispassionately observe the horror of her existence as it unfolds. This makes the use of “I” for the inanimate self and “you” for the animate self particularly appropriate, implying that although Opal looks at clone!Opal through real!Opal’s eyes, what she thinks she sees is real!Opal from the perspective of the clone – exactly as though she were looking into a mirror.
The idea that it wasn’t an all-consuming delusion, either, was something I very much liked. From the beginning, there’s a rough parabola shape to the fic as Opal struggles and fights against her circumstances, plateaus, and then descends as she slowly gives up and gives in. “I” appears gradually (even in her first appearance, she’s hidden half-way through a sentence as an afterthought) and starts becoming more and more real to “you”, embodying more and more of the qualities Opal admires in herself. She’s very consistent with keeping the two personalities separated in the narrative point of view, but then right at the end, as she’s struggling with delusion/reality, she fights to pull some of what she’s lost to “I” back into “you”. When she’s in her own “rational” mind, she sees that clone!Opal isn’t worthy of her time; when she’s in clone!Opal’s mind she worships her real self but, since she can’t see herself, she expresses it to the clone and believes she experiences it as the one being worshipped. The delusion, as such, is consistent and relatively straightforward even when it does switch around.
That said, I like to believe that Opal was still mostly sane, all the way through the fic and even at the end – at least the clone!Opal part of her was – but also pragmatic enough to realise there was no point in trying to hold onto her sanity if her mind was kind enough to provide her with another way of processing things. There’s something all the more deliciously horrifying about the idea of knowing something is a delusion but deliberately letting yourself fall under its influence because it’s better than the alternative.
Man, I love this fic.
The Great Identity Swindle:
I had exactly sixty-four words written when I had the flash that carries the whole fic: that of Opal cleaning clone!Opal’s face, revealing a thin strip of clean white under black. I started in on a sentence describing clone!Opal, and kept coming up with words that described Artemis, too. I frowned and didn’t identify the narrator. Two paragraphs full of half-finished sentences later, I still wasn’t sure who I was writing about, and I knew I was onto something.
Of course, it was harder than that to write a piece that could be so totally read in two ways. I worked off a table I’d made of Artemis and Opal’s similarities and differences – which became my reference point for the whole fic. The biggest false clue, of course, was that they would both be taller than the average fairy and still growing – Artemis, because of his age, Opal, because of theplot hole pituitary gland she’d had implanted in her brain. This became the centre point of the deception, right at the beginning to get the reader making assumptions before they’d even realised there were doubts. From that point on, it reads almost entirely as an Opal piece, with little that particularly distinguishes her from Artemis, but with nothing really Artemis about it at all. But since at that stage the reader’s minds are already set, they’ll twist most subtly wrong things into shape to read as Artemis.
The most fun part was taking the opinions that particularly identified Opal – about Foaly, Holly, Root, her parents, etc – and hiding them inside words and phrasing that seemed only slightly wrong for a bitter, much changed Artemis to say. I also very much enjoyed describing the events of The Opal Deception from the inside in a way that wouldn’t necessarily identify them as such. For the second-time reader, there’s a great deal of winking and nudging going on, which is all a part of a good twist fic as far as I’m concerned.
One thing that did make it easier is that with an imaginary (or at least comatose) narrator, I couldn’t have properly described real!Opal clearly even if I’d wanted to. Real!Opal can’t see her own face, doesn’t want to look at herself, and doesn’t want to think about her own mental state any more than she absolutely has to. This means I could very easily keep the camera looking out from real!Opal’s eyes, on her surroundings and on clone!Opal.
I had three betas for the fic. All were beautiful, wonderful angels I couldn’t have done without – particularly since I never would have made the twist work without all three. The first version, my beta didn’t even work out when we got to the end that it had all been Opal all along. (I added in a whole lot more foreshadowing and performed a great deal of polishing.) The second version, the beta knew that it was Opal right from the beginning. (I left all the foreshadowing, but concealed it better and performed a great deal of polishing.) The third… read right through, pointing out practically every bit of foreshadowing as a “mistake” I’d have to fix, told me off for using the fabulous clonecest line (“Am I really that beautiful?”) out of context, hit the ending and got so excited that I ended up with virtual double scoop ice-cream all over me. (It was Yeti. Don’t ask. But I fine tuned the foreshadowing a bit more, and then kept polishing like some kind of obsessive maniac.)
With all of that said… it’s really not the identity swindle that gets me about this piece. It’s a bit of a cool added extra, a little commentary on the fine line all our beloved geniuses* walk. It was fun, and it added another level of depth to the rest of the fic which forced me to leave so much of it wonderfully overelaborate and under-elaborated, but I had lost my heart to narcissistic!Opal long before the identity fraud was a twinkle in its author’s eye. I don’t think about Artemis at all when I’m rereading – it’s always Opal, all the way through – and I had to really force myself to think about reading it with Artemis in mind to smooth out that aspect of it.
Of course, after four months of playing around with the story, then it was time to finally nut out the mechanics.
Mechanics:
Writing from clone!Opal’s point of view was the only thing that would work in my mind, right from the beginning. All the reasons I have above for doing it that way are the results of long arguments with myself (in the mirror, of course – I don’t have a convenient comatose clone), trying to convince myself to stop being so ridiculous and write something more readable (and writable). As a person who already has a tendency to create monster sentences at the drop of a hat, it was an extra sentence complicator I didn’t want to have to deal with.
I tried it the other way around, and I tried it with first person and third person both ways. But it just wasn’t the same without the convolution of making all clone!Opal’s narrations loop through what real!Opal saw or thought. It decreased the feeling of creepy immediacy, of being somehow between the two “her”s that later turned out to have no distance between them at all, and I loved that feeling. Besides, having a real, story-related reason for an omniscient first person narrator wasn’t an opportunity I wanted to pass up. So I soldiered on.
The entire tense issue was complex to start with, but it was further complicated by the fact that I couldn’t decide whether to consistently write in present or past tense. Present was the correct choice for the fic, but I’d never done it before and in such an ambitious piece, I didn’t want to overreach myself. Of course, I ended up shooting myself in the foot with my indecision – by the time it was finished, the tenses weren’t even mostly right, because I couldn’t make up my mind and had written it half in one, half in the other – often randomly switching back and forth in the middle of sentences.
So, after finally making a decision and a month of randomly trying to convert it all over, I eventually had to print it out and go through the entire fic with a pencil, underlining every single verb, asking it what tense it was in – and what tense it should be. And then read it aloud, and read it aloud, and read it aloud, and…
I spent months obsessing over the mechanics of this fic. I should have kept my pencil-scribbled pages as a memento, but I must admit I merrily threw them out when I decided that I had to draw a line somewhere, or I was only going to keep changing the same things back and forth between two equally valid or equally invalid options forever.
The question of what tense it should have been was rather more complex than I’d imagined, given the integrated feel I wanted for my flashbacks. In that sense, present tense makes things much more complicated – it doesn’t take away any valid tenses, so I had four possible present tenses and eight past and future tenses happening in flashbacks. Cross all these possibilities with the various moods, voices, conditionals, first and second person omniscient, and Lily’s trademarklong complex sentences, and you’ve got something so complicated that it would drive the mildest flower to SCREAMING.
For example, let’s start with one from before the person starts getting complicated: when a character is presently making retrospective judgements about an event that might have been (but isn't) happening in the past-present-future, with reference to having experienced it at a point in the previous past, and what they had judged it at the slightly more recent point in the past where it had seemed possible it was going to start happening, but didn't... does anyone even care what tense it's in?
Well, actually, yes, I do. Because I’m just that obsessive. And insane enough to research and agonise over a single sentence for days. In a fic where there were hundreds of similarly complex sentences – some very much worse.
For those who are interested, I finally decided that while it should probably be a past counterfactual conditional (if he had spoken [past perfect] then it would have helped [present perfect]), it flowed better as a mixture of this and present counterfactual conditional (if he spoke [simple past] then it would help [present simple]). (Although I shall await correction on this subject by those who Actually Know Stuff.) Since you’re allowed to drop out of perfect in the middle of an integrated flashback to avoid the inherent clumsiness, I decided to go for the flow. The section in question is: “… [your hands] had been torn to shreds in your one stint of physical labour. At the time of your sentencing you had thought it would be [or would have been] second only to the death penalty as a punishment, but at least it would have relieved the relentless monotony.” Thus, it starts in perfect to signal a flashback, goes to simple in the middle, and then heads back into perfect again to signal the end of the flashback at the end of the sentence. I still wonder about whether I should make it “you thought it would be” to eliminate the perfect/simple conflict so close together and conduct the tense switch more consistently – but that sounds wrong to my ears, and then I have to factor in that possibly it really should be in a progressive tense, since if it had happened it would still be happening at the current time and fundamentally STOP IT LILY.
On the plus side, I now have a whole lot of knowledge and experience with tenses that I never got in my school’s stupid “drop ‘em and run” English program. I really am glad I persevered with it – apart from the finished product, it was a brilliant learning experience that means that I haven’t needed to look up the proper tense for something ever since.
Wow, I still love this fic. I really do. I reread and reread, and it never gets old.
The flash is just as strong as the first moment I saw it. I still see that one, vivid image of the strip of perfect white skin appearing in the flickering burnt-orange light. I still feel the soft give of the clone’s perfect cheek against the scrap of course-woven prison uniform, rough and tacky with moisture and grime in my fingers. I still feel the jolt of making an unbelievably longed-for connection to another human being that becomes so much more than it ever should be because it’s the only thing left in the world. I still feel the inevitable, accelerating pull from that point of first contact down into true insanity.
I still feel the vivid, sinking feeling in my gut as I read through. I still feel like I’m weightlessly, helplessly dragged along with Opal in that slow parabola down to the magma lake as I read my equal favourite line: it feels like flying, it feels like floating, it feels like falling. I still feel the churning flip-flop of my stomach as I read the revelation point of the narrator’s unreality – which, to the first-time reader, is the revelation point that we’re really talking about Opal – but to me is still that first conception of willing mental illness. I still feel the bittersweet, necessity-driven self-delusion of Opal’s decision that reality is in the mind of the beholder – that if cogito ergo sum, then a true genius can be and have anything she wants if she only believes and that nothing but her own irrational attachment to a world no more real than she lets it be is holding her back.
I love this fic. Over a year since it was finished, and I’m still in love with this fic. So thank you, Orions; thank you, judges; particularly thank you, betas.
Finally: my sincere commiserations to Yeti over Aquarium, set among the congratulations for it having taken the awards for Best Drama and the Best Relationship PC. I still think should at least have tied for Overall, because wow that fic is awesome and fundamentally who cares if Holly’s a plot device, Artemis is an adulterous shite, and no one has any clue what they see in each other? It was the flawless, seamless, casual expansion of the underground universe – set as though without care beneath a shimmeringly heartbreaking plot that made Aquarium the shiny, fishy, magnificence that it was. Aquarium didn’t need to shift the camera off Trouble at any point, because, for the purposes of the story, nothing else mattered. To Trouble, Holly was just a possession, just a plot device. If she’d been more than that to him, he probably would have held on to her. It might have worked to have shown more of Holly and her relationship with Artemis, through Trouble’s skewed perspective, giving the reader room for interpretation of what they felt about what was happening - but it could also have lessened the fic from what it really was and I didn’t miss that absence at all.
Aquarium is the only fic that I ever reread and reread and find as heartwrenchingly immersive as something I’ve written myself. And given how strongly I feel the connection to my own fics, that’s really saying something. :) Yes, perhaps I’m biased, but I’m serious when I say this would have been one fic that I would not have been remotely disappointed to lose to.
Rereading all I’ve written about MOI, makes me rather amused at myself. I hated high school English, because I hated pulling apart a book and “ruining” it by trying to find connections that I was sure the author couldn’t have meant to put in there. Give me story, I said, or give me boredom. Now I say give me both, and I’ll take ‘em and run with ‘em. Give me themes, give me parallels, give me images… and give me a story to put over the top so I don’t need my readers to notice them on a conscious level to enjoy the story.
And hey, if I can have some clonecest on top of that, I’m happy. :)
* Yes, contrary to Artemis’s assertion in the last book, the plural of genius is geniuses. The “genius” that pluralises to “genii” refers to a guardian/influential spirit, not a person of exceptional mental capacity. Please, Colfer, learn to use a dictionary.And Orion Awards Judges… you take his word over mine? I’m crushed! :P (But all hail But Why?'s "You must have been good, for half a tonne of gold..." for being twice as good as the rest of the nominees combined. :D) Seriously, though, of the three dictionaries I use, one said geniuses full stop, one said geniuses for Fowls and genii for spirits, and one mentioned both but didn’t specify which for which and then went on to produce examples that happened to use geniuses for Fowls and genii for spirits. I'm counting this in the "canon that, apart from being canon, is total crap" pile.
Congratulations to all the the nominees, all the shortlisters, of course to all the winners, and congratulations and thanks to all the judges for having got through a marathon of critique, debates, arguments, and flat out duels to the death. I hope to see you all back again next year. :)
I feel proud and honoured that my fics have done so amazingly well - particularly against some of the competition. I’ve shortlisted fourteen times across four fics, and won four awards across two fics. (NB: None of these stories, with the possible exception of Axiom, will make sense to anyone who has not read Artemis Fowl.)
Lunar Fallacy shortlisted for Best Drabble (under 500 words)
Watching shortlisted for Best Angst, Best Slash Romance, Best Short, and Best/Most Memorable Line (Artemis died young, died suddenly. Geniuses* never live long lives, criminal ones with powerful enemies even less so.)
On Becoming an Axiom shortlisted for Best Overall Characterisation and Best Overall – and won Best Heterosexual Romance and Best Drabble
The Mother of Invention shortlisted for Best Angst, [spoiler removed], and Best Concept/Idea – and won Best Short and Best Overall
Words really can’t express my delight and pride, so I’ll simply say… squeeeeee!
It's not really a surprise – as Judge Coordinator, I have access to see what the judges are saying about my fics, I have warning. The joy of slowly realising something is going to win a category is spread out, and the frustration that a fic is not doing well is spread over a longer time. But while I can eagerly read the criticism, praise, and/or general luke-warm reactions the other judges dole out for my fics, I can’t say anything about it.
If another judge misunderstands a point – or the entire fic – or comes at things from an angle that casts it in a totally different light, we're not allowed to say anything to help keep things unbiassed and at a distance. It's not that I want to shake the person and say they should see it the way I meant it – I should be judged on what I wrote, not what I meant to write – it's just that I want to talk about my fic! I want to sit with the judges across a bottle of red and talk about this line and that line and that plot point and where they got that idea from and where they think I could have trimmed or extended to deal with the misunderstanding or problems they had with it. I love criticism. It's honestly the most amazing thing to receive, because it shows that the reader has really read my story, and thought about it. Someone's showing that kind of attentive deconstruction to my story. Wow.
So, after being gagged for three months while I watched people discuss my stories, I’ve built up a little bit of a head of steam to let off. Now the moment has arrived. Here we are, at last: the results are out, and finally I can speak without either influencing the outcome or being seen to do so. So I’m going to take advantage of the opportunity to rave about them at length, starting with The Mother of Invention. (I was going to do both at once, but… I’ve been stuffing around with the notes for Axiom for almost a month now, because it’s such a personal piece that I keep changing my mind about what to say and where it crosses the line into Too Much Information. :) I’ll probably post them… some time.)
Please don't read on if you haven't read The Mother of Invention - it really will spoil it for you. And you really can’t read MOI without having read Artemis Fowl, because it won't make the least amount of sense without that background. Neither will the authors notes.
Yes, sister dearest, I do mean you, and I know you're tempted, but please go away. :)
The Mother of Invention - winner of Best Short Fic and Best Overall
What can I say? His Son's Father may have ruled my life for two months, but The Mother of Invention owned my soul for six. It would not be exaggerating to say that I spent upwards of four hundred hours working on this fic – which would be averaging less than ten words an hour. Given the number of times I’d looked at each and every word by the time I was finished, that sounds about right.
But first of all, I’d like to make a special apology and thanks to my three (3!) beta readers for this fic, whose thank you note was sadly mislaid in a last minute edit to the story. They took a rough, confusing, and absurdly long sentence filled draft and poked it until it managed to turn it into something I could be truly proud of. I cannot thank them enough. Dim Aldebaran, Kitty Rainbow, and Blue Yeti… thank you. *offers cloned chocolate truffles*
I should also probably
I was inspired. There were only three disjointed sentences of wondering, before I got a flash and I was up and running. The conclusion was written first – the last five paragraphs are practically the only words which have survived unaltered for the entire fic. They’re embellished some, but only one or two words I wrote in that first half hour ended up being cut from the final product. By the time I’d come to the line that’s still my favourite – reality is in the mind of the beholder – I knew I’d uncovered the guts of something wonderful. Half an hour later, I was reading a primitive version of the ending out to Hubby, who pronounced it “awesome”, and then I stayed up all night writing.
I had a first draft written within twenty-four hours. When I read back over it, apart from the polishing and the grammatical spasms inherent in writing in an unfamiliar tense and person and the fact that it’s only half as long as the final product, it’s almost exactly what I ended up with. It’s strange to read, though, because for whole sections that first draft goes on with only the first few words of each sentence – I was really flying writing this thing, and I didn’t remotely have time to finish each thought before I moved onto the next one.
There are three things in the final version of MOI that make me particularly proud: the delusional relationship, the identity fraud, and the mechanics. Obviously the three are tightly interrelated, so there’ll be some crossover – but I think I can talk about them separately.
The Delusion/Relationship:
Opal/Opal clonecest is – if not an entirely unique idea – then at least one that hasn’t been done to death. But the really fascinating thing to explore as far as I was concerned was the mental illness – the combination of narcissism and dissociative identity disorder leading to delusions that the comatose clone housed her true self – meaning that an totally selfish character could, in effect, devote herself entirely to selfless love of… herself. Yeah, that’s an idea that was always going to be a lot of fun to play with. :) Originally the clone was going to be fully animated the whole time and the twist was going to be that the clone hadn’t actually developed consciousness and her animation through the entire fic was a delusion – but that idea soon got overtaken by the identity fraud. In my first version, I tried to keep both twists, but that just ended up far too confusing and I decided to make it fairly clear from the start that clone!Opal was comatose, and use her apparent awakening as the cue for how very insane real!Opal had become.
“I”, of course, never actually makes a direct observation of her surroundings – she only narrates what “you” perceives – which is the big stylistic hint that things are not exactly as they seem. It adds another layer of complexity to the lovely paradox about which part of Opal houses her true identity. By the end, “you” is practically a mindless thrall, all the qualities she admires about herself gone and only her obsessive emotions towards “I” remaining – while the disassociated identity “I” embodies all those qualities in their purest form, remaining a perfectly beautiful, well-groomed, rational, and stoic idol, untouched by circumstances. Fairly straightforward, until we add in the contradiction that by far the most used pronoun is “you”, because she can’t completely disassociate – she still perceives things through real!Opal’s body. She still has to use her own eyes, but she’s separated her sense of “self” into another being that can dispassionately observe the horror of her existence as it unfolds. This makes the use of “I” for the inanimate self and “you” for the animate self particularly appropriate, implying that although Opal looks at clone!Opal through real!Opal’s eyes, what she thinks she sees is real!Opal from the perspective of the clone – exactly as though she were looking into a mirror.
The idea that it wasn’t an all-consuming delusion, either, was something I very much liked. From the beginning, there’s a rough parabola shape to the fic as Opal struggles and fights against her circumstances, plateaus, and then descends as she slowly gives up and gives in. “I” appears gradually (even in her first appearance, she’s hidden half-way through a sentence as an afterthought) and starts becoming more and more real to “you”, embodying more and more of the qualities Opal admires in herself. She’s very consistent with keeping the two personalities separated in the narrative point of view, but then right at the end, as she’s struggling with delusion/reality, she fights to pull some of what she’s lost to “I” back into “you”. When she’s in her own “rational” mind, she sees that clone!Opal isn’t worthy of her time; when she’s in clone!Opal’s mind she worships her real self but, since she can’t see herself, she expresses it to the clone and believes she experiences it as the one being worshipped. The delusion, as such, is consistent and relatively straightforward even when it does switch around.
That said, I like to believe that Opal was still mostly sane, all the way through the fic and even at the end – at least the clone!Opal part of her was – but also pragmatic enough to realise there was no point in trying to hold onto her sanity if her mind was kind enough to provide her with another way of processing things. There’s something all the more deliciously horrifying about the idea of knowing something is a delusion but deliberately letting yourself fall under its influence because it’s better than the alternative.
Man, I love this fic.
The Great Identity Swindle:
I had exactly sixty-four words written when I had the flash that carries the whole fic: that of Opal cleaning clone!Opal’s face, revealing a thin strip of clean white under black. I started in on a sentence describing clone!Opal, and kept coming up with words that described Artemis, too. I frowned and didn’t identify the narrator. Two paragraphs full of half-finished sentences later, I still wasn’t sure who I was writing about, and I knew I was onto something.
Of course, it was harder than that to write a piece that could be so totally read in two ways. I worked off a table I’d made of Artemis and Opal’s similarities and differences – which became my reference point for the whole fic. The biggest false clue, of course, was that they would both be taller than the average fairy and still growing – Artemis, because of his age, Opal, because of the
The most fun part was taking the opinions that particularly identified Opal – about Foaly, Holly, Root, her parents, etc – and hiding them inside words and phrasing that seemed only slightly wrong for a bitter, much changed Artemis to say. I also very much enjoyed describing the events of The Opal Deception from the inside in a way that wouldn’t necessarily identify them as such. For the second-time reader, there’s a great deal of winking and nudging going on, which is all a part of a good twist fic as far as I’m concerned.
One thing that did make it easier is that with an imaginary (or at least comatose) narrator, I couldn’t have properly described real!Opal clearly even if I’d wanted to. Real!Opal can’t see her own face, doesn’t want to look at herself, and doesn’t want to think about her own mental state any more than she absolutely has to. This means I could very easily keep the camera looking out from real!Opal’s eyes, on her surroundings and on clone!Opal.
I had three betas for the fic. All were beautiful, wonderful angels I couldn’t have done without – particularly since I never would have made the twist work without all three. The first version, my beta didn’t even work out when we got to the end that it had all been Opal all along. (I added in a whole lot more foreshadowing and performed a great deal of polishing.) The second version, the beta knew that it was Opal right from the beginning. (I left all the foreshadowing, but concealed it better and performed a great deal of polishing.) The third… read right through, pointing out practically every bit of foreshadowing as a “mistake” I’d have to fix, told me off for using the fabulous clonecest line (“Am I really that beautiful?”) out of context, hit the ending and got so excited that I ended up with virtual double scoop ice-cream all over me. (It was Yeti. Don’t ask. But I fine tuned the foreshadowing a bit more, and then kept polishing like some kind of obsessive maniac.)
With all of that said… it’s really not the identity swindle that gets me about this piece. It’s a bit of a cool added extra, a little commentary on the fine line all our beloved geniuses* walk. It was fun, and it added another level of depth to the rest of the fic which forced me to leave so much of it wonderfully overelaborate and under-elaborated, but I had lost my heart to narcissistic!Opal long before the identity fraud was a twinkle in its author’s eye. I don’t think about Artemis at all when I’m rereading – it’s always Opal, all the way through – and I had to really force myself to think about reading it with Artemis in mind to smooth out that aspect of it.
Of course, after four months of playing around with the story, then it was time to finally nut out the mechanics.
Mechanics:
Writing from clone!Opal’s point of view was the only thing that would work in my mind, right from the beginning. All the reasons I have above for doing it that way are the results of long arguments with myself (in the mirror, of course – I don’t have a convenient comatose clone), trying to convince myself to stop being so ridiculous and write something more readable (and writable). As a person who already has a tendency to create monster sentences at the drop of a hat, it was an extra sentence complicator I didn’t want to have to deal with.
I tried it the other way around, and I tried it with first person and third person both ways. But it just wasn’t the same without the convolution of making all clone!Opal’s narrations loop through what real!Opal saw or thought. It decreased the feeling of creepy immediacy, of being somehow between the two “her”s that later turned out to have no distance between them at all, and I loved that feeling. Besides, having a real, story-related reason for an omniscient first person narrator wasn’t an opportunity I wanted to pass up. So I soldiered on.
The entire tense issue was complex to start with, but it was further complicated by the fact that I couldn’t decide whether to consistently write in present or past tense. Present was the correct choice for the fic, but I’d never done it before and in such an ambitious piece, I didn’t want to overreach myself. Of course, I ended up shooting myself in the foot with my indecision – by the time it was finished, the tenses weren’t even mostly right, because I couldn’t make up my mind and had written it half in one, half in the other – often randomly switching back and forth in the middle of sentences.
So, after finally making a decision and a month of randomly trying to convert it all over, I eventually had to print it out and go through the entire fic with a pencil, underlining every single verb, asking it what tense it was in – and what tense it should be. And then read it aloud, and read it aloud, and read it aloud, and…
I spent months obsessing over the mechanics of this fic. I should have kept my pencil-scribbled pages as a memento, but I must admit I merrily threw them out when I decided that I had to draw a line somewhere, or I was only going to keep changing the same things back and forth between two equally valid or equally invalid options forever.
The question of what tense it should have been was rather more complex than I’d imagined, given the integrated feel I wanted for my flashbacks. In that sense, present tense makes things much more complicated – it doesn’t take away any valid tenses, so I had four possible present tenses and eight past and future tenses happening in flashbacks. Cross all these possibilities with the various moods, voices, conditionals, first and second person omniscient, and Lily’s trademark
For example, let’s start with one from before the person starts getting complicated: when a character is presently making retrospective judgements about an event that might have been (but isn't) happening in the past-present-future, with reference to having experienced it at a point in the previous past, and what they had judged it at the slightly more recent point in the past where it had seemed possible it was going to start happening, but didn't... does anyone even care what tense it's in?
Well, actually, yes, I do. Because I’m just that obsessive. And insane enough to research and agonise over a single sentence for days. In a fic where there were hundreds of similarly complex sentences – some very much worse.
For those who are interested, I finally decided that while it should probably be a past counterfactual conditional (if he had spoken [past perfect] then it would have helped [present perfect]), it flowed better as a mixture of this and present counterfactual conditional (if he spoke [simple past] then it would help [present simple]). (Although I shall await correction on this subject by those who Actually Know Stuff.) Since you’re allowed to drop out of perfect in the middle of an integrated flashback to avoid the inherent clumsiness, I decided to go for the flow. The section in question is: “… [your hands] had been torn to shreds in your one stint of physical labour. At the time of your sentencing you had thought it would be [or would have been] second only to the death penalty as a punishment, but at least it would have relieved the relentless monotony.” Thus, it starts in perfect to signal a flashback, goes to simple in the middle, and then heads back into perfect again to signal the end of the flashback at the end of the sentence. I still wonder about whether I should make it “you thought it would be” to eliminate the perfect/simple conflict so close together and conduct the tense switch more consistently – but that sounds wrong to my ears, and then I have to factor in that possibly it really should be in a progressive tense, since if it had happened it would still be happening at the current time and fundamentally STOP IT LILY.
On the plus side, I now have a whole lot of knowledge and experience with tenses that I never got in my school’s stupid “drop ‘em and run” English program. I really am glad I persevered with it – apart from the finished product, it was a brilliant learning experience that means that I haven’t needed to look up the proper tense for something ever since.
Wow, I still love this fic. I really do. I reread and reread, and it never gets old.
The flash is just as strong as the first moment I saw it. I still see that one, vivid image of the strip of perfect white skin appearing in the flickering burnt-orange light. I still feel the soft give of the clone’s perfect cheek against the scrap of course-woven prison uniform, rough and tacky with moisture and grime in my fingers. I still feel the jolt of making an unbelievably longed-for connection to another human being that becomes so much more than it ever should be because it’s the only thing left in the world. I still feel the inevitable, accelerating pull from that point of first contact down into true insanity.
I still feel the vivid, sinking feeling in my gut as I read through. I still feel like I’m weightlessly, helplessly dragged along with Opal in that slow parabola down to the magma lake as I read my equal favourite line: it feels like flying, it feels like floating, it feels like falling. I still feel the churning flip-flop of my stomach as I read the revelation point of the narrator’s unreality – which, to the first-time reader, is the revelation point that we’re really talking about Opal – but to me is still that first conception of willing mental illness. I still feel the bittersweet, necessity-driven self-delusion of Opal’s decision that reality is in the mind of the beholder – that if cogito ergo sum, then a true genius can be and have anything she wants if she only believes and that nothing but her own irrational attachment to a world no more real than she lets it be is holding her back.
I love this fic. Over a year since it was finished, and I’m still in love with this fic. So thank you, Orions; thank you, judges; particularly thank you, betas.
Finally: my sincere commiserations to Yeti over Aquarium, set among the congratulations for it having taken the awards for Best Drama and the Best Relationship PC. I still think should at least have tied for Overall, because wow that fic is awesome and fundamentally who cares if Holly’s a plot device, Artemis is an adulterous shite, and no one has any clue what they see in each other? It was the flawless, seamless, casual expansion of the underground universe – set as though without care beneath a shimmeringly heartbreaking plot that made Aquarium the shiny, fishy, magnificence that it was. Aquarium didn’t need to shift the camera off Trouble at any point, because, for the purposes of the story, nothing else mattered. To Trouble, Holly was just a possession, just a plot device. If she’d been more than that to him, he probably would have held on to her. It might have worked to have shown more of Holly and her relationship with Artemis, through Trouble’s skewed perspective, giving the reader room for interpretation of what they felt about what was happening - but it could also have lessened the fic from what it really was and I didn’t miss that absence at all.
Aquarium is the only fic that I ever reread and reread and find as heartwrenchingly immersive as something I’ve written myself. And given how strongly I feel the connection to my own fics, that’s really saying something. :) Yes, perhaps I’m biased, but I’m serious when I say this would have been one fic that I would not have been remotely disappointed to lose to.
Rereading all I’ve written about MOI, makes me rather amused at myself. I hated high school English, because I hated pulling apart a book and “ruining” it by trying to find connections that I was sure the author couldn’t have meant to put in there. Give me story, I said, or give me boredom. Now I say give me both, and I’ll take ‘em and run with ‘em. Give me themes, give me parallels, give me images… and give me a story to put over the top so I don’t need my readers to notice them on a conscious level to enjoy the story.
And hey, if I can have some clonecest on top of that, I’m happy. :)
* Yes, contrary to Artemis’s assertion in the last book, the plural of genius is geniuses. The “genius” that pluralises to “genii” refers to a guardian/influential spirit, not a person of exceptional mental capacity. Please, Colfer, learn to use a dictionary.