goseaward

Another 100 stories post--fanfic, this time. [note: making an alphabetical index here for all of these]

Rageprufrock's Seven Things That Didn't Happen On Valentine's Day At Hogwarts, Or Maybe They Did is a Marauders-era Remus/Sirius fic. It's one of my favorite Harry Potter fics ever, despite the fact that I was never really into R/S as a shipper. It is, as you might expect, the story of the seven Valentine's Days the Marauders spent at Hogwarts, and so it bears some structural resemblance to the ever-popular 5(+1) Things fics. However, the usual assumption of those is that you're dipping into and out of a time line, so that the Things give you snapshots of the characters' interactions at different points during the development of their relationship (or whatever--I mostly read shippy fics, so that's my reference here). Seven Things... is sort of the other way around: you know that characters & relationships develop between the periods of time the fic portrays explicitly, but a lot of the changes are catalyzed by Valentine's Day, so instead what you get is nearly constant evolution in the way the characters interact. It ends up feeling a lot less disjointed than a lot of Things fics do.* (Though that's also because the author is so good.)

What else can I say about this fic? It's very funny in parts; the relationship between Remus and Sirius is excellent; the Marauders gel over a period of several years, rather than the instantaneous friendship that's often portrayed. The first few snippets are short, but there's one in the middle--the emotional heart of the fic, I'd say--that's longer than almost anything I've written. I don't even know how many times I've read this, that's how much I love it. If you're the fanfic type and you haven't read it, check it out.

*not to badmouth the usual mode--disjointed can be the point, of course, and I'm as much a practitioner as anyone.

So I thought I'd do the 100 Things Blogging Challenge. Basically: pick a topic, blog about 100 things that fit in that topic. I'm going to blog about stories that were/are important to me in some way--whether that's because I just think they're good, because they changed the way I thought about things, the way I wrote about things, whatever. And stories means I can do books, short stories, movies, TV, fic--see how that works out? :D

First up: Dragon's Blood, by Jane Yolen. This was one of my favorite books as a kid, so beloved I can still quote phrases from it. The book takes place on a planet called Austar IV, an inhospitable world originally used as a penal colony and now mostly a gambling planet--the main economic driver is the dragon fighting pits (the native dragons having been bred up, but not really tamed, by the human settlers). The plot follows Jakkin, a teenage worker on a dragon farm, as he independently raises a dragon from hatchling to her first fight.

I really loved this when I was younger because, one, interesting worldbuilding, and two, DRAGONS! Awesome dragons! (And some philosophical things later on in the books.) However, there are some weirdnesses about the book that I notice now. ( Read more... )

It's a short book--I think it took me about 3 hours to reread it recently--and the other books in the series are good as well. I don't love this the way I did when I was, like, ten, especially the rather abrupt ending, but it's still a fun little read.