FIC: The Guard's Tale (Valiant Tales)

[lindenharp]

Title: The Guard's Tale
Series: Valiant Tales.  Read them in order here.
Rating: PG
Characters: The Master (Simm), other characters
Genre: drabble
Spoilers: Minor spoilers for The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords.
Summary: A series of drabbles about the people who lived, worked, and suffered on the Valiant during the Year That Never Was.  100 words according to MS Word.
Disclaimer: The sandbox belongs to RTD and the BBC. I'm just playing here, in the corner, making little sand-TARDISs.

 

It’s the best job ever.  Lots of chances for fun, just don’t touch the Master’s pets.  Put a finger on the old guy – you die.  The Freak is invitation-only.  I’d love to watch a session.  Techs are all off-limits.  Pity.  Turner in engineering looks like a poof who’d jump if you gave him a hard look.  We can’t even talk to the admin staff.  There’s one real hottie --  snobby university bitch, but I bet I could make her moan.  Maybe she’ll make a mistake, piss ’im off.  A bloke can dream, yeah? 

Nobody calls Jimmy Stone a loser now.

Comments

Re: Rambling about writing and writers -- LONG

[wendymr.livejournal.com]

So, it comes down to what I call "authorial blinders". It's hard for me to have a clear perspective on my own work. The surprise at the end of the chapter isn't much of a surprise to me, since I've written it, re-written it, and read it three dozen times over. I can appreciate a nice turn of phrase or a clever bit of dialogue in my own fiction, but I see them "through a glass darkly". Then I read someone else's story, and it's all fresh and new, and the language jumps out at me, and I think, Wow! I want to make people feel like this when they read my fiction. Apparently, some people do feel like that when reading my stories. The paradox is that I can't read through their eyes.

You've captured so perfectly here the feeling I think just about any writer has, both in respect of their own work and of the work of writers they admire. I can name off the top of my head several writers whose work makes me react like that: dameruth, dark_aegis, rallalon (particularly with her At Thirty Paces series), to name just a few. And, of course, yourself.

And, no, we can't see our own work in that same light. The element of surprise is rarely there because, of course, we tend to know what's coming. We know if character A will be a villain, or if character B is going to make a decision that will shock readers (even if it makes perfect sense to us, because we've laid the threads leading to that decision, but often in a way that only makes sense to the reader in retrospect).

I think this could be a really interesting discussion and, with your permission, I may post about it on my own LJ :)

Re: Rambling about writing and writers -- LONG

[lindenharp.livejournal.com]

I think this could be a really interesting discussion and, with your permission, I may post about it on my own LJ :)

Please do. I half-considered posting this -- or re-posting this -- as a separate item on my LJ, because I think it may be lost amongst the other comments which are story reviews. I think it's an interesting meta-topic, and I'd love to see what other writers think about the issue. It doesn't matter where the discussion takes place, and you have many more writers on your Friends list who will see it and perhaps join in.