sam_storyteller (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 02:31 pm
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 02:31 pm
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The Theory of Two Centres: Post Story Notes
Post-Story Notes
On September 27th, 2008, I started writing this story.
Within the fabric of the story, Ianto Jones is retconned on September 29th, 2008, and four years of his life are taken away from him.
On October first, in realtime, my LiveJournal was hacked and five years of my journal were deleted in the space of about twenty minutes.
When they say Life Imitates Art, it's not supposed to be quite this literal.
I honestly don't know where the impetus for this story came from, which is unusual for me. Presumably at one time I did, but I don't remember now. The hack turned that whole time into something of a blur. The week had sucked already, which was probably why I was writing so intently. At a certain level of unhappiness, compulsive creation is pretty much what I do.
I had been writing the story directly into my LJ posting-client's window and saving it private-locked, gauging chapter length by how much I could fit in before LJ declared it too long to post. Thus, the first four chapters of the story -- somewhere between 35 and 40 thousand words -- were privatelocked on my LJ. If I hadn't transferred them to a word processor file the morning of October first, in order to have it all organised to send to my beta-readers, the posts would have been deleted and this fic probably wouldn't exist. The first four chapters would have had to be rewritten, and on top of all the rest I don't think I could have handled that. I think I would have just walked away from it.
For me, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that this story was some kind of back-echo of the event. It makes me sound potentially a little insane, but I've seen my mum do some eerily witchy things and since adulthood some of them have started happening to me, too, so I'm not going to discount premonition. It wouldn't be the first time I've anticipated calamity. Six years ago I predicted getting hit by a car about two hours before it happened. On the other hand, the world is a very coincidental place sometimes and random things happen. Who can say?
It would certainly be nice if I could predict something like winning lottery numbers, but if nothing else I suppose forewarned is forearmed.
A couple of notes on the Utah chapters: as many of you noticed, Henry van Statten is a character from the Doctor Who new series, episode 1.06, "Dalek". I hadn't originally intended to work him in but I needed the Eggs to be a little bit scattered, and the only breach I could think of other than Cardiff and London would be one caused by the amount of Alien Stuff he has in his underground bunker. And as I've said in comments, I fully believe that the day the mindwipe machine arrived, Richard the PA withdrew a considerable retirement fund and hightailed it out of the country. Jack probably helped him hide.
Ordinarily this is where I'd put deleted scenes, but in this case the deleted scenes involved Ianto having flashbacks to Suzie, because I find the Ianto-Suzie relationship fascinating. Those scenes didn't really fit, but that's okay -- they actually rose up and formed a fanfic of their own, they fucking unionised or something, so I don't have any deleted scenes. Instead I have a fanfic: It Was Not Death, For I Stood Up.
All that's left, really, is the Saga Of What The Hell Do I Call This.
I couldn't figure out what to title it at first. In my head it was "The Amnesiafic" but eventually I decided I had to find a slightly more compelling name for it than that. First there was "I Don't Remember The Stories You Tell Me" but that's weird and obscure; likewise "Then And First". I thought of doing something with the song "New York Mining Disaster 1941" by Chumbawamba, but then I discovered it was originally a Bee Gees song and I'm not sure I can deal with that. Plus, the lyrics -- while interesting -- give the wrong sort of impression:
In the case of something happening to me
There is something I would like you all to see
It's just a photograph of someone that I knew --
Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones?
Going with a musical theme I queued up all the songs that this story made me think of, and for a while the working title was quite seriously The Road To Morrow. I just kind of like the name. But there was no logic behind it, and the lighthearted nature of the song wasn't best suited to this story.
As I was reading Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, I considered "Siddhartha On The Path" as well. It is on the path away from the Buddha that Siddhartha has his great revelation about not knowing his own self, after all. Spider, quite rightly, veto'd this. Sometimes you need people who will protect you from your own insanity.
Spider suggested a title associated with the Mundane Egg, which was intriguing and brilliant as I hadn't 1. considered a title referencing the Eggs or 2. known what the Mundane Egg was before she explained it to me.
I googled Mundane Egg to see what else I could find about it and observed Sam's Law Of Googledynamics: life's no fun if you don't click the first link. Rather than make you wade through the bombast of that website, however, let me give you Spider's explanation:
In a lot of ancient Eastern mythology -- ranging from Japanese to Sumerian -- the world was hatched from an egg. I have always liked the phrase "Mundane Egg" because it has so many meanings. The cracks in the Mundane Egg are cracks in reality. I'm thinking, since you're referencing eggs in the story, you might call it "A Crack In The Mundane Egg". I like Mundane Egg because it also means something banal, someone's every day life.
I really liked the idea, much better than the ones I'd had, but something was still slightly askew, which is why I went googling for more info. In the end, it's just as well I clicked the first link, because it helped me find what I was looking for. In fact, the link was to a "Book of Earth" stored at, wait for it, boe19.htm.
Yes. I found the title for this fanfic in the face of Boe.
I was skimming the info when I caught a reference to something that sounded interesting, the Theory of Two Centres. The Theory is referenced as a form of the "Mundane Egg", St. Augustine's vision of a sphere of earth floating gently on a second sphere of water. Which nicely symbolises Ianto's conscious and unconscious mind, not to mention Adam hiding away beneath the surface and, more directly, Jack having found a "centre" in Torchwood even as the Time Agency's supercomputer Centre is failing.
(References to "The center cannot hold" were unintentional but rather brilliant all the same, don't you think?)
Spider agreed that The Theory Of Two Centres was a fitting title, and there it was. I titled it, did a bit more revising, and then sat down to write this.
And here I end.
On September 27th, 2008, I started writing this story.
Within the fabric of the story, Ianto Jones is retconned on September 29th, 2008, and four years of his life are taken away from him.
On October first, in realtime, my LiveJournal was hacked and five years of my journal were deleted in the space of about twenty minutes.
When they say Life Imitates Art, it's not supposed to be quite this literal.
I honestly don't know where the impetus for this story came from, which is unusual for me. Presumably at one time I did, but I don't remember now. The hack turned that whole time into something of a blur. The week had sucked already, which was probably why I was writing so intently. At a certain level of unhappiness, compulsive creation is pretty much what I do.
I had been writing the story directly into my LJ posting-client's window and saving it private-locked, gauging chapter length by how much I could fit in before LJ declared it too long to post. Thus, the first four chapters of the story -- somewhere between 35 and 40 thousand words -- were privatelocked on my LJ. If I hadn't transferred them to a word processor file the morning of October first, in order to have it all organised to send to my beta-readers, the posts would have been deleted and this fic probably wouldn't exist. The first four chapters would have had to be rewritten, and on top of all the rest I don't think I could have handled that. I think I would have just walked away from it.
For me, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that this story was some kind of back-echo of the event. It makes me sound potentially a little insane, but I've seen my mum do some eerily witchy things and since adulthood some of them have started happening to me, too, so I'm not going to discount premonition. It wouldn't be the first time I've anticipated calamity. Six years ago I predicted getting hit by a car about two hours before it happened. On the other hand, the world is a very coincidental place sometimes and random things happen. Who can say?
It would certainly be nice if I could predict something like winning lottery numbers, but if nothing else I suppose forewarned is forearmed.
A couple of notes on the Utah chapters: as many of you noticed, Henry van Statten is a character from the Doctor Who new series, episode 1.06, "Dalek". I hadn't originally intended to work him in but I needed the Eggs to be a little bit scattered, and the only breach I could think of other than Cardiff and London would be one caused by the amount of Alien Stuff he has in his underground bunker. And as I've said in comments, I fully believe that the day the mindwipe machine arrived, Richard the PA withdrew a considerable retirement fund and hightailed it out of the country. Jack probably helped him hide.
Ordinarily this is where I'd put deleted scenes, but in this case the deleted scenes involved Ianto having flashbacks to Suzie, because I find the Ianto-Suzie relationship fascinating. Those scenes didn't really fit, but that's okay -- they actually rose up and formed a fanfic of their own, they fucking unionised or something, so I don't have any deleted scenes. Instead I have a fanfic: It Was Not Death, For I Stood Up.
All that's left, really, is the Saga Of What The Hell Do I Call This.
I couldn't figure out what to title it at first. In my head it was "The Amnesiafic" but eventually I decided I had to find a slightly more compelling name for it than that. First there was "I Don't Remember The Stories You Tell Me" but that's weird and obscure; likewise "Then And First". I thought of doing something with the song "New York Mining Disaster 1941" by Chumbawamba, but then I discovered it was originally a Bee Gees song and I'm not sure I can deal with that. Plus, the lyrics -- while interesting -- give the wrong sort of impression:
In the case of something happening to me
There is something I would like you all to see
It's just a photograph of someone that I knew --
Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones?
Going with a musical theme I queued up all the songs that this story made me think of, and for a while the working title was quite seriously The Road To Morrow. I just kind of like the name. But there was no logic behind it, and the lighthearted nature of the song wasn't best suited to this story.
As I was reading Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, I considered "Siddhartha On The Path" as well. It is on the path away from the Buddha that Siddhartha has his great revelation about not knowing his own self, after all. Spider, quite rightly, veto'd this. Sometimes you need people who will protect you from your own insanity.
Spider suggested a title associated with the Mundane Egg, which was intriguing and brilliant as I hadn't 1. considered a title referencing the Eggs or 2. known what the Mundane Egg was before she explained it to me.
I googled Mundane Egg to see what else I could find about it and observed Sam's Law Of Googledynamics: life's no fun if you don't click the first link. Rather than make you wade through the bombast of that website, however, let me give you Spider's explanation:
In a lot of ancient Eastern mythology -- ranging from Japanese to Sumerian -- the world was hatched from an egg. I have always liked the phrase "Mundane Egg" because it has so many meanings. The cracks in the Mundane Egg are cracks in reality. I'm thinking, since you're referencing eggs in the story, you might call it "A Crack In The Mundane Egg". I like Mundane Egg because it also means something banal, someone's every day life.
I really liked the idea, much better than the ones I'd had, but something was still slightly askew, which is why I went googling for more info. In the end, it's just as well I clicked the first link, because it helped me find what I was looking for. In fact, the link was to a "Book of Earth" stored at, wait for it, boe19.htm.
Yes. I found the title for this fanfic in the face of Boe.
I was skimming the info when I caught a reference to something that sounded interesting, the Theory of Two Centres. The Theory is referenced as a form of the "Mundane Egg", St. Augustine's vision of a sphere of earth floating gently on a second sphere of water. Which nicely symbolises Ianto's conscious and unconscious mind, not to mention Adam hiding away beneath the surface and, more directly, Jack having found a "centre" in Torchwood even as the Time Agency's supercomputer Centre is failing.
(References to "The center cannot hold" were unintentional but rather brilliant all the same, don't you think?)
Spider agreed that The Theory Of Two Centres was a fitting title, and there it was. I titled it, did a bit more revising, and then sat down to write this.
And here I end.