fic update, friend nonsense, works cited

[eccentric_hat]

caminante has been teasing me about cryptids. I tried to tell her "I'm not all that interested in cryptids by themselves, it's just Amnesty fandom," and she came back with "how many times have we had sad Loch Ness Monster conversations?" Those conversations were really about The Areas of My Expertise, but you know what: fair. She bought me a Bigfoot sticker that says "Hide & Seek World Champion" on it and offered/threatened to come up with a pairing smush name for my weird ship. "There are only like two of us who ship it," I said, "I don't think we really need one of those," and she said, "No, I'm going to get into it! You can do something with their cryptid names!" But there aren't a lot of great possibilities. Mothfoot might as well be a fairy from Midsummer Night's Dream, and Bigman sounds unrelated; you could come up with a fanciful ship name like people used to do a la Stark Spangled Banner, but I haven't thought of one.

(I also told her my fic has "so much more apocalyptic dread and so much less midcentury cryptid shenanigans than I intended," and she said, "well, that sounds like a fic by you. [eccentric_hat], every year: 'Is this story too sad for a Yuletide gift?'")

All of this is to say, I'm posting a chapter of my Bigfoot/Mothman Amnesty fic today, the last chapter I currently have ready for posting, and I felt like talking a bit about where it came from.

There are a lot of influences on this fic. That's what happens when you carry a story around in your head this long; it does that Katamari Damacy thing and picks stuff up everywhere you go. I've been doing this at least since I posted this last April. But the biggest ones have to do with Indrid:

1. As noted in the endnote to chapter 5, grace coming out of the void; there aren't enough fics about grownups making reasoned and difficult decisions, and these are top notch. (In Yuri on Ice fandom I used to scroll through the "breakup and makeup" tag looking for stuff like this and only rarely found it; sophiahelix's the fences we mended remains a favorite for this reason.) Indrid's character in canon is surprisingly rich for the amount of time he appears--his mix of formality and disastrous messiness, his sense of responsibility to other people along with a willingness to give up on it if it's too hard, his wry distanced amusement about human beings and his resigned acceptance of the fact that they might turn on him--and I have a lot of headcanons about him that aren't particularly supported by the podcast, but this series did a lot to bridge the gap between those two.

2. Ted Chiang's fiction, especially "Story of Your Life" and "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom." One of these is about time, and the other is about parallel universes, but they're both about gaining knowledge of how things will go, might go, or could have gone, and what it means for people once they know those things. I love Chiang's work so much, and I love how these stories bookend each other, which as far as I know they weren't intended to do. "Story of Your Life" gave me the analogy between clairvoyance and stories you already know but still want to hear; "Anxiety" did a lot to help clarify my thinking about what it means for Indrid to see all possible futures and organize those visions into an understanding.

3. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley, and in particular one fic for it, Revisions by Trismegistus. Don't read the fic before the book, but DO read the fic if you've read the book. It does a remarkable job of making sense of a process the book only shows us from the outside. I have mixed feelings about how this novel is executed (it is SO STRANGE) but it really got into my head, and in particular the possibility of clairvoyance being as precise, powerful, and manipulative as portrayed here has a lot to do with how seriously my Indrid takes his ethics.

Other things to a lesser extent: Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower, which includes a lot of carefulness about truth-telling; The Left Hand of Darkness, which argues that knowing the truth about the future is unbearable; the podcast Greater Boston, which draws meaningful connections between future-telling, uncertainty, and grief. And, for coming along at the right time, Sarah Pinsker's "Sooner or Later Everything Falls in the Sea," from the anthology of the same name, which influenced the trolls in my story.

I don't really have sources for where this Barclay comes from--half of it is just dialogue that I wrote early on, decided to keep, and shaped the narrative around. But I did find it gratifying, when I was well into writing the story, to come across an anecdote in a Ruth Reichl book about a dude she met, big hairy guy, who used to be an evolutionary biologist and then decided he wanted to get into the food business.

Actual cryptozoology is way down on the list. Ask me anytime and I'll happily dunk on The Mothman Prophecies, though I might have to go back to it to retrieve the breathless sentence that went something like, "The presence of these beings is a normal condition of this planet"--that's something of a theme in this fic, though I'm not sure I'm willing to credit that fact to John Keel. I've done some reading on Bigfoot and learned a lot about pulp magazines and midcentury pop culture in the process, but Barclay here is the opposite of the mindless, violent, solitary, uber-masculine creature that the men's magazines used to portray in their Bigfoot stories. I had to laugh when I realized the gulf between those and this guy, a queer city-dwelling vegetarian academic. He'd fit in better with the middle-class, gently environmentalist versions that came along in the 80s and 90s. I don't really know where I got this interpretation of the character but I'm very fond of him.