Titles pt. 2 + errata

[queenlua]

Well since Rethi and Raphi are doing titles, and since it's been a few months since my last titles infodump, might as well do another one :D

• Delicately, Madly: So the title that seemed closest to "fitting" while I was writing was actually ganked directly from the title of a James Tiptree Jr. short story: "With Delicate Mad Hands." However, (1) I didn't want to just yoink Tiptree's title directly (esp. since the stories have almost nothing to do with each other), and (2) the motif of hands suggested by that title was kind of a problem—I didn't want to call too much attention to the hands in the story, since that sort of risked calling attention more toward Oliver (see: Oliver-grabby-hands-scene) and away from Reyson himself. But I was flopping around and couldn't think of anything I liked that much more, so in the end I took delicate, mad, adverb-ified them, and called it a day :P


• Every Little Thing: It'd been sitting in my list of "phrases that would make really awesome story titles if you ever find the right story" for a while. I had it in mind when I wrote the first draft and decided it fit.


• Wings Dancing in the Darkness: This actually had a working title of "Bitterroot" and it kept that title until I was very nearly almost finished with it. Bitterroot is an actual flower, but I didn't know that at the time—I just compounded the words "bitter" and "root", and I felt like it fit especially well with that opening scene.
  
  But during the revision phase, while I was glancing at FE Wiki to look double-check some trivial fact, I noticed that Naesala's title in the epilogue, "Sky's Shadow," can be literally translated as "Wings Dancing in the Darkness"—which I actually really liked the sound of, felt like some nice imagery for a Rafiel and Naesala tromping around in a bog after sunset, something something. So I stole it.


• Kingdom of Earth: So there's this brief scene in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra that stood out to me when I was in middle school—it's basically a parodic/satirical send up of Christianity, this one scene where some dudes are praying to a donkey, and Zarathustra gets pissy at them for praying to something so dumb, bla bla. Anyway the line he uses I remembered clearly:
  
  "To be sure: except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into THAT kingdom of heaven." (And Zarathustra pointed aloft with his hands.)
  
  "But we do not at all want to enter into the kingdom of heaven: we have become men,—SO WE WANT THE KINGDOM OF EARTH."
  
  (I seem to recall the translation I read just had "WE WANT THE EARTH," which sounds more powerful to my ear, but I could just be imagining things.)
  
  Anyway I thought that whole theme of "accepting and embracing the harshness of reality" was pretty fitting for Naesala, especially in that situation, so I yoinked the phrase from there.


• lust like remembrance: Just a little phrase that drifted into my mind near the early part of drafting and felt right for whatever reason. (I wrote the whole fic terribly quickly and was honestly just going with my gut on everything herp derp)


• Sink: Uhhhh. If I were being 100% honest I would mention that "Sink" was the title for a thread on one of the wolf RPGs I played on :D;;; But no seriously it got me thinking about the word and how it's not just, y'know, a kitchen sink, it's a slow pulling-under, a weightiness... it's a nice word and when I was thinking about titles near the end of the fic it seemed to fit. So.


• Sounds and Silences: I knew I wanted a title that touched on the theme of "quiet" since that's a big thing in the opening paragraph and since it's a bit of a motif in the story, but I didn't want it to be too heavy-handed. I reread the story explicitly looking for phrases that would fit for a title, and "sounds and silences" jumped out at me and seemed to work.

Also the last time I did an author's-notes-type-thing was last October, since I never have enough thoughts on any one story to make an actual post about, but here's a roundup of random thoughts on stories I've written since then.

• wow I just found my earliest note for "Wings Dancing in the Darkness" and evidently I have a text file vaguely mentioning the original concept dated to October??? wow it is mighty convenient my fe-exchange prompt happened to fit it perfectly haha


• I go back and forth on how much I actually like "Wings Dancing in the Darkness." When I submitted it to the exchange I was actually kind of convinced it was one of the worst things I'd ever written but no amount of editing was going to fix it so I just submitted it and felt bad. I went back later and decided I'd been too hard on myself—and I still kinda flip-flop whenever I go back to read it, heh. I guess my main thought is that there should've been a livelier/faster way to get to that final scene with Zarieth, but despite that it mostly works, and I'm really fond of the bit with Zarieth, so.


• when writing "Kingdom of Earth" I watched a whole bunch of videos about how to gut deer and how decay works and it was all pretty gross for squeamish little Lua and I'm not very convinced that I even did a good job with writing it. Then when I was about to publish it I was like "man is all this random shit about Naesala tearing up the deer even necessary, like he's a fucking giant raven he can probably just jab his beak in fucking anywhere and it'll be 'kay," but at that point I was too lazy to edit any longer and bla bla not sure how to balance the story properly so it stayed in


• also! "Kingdom of Earth" was very almost titled "Closer, Still Closer"—I remembered vaguely some hymn with that as a title or a refrain or something? but I couldn't find the exact hymn I was thinking of online, just some fairly modern hymn with the same title, and I wasn't even sure "unreachability of God" was really a theme that jelled with the fic, so I looked for other ideas :P


• I wrote "lust like remembrance" in like two days. That is absurdly fast for me.


• I am terribly fond of "Sink" for literally no good reason. It's really just a bit of weird AU headcanon masquerading as fic, and it's not even the main bit of AU headcanon I was wanting to get across, and it only barely qualifies as fanfic because let's get real half of it is just me writing a horse race with very little canon connection and the prose isn't even objectively that great... but I still feel oddly content and warm when I reread it, and I really really enjoyed writing it. Maybe I just like it because it was the first thing I wrote post-thesis and I was just walking around on cloud nine :p