Fic: Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

[jjpor]

Fic: Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

So, I was sitting down this morning to write some fic (in between watching the Grand National - my donkey didn't even finish! - and the footy). I swear that I was trying to write the next part of Battlelines; I swear. However, instead I wrote this, straight off the bat, more or less in one sitting (which is unusual for me).

You see, I've been thinking about some of the stuff I’ve written about the Time War and Romana’s part in it. And more particularly, about my own feeling that in some sense I may have wussed out a little in ignoring some of the more difficult strands of continuity in the novels and audios, in particular the whole issue of Romana III and the hardening of her relationship with the Doctor. So this grew out of that; maybe it’s an apologia, maybe just an effort to organise my thoughts on the matter. I borrow some elements here from the Eighth Doctor novels, although it isn’t set in that version of continuity, and from Lawrence Miles’s Faction Paradox universe, and must also acknowledge a debt to my good buddy clocketpatch, whose fic about Romana in E-Space got me thinking on some of this stuff again. Anyway, here it is; as always, Doctor Who and its concepts belong to the BBC and to their individual creators; in particular, the Daleks belong to the Terry Nation estate:

www.whofic.com/viewstory.php

Comments

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose you can see why someone would want an icon of Delgado!Master, because he is kind of excellent, but Sutekh?? and a Sontaran?? I don't know, I sort of have to admire Sutekh; whatever else you may say about him, there was someone who really enjoyed his work. And I always felt like the Sontarans got a bit of a raw deal, going from Linx, who was like some sort of uber-capable one-man A-Team (how did the Rutans think they had a chance when the Sontarans had an army of guys like him?!) to being basically the jokes of the universe. A situation that I, hypocritically, do nothing to remedy by making them the subject of ridiculous Victorian music hall numbers in my fic. The SJA Sontaran two-parter is more or less the entire Sontaran story-arc condensed into fifty minutes of television. Seriously.

My English A-level experience made me feel about DH Lawrence the way you feel about Frost; we had to read his collected poems, which are, quite frankly, not that great (he was definitely a much better novelist than a poet), and ever since I have been unable to shake my prejudice against him. His wife was a cousin or something of the Red Baron's, though, interestingly enough.

And yeah, regarding the Time War, I am the kind of person who says things like "you know, some things are better left mysterious", while simultaneously making up ridiculous backstories about Mrs Who and Susan's mum and the Doctor's mysterious birth, and exactly what all of RTD's completely bogus and throwaway references to Time War battles actually mean (the Fall of Arcadia's one I always seem to come back to for some reason). It's a weakness of mine, I guess. :D As you say, it's a Big Unexplained Plotty Swirly thing in space...

[thisbluespirit]

Well, you've just made me feel grateful. I cannot imagine the trauma of trying to do D H Lawrence with that English teacher. Tess was bad enough and the whole endless, disturbing discussion on what precisely Alec did to Tess (including stopping Polanski's film to rewind and point things out). *turns faint with horror* It doesn't bear thinking about.

(I'm fairly confident I can trump your bad teacher. If, however, yours also made you do practice exam essays and then went round the class making everyone read them out aloud - and I do mean timed, practice exam essays scribbled so quickly you couldn't read your own handwriting back - and stopping them every so often to comment. (If it was Hardy, you could, if you were brave, save the rest of the class by using a Different Term to describe the rape scene, because he would have to stop and discuss that in detail. And he'd never heard of The Mabinogion. Asked me if it was some sf novel. You know, thinking about it now, we really should have told someone about all this, but you just kind of accept bad teachers, like bad weather at the time!! (He did get made to resign a couple of years later). Mind you, I shouldn't let Merle get away with ruining a good poet. I shall go find a collection of Robert Frost and exorcise the ghost, I think.

Erm... back in the worlds of DW...

I'm quite good at navigating the Big Swirly Plotty Things in Space, but I get easily sucked into orbits by smaller Planets of Daft AUs and throwaway lines. :-)

[jjpor.livejournal.com]

"the whole endless, disturbing discussion on what precisely Alec did to Tess"

??!! I mean; ??!! We had a GCSE science teacher a bit like that; you know, with a slightly...unhealthy enthusiasm for certain facets of the subject. The teacher who taught us DH Lawrence was sort of the opposite; she looked as if she was going to die of shame at times depending on how, er, forthright, the particular bit of text under discussion was. The net effect was the more or less the same, however; not much actual education getting done at the end of the day. Now, the other English teacher we had was the one who got me into Christopher Marlowe (who I came to think of as Shakespeare's funnier, more evil twin), so I have that much to thank her for.