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Will You Bloom Bright And Fierce was a Yuletide Treat for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teaotter, who wrote the fabulous Steerswoman story Dumb Animals last year.
It's based on the gorgeous Dave Carter and Tracy Grammar song The Disappearing Man. The story itself requires no familiarity with the song or anything else. Rated R for brief but somewhat explicit sex.
I loved her prompt, which I saw and coveted before assignments went in. In particular, I liked her suggestion that it was a myth about the change of seasons.
Obviously this is not my usual writing style! The song is in second person, and I started the story that way as an experiment, but liked the way it read so I kept it. I wanted a style that wasn't similar to that of the song, but also wasn't ordinary prose, to preserve a somewhat surreal, dreamlike, heightened flavor.
The song has almost no clues in terms of setting. Going by the lyrics alone, the overall feel seems European-mythic, though "canyon" suggests America to me. But I'm a huge fan of Carter and Grammer, and their work overall is very, very American. So I decided to have a mythic story enacted in a real location, small-town USA with burgers and fries and bears in the woods outside of town. Since I prefer, whenever using real locations, to use ones I know, it's set in rural California near Yosemite - maybe Coarsegold, maybe Mariposa, maybe one of the other little towns nearby. The plants I mention all really grow there, and there really are bears and cougars (and meth labs) in the woods.
This post (http://heron61.livejournal.com/654149.html) commented that the story is very feminist, and received this comment, which cracked me up: "What I notice about that fanfiction story is that the author is extremely unusually familiar with Southern California native wildflowers."
I'm not particularly, but am familiar enough (my parents have a house in Mariposa) that I was able to fill in the rest with research.
teaotter, who wrote the fabulous Steerswoman story Dumb Animals last year. It's based on the gorgeous Dave Carter and Tracy Grammar song The Disappearing Man. The story itself requires no familiarity with the song or anything else. Rated R for brief but somewhat explicit sex.
I loved her prompt, which I saw and coveted before assignments went in. In particular, I liked her suggestion that it was a myth about the change of seasons.
Obviously this is not my usual writing style! The song is in second person, and I started the story that way as an experiment, but liked the way it read so I kept it. I wanted a style that wasn't similar to that of the song, but also wasn't ordinary prose, to preserve a somewhat surreal, dreamlike, heightened flavor.
The song has almost no clues in terms of setting. Going by the lyrics alone, the overall feel seems European-mythic, though "canyon" suggests America to me. But I'm a huge fan of Carter and Grammer, and their work overall is very, very American. So I decided to have a mythic story enacted in a real location, small-town USA with burgers and fries and bears in the woods outside of town. Since I prefer, whenever using real locations, to use ones I know, it's set in rural California near Yosemite - maybe Coarsegold, maybe Mariposa, maybe one of the other little towns nearby. The plants I mention all really grow there, and there really are bears and cougars (and meth labs) in the woods.
This post (http://heron61.livejournal.com/654149.html) commented that the story is very feminist, and received this comment, which cracked me up: "What I notice about that fanfiction story is that the author is extremely unusually familiar with Southern California native wildflowers."
I'm not particularly, but am familiar enough (my parents have a house in Mariposa) that I was able to fill in the rest with research.
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