(no subject)

[melannen]

Okay, I haven't managed to get back in the writing groove since I got back, and there's a commentary meme going around, and at least I have enough relatively recent stories up for it to not be to embarrassing to ask, so, um:

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Comments

[lannamichaels]

From Mu:

Hendricks gave me a look. "Don't be ridiculous. Apparently there was something involving Dresden's fairy godmother and an intercepted transformation spell. It'll wear off in 72 hours, he said, and in the meantime he's not letting unexpected opposable thumbs interfere with his duties."

"Of course. Dresden's fairy godmother turned his dog into a human. I should have thought of that immediately; why do I always leap to the complicated explanations first?"

"Good question, boss," said Hendricks. "Hey, do you think they're sleeping together? On the one hand, Mouse is his dog, but that didn't stop him from being really obvious about West back in the day. And, unlike certain people, he's never seemed to suffer from overactive scruples about dependency and consent. Plus, on the other hand, speaking objectively, you have to admit: Phwoar!"

I wasn't going to touch that one. Hendricks knows that there are some things that I simply cannot afford to confront openly. But he also knows it's his job not to let me get complacent, so he's never, quite, stopped pushing.

"Is that why you still let Dresden call you Cujo?" I asked instead. "And let him treat you the way you do?"

"But I am my Lord's faithful dog."

I spun grabbed him by the shoulders, pushed him against the corridor wall. He let me do it, of course. "Don't ever call yourself that," I said. "You are so much more--"

He looked down at me, all softness in his eyes, in the broad strokes of his neck, and said quietly: "Would you prefer 'I am the Baron's hound, to lie at the Baron's feet?"

I couldn't afford to answer that one either. I let go, took a deep breath, turned away. "What did you and Mouse talk about so intently, anyway?"

"The nature of nonexistence and will."

I wasn't even going to try to make an intelligent comment on that one. "Smart dog?" I asked.

"I asked him whether dogs had the Buddha nature," Hendricks said, and answered my ignorance by adding, "It's one of the most famous of the Zen koans. The traditional answer is most often translated as, essentially, 'null', but there's enough cultural shift, deliberate ambiguity, and inherent unknowability that the interpretation can still be questioned. I thought he might actually know the answer."

"And what did he say?"

"'Does a human have the Buddha nature?'"

"Ah. Good answer," I said.

"That answer's actually a lot closer to traditional Western modes of dialectic than what we Westerners expect from Zen-type philosophies, but of course Mouse has had at least as much influence from Dresden's sort of muscular post-Christian humanism."

"It's good to know you're making other friends. And I mean that with utmost sincerity."

Hendricks laughed at me, gently. "He's agreed to look over the chapter in my thesis comparing Jamesian epistemology with Mahayana meditative practices, on the strict understanding that he never had the full training. We're meeting on my half-day next week."