#but my map is on a river! and my colony's ass is up against a mountain! so i have nowhere to move!!!

[dragonmons]

i fuckin adore rimworld so much but whenever i look at other people's colonies in the tag im confronted with the fact that other people make aesthetically gorgeous colonies and mine are. uh. Not That

[sanguinarysanguinity]

1-15 (as many or few as you like, or as best fit the work(s)) for Persistence of Memory; Desperate Men and Fools; Strange Angels

(Questions; answers for Persistence of Memory; answers for Strange Angels.)

“Desperate Men and Fools” follows!

1. What inspired you to write the fic this way?

I talked about that a bit in the announcement post on DW/LJ, but I’ll add that @gardnerhill‘s talents are wildly different from my own: my initial attempts to mimic Mayor Strade’s storytelling style were… well. Let’s just say I can’t do what she does, and leave it at that.

3. What’s your favorite line of narration?

Lock pushed up the lantern’s chimney and lit a cigarette from the flame. For a few moments his face was clearly lit, his eyes slitted narrow against the light. Then he set the lantern aside and turned the wick down, extinguishing it. All I could see was the glow of his cigarette’s coal, and the stars beyond him.

Doc’s heart is breaking right there, and damn him if he’ll say it. When I wrote it, I didn’t explicitly put together that Doc was fixing in his mind what was like to be his last image of Lock, but that’s what he’s doing: looking while he can still look, and then the light goes out and there’s just a hole in the stars where Lock ought to be.

And that, he thinks, is the last he’ll ever see of him.

I shut my eyes, against him and the stars both, and hoped he’d have the civility to ride out before I woke.

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“I have never met a man with a gift for being silent as loudly as you, Doc.”

Which is, of course, playing with the famous line from “The Twisted Lip”:

“You have a grand gift of silence, Watson,” said he. “It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.”

5. What part was hardest to write?

omfg, the scene just after Doc and Lock recover their horses, when they’re supposedly talking out what happened with Dumont. Those two laconic bastards never talk, not like they mean it, so trying to get their issues out on the page for the reader… UGH. I thought I was gonna have to beat them both over the head with a tree limb to get either of them to say the thing.

6. What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

It’s a capital-W Western, which is a genre which I normally give wide berth. I talked about that a little bit in the DW/LJ announcement post.

8: Did any real people or events inspire any part of it?

Louis Riel and the Red River Uprising, of course, which is the backstory for Strange Empire. The surveyor getting killed was an invention of the show, but everything else in “Desperate Men and Fools” about the Uprising is reasonably accurate, at least in broad strokes. Further, most of the details about the Metis and the Red River Colony are historical, at least as I best understood them. Other random bits are factual, too, like the lynchings during the New York City draft riots, and the mayhem of the Nevada silver boom.

That said, there are details I fudged. I don’t have any concrete evidence for putting that particular card game in Red River, the one with the stripped down deck and extra jokers (although there were French card games that used that deck, and there was a ton of French influence in Red River). Also, there was a point where I got fed up with trying to sort out the on-again/off-again steamboat situation on the Red River. Also, anyone who makes a strict accounting of the dates might discover July-through-September has a few more weeks than those three months usually have. (I blame the steamboats that were probably not running that year.)

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

The first draft had a different ending, jumping ahead to Bakerstown in 1885, the year of the Northwest Uprising / Second Riel Rebellion.

The original ending, starting just after finding Dumont’s bounty poster:

“Reckon there’s enough good left in the world to stop what’s coming to Red River?” I asked him later. It seemed that over the past year maybe Lock and I had become the same kind of fool Dumont was. Ever since she let us walk away that day, I’d been noticing the little bits of good still left in the world, and the people trying to grow them. Lock and I weren’t farmers, but sometimes we stepped in and tried to stop someone else from killing a thing. Sometimes we succeeded, but most times we couldn’t offer much more than vengeance.

Lock shook his head slow, turning the question over. “I reckon there never was enough good in the world to stop that.”

And maybe Lock was right – or maybe all the good in the world was looking the other way – but the army did finally come to Red River, and the surveyors got their stakes and string into the place proper after all. By the time they were done, a lot of those Métis lost their farms. I heard later a bunch of them settled up along the Batoche River, up in Saskatchewan. Maybe they thought that was far enough west to be safe from Ottawa’s surveyors, but then in 1885 it all happened again, this time with a lot more shooting. Some hangings, too, there at the end.

By then, Lock and I had washed up in a little Texas cow-town, where Lock was wearing a tin star, and I was taking the time to patch people up after I finished shooting ‘em. We still weren’t farmers, but Lock figured that he and that mayor there might make a place where other people could grow some good things if they cared to. I didn’t see much point in it, but didn’t mind letting him try.

“Think Dumont and her auntie got caught up in it?” I asked Lock, when I heard what had happened up in Batoche. I didn’t want to mention that baby, although it had to have been full-grown fighting age by then. I hoped its mother had taught it to shoot as well as she did.

“No telling,” Lock said. I knew he still had Dumont’s bounty poster, hid somewheres people couldn’t see it and get bright ideas about easy money. Whether he kept it hid for her sake or theirs, I couldn’t say, but I knew he still had it. Lock shook his head, looking like the world pained him sore, and I couldn’t say I disagreed. “Ain’t no telling at all.”

However, Saskatchewan isn’t Doc’s story to tell, and everyone who read that draft agreed. So that all went away, and I eventually settled on the ending it has now.

13. What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

For the scene in Red River, I recommend Metis fiddling.

For the Doc and Lock scenes, “Arms of My Love” was usually running around my brain, but Jay Ungar is much closer to Lock’s sound, especially some of that haunting fiddle-work. (Fiddler’s Elbow, Ashokan Farewell, Blue River Waltz, Prairie Waltz, Lover’s Waltz) I expect Southern Soldier Boy might make an appearance if Lock is in a particularly sentimental mood. 

However, while “Red River Valley” is (probably) period and topical, it is not on the playlist. From Wikipedia:

Edith Fowke offers anecdotal evidence that the song was known in at least five Canadian provinces before 1896. This finding led to speculation that the song was composed at the time of the 1870 Wolseley Expedition to Manitoba’s northern Red River Valley. It expresses the sorrow of a local woman (possibly a Métis) as her soldier lover prepares to return to the east.

Just… no.

15. What did you learn from writing this fic?

The Red River flows north. I checked that three times, then looked at some terrain maps, before deciding it was probably true.

Because of @bowiecadmium‘s generosity and diligence, I also learned: Horses are asses. Horses don’t travel faster than humans over long distances; they just carry more. Horses see better than humans in the dark. A dappled gray would have been super-distinctive in that decade and place, and thus shit for any kind of undercover work. Museum photos of Metis saddles typically show them stripped of all their hardware, which is not how they would have looked in actual use. Breaking trail on horseback is exactly as much of a pain-in-the-ass as breaking trail on foot. When camping with horses, you can hear the horses doing horse-things; if you like horses, you might even have warm feelings about that. One can turn a horse without using the reins, but one wouldn’t call that ‘kneeing’ a horse. Doc’s lack of emotional attachment to Betsy is likely an artifact of his war service, during which he probably had a disturbing number of horses die under him, and/or had to eat his.

And a horse fact that I picked up on my own after @bowiecadmium’s beta pass, so I might have fucked it up: roan horses sometimes have corn marks.