Meme - caving to peer pressure:

[concertigrossi]

Pick a paragraph (or any passage between... let's say 200 and 600 words) from anything I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you 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

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

From your "Epiphanic Drabbles":

Singapore stank. Not as bad as London, which you could smell for miles out to sea, but it was thickly rank nevertheless. The odor roiled through the port, the effect of thousands of people and their animals, the smoke from their cooking, their food and the resulting effluvia. He stared at the source of the stench and saw in it a microcosm of the whole of humanity. People working and playing. Eating and fucking. Being born, living their lives, and dying. His had been a clean sort of limbo, and he’d gotten too used the cold asepsis of a place above and past and done with all of this. He didn’t feel ready to wade back into the filth of being alive.
“See, here’s how this works, Commodore. They put the pretty board down to the pretty dock, and you walk across it and off my pretty ship. Savvy?”

Then again, it wasn’t like he had a choice.

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Well, ok, I needed a snippet for smell. And I'd been reading about how stinky the world was before modern sanitation, that you could literally smell when you were nearing a port.

And, when you get down to it, life is really messy and undignified. The sheer number of gross bodily functions that you deal with in the course of the average day is pretty impressive.

In truth, I was also thinking of the scene in "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" with the King and Queen of the Moon; the King's Head lamenting that it ever has to be reattached to the body and all the nasty things the body makes it do, that once the body dies it can be pure and think elevated, rational thoughts amongst the cosmos.

So there James was, able to sit and reflect without headaches, hard-ons or upset stomachs. And now he's got to face all that again and he has no choice in the matter.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

I liked the whole idea you had in these drabbles of James readjusting to life - like coming back from the dead was a kind of shock he had to recover from over time. It reminded me of that Rilke poem about Eurydice.