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

I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[soubie.livejournal.com]

Touch
A bed. Not a cot, or a bunk, or a hammock, but a proper feather bed. Big enough for him to stretch out completely and only have his feet sticking off the bottom. Soft enough to burrow into, the better to escape the penetrating chill of late fall in London. Linens, clean and fresh-pressed, smelling faintly of lavender. A new night-dress. The sheer sensuality of all that snowy cloth against his bare skin engulfed him as much as the duvet did. It was bliss, and he reveled in it.
Chagrin took over, as sleep began to claim him. Good Lord. He was waxing rhapsodic about bedclothes. Much more of this and he really would run mad.

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

:)

Well, I needed "touch." I was going to do sex but 1) I'm not good at writing smut, and 2) it seemed a tad obvious. So I got to thinking of really sensual things that didn't involve sex.

And that's one of them right? You hop into a soft bed with fresh linen right after a shower, and it just feels really, really nice and comforting. Especially on a cold night, when it's nasty and raw outside.

So I figured the guy's been on a ship for months, at best in a bunk if not a hammock, so a real-non-moving, actually-tall-enough, total-lack-of-vermin bed would be a real treat.

But he's James, so he's going to be all, OMG, I just got excited about the bedding. What's wrong with me?

A book I read once about people recovering from traumatic events said that people who have been through hard times can get fixated on little things, mundane things, and this seemed to fit.

(Incidentally, one of my favorite puns ever is in one of the next ones down, where James goes into a fugue state while listening to Handel. :) )

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[soubie.livejournal.com]

Yes, I VERY nearly picked that line. Well done. (It's just that, well, spacing out when listening to music isn't particularly weird... James. Really. Not on the scale of gasping: "Look! It's a mango!"- and really, that was only because you were used to mangos. Most of your contemporaries aren't, although admittedly mangos are actually quite difficult to identify if you've never seen one.)

(And yes, the idea of James going: "Look! It's a mango!... damn, wrong character!" is very, very funny.)

The beds on ships- old and relatively new (HMS Britannia being the other ship of the line that I've seen the sleeping quarters of) intrigue me. They're too short, by such a bizarre margin. Men of those times really weren't that much shorter than now (certainly not on board the Britannia, where the bunks for the Marine corps were fitted in the 1970s. My dad's contemporaries used those bunks- and they're about 4 feet long, albeit on the wide side.) I sort of imagine that hammocks automatically tip you into a foetal position, but the Sick Bay hammocks on the Victory were clearly designed to be quite rigid, letting the patient lie on his back... I and don't think any were longer than 5' (I measured by lying on the floor- it was exactly my length.) Now, okay, so 5' is within the bounds of normal for British people- I'm an British person!- and a lot of the 'men' were not actually fully grown, but... well.)

This is a bit of head-scratcher for me, actually, in ship-board-smut; one has to try to ignore the fact that beds that comfortably fit two (or more) were not normal on ships. Not impossible, obviously- (there's one double bed on Britannia, but obviously, as a Royal Yacht, it's unusual in a lot of ways), but not a standard bit of equipment. Certainly, the Captains' beds on the Victory are strictly one-man units!

(I suppose it was possible to get two in a bunk for a short while, in order for loblolly girls to... perform their duties. (Another thing that's ignored in PotC fanon and certainly canon, of course.) Just not to lie back afterwards.)

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

:)!

I know in the 18th century they had this thing about not lying flat to sleep, that it was somehow bad for you. I've toured a bunch of 18th century houses in the States, and they all have these absurdly short beds.

I know Captains did occasionally bring their wives on board, but I haven't found anything on how the sleeping arrangements worked... and in terms of the loblolly girls, it's not like you need to lie side by side, either.. :)

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[soubie.livejournal.com]

And, um. You know you asked me once to check for 'Brit-speak'?

Well, um. The use of 'cot'... in British dialect now, it doesn't make sense here. I know from seeing it in other places, that in this context it means a collapsible or temporary bed. But in Brit, it exclusively indicates a bed for a baby.

(Specifically, in my dialect, it's the larger, usually wooden, permanent, rectangular sort of baby's bed, you know, with the bars. 'Crib' means a cradle, bassinet or basket for a very young baby.)

HOWEVER, I'm a little uncertain, because I don't think 'cots' in that sense were actually used in this period. (Baskets and cradles, sure, but the sort of 'cot' I'm thinking of I'm pretty sure was a furnishing of the 19th century nursery- as I understand it, in days of the wet-nurse, nurseries in the Victorian sense only came in when the pre-industrial wet-nurse was replaced by the more 'modern' nanny and her nursemaid.) Now, it's possible that the American usage is actually an older one that was commandeered in England to mean something rather more specific. (I tend to let 'fall' go for just this reason- it's not used in that way in Britain any more, but I think it actually pre-dates 'autumn'.)

In fact, the use of 'cot' that I'm aware of before the great parenting revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century is as a truncation of 'cottage'. So I don't know whether it's period or not.

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Ah! Gotcha. V. tricky, I wouldn't have thought of that (clearly!).. Thank you!

It's funny how words move back and forth... in the SCA, people want to use the word "remove" to indicate a course at dinner, because it feels older, but it turns out that the word "remove" in that context is a Victorian innovation, and when medieval people wanted to indicate the bringing on of a dish during a feast they used the word...

"course." :)

Thanks muchly..