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

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.. :)