On Remixing

[such_heights]

Story here.

So, when I first got my assignment of glass_icarus, I was delighted, because she is awesome. I went through lots of her stuff and toyed with going with one of her blanketforts submissions, but there was something about It goes like this that caught my eye, and so I decided to show my appreciation by mangling it completely =P

Particularly, I liked the idea of the charmed flowers in the fifth segment, which quite quickly gave me the image that the remix starts with - A man stands at the top of the stairs... preoccupied with the dead flowers he clutches in his hand - and it all sort of flowed on from there.

I always like the 'Five Things' and 'Five Ways' stories, I think they're quite interesting, and I suppose this remix is taking that to a bit of an extreme. As a study of my stories could tell you, I have a bit of a fixation with the idea of memory - and Remus and Sirius particularly offer such wonderful opportunities to play around with that. On that note, I was delighted when Yvonne confirmed what I suspected, that it was something she was interested in too - made me feel slightly less self-indulgent! Anyway, the way those stories work is that they build up to the best thing, or the saddest thing, or the most true thing, which here has been taken to imply that fifth time appears to be the charm for Sirius when trying to remember what actually happened.

Why I thought it was a good idea to write from a very confused character's POV, I don't know, because it's terribly difficult to make it sufficiently mysterious and make the reader go on the trip down memory lane with Sirius without making the writing so oblique it turns people off completely. I'm not sure how well I succeeded at that, but thankfully melandry did pull me up at some of my deeply obscure moments, so I hope there's some kind of coherency in there somewhere if you pay attention.

When writing this, I didn't always know a great deal more than Sirius did. In fact, it was a bit of a surprise to me when he said "You fell." and I realised he was dead. I'd originally intended this to be Grimmauld Place era, but really I think post-veil makes much more sense - or doesn't need to make sense, anyway, more to the point. And then I remembered something I'd read about H. H. Price and his theory of the afterlife and the whole thing began to click into place a little more.

This isn't a definite vision of the afterlife for me, by any means, but I did think it was an interesting idea to play around with. I'll admit the end result doesn't exactly have mainstream appeal, but and I'm fond of it myself, and glass_icarus seemed to like it, which is the main thing!

Anyway, that's quite enough of my rambling now. Thank you, Yvonne, for such lovely stories to play around with! However it turned out, it was most certainly a labour of love.