#crossing caina

[bonearenaofmyskull]

Fic Meme

I usually don’t tag anyone in these things, because I know no one here, but I want to tag@bonearenaofmyskull, even though she hasn’t published five fics yet. If she wants to, she could talk about her five favorite ‘Crossing Caïna’ chapters instead? I always love to hear more about that story! (via @pka42)

Well, I can give you five specific things I’m most proud of or like the best from that story. There’s only 14 chapters, so it seems like 5 chapters is a lot! XD

1. I’m proud that you can take the lines Will says at the end of Chapter 13 entirely literally and if you do, it changes everything in the story, but the story still works. That’s my favorite version--I like the implications of it, and the theme of it, and the fact that Will is the one who realizes it and then changes everything about their existence from it. I’m also proud of the literary allusions that this reading draws on to make this work, and how if a reader isn’t familiar with them, they probably won’t see it.

2. I’m very proud of Hannibal and Will’s conversation about pain.

3. I love the moment when Hannibal goes to check on Will while he’s sleeping in Hannibal’s berth. 

4. I like that if you’re looking, you can pinpoint the exact moment things started to go downhill for Hannibal and Will, but if you’re not looking, it feels like it started gradually and snowballed. 

5. Cetus. I liked imagining Cetus was somewhere between the setting, a third character, and the audience stand-in, and that there’s an interplay between what Hannibal and Will are experiencing and how Cetus both reacts to them and anticipates them, almost as if she’s a shipper...because...pun.

I think everybody I know has already done this meme? So I’m not sure who to tag. Here’s the original meme directions, and whoever wants to do it should do it--it’s always fun talking about your work!

(When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you’ve written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Do multiple fandoms if you want!)

[bonearenaofmyskull]

pka42 replied to your post “pka42 replied to your post “fragile-teacup mentioned you in a post...”

And you were the one teasing about writing a self-indulgent sequel. : P Oh well, maybe Bryan Fuller will update his fanfiction before you finish something new and fill the void you have left in my heart. It'll be a crump of comfort. ; )

People did try to entice me down the path of self-indulgence, but I have returned to the straight and narrow. The ambiguity was too much a part of the point, and if I ever diverged off into a “what might have been” people would have never left room for a literal interpretation of Will’s words in the end. As it is, I shouldn’t have talked about it at all, because it’s already been too much of a distraction and influenced too much of what people have taken from the story. 

If Bryan finishes his fic before I finish mine, I will surely abandon it. But I will consider myself satisfied, all around. ;)

[bonearenaofmyskull]

pka42 replied to your post “fragile-teacup mentioned you in a post “Fanfiction Writers...”

*silently continues to sob in a corner* H-hey, there's still that canon-compliant Season 4 fic coming, right? RIGHT?

Psh! You were the one who thought the ending was too happy! :P  NOW YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT.

J/K, j/k!!!  Yeah, I work on the S4 thing from time to time, but my goal publishing date for that is not for a long time. Sometimes I start short fics, but I never seem to finish them. 

[bonearenaofmyskull]

fragile-teacup mentioned you in a post “Fanfiction Writers Appreciation Day”

Sharing the love for these amazing writers! I know that every time I see a fic by @damnslippyplanet,@devereauxsdisease and @bonearenaofmyskull, it’s going to be something special. And I want more, please!! Especially a sequel to Crossing Caïna, @bonearenaofmyskull! No pressure though. ;)

I’m sorry to say there will never ever ever be a sequel to “Crossing Caïna.” I have to preserve the darker of the two interpretations of the story and ending. 

[bonearenaofmyskull]

Hi! You mentioned that you had plans for more Hannibal fic in your replies to my comments on Crossing Caïna. Can I ask how that's going? Please don't feel any pressure! I'm just a fan of your writing and hoping for more soon. <3 Love your blog, btw.

I’m so sorry–I changed my mind. D=

It was very tempting because I did continue the story for my own benefit so I could add a one-shot of about a thousand words, which would have been a kind of okay afterword. It was pretty enough, but I think it just would have destroyed some of the ambiguity I wanted to leave in the story about what was left for them from there, and I don’t think it really would have added anything meaningful to the story. It ended where I wanted it to, regardless of what branch of reality I decided to climb onto afterward to continue the story for my own amusement. I was full-on excited about it for a few days, but by the time today arrived, I knew posting it would be the wrong decision. 

I’m afraid I don’t have anything more in the offing, unless I happen to do up a one-shot based on this moment or that from a given episode, which occurs to me from time to time but I never actually sit down and write. The S4 stuff is a ways off. I’ve got a lot plotted, but then I get to self-doubting and thinking it’s all bunk, and I’m in one of those moods currently. We’ll see. But even if I started writing in earnest tonight, it’d be a long while before it would be ready to publish. 

I’m sorry again for being misleading, and I do appreciate your support and enthusiasm. I’ll go ahead and publish this just in case anyone else was wondering what happened along those lines. 

Thank you again!

[bonearenaofmyskull]

where's the chapter ? :*(

It’s up!

[bonearenaofmyskull]

hey, did you say that you were writing a nsfw version of your fic crossing caina, or did I imagine that??

Haha, I can imagine saying that, can imagine someone imagining that, and I can imagine that I may have said something to that effect at some point in the past. 

If I did, though, I’d never be able to publish it. 

Believe it or not, public school teachers still have a morality statute in the state law: it’s not enough that I do my job, but that I have to continue to be a fine upstanding societal role model in my personal life. My blog is fairly TV-14 and educationally oriented, especially in the current fuss over social media presentation. Meta tends to be safe, and my state is both liberal enough and my community chill enough that I feel I am operating under their expectations of propriety, even with the casual swearing and discussions of sexuality and sexual identity that go on here occasionally. Our school has an egalitarian dress code and liberal sex ed policy, to give tumblr-common examples of what the environment is like, and I think I could defend this blog from an educational perspective if I were called on to do so. 

But I’m very careful with that AO3 account. I always stress out about even just leaving kudos. I almost never comment on anything that I might have even the smallest concern about and often delete them after the writer has seen them, and to be honest, just being supportive of my friends’ fic has meant crossing boundaries I would rather not cross. You’ll never see me bookmark much, and I’ll delete bookmarks if a fic gets above a teen rating faster than you can say lickety-split, by my personal definition of “Teen and Up” which has absolutely nothing to do with the way these things are commonly decided by fandom authors. I’m a bit too on the lazy side to log out to leave kudos and comments (also I forgot what my password is), but I keep telling myself that I should do that. 

Anyway, I don’t know if this ask was truly serious or not, but that’s the reality of fic that I’d write, one way or another. I use Hannibal as it appeared under NBC’s standards and practices as a kind of guide to what kind of things I feel I could write about freely, or close enough.

Those of you who are in elementary or secondary education or think you may want to become teachers someday might want to keep some of this in mind. 

[bonearenaofmyskull]

Hi there, I was wondering if you have a playlist for Crossing Caïna? I'm so in love with this fic, the pacing, the details, the way you use your words brings out a very visual feeling not unlike the actual show itself, so I tried to play the show's original soundtrack. But obviously all those bangs and clangs didn't work well with the scenery you were creating.... :P any suggestions?

I hadn’t thought about it before, but now that you mention it, I would like to plug possibly my favorite musician of all time, Dax Johnson. He was a local pianist in my area, having started as a street musician, and he doesn’t have a ton of work--he died a number of years ago of a drug overdose while pursuing his career in LA. 

But I’m SO GLAD you sent me this ask because I went to his website to answer it, and I hadn’t realized there were previously unreleased tracks there (at least since I last looked in like...2006), so THANK YOU for helping me discover this. I didn’t even know The Beauty of Human Error existed. I’m crying. 

I know Hannibal would have preferred a harpsichordist, but imo, Dax’s music contains all the immediacy of the present that Hannibal so admires--IIRC, he recorded all his music by sitting down and playing it through, just like a live performance--along with all the dreamlike wistfulness of memory. He used to play two pianos at once in his performances, and he used to pluck the piano strings as well as mute them to create different musical effects. I think Hannibal would have admired him.

I think you can listen to most of his music on his website, although I don’t see his Christmas disc there. “Sleeping Sisera” is my favorite song of his, which happens to be a Biblical allusion to murder, go figure: here’s Gentileschi’s depiction.

(“as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone”)

“Through the Storm” is probably a good starting place for “Crossing Caïna,” at least for Chapter 8, heh. I think most of his music would be a nice match. It’s consistently both stirring and sad. He has an arrangement of “Canon,” too (Pachelbel’s Canon is mentioned in Red Dragon), which has become my only version of that song, frankly--all other versions sound lifeless. 

The fic is here, if anyone still wants to check it out. And thank you for the interest and for your love, Nonny. :D