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brightknightie) wrote2014-09-14 06:36 pm
brightknightie) wrote2014-09-14 06:36 pm
Entry tags:
Lighthouses
Any Forever Knight fans who are also lighthouse lovers reading this?
I read an essay/article in the New York Times today about lighthouses, which reminded me of an FK flashback story idea that I had ages ago — Nick as a nineteenth-century lighthouse keeper on a particularly fog-ridden stretch of the west coast of North America — but, though I did the research (and even visited the model RL lighthouse!), never got around to writing.
In part, the story never getting written was because because I could never seem to pair it with a present-day plot, and back at the particular vintage of this idea (years and years and years ago) it seemed vital to follow canonical episode structure whenever feasible. At this distance, I remember much of what Nick and the human OCs were up to, but though I remember Lacroix dropping in, his action has slipped my mind entirely... something dastardly, of course!
And in larger part... I remember fretting about whether to adapt one particular real historical incident to the fiction. Would it be immoral to have Nick fictionally do what a real person once really did? They couldn't both be there and have it happen; what made it a heroic lighthouse keeper action was that there was no one else, no relief, no back-up. On one hand, probably hundreds of lighthouse keepers did similar things across all of history, so it would probably be okay to adapt it. On the other hand, the specific historical story in which I encountered the action was... a woman's. And it's generally extra bad to obscure a woman's historical contribution by ascribing it to a man (even so utterly fictional a man as an 800-year-old vampire cop crusader).
I read an essay/article in the New York Times today about lighthouses, which reminded me of an FK flashback story idea that I had ages ago — Nick as a nineteenth-century lighthouse keeper on a particularly fog-ridden stretch of the west coast of North America — but, though I did the research (and even visited the model RL lighthouse!), never got around to writing.
In part, the story never getting written was because because I could never seem to pair it with a present-day plot, and back at the particular vintage of this idea (years and years and years ago) it seemed vital to follow canonical episode structure whenever feasible. At this distance, I remember much of what Nick and the human OCs were up to, but though I remember Lacroix dropping in, his action has slipped my mind entirely... something dastardly, of course!
And in larger part... I remember fretting about whether to adapt one particular real historical incident to the fiction. Would it be immoral to have Nick fictionally do what a real person once really did? They couldn't both be there and have it happen; what made it a heroic lighthouse keeper action was that there was no one else, no relief, no back-up. On one hand, probably hundreds of lighthouse keepers did similar things across all of history, so it would probably be okay to adapt it. On the other hand, the specific historical story in which I encountered the action was... a woman's. And it's generally extra bad to obscure a woman's historical contribution by ascribing it to a man (even so utterly fictional a man as an 800-year-old vampire cop crusader).