I love good guys

In the US, it's "National Poetry Month." celli is generously sharing a community experience of the event by posting one poem per day. Read Celli's recommended poems.

I'm enjoying reading each as it arrives and wanted to share. I appreciate these gentle invitations to pause and think and feel in the different way that poetry fits, sometimes much like prose, but more often a wholly divergent mode, somewhere between words and sound, between words and light, with the emotions and meanings floating almost, but never quite, loose at all levels, not only waiting at the end of a precisely charted and paved path.

(I'm lucky that I was academically taught how to ready poetry, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to teach myself this much wholly on my own, in the culture we share today and the incentives I've personally had. But many others can and do, by instinct, talent, observation, research, or practice!)

Additionally, as some of you know, as a fiction writer, I personally find that I really do much beter with a moral, theme, or interpretive contention to work toward. We have fkficfest coming up, and this year's elected prompts seem to me to lean more toward plot than theme. I haven't yet found my angle on them. I'm hoping that perhaps I'll discover it in one of these poems. We shall see!

Don't you love it when someone writes an exciting, energetic, original, pop song about the book you're currently reading and delivers it with full orchestration on one of those singing competition shows? Granted, that's never happened to me before, but I've never read the unabridged Journey to the West before, so...

Watch on YouTube

Subtitled in English: [Single Song] "Great Sage Equal to Heaven" sung by Hua Chenyu

(I listened to a podcast interviewing Julia Lovell, the translator of the recent (2021!) abridged version of JttW that I read before diving into the unabridged translation by Anthony Yu, and this was the outro music. I checked the podcast's credits to learn what it was and followed a link to this performance.) (Lovell's abridgement is very nice and absolutely imperative for classroom use! But I'm so into these characters that I need the whole hundred chapters. And, apparently, filks.)

For this year's rarelywritten game, I went where I've rarely gone before: fanfiction of source material that is itself prose narrative! I've often been just a little uncomfortable, personally, with fan creations in precisely the same medium as the original. The element of transformation is stronger when the medium shifts. The comparison is less fierce, as well, perhaps. I've seen it done wonderfully! But I don't usually seek it out. Personal thing.

Then I saw this request.

Daniel Deronda (1876) was George Eliot's last, and perhaps most ambitious, novel. The ficathon request that I received was: what does Gwendolen, one of the two main characters, do post-canon? To make a long (~900 pages) story very short ( spoilers ).

My attempt to satisfy the fest request involves a London townhouse, a dinner party, a seance, and several friendships.

My sincere thanks to those who chimed in on my various brainstorms! And thanks most of all to batdina for beta-reading! (She re-read this monster Victorian novel just for me and my recipient. Much appreciated.)

On the AO3:	"Between within and without"
Length:	6,689 words
Date:	April 2015
Rating:	G
Characters:	Gwendolen Harleth Grandcourt, Catherine Arrowpoint Klesmer, Julius Klesmer, Mrs. Arrowpoint, Lady Pentreath, original characters
Summary:	Five years later, Gwendolen steps up to help a dear friend and ends up confronting an old terror.
Quotation:	"That she was beautiful had never been in doubt, as far as Gwendolen knew, but that she could meet her own gaze with neither revulsion nor complacency required tenacious confirmation. To live, she must bear her demons and her angels together. She meant to live."