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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ycore Rixle" data-source="post: 4227155" data-attributes="member: 675">Notes on my story[sblock=Notes on my story]Whew! That was fun. It came in on the long side, so I hope it is worth the words. If not, apologies!1. It's partly a response to Rappacini's Daughter. That's what I had in mind, anyway. In Hawthorne's story, the science is the devil, and tragedy is the price for playing god. In my story, science helps at every turn. Theresa's relentless pursuit of science eventually sets her free from her mom.2. That's why most of the metaphors, similes, and symbolism follows the following rule: If it's a natural image, it represents something troublesome or something that is an obstacle to Theresa; if it's a scientific or technical image, it helps.3. Parad's original name was Hawthorn until I thought of the Parad/DARPA anagram trick. I wanted to fit in a reference to Louis Friend and SOTL, but couldn't get it to work.4. The info on Crystal Falls is accurate. There wasn't anything in the rules about not putting in extra links, so to lend authenticity, I put in a few. Herreman said not to play conservatively, so I figured I'd go for it.5. The story formulation went like this: I loved the hillbilly/redneck guy with the beer in the flooded tent city. He had to be a central character, and he had to be a happy, good guy. The girl with the candle looked good too. So I had to make a third character to be the villain. The insect nit was a hard fit (heck, I still don't even know exactly what that thing in the picture is), but eventually I decided that its impending hatching would make a good plot device that drove toward a climax, like Fortinbras marching in the background in Hamlet. Then the crop circles went with the botanical theme that came from the nit, the hillbilly/redneck setting (Crystal Falls worked because of its Humongous Fungus), and the science fiction tropes.6. In Rappacini's Daughter, the daughter is named Beatrice after the guide in the Divine Comedy. Beatrice was too old-fashioned a name for a web-designer BG fan, so I went with Theresa, after a more modern saintly figure.I think that's about it for now. Best of luck to everyone![/sblock]</blockquote>

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