Elanor's · Explanations

Chapter 22 of A Secret Gate is up today. Given the length of time it took to get it there, it ought to be a creation of flawless beauty and depth. I’m sad to say it isn’t; it has its moments, though!
The chapter is divided into three sections, on each for Merry, Pippin and Jamy as they tend to the business of getting on with things in the last few days before the Wedding and the Great Farewell. Merry entrusts a few secrets of his heart to Estella and bids a personal farewell to Buckland; Pippin settles a rift in the family and considers paths of destiny; and Jamy discovers the Shire beyond the banks of the Brandywine, observes the eccentricities of Tooks, and finally gets to meet the famous Thain Peregrin.

SPOILER ALERT: You will probably want to read the chapter before you read the following long discussion of a particular plot thread. It is a discussion I have been having with myself for some time, and that I share here simply for purposes of clarifying my respectful intentions for anyone who might be alarmed at certain developments.

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I went the other day to look at something on my story website and nearly had a heart attack: it cannot possibly be more than SIX MONTHS since I last posted to A Secret Gate!!

Alas, it apparently has been. Life happens; sh*t also. And while I'm sure I've been written off in every quarter as a fly-by-night hack (not to mention that most specious of fan-fic writers, the WIP writer who doesn't keep up) I thought maybe I owed everybody who hasn't purged me from their f-list a reason for being such a deadbeat.

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Hello! Chapter 21 of A Secret Gate is now up on my website (http://entropyhouse.com/elanor/secretgate.html), so I am once again journaling a few thoughts. (Also, I just noticed the other day that I have a few new Friends! How nice! Thank you, and I hope you don’t mind if I Friended you back. Please know your interest is much appreciated.)

Chapter 21: Pippin and Merry fill the waning Shire days left to them with last-minute tasks of significance. This is a gossipy, domestic sort of chapter, filled with parting gifts and lots of little tangential details about people and places in Merry and Pippin’s lives. I hope you find something to enjoy in it. ( Read more... )

Chapter 20

It has been four months (!) since I last posted a chapter to A Secret Gate: my excuses are an amalgam of Real Life, unexpected rites of passage, physical setbacks, intersections with the children’s busy adult lives, holidays—and a surprising mutiny in that part of my brain that quietly, and mostly benignly, oversees the creation of this story, deferring graciously the better part of the time to Merry, or to Pippin, or to Jamy.

I never planned to write this chapter. It was nowhere on my radar. A very tiny part of it—very small indeed!—was intended to be seen as a vignette in another chapter like the last that progressed through a series of scenes showing different characters going about their businesses in different places, the whole of it designed to carry us onward to many poignant meetings and leave-takings. I never saw this coming. ( Read more... )

Chapter 19 of A Secret Gate is posted today. You can find it listed here: http://entropyhouse.com/elanor/secretgate.html

Not a lot to say this time, but I'll answer questions if there are any. This chapter is a series of vignettes,back and forth between Buckland and Tuckborough, as Merry and Pippin prepare to leave the Shire, and their folk prepare to let them go. I hope you find something to like!

There are no illustrations as yet, though I know Rachel is working on them. I'll let you know when they arrive.

As always, thanks for reading!

Chapter 18.2 is added to A Secret Gate today: Mat Bucket arrives at Brandy Hall where he encounters all manner of surprises and—at last—reunites with Jamy.

I feel I should explain that I wrote in a virtual vacuum for several years before I came to LJ, and while I endeavor to follow canon as slavishly as I can, sometimes my isolated beginnings show up in big ways. So it is with Stairs, the subject of my remarks this time out!

One of the first things I noticed when I started reading fan-fiction at LJ and SoA was that there was strict adherence to the canon-ordered hobbits’ distaste for stairs. Of course, I have written stairs into both Brandy Hall and Great Smials and may I say now I’m grateful to all of you who have been so kind (and tactful) as to not make a canon issue of these heretical constructions. Still, I thought the time had come to acknowledge my departure in this vein; to that end you will find a nod to the business of stairs in this chapter!

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As A Secret Gate progresses, it's getting a little hard to remember who's who in the extended families. A reader wrote me earlier today to ask if I had a set of family trees for my OC Took and Brandybuck families, and if I'd be willing to post it. As it happens, I do have a rather extensive one, and after a crash course in LJ formatting, I offer a simplified version here. I have not included the Gamgee Gardners per se here, I am only dealing at present with Goldilocks and Tom and their marriages and children are included here. (I will be updating as more OCs arrive!) Hope this helps anybody who's starting to lose track of people over time!

I think I have explained the meanings and/or the antecedents in most of the names in previous posts, with the exception of Berry Brandybuck's, which I've dropped in at the end here just because I had so much fun figuring it out in the first place!



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A Secret Gate continues…with Chapter 18.1.

This is another chapter, like “the 12s” that got too big for its britches and had to be broken in two. It’s a bit of a cliffhanger as a result, which I know is frustrating, but the good news is that a whole lot of 18.2 is already written! ( Read more... )

At last! I give you Chapter Seventeen, in which we meet more of the Thain’s family and Pippin sets himself to tackle both his children and the Wide World with regard to his future. I have no reasonable excuses for the long delay in creating it; it just took forever to write! It’s here: http://entropyhouse.com/elanor/secretgate.html

Actually, part of it is the fault of the grandchildren, which, of course, is really my fault. If you are foolish enough to give someone four children, why then those children will have children, and before you know it, you’re up to your ears in little folk—and then you have to figure out what to do with them all! I assure you, they are all lovely little hobbits, but they’re a bit overwhelming when they’re all sitting around the dining room table, looking at you with bemused expressions, waiting for you to tell them who they are!

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Hooray! Rachel has summoned up pictures with a magic wand, it seems! They arrived barely a week after she got the text, and I hope you all will like them as much as I do. There are three, scattered through the text of Chapter 16.

The first is entitled “With Merry close at hand…” and is Pippin and Merry sitting and talking in the grass. I like it very much, especially Pippin’s long hair! When at long last I make a paper copy of this story, I think this picture will be the cover.

The second you will find tucked in among the paragraphs is one of Sam and Rosie called “Soothing and Mending.” Very sweet and so touching, a reflection of those moments when the long dark of the Quest came haunting later.

The third is called “The Best of Us,” and is a portrait of Pippin’s children as described toward the end of the chapter. How handsome they all are!

After far too much time, Chapter 16 of A Secret Gate is finally posted at WinterFlowers (http://entropyhouse.com/elanor/secretgate.html). My notes are behind this break. ( Read more... )

This new chapter brings Pippin into real time at last and unites him with Merry after a very long wait for all of us. I was quite excited to be working with Pippin again; he is always here and helping, of course, but I haven’t had the opportunity to really work through him in a very long time. This is part of the reason we’re a little tardy—I have been working with Merry so exclusively for so long that it took a little while to readjust my viewfinder! I put a yellow sticky-note on the monitor to remind me of how Pippin approaches life—Lighthearted, Physical, Impulsive—and tried to stay true. These are not qualities I have in abundance myself, so I had to stop a lot and make sure I was staying on track!

I'll put the rest of this in a link. I know I get a little lengthy sometimes! ( Read more... )

Just a quick note to say--in case you missed them--that Enchanted Oaks has provided three new pictures for Chapter 14 of "A Secret Gate." Look for Merry and Goldilocks in a cute little drawing called "Pillows and Possets"; for a zen-like "Galen Elf-friend" (wearing the Healer's Stone!); and for a a sweet but sad "Season of Mourning" in which Merry and Pippin comfort one another as the snow falls. In case you didn't know, all of these pictures are linked so that when you click on them, you will be able to see a much larger version. It's worth it to click--Rachel's detail, particularly in terms of costume, is really lovely!

Chapter 15 is still in production. I'm writing about 5-6 hours a day, but it is proving quite a project, in large part because there is so much ground to cover in so many layers (also I'm slow). Not long ago I had a note from a reader who pointed out that since she had been made to wait through ALL these chapters for Merry and Pippin to FINALLY get together, she was really expecting this chapter to DELIVER!! Yikes!! I took that seriously and am working hard to create both an interesting and emotionally satisfying reunion. The chapter will be longer than most, but when I began looking for a place to break it in two, I realized that even I would howl if any part of it was withheld--so I hope you will bear with me, and I hope the end result will be worth waiting for!

I find I am becoming like Tolkien in this journal: once I get started chatting about things, I do tend to go on! I have just realized this must be a problem for the LJ folks who have friended me, so for their sakes I will make a cut early on here and move the bulk of this off their Friends pages and into a more manageable format!

This chapter brings the Master of Buckland to Tuckborough at last! Merry and Pippin, together again! Well, almost…Merry finds there’s trouble at Great Smials, and he will hear about it from Pippin’s sons: Faramir (whose birth is noted by Tolkien in Appendix B), and Galen, who, you have probably surmised, I made up. ( Read more... )

Chapter 13 is now posted at A Secret Gate. This chapter falls into the “we’re walking, we’re walking…” category, as it moves the feast (as it were) from Brandy Hall to Tuckborough. Along the way there are, of course, lots of things to see and hear…! We also meet Robin Gamgee, Sam’s second-to-youngest, and a grown-up Faramir Took.

I had just a few things I wanted to note this time:

Buckland Beer and Robin’s Ale: There seems to be a kind of argument online as to whether beer and ale are the same thing and were the same thing in medieval times (which is the general period I google for information on food, furniture, textiles, boat construction, herbal medicines, burial practices and the like). I am abysmally ignorant on the subject, but I did try to get my head around it! In my story, they are two different things, based on what seemed to me to be a useful argument put forth in a couple of online articles, to wit: “Experts have uncovered evidence that 12th century Londoners drank ale by the gallon, starting at breakfast time, due to poor quality drinking water. John Clark, curator of the Medieval London gallery, said: "Most people, including children, drank ale made from malted barley without hops. They even drank ale for breakfast, and got through up to a gallon, or four-and-a-half litres, a day each. At a price of a penny per gallon, only the poorest had to make do with water." However, he pointed out that this ale was much weaker than the beers people drink today. During the 1400s beer, brewed with hops, became increasingly popular in London, replacing traditional ale.”

The two pieces I used were "Recreating Medieval English Ales (A recreation of late 13th - 14th c. unhopped English Ales)" by Paul W. Placeway and "Binge-drinking: An age-old Problem" from BBC News, both online.

Names: I always like to know how original characters in Tolkien fan-fiction come by their names. (More on this next time, too, when the rest of Pippin’s children are named.) So by way of explanation, “Lyssa” is a shortened version of Sweet Alyssum, in keeping with the flower tradition of naming hobbit lasses. “Mat” Bucket started out originally as “Matrim”, which I had discovered meant ‘sailor’ in Greek! I decided Matrim was not likely to occur naturally in the Shire, though, so he became plain Mat. The Barway is my own invention—both the place and the name. I found the word in a thesaurus listing for “gate” and liked the sound of it.

For those who may have been hoping to see pictures of Merry and Estella’s courtship, Rachel has sent four new pictures, which can be discovered by scrolling through Chapters 12.1 and 12.2. Do go look—they are wonderful! Rachel mused a bit recently on trying to capture Merry & Estella’s moments:

“Somewhat strangely, the longer its taken to do something as important as a Merry and Estella moment, the more nervous I've become about whether they'll be up to the reader's imagination. I was torn for a fair while on the kiss, because what first touched me was how sweet their initial embrace was, and how later Estella told Merry he was the only ambition she ever had. I LOVE that line! So actually what I first saw was a rather tender cuddle between the two, but I just felt that Pippin got his picture of a kiss, so Merry deserved one too!

The other Estella/Merry picture for me came mostly from another line of her's. "You - you won't go away, will you?" I just had this image of her face looking up at him, expressing 'Please don't leave. Not again. Please not again.' Well, that's my take on it anyway. Hark at me, adding words to your own!”

As promised, Chapter 12.2 is posted today. This is the remainder and conclusion of Merry and Estella's courtship—a kind of story within the story, but relevant to the whole. There are no illustrations as yet; Rachel (who is Enchanted Oaks) has been moving and was still awaiting a land line for her computer last week! So they're coming, but not right away. I'll drop a note when we get them up.

Hello! I have for many chapters now been thinking I would like to find a way to occasionally explain what I am about here—and also to tell my very welcome visitors more about the lovely pictures from Enchanted Oaks that can be found sprinkled throughout A Secret Gate. A very generous and knowledgable person called Anso the Hobbit made me aware of Live Journal, at about the same time my webmistress (known to some as Penwiper) began to hint at the same. So I am gamely giving it a try and I hope to post little notes here as each chapter goes up from now on. I think there is a place somewhere about where you can read about me, so I won't reiterate that here.

I am one of those people who feels compelled to explain gifts. I do this so often that nowadays, when we all sit around the table at a birthday, or around the tree at Christmas, people stop before they open my presents and say, "Okay, what do you want me to know about this?" And then I say, "Oh, no, no! It's nothing, go ahead!" and everyone laughs because they know before long they will hear the explanation anyway.

So it is with my stories as well. Sometimes I really do want to explain why I did one thing or another, or how something came to be, or why I have incorporated (as someone pointed out) bits of language that are not necessarily part of the source material—which is a very important question, because canon is paramount in this endeavor. So occasionally I may mention some of those things here, by way of explanation!

I write what I understand is called "gap-fiction." I liken it to following breadcrumbs, which Professor Tolkien spread fairly generously across the lands and times of Middle-earth. I am particularly fond of following Merry and Pippin into hinted-at but otherwise unexplored territories; I think this is because to begin with, they were Boys Becoming Men, and there is nothing more shimmery or more full of equally balanced promise and peril. Further, as their Creator endowed them both with very long lives, I expect he thought they would go on Becoming, which is why I got an idea that perhaps their Last years were as important as their First, and set out to see if that was true....And of course, I write about them because I am very, very fond of them—just for who they are!

The chapter that goes up today (Chapter Twelve-One) is a flash-back, the story of Merry's courtship of Estella Bolger. It is Part One because there is also a Part Two. This surprised me when it happened, but that is the way the three of us write—Merry, Pippin and Me; whenever I think I know what I'm doing, one or the other of them (or Faramir, in Left Behind!) says very cheerfully (if it's Pippin) or very consideringly (if its Merry), "Oh, but I forgot to tell you....!" and I am properly astonished and chastised and set to writing their version with all speed!

What happened with Merry and Estella was that they showed me, about a year ago, a tantalizing little vision of their story and then eked out the rest over a number of months, layering and embroidering and smoothing as they went, until I had a lovely little bundle of visions in my head, which told me the story in something like a little film that lasted about 45 seconds when I played it. It was charming! And I was very confident about writing it—until, as I got into it, I began to realize that every second in my head equalled a page and half of written text! Thus, this very compact little story became an enormous chapter—far too long to serve up all at once in a story full of 20-page episodes! So I have broken it in half (more or less), and hopefully you will like Part One enough to come back for Part Two!

Now, as to the pictures. Enchanted Oaks is lovely young lady artist who lives in Cambridge, England, and is particularly fond of hobbits and faeries. Her pictures of ladies are very romantic; I have long admired a particularly ravishing little painting of Arwen she has on her website, and was actually drawn to ask her about illustrating my story because I could imagine what she might do with Diamond and Estella! When she agreed to do some pictures for A Secret Gate, she imagined she would do one per chapter (and she really hoped I might get Frodo Baggins in there somewhere, because he is really her very favorite hobbit!). Needless to say, as time went on, she began to get more and more ideas about pictures she wanted to make, and so it is that several chapters have 2 or 3 pictures now, and not a lot of people know it, I think.

I don't imagine that people go back to chapters they've already read, but I want to tell you that I hope you will, because there are some lovely pictures that you may have missed. Some of my very favorites (and I am delighted with them all) are a very sweet picture of elderly Pippin sitting among the violets next to Diamond's barrow in the Prologue; a funny little view of Tansy Boffin and her unwelcome suitor Folco Potts in Chapter 7; a very dramatic picture of Paladin Took and the messenger Elf in Chapter 8; and an absolutely beautiful portrait of Estella posted to Chapter 10 a week or so after the text went up. If you haven't seen them, I hope you'll look!

Enough for now, but I'm sure I'll be compelled to explain more later! —elanor