anne_of_green_gables epitome of incomprehensibility ...isn't quite as trigger-happy as my parodic fanfiction imagines her to be. I reread the book recently and most of the time she's sweet, maybe too sweet, while Marilla's character (what she's like and how she's written) stands out to me as strong. I hadn't noticed her much before when reading the books as a kid. She was always the strict one and Matthew was the good guy, while Anne was the almost-me with the genius imagination, except I resented her for resenting her red hair. Maybe Anne was a bad influence on me. I'm almost serious. Imaginative geniuses can get away with hitting harmless kids on the head for a perceived insult, since they're "sensitive" and "high-strung"... oh, yes, and violence is love. Good god, it is almost true. At that age I could get away with hitting my parents; not so my eighth-grade teacher. In the here-and-now I wrote a poem where Anne hits Marilla and Matthew and read it at a Tuesday poetry night - people didn't quite know what to say. That was before I reread the book and realized I'd twisted her character by mixing it with mine. (Since it wasn't a YouTube video, nobody said I'd ruined their childhoods. Of course, people don't read the same things, and probably not everybody recognized the name). Anne of Green Gables can be a bit of a national heritage thing here, what with L. M. Montgomery having been a Canadian writing things set in Canada, but lots of people don't know about national!literature stuff. And fair enough. I didn't know about the journals of Susanna Moodie until I'd heard of her from Margaret Atwood (who will die, and become more national than Moodie. Poor woman. I wouldn't look forward to dying if I was going to become all national like that.) And since I've talked myself out of guilt into goofiness, where on blather red did I write about Anne killing Holden Caulfield's nemesis Stradlater? I think I want to write about Anne killing other fictional characters because it would be amusing. Is this wrong? (If this is wrong, I don't want to be right-angled.) 150510 ... e_o_i No, she killed Alex from A Clockwork Orange, and I'm sure I said something about James Joyce afterwards and blah blah blah... yup, that's the perfect e_o_i trio: James Joyce the father, Anne of Green Gables the daughter, and A Clockwork Orange the holy spirit... but where is it? 150510 ... e_o_i It's on the word "focus," just because. Silly. And if I use it again, I'll have to modify it. The syntax is a bit awkward. Still, I like the conciseness. Why can't I do that in my "real" writing? 150608 ... e_o_i relating_to_books fanfiction 2015: "In the here-and-now I wrote a poem where Anne hits Marilla and Matthew and read it at a Tuesday poetry night..." Hmm, past self? I have no memory of the poem, though I can imagine what the feeling must have been like, standing on stage (I thiiiink it was at the now-closed Chez Boris, with the Icelandic hotdogs and Russian donuts) and worrying that others thought I was morbid or strange. Or maybe they were just bored, or didn't get it. Anyway, off and on, I'm trying to compile a poetry chapbook called Fanfiction is for Teenage Girls because someone said that she'd like to publish a chapbook of my work with her small press, except then the plague happened. TWO poems I'm considering putting in it (the chapbook, not the plague) refer to AoGG: one's called "Lux Aeterna" and is about finding a particular choir song with that name, since there are a lot of things called Lux Aeterna, and the other is a loosely rhymed-and-rhythmed seven-stanza piece where Anne Shirley goes around murdering characters from other fictional universes including Pollyanna, Molly Bloom, and Hazel Motes from Wise Blood. It's called, naturally, "Anne of Green Gables, Serial Killer." I'm proud of that one, okay? I worked on it a lot. Even if it's completely ridiculous. But then I also semi-seriously started a story where Anne is in her 70s, her husband Gilbert is dead, and she slowly falls in love with another doctor who turns out to be the son of the man who sold her the black-but-actually-green hair dye. He's from Montreal and about ten years her junior. And it's set at the beginning of World War 2, so there's the possibility of at least two of Anne's grandsons fighting in it, as The Blythes Are Quoted reveals...although in that book, Gilbert and even Susan live to a ripe old age. Hey, I'm keeping Susan alive. FOR NOW. Anyway, I was about to turn off my computer last night - dutifully closing files - when I came across chapter 2 of "Anne Wins the War", which I'd been dabbling with between phonetics homework and catching some scenes of Casablanca that Mom and Y. were watching in the living room. So I decided to browse the Anne of Green Gables section on fanfiction.net to see if anyone had written anything like it. I came across a multi-chapter story written by someone with the pen name "ruby gillis" after one of Anne's friends. It was called "Bertha of Green Gables" and I stayed up reading it until 3. The first chapter seemed just okay, but the rest had me hooked. It had the spirit of Rilla of Ingleside, which was about Anne's daughter, in World War 1. In fact the main character here was a niece of Rilla's, named Bertha, who grows from teen to adult during the next world war. Bertha is a granddaughter of both Anne and Diana (no, Anne and Diana don't get together romantically; it's that Anne's daughter marries Diana's son - this is canonical, from the Rilla book). The nice things about it? It had its own plots and characters, many memorable, and didn't feel like a carbon copy. Plus, I'm a sucker for epistolary stories and romance-adventure stuff, at least sometimes, and there's a subplot where Bertha studies opera and travels to the U.S. And there's an eccentric millionaire character named Archibald McTavish, which is just THE BEST eccentric millionaire name. Now, it probably wasn't on par with Montgomery herself. Montgomery is funnier, for one. Second, it didn't integrate the historical material as well as Rilla of Ingleside did - but then how could you feel it as intensely as someone who lived at that time? And L.M. Montgomery reportedly obsessed over war news, at least in the first world war (she died in 1942). But the way it started and ended was very satisfying. Damn, some people can do plot. I wonder if she planned it all out ahead of time? I guess I semi-plan my plots. Anyway, back to sociolinguistics - I wonder what Anne would say about that? 220131 ... unhinged one of my favorite series growing up 220131 ... kerry re-reading right now! 220201 what's it to you? who go blather from