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nettlestonenell · 8 years ago

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Afterword

Here I am, five years to the day of when I posted the go-for-broke chapter of Don’t Give Out With Those Lips of Yours where Marion ‘dies’/is sent away to Germany, posting the final chapter of the entire Don’t series, as well as an afterword.

I have always thought of myself as a persuasive writer—certainly with regard to writing, that is what has most often drawn me to the process.

It might seem strange to say, a persuasive fiction writer, but it makes sense to me: getting the facts, figuring out the character, persuading a reader to buy into the fact that the story is genuine, [even though it is] set somewhere they’ve never been (time or place), and that the characters are believable and ring true.

Persuasion plays an even greater part in fan fiction. Can I, as an author, sell you on decisions this character—whom you may know quite intimately—will make? Do their words sound like them? How about the setting, the diction?

Not many know it, but I promised Glorious Clio that 2016 would see the conclusion of the Don’t Series. And I meant it when I said it. Well, 2016 proved a lot of things, a great many of them disappointing, and on this count I, too, failed 2016.

But here it is, February 9, 2017, and it’s DONE.

Funny, as Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree actually began in direct relation to my finishing the long work Death Would Be Simpler to Deal With—and fearing what came next.

What would I think about? What would I scribble notes about on random scraps of paper? What would I write?

It was 2010, the year of season one Sherlock in the US. The idea of an Alternate Timeline re-boot hung heavily in the air. And me? I couldn’t think about anything but Robin and Marian MOST OF THE TIME. Go to a concert—imagine every song through that lens, for example. I was still really, really burnt from the show killing Marian, and the failure to even follow through dealing with it on the scale it deserved. But mostly the show killing Marian. And Robin. And…[footage not found].

Look, Marian and Robin die OLD, their deeds accomplished, their lives fully LIVED. That’s how it works. It’s not JFK’s Camelot, a sort of short, limited run. It’s a lifetime. It’s-- Anyway…

I knew about AT or Uber-fiction from the Xena fandom, at the time the most famous of which was Melissa Good’s Dar and Kerry stories (Xena and Gabrielle’s dynamic transplanted into present day).

As for WWII? Anyone who examined my childhood would say that I was destined to create something about that era. Myself, I was raised in the post-war 50s. Yes, I am Older than Reblogginhood—but I’m not that old. But when one lives rurally, time does move slower, and despite my parents being born 1939 and 1941, they were raised more like turn-of-the-century babies. My mother recalls the installation of electricity in her home, a home that never saw running water. And so, despite living in a world with Original Madonna and Thriller, at my house we were listening more often than not to “Wonderful Songs and Inspiration” on Cincinnati’s WSAI (one of the program hosts was George Clooney’s dad/Rosemary Clooney’s brother). Big Band songs were often the standard, the soundtrack of a lot of our lives.

My father (more on him later) consumed WWII-centric film and television round-the-clock. From early days I saw war films (I may not know all their titles, but if Hollywood made it, chances are I saw it—multiple times), I went to bed at night to the sound of anti-aircraft guns, or submarines diving.

In the days of the big three networks, it was public television that most often showed my dad’s John Wayne films, Audie Murphy, documentaries, and (bless them) screwball comedies and serious dramas infused with pre-war or war time life of (often) civilians.

And that proved to be my jam. The lives of regular people, un-enlisted people, in the midst of war. Often, this means women. Sometimes, it means prisoners. And there’s simply not enough written or filmed about them for my taste. If the soldier’s role in WWII is well-documented (perhaps, even, in contrast with other wars, over-documented), the civilian/non-combatant story is nearly silent, with the exception of Holocaust literature.

So as Papa Nettlestone watched his war films, I was always like a research assistant, looking into the corners of frames, fixating on incredibly brief scenes and unnamed characters who seemed to fit into that class: ‘regular’ people and how they managed life during that war.

Shows like Jeeves and Wooster (and those period-filmed screwball comedies) showed me a pre-war lifestyle the wealthy in both America and Britain took part, or at least a facsimile of it.

And the timeline—the intersection of this period of human history: that a title-stripped Russian aristocrat raised in the opulent (and it could be said) out-of-touch Court of the Tsars could find himself in the war, become part of the new world following that war.

That an English lord born during the hoop skirts of the American Civil War, could see the colonization of India, women get the vote—and live to see the fashion of WWII, and the German’s plans to exterminate an entire people. Hot dog, that compelled me. Such drastic reorganization of the world, of society, of all European aristocracy. Still blows my mind.

But credit also must go to Clio, who stuck with me once she found Death, faithful in communication and reviewing. I knew she loved Hogan’s Heroes (at our house, also, required viewing), that team dynamic. I loved it, too, the soldiers now rendered non-combatants by virtue of the fact they are imprisoned—yet finding clever means of resistance. I loved The Great Escape (a film that has plenty for both me and my dad). Thomas Carter a definite character ‘descendant’ of Steve McQueen’s Cooler King, Hiltz.

I love stories about people hiding downed RAF pilots (Mary Lindell in One Against the Wind). Hiding Jews. Fusia Podgorska (Hidden in Silence) who hid thirteen people in her house’s attic for two and a half years, feeding and supporting them while she was still in her teens. Eight months of this time, German officers and their nurse girlfriends occupied the rooms directly below that attic. Charlotte-freaking-Gray (please, just the film version) getting stranded in France without a full cover story, unable to tell a soul who she really is, scheming to find a way to her crashed RAF lover, and living a constant knife’s-blade-edge away from being discovered.

Papa Nettlestone is a 1939 baby. He never really saw his father (that he would remember) until the man returned home after the war (Purple Heart, Battle of the Bulge). Papa N was six years old at the time. Their relationship was never less than damaged. So he’s that bridge between Then and Now, my dad, as is Zara--but he’s also quite strongly the story’s Carter.

Although what he would guaranteed say to me if he were ever to find and read these stories (which will never happen), is that they should contain battlefront action. And that it’s a great shame that they don’t.

Mind you, when I began writing this I had no thought to cultivating a series of stories. Apple Tree was meant to be a one-off as they say in television, not a back-door pilot.

It was just meant to get me over the hump of concluding Death. But, as with any good (I would say) short story, the final lines of it conveniently spiraled outward.

And then Clio said she would read the story forever in one of her reviews.

And that? That was clearly a challenge.

And Carter proved to be the necessary plot propulsion key.

I don’t know how long it took me to fully ‘break’ the story (obviously, via the series, certain plot beats were already there—but how to re-imagine them?), it happened over time.

I remember where I was standing in my house when I realized not only that Guy should burn down the barn, not the house, but that Marian wouldn’t die but would be sent away to a camp. (Originally, those two plot points happened more back-to-back in the narrative.)

I went with four stories primarily because that’s how many lines from the song I wanted to use. Purely dumb luck that it worked out so well.

I chose the Channel Islands after seeing an advertisement for the Island at War DVD series in a mail order catalog, and reading the small blurb saying the Nazis had occupied British islands, which left me suitably dumbstruck. I know A LOT about WWII for someone who has never studied it, as I said above. I’d never heard of these islands, much less their war-time past.

So, I looked them up.

Now, keep in mind: when I began this odyssey in November of 2010, the Internet was not what it is today. Today I can sit and watch YouTube video after YouTube video of Channel Islands travelogues. I can *see* Sark. Then, Google could find exactly ONE image to show me of Joe Kennedy (Carter). The Channel Islands had neither an official webpage nor a very good Wikipedia entry. I was largely flying blind. I wasn’t even certain the estate I’d imagined as Barnsdale (and its house) could feasibly be located on Guernsey.

The internet has vastly improved in Channel Island content in the intervening years. (Somewhat, likely, due to interest in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society published in 2008, but of which I was unaware until a reader brought it to my attention in the review section of-–I believe—Lover’s Lane.)

As I learned new information I tried to make use of it—without mucking up anything I’d shared in the narrative prior.

Finding Sark was, quite frankly, the kind of plot/setting gift any writer would endlessly thank her muse for. It is, and I say this as a person having never been there, the almost perfect 1:1 stand-in for Sherwood.

I do have regrets. I regret not better outlining how the Sheriff even caught wind that Stoker’s sub was coming to Sark in Lips (sylvi10 caught me out on that giant oops when it was far too late to fix).

I regret that fanfiction.net turns all my double dashes (--) into (-) single ones. That its cut and paste interface erases my (*,&,+)s that are meant to help me insert lines where breaks need to be.

I regret not allowing for more of a story between Mitch and Eva, that I didn’t get to make better, fuller use of Freyga Tuckmann and most particularly ReichKaptain Lamburg (at one point there was a whole side story during the break in Lips right after the wedding that focused on the unit and Lamburg, with R/M only in the deep background).

I regret misplacing the notes (I will find them someday!) that name Allen and Eleri’s two daughters.

As a (fan? is that the right word here?) of A Tale of Two Cities, I regret not having Robin reference Dr. Manette’s being ‘returned to life’ in the wake of his own ‘death’ and Marion’s ‘death’ and rediscovery. (I will not elaborate here on the Sidney Carton/Charles Darnay similarity to Marion/Magda, but I will recognize that I see it in the narrative, and that reading a lot of Dickens in my formative years is doubtless to blame.)

And while I don’t at all regret the format/design of ‘Til I Come Marchin’ Home (I 100% believe that it is done in the right, and the only, way to best relate the stor(ies) at that point), I do recognize that it is a format not at all conducive to reading easily in choppily posted, stretched-out-over-time excerpts.

I do not regret, but will take a sentence or two to explain that if at times words for things or spellings alter, such as sometimes tire, others tyre—color or colour, it’s because I always thought of the original series as a sort of US/British hybrid. US in the sense that so much pop culture is from there, and a series as openly anachronistic as BBC Robin Hood is going to have that aspect to it, Hollywood sort of creeping in here and there, the word ‘Okay’ being thrown around. For that matter, though he’s become a German Kommandant, the Sheriff, to me, still pronounces his English the same as Keith Allen doing Vaisey. He still barks LEFT-tenant at Guy, though a German would say LOYT-nant. Robin still says ‘punch’ like Jonas.

I try not to regret that there’s a lot of Love in this story, a lot of couples. The BBC series is responsible for a lot of that, I think. Sometimes I wonder if it were to be placed in a bookstore (and not shelved as fanfiction) if it would get sorted into the ‘Romance’ section.

I did write it for myself—make no mistake, this is 5000% the story I Want to Read, and one of the reasons I wrote it down (that I write anything down) is because it started to become so immense I was having trouble keeping track of it all in my head.

I had gone to an October yard sale the year of the first story (some of you know this story), I bought a cassette tape of Time Life’s “Romantic Memories of the War Years”—filled with pre-war and war-era Big Band. A four tape series, they only had the first one. Because at that time I was doing a sort of Robin/Marian overlay to almost anything I thought about, I overlaid them on those songs, and it was a potent fit for me.

I had Glorious Clio on board, and soon enough sylvi10 joined in, and—much later—reblogginhood. I mention them in particular because while I was writing the story for myself, their comments—as do any comments—caused me to turn my attention to certain parts of plot and character, and the narrative changed in specific ways directly related to those reviews. (Which is a definite endorsement that readers should consider writing reviews.)

Allen Dale bloomed as fully as he did in the way that he did due to sylvi10, I’ve no doubt of that. Chatting with her about the stories, hearing her thoughts on Allen, her investment turned my brain to his corner, caused me to think more about him than I might otherwise have done. (Allan does tend to take over stories I write anyway, tbh.)

I had at least one reader caution me about putting Robin and Allen as the two main characters in the fanfiction description for Marchin’, saying it would make people think the story is about a romance between the two. But I couldn’t not list Allen as second-most-important in that story (and at times, first). For a great deal of Marchin’ is Allen’s story. He’s at a point in his grief and dealing with the war where he’s finally agreed after years of swallowing it down to become proactive. Where he’s realized that his path to handling what he did in the war is to pursue facing it, whatever the consequences.

Perhaps his personal life triumphs/finding the love of his life are his ‘reward’, then. The good that came to him from his agreeing to hunt down and conquer--face the bad. He would not have re-met Eleri, after all, had he not traveled back to put his memory of Annie to peace, and avenge and memorialize her death. And it is in Eleri, who is able finally to understand what he was during the war, to whom he needn’t hide any longer, that he needn’t be two-faced anymore.

There’s a definite Allen/Marion parallel (not 1:1 in any sense) in the series. From the first moment they meet when he, just, misunderstands 1000% about her, to the life that she leads (like him) where no one knows all the contradictory and self-transgressive it involves. And she misunderstands him, too, thinking he’s nothing more than a short grift con man.

But it’s Robin who, while he doesn’t see all about either, knows both for being more than is shown.

I wrote Edward/Miranda entirely for myself. I fell so HARD for them and their narrative. But some of the latter sections with them (particularly their backstory in Marchin’) is directly resultant of reblogginhood having commented that she would read about them if it were written. That made me feel okay (because by the time you’re that far in to writing a series of this scope you can find yourself TOTALLY distracted by audience expectations) to write those portions, which were, to me as a reader, a joy in every way. So, thank you for that.

I learned some things: I learned that if I, with the RL I have, with the lack of RL time-to-myself, can not only find time to write, but to finish, this is an accomplishable goal for anyone. If you want it.

There’s a lot of writing advice getting blogged around on tumblr, but being a writer can be boiled to the simplest terms: the thing about writers is, They Write.

You can go to school for writing for as many years as you like, and your instructors will tell you this, they will expect this of you, but until you embrace it yourself, you won’t really get it. Writers write.

Look at these ridiculous timelines:

Apple Tree – Nov. 1, 2010 - November 10, 2010 – completed in TEN DAYS!

Lover’s Lane – November 11, 2010 – January 18, 2011, it’s 67K words. In just two months’ plus one weeks’ time.

Lips – January 20, 2011 – March 24, 2012, 239K word count. Fourteen months. That is within spitting distance of the length of HP and the Order of the Phoenix, for reference, which has 257K.

The first stories are ridiculous because of how MUCH was accomplished, and how quickly.

I posted the final chapter of Lips from the hospital, after having a baby—largely because I knew from experience I wasn’t about to get many chances to work on Don’t anytime in the near future.

So, I came to Marchin’. Of which contemplating it is hysterical to me, because I had always expected it to be only just slightly longer than Apple Tree. [laughs maniacally]

Marchin’ – April 1, 2012 – February 9, 2017. (Completed, though not yet fully published on fanfiction.net) Final count will show it just over 220K words. 30K more than HP and the Goblet of Fire. [Yes, I realize the almost five-year timeline to finish this was really, really, not acceptable. Way tooooo long to expect anyone to still be hanging around. I am not Susanna Clarke. And not only because I never got close to the 308K final word count of JSAMN in a single one of the discreet stories.]

And please don’t forget the little bit of holiday side-fic of Zara and Carter, with gang-based Christmas flashbacks. Don’t: The Ghosts of Christmas Past, published January 2012, at 5K words.

And to be accurate, I was occasionally writing and posting other fic while also writing Don’t (including fic outside of BBCRH).

I learned that I can write to an epic length (an important discovery for a short story writer), I learned how to craft a chapter (feel free to tell me I failed if you disagree). I learned how to juggle 10K plot strings and tie them off in the ending.

I learned that in the beginning writing is easy, slick as soap in an empty-but-wet bathtub; words can pour onto the page. You’re building. But then something clicks over in your plot, and suddenly you’ve got a lot of things to juggle, a lot of stitches not to drop.

You have to navigate among and around what you’ve built. Writing speed slows, writing time can get eaten up referring back to what you’ve written before to make sure all your pieces fit. To make sure you’re still holding the strings of all your marionettes.

I learned (I already knew a little about this before) that sometimes, when the words are gross and sticky and not coming out onto your screen you must fight to put them there anyway. That 97% of scenes/writing is clumsy and workman-level rather than craftsman quality. But you have to put down the bones and sinew before you can go back and build on that and add the plump flesh, the other parts of it that add beauty and poetry.

You have to trudge at times before you can dance. And if you’re not willing to slog through, you’ll be done (but not finished), your work will stall—and you’ll never dance.

As for process, I wrote these straight through, beginning to end. Does that sound crazy? I don’t know. I got into the way of that due to posting updates online, I suppose. In the early days, I would always be posting something a little earlier in the narrative than what I was presently working on. But at some point that stalled out and I was publishing in tandem with what I had just done, having no other writing ‘banked’.

As for the ‘finale’, I will confess that portions of Carter’s journals used there were written—as many as five to six--years ago. And a lot of the reunion scene speeches were also conceived and written before the last chapters of Lover’s Lane were posted online (that was posted Feb 2012).

I don’t mean that as a brag, only, to say that the storyline has always been pretty closely orchestrated and set for some time. Not all the particulars, though.

Clio said something recently about it being difficult to get back into the swing of writing Don’t, but you know, I’ve never really been out of it all these years. I wrote the unconventional narrative format of Death as what I expected to be my way to work through Marian’s on-screen murder.

And I started Don’t even before I completed the ending of that story. And creatively and in any daydreaming, I have lived solidly in that world ever since. Spare time? Think about Don’t. Can’t sleep? Think about Don’t. People, that’s a long time. Am I over Marian’s death? Probably not, but that frustration point is more like background noise at this point. But Don’t’s been with me long enough that I don’t think it will ever leave.

I’ve been stalling a long time (telling myself to finish it first), not going back to Story 1 and reading straight-through sequentially to the end.

It’s startling to think I don’t have to put it off anymore.

Don’t has received its share of criticism—not necessarily hostile criticism (thankfully). A reviewer thinking Marion’s reaction to Robin upon seeing him in Story 1 is too stoic (yes, I may have been watching too many stone-cold Barbara Stanwyck films, but I stand by the characterization), LOTS of feedback on how Marion was not in ‘Til I Come Marchin’ Home, the notion that all four stories are too sad/depressing, just to name a few.

It was always a deliberate intention to keep Marion absent for most of Marchin’. She is, after all, a ghost at that time. And readers should feel the Marion-shaped hole she left just as much as do the characters. Even saying her name is at times too much a trigger for them. And almost every side-flash scene of Marion when she appears post-war refrains from using her name in a familiar way. As though she no longer even thinks of herself as Marion.

I do believe her absence and the emotion of her post-war storyline is more bearable when all of Marchin’ can be read as a seamless whole rather than in parts and pieces and stops and starts.

As for sadness—well, okay. Maybe? I’ll say it’s hard for me to judge. If it is sad, to me it is an exquisite pain, a pain felt on the way to coming joy. But then, I always knew the end. I always knew the pain would not end in loss and futility.

And the end, frankly, may not satisfy all. [spoilers] Everything that happened (even, took place pre-series) to our beloved Robin and Marion can’t be fixed, simply, by mind-blowing sex following their reunion.

But their scars and insecurities still present shouldn’t be taken as unreclaimable. Only, the time it takes to regain such things in a relationship isn’t covered explicitly in the plot.

Real world studies have been done about those imprisoned in the camps. Contact me if you want some links. Everything from (obviously) PTSD to a myriad of health complications plagued those liberated, often for the rest of their lives. To pay true respect to what Marion is to have been subjected to, is to admit that there is no easy fix for it, not simply a ‘spunky’ disposition that can overcome it.

As for why Marion stayed away, when taken as a whole, pieces of that puzzle are (without direct mention of Marion) everywhere within Story 4’s narrative (and strong correlations exist to it in earlier stories), spoken about, by, or with regard to everyone tainted by the war, from Allen to Miranda to Djak to Carter (and others).

As for the long timeline between Marion’s ‘death’ and her being located alive, I respect cries of ‘too long!’, but as a person older than reblogginhood, I say: a decade, when life is at its most distracting (as with small children to care for), passes as less than two years’ time in one’s carefree singleton twenties. Time simply shortens later into life.

From Story 1, Don’t has always been about the conundrum of sexual loyalty, just as the song it was crafted around. A loyalty that goes (according to the original song’s lyric) both ways, just as the woman is asked not to sit under the apple tree, the man is later on admonished (*significantly, but curiously, this lyric is absent from The Andrews Sister’s most-famous version of the song) “Watch the girls on the foreign shores, you'll have to report to me, When you come marchin' home. Don't hold anyone on your knee, you better be true to me… you're gettin' the third degree, When you come marchin' home”

Clearly calling out the woman’s mate who is currently serving overseas.

So the sexual loyalty question in WWII goes both ways. Let me be clear: I don’t necessarily believe jealousy and compromised sexual loyalty are a 1:1.

I would, in fact, mount a defense of BBC series Robin as not necessarily motivated by jealousy toward Guy. At least not ‘simple’ jealousy. (ie: you have Marian! And I don’t!)

With as much in-series as is NOT said between Robin and Marian (recall: he tells her he loves her when she’s dying/dead/unconscious—and when she recovers he doesn’t bother to re-state it), a partial dynamic of Marian/Robin’s relationship is what goes unspoken between the two of them. Yet Guy is held back by no similar scruples. He may pursue BBC series Marian openly, speak with her openly, offer her safety, a home, financial and societal security. In short, as given, Guy represents a future for Marian. (And to most people/certainly her peers and her betters, an ACCEPTABLE future, as Guy is allied with the present power structure and law-in-place).

In this, BBC series Robin is frustrated (and Don’t series Robin even more so). What can he offer Marian? What can Don’t Robin offer Marion? Even less. He has nothing of stability, no home, no financial means he can access. He cannot even offer her (with any certainty) that he, himself, will remain alive and accessible to her.

I confess, I kept from placing Marion into a fait accompli sexual relationship with Guy primarily because that felt like more weight than the story was prepared to bear, and secondarily because I find the idea of Geis’ sexual frustration really enjoyable, and it drives him very particularly as a character. A Geis who agrees to be put off by Marion repeatedly, when nothing truly stands in the way of his forcing himself on her is far more interesting than Geis as Marion-rapist. (Now, Geis as Anya-rapist is interestingly fraught in its own way, and faithful to the BBC series, as well.)

Sexual loyalty through the lens of female characters whose agency is compromised by something like an Occupation exists as well. Marion and Eva (on the BBC series more of a contrast than a comparison) here become two versions of a similar story. Yet the chance arose to give Eva, the more sexually transgressive (for the era depicted) with a bastard child and a confirmed sexual relationship with the Kommandant, offered the chance to give that character a happy ending sooner than that of her former mistress.

Early on, in a world where so little can be counted on, the question of Marion’s loyalty is of paramount importance to Robin, more so one might argue, than whether, even, she reciprocates his love.

The sexual aspect of her loyalty early on in Apple Tree and Lover’s Lane is almost always their departure point for argument. Marion expects him to have faith in her. But Robin, as would any of us (like the rest of Guernsey), logically assumes she is sexually involved with Geis.

Robin believes that sleeping with Geis would equal a betrayal of English values, and therefore, of him.

He carries the wound of Marion, at the time of their break-up fight, attempting to (in his eyes) use sex to manipulate him before she intends to leave him behind for America. And he knows, historically in their relationship, that Marion has never viewed sex in the same light as he has (and was socially expected to do).

Which culminates in the argument on Sark before Marion is returned to Geis following her kidnapping, wherein she attempts to get him to see that on the Islands during occupation, believing her agency is uncomplicated and without consequences in any sexual liaison is merely an illusion.

Hopefully, the series is more than just this debate/discussion. Certainly, to me it’s about more than sexual jealousy, but certainly that was an inciting catalyst.

Then again, maybe the overriding issue of sexual loyalty is just a notion I contemplate to try and defend the large number of hook-ups in finalizing the series…

But Don’t is also about heroism. At its very core.

I have personally long been fascinated by certain ‘hero’ narratives that see the heroes returning to normal life, such as the man instrumental in the Warsaw ghetto uprising who survived the war, moved to Florida, and successfully opened a chain of grocery stores. Or the Daniel Craig character/ real-life figure of the Jewish commando, Tuvia Bielski, who hid people in large numbers in the Polish woods in Defiance and went on to live a life in New York, running a small trucking company for 30 years--where his own children were ignorant of what he had done during the war.

For a long time this kind of “post war information”/return to normalcy always bummed me out. But as I’ve aged, I’ve honestly come to believe that this is wherein true heroism lies.

To know when to stop fighting. To manage to reclaim something of a ‘normal’ life. To enjoy the accomplishment of what was being fought for, the fruits of your wartime labors—and particularly for the oppressed people groups in WWII (Jews, the Rom), to partake in the society, culture, and family life/continuation of your people, as that is exactly what your enemies were trying to prevent you from doing.

To thrive in the wake of your oppression.

And in my age, I think I’ve realized that even though these heroes, these people who accomplished remarkable things during the war, then stop behaving quite so obviously heroic (no longer action movie stars) the heroism that they then face is a quieter one, one of learning to cope and process what the war did to them.

And really, it’s not flashy, but it is no less compelling. No less transformational, and dramatic as can be.

Some readers may still wish to argue that twelve years is too long a time, that it is impractical that Carter’s grandson is not well-acquainted with all that took place in the narrative. Rest assured; I’ve read more than my share of war and post-war narratives, of combatants and non-combatants alike, and the thread of survivors never again speaking of what happened to them, or simply never coming back home (though they lived) are more common than not.

Sometimes they find a way to speak of what happened to them, they speak only to others who experienced it, they go on to help curate a memorial—that safe space where they can speak and share about their experiences; they write it down, they paint it.

I’ve had two feedback responses that I think are important enough to include here for the general reader.

The first involves the gang not attempting to canonize Marion as a hero during the time she is missing/a thought that Marion should not feel quite so awfully, or make such drastic decisions based upon her wartime life choices.

Historically, honestly, that would have been pretty unlikely. The taint of collaboration would have overwhelmed any ‘redeeming possibility’ of Marion's resistance work as the Nightwatch (which it would not be simple to convince anyone she 100% was; the wrong accent--the fact no one ever really saw the Nightwatch, the fact Vaiser put forth that it was really Joss Tyr just for starters), and the fact Marion was female, in the 1940s; the world at large would hold the likelihood of her having been Geis' lover (recall: the importance of sexual loyalty) far above the slim chance that she was also the Nightwatch. Such things as promiscuity (especially with the enemy) weren't taken lightly, nor forgiven in females. Robin’s connection to her would have been colored by the notion she had been a scarlet woman, and him, doubtless unable to resist being in her thrall. (Honestly, as backward a notion that man is defined by an inability to resist his private parts as that a woman is in all situations responsible for what befalls hers). In fact, into the 1980s and 90s, the Channels were still fighting over who collaborated and who didn't. (Jersey records account for at least 900 illegitimate babies born to Islander mothers and German soldiers during the Occupation. As recently as 20 years ago the Islands were still in denial of this, despite Public Records being released that proved the numbers.) It was very divisive, a true crisis of the islands, and remains so to this day. So while I think, in later decades, yes, the world could embrace Marion as a hero, could believe her tale--those alive during the war, living out those years and trying to survive the wake of its ending, would not have been in a state of mind to accept her. In that starkly black and white, right and wrong, mindset of the times, she would have been condemned on all accounts. She would have had to be dead for real for her to be lionized, or even thought acceptable in Britain. Additionally, the National Secrets Act, which kept Robin & Co., and likely Carter from speaking about their war work for DECADES (if ever) following the war's end would have prevented anyone from talking about the Nightwatch, their time on Sark, etc., under penalty of imprisonment, and/or threat of a charge of treason. Not to mention being socially ostracized.

And Marion is that great sort of pragmatist/realist that fully understands this. And she's right, really. At least in that she's right that collaboration was not at all tolerated in the wake of the war. The taint she fears for Robin would have been 125% a real thing. He would have been tainted.

And we all know how skeletons in the closet are found and often via spin made into skeletons when they may not really be—in the political (or as he calls it, public) world. In fact, despite the majority of Islanders alive during the Occupation having died (and some, emigrated elsewhere) the Channels are still trying to work through and figure out how to accept WWII collaborators among them, how to speak of them historically. As said, it is still a tremendously divisive issue. So Marion's right in her conclusion about what association to her would bring about (even if her Nightwatch identity were known), but she's wrong in her understand of Robin. She's always hoped for that public life of doing good and legislating for Robin (no doubt because Edward was her standard for how a good man behaves/takes action), and she's right that Robin would excel at it, but she has never been able to get her head around the idea that Robin doesn't have any interest in that, playing that game, being that person—no interest in matters of state and diplomacy. It is that tragic flaw of a mistake/miscalculation she makes over and over again.

It may seem to go without saying, but let me thank you (any of you, all of you) for reading. Let me shower laurels on those of you who reviewed. I did write this work for myself, no doubt about it, but the encouragement of hearing from others reading cannot be undercut. It is an immense support to know as an author that your words matter to someone else out there.

And if you’ve been reading and you’ve never commented or checked-in, by golly, you’ll never find a better time than now.

I made some promises to myself, for when I finished Don’t. To buy all four CDs of Time Life’s Romantic Memories of the War Years (digital files of the original versions of many of the songs on them not available). To commission some fan art. To work to get the entire series posted to AO3.

But right now, I’m learning something new. I’m learning how to deal with surviving in the wake of completing a long, long work. As I mentioned earlier, when the end of Death came, I was already working on Don’t.

But, what now? What next?

I will never be over Robin/Maria(on). Of that you can be sure. But will I write more BBCRH? It seems doubtful, unless I do so to conclude at least one unfinished story (hi, sylvi10!). Don’t is certainly my ‘last word’ on the BBC series (I think). While I’ve not ‘gotten over’ them killing Marian (etc.), I have at least worked through it.

There was a time I thought to play around with writing “Widow Hood”, wherein Robin is killed in S2 in the Holy Land, not Marian, and Marian is the one left to reassemble the gang (re-recruit Will and Djaq back to England) and we sort of see if she can accept Guy into the gang, as the show had Robin doing, if she can forgive Allan’s betrayal, and see if she can overcome Robin’s loss (as the show had Robin ALLEGEDLY doing in S3). But I think my pursing that (at least as a whole) is pretty unlikely at this point.

What I do know, is I feel confident I can write to a longer form now, and manage chapter breaks to my own satisfaction if not others’. And somewhere out there, the promise of The Perfect Hat is waiting for me.

#the don't series #afterword #neftzer #'til i come marchin' home #fanfiction

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