Welcome to the DVD extras for the Katie chronicles!
These stories were begun on January 13, 2005, and were completed on December 28 of the same year. 101 chapters, about 3 pages a chapter, equals somewhere around 303 pages of text in Microsoft Word. 101 chapters in one year is just about two chapters a week.
When I first started writing, I didn't have any plot in mind whatsoever. Reading LotR fanfiction, I had noticed that although there were plenty of "girl-from-our-world-falls-into-Middle-earth" fics, they were all from the girl's POV—not a single one showed what the Middle-earthlings thought of finding a random person suddenly appearing in front of them! I had a fun idea for a girl appearing in Elladan's bed, and decided to write a non-Mary-Sue Mary-Sue, if you know what I mean: None of the expected clichés, she knew nothing of LotR at all, and it would all be from the POV of the Middle-earthlings. I only managed to keep that part up for half of Something Rotten.
After a chapter or two, I decided I had a plot: Katie had to have come to Middle-earth for some reason, and I wanted to explore chaos theory, etc. The plot grew from there.
By the end of Something Rotten, I knew I wanted a few of the Middle-earth characters to come to Pennsylvania, and had the character of Katie's grandmother in mind. By the end of That is the Question, I was planning to have Katie fall in love with Elrohir, and despite the many reasons why elves and humans can't marry, they could because of the Hope that Vivian would bring to both of them. The rest of the plots fell in from there.
Looking back, it was a rather raggedy way of writing, and involved a lot of good luck and divine guidance. For instance, when Katie fell on the marker at the very beginning of Dark and Deep, I knew it was going to be the way she would save Rivendell, but I had absolutely no idea how. I figured that out later!
I think this may actually be the first long piece of writing that I actually completed and was pretty much satisfied with, including my original fiction. That doesn't mean it's perfect, by any means—there are plenty of typos, and some things that should be clearer or taken out altogether (like that accursed karaoke scene!). Some major mistakes:
In the first part (There's Something Rotten in Rivendell), the elves use nicknames. Elves don't do this. It would be insulting, like implying that they don't deserve their full name.
Also, Gilraen (Aragorn's mother) is completely absent from these stories. That tends to be a common lotr fanfiction convention, but it's incorrect. Gilraen lived in Rivendell from the time her husband died until well after Aragorn left, and only died a few years before the War of the Ring.
Speaking of dead mothers, I just noticed after I finished the last chapter, that Katie tells Elrohir in the Prospice that she has never heard what happened to his mother. That's a funny thing, since he told her about it (very abbreviated) in Dark and Deep! I imagine she probably forgot… In that scene, he also makes the mistake of saying that Elrond and Elros were twins, which Tolkien never said they were (and given the rarity of elven twins, he probably would've mentioned it if they were). I must've gotten that idea from Cassia and Siobhan's Mellon Chronicles.
In Dark and Deep, the elves know about the slave traders because they tried to kidnap some people from neighboring villages. There were no neighboring villages around Rivendell at that time. The only people who lived in the north were the Hobbits, the Breelanders, the Northern Dúnedain, and the Elves themselves. And I'm pretty sure that if people were kidnapped from a village of Dúnedain, those Rangers would've ridden off after the kidnappers themselves, rather than relying on the Elves to protect them. Unfortunately, this mistake is central enough to the plot that I see no way to fix it!
I made some mention at one point of Elladan inheriting the rule of Rivendell as the eldest of Elrond's children. Elladan actually isn't older than Elrohir. Tolkien never mentions their birth-order, but that's probably because the Elves didn't care. Elves considered the moment of conception the beginning of life, not the moment of birth. In fact, they celebrated their conception days rather than their birthdays! Elladan and Elrohir are twins, so they were conceived at the same time, and therefore neither of them is considered the elder.
That's just a couple of mistakes I've found, and I'm sure there are plenty more!
Deleted scenes:
I'm afraid I don't have the time (nor the attention span!) to actually write these scenes out for you, but I shall list them and you can have some fun imagining them yourselves. :)
An early list of plotbunnies included this gem, which you might recognize as the seed of the plot for Prospice:
Katie crosses a dead battlefield to get a kid, makes him not look as she carries him out on her back. Has nightmares later. Ro comforts her. Much later, her heroism has a song written about it. She doesn't want to listen, but Glorfindel talks to her, and she's better—holds very tightly to Ro's hand the whole way through the song, but can smile and incline her head when she is toasted at the end.
Originally, Glorfindel was going to be in Lake Evendim instead of holding down the fort back in Rivendell. Katie, being so traumatized by her experience, was absolutely horrified at the idea of having to listen to a song that has been written about it. (This is echoed in the scenes where she is a little embarrassed by the Elves honoring her in a feast in the end.) But Glorfindel, having gone through a traumatic experience himself (his death at the hands of the Balrog) gives her a bit of counseling. You'll notice several mentions of Glorfindel throughout earlier parts of the story, which were written to lead up to this scene… Which was never included!
I also thought about having a lot more things happen to Katie on her trip with Arwen's escort to Minas Tirith: Meeting Éowyn, getting insulted by a couple of Rohirrim and the twins jumping to her defense… But the story was getting too long already! Looking back, I could have cut out a good bit of that story, because the only parts that were really important were her reading the Athrabeth for herself and deciding she was in love with Elrohir, then realizing he loved her back. All the rest is gratuitous, and I think it gets kinda boring in the middle.
Someone also suggested, and I toyed with the idea, that Katie should find the books back in Pennsylvania and marvel over them. It would be a fun scene, but I don't think it really fits anywhere in the narrative. Besides, it only confuses matters! But it's a fun thing to think about.
My notes for Something Rotten were pretty much a list of funny quotes, some of which I managed to get Katie to say, and some I didn't. Here are some of the better unused ones:
"Die young, make a pretty corpse!"
"I've heard a saying, 'Do not argue with dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.'"
"Wow. That's just wrong on SO many levels…"
"FUDGE MONKEYS!"
-cough-bullshit-cough-
"Can I gut him with a dull spoon? PLEASE? What about a spork? Melon spoon?"
"Oh no, you did NOT just say that! Do you wanna go? Huh?"
"as soon as you're born you start dying, and when you stop dying, you're dead."
"And them's good eatin'!"
"Oh, goody. Jump for joy."
"Man!... Elf!"
"Can I sit down?" shrugs "It's a free country."
"What's up?" glances up at the sky in puzzlement
"There's just one problem with life. Nobody survives it."
"Two things in life are a given. Death and taxes."
"Aww! I've got warm fuzzies!"
"Play nice, children."
Katie smiled quite sweetly and said in a dulcet tone, "Legolas, darling, if you do that again, I'll rip your face off."
And if I ever get a chance to revise, this one is definitely going in, and the recipient of the kiss will be Elrohir!
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "What was that for?" "For being a genuinely nice guy." "Do you kiss every genuinely nice guy you meet?" shrugs "I don't meet many."
At the bottom of that document, I also have the entire scene of Katie's temptation written out, follow abruptly by this:
Then Glawar redeems himself by shooting Dorlarth for some reason.
So you know I definitely had it in for the bad guy from the beginning.
I wanted Katie to end up in Middle-earth from the very beginning, but I just didn't know how to achieve it:
Ringbearer: Because Katie ahs played a large part in the history of the elves and the salvation of Middle Earth (even tho, characteristically, it was in a way very small), and because she is a "servants of Elrond" as Gimli was "servant to Galadriel", the Valar may eventually grand her passage to the Blessed Realm, where she will live in a sort of fabulous purgatory until the time she decides to give up the ghost. Same could happen to Gma? Special dispensation of Eru and Valar?
If I ever go back and edit, I'm going to make sure I tie in the themes a little better into the end. For instance:
In the very first fic of this series, Katie said that she didn't want to be immortal like the Tucks. And of course, the ultimate fate of mankind was greater than that of the eldar. So in the end, Katie and ro and dan all choose mortality! Plus all the Christian stuff, in which "to live is Christ and to die is gain". And the fact that the resurrection of mankind through the Messiah brings everything to a whole new level and redeems it ALL—nature, men, elves, the whole shebang.
You may have noticed that after I put out the chapter dealing with Elrohir and Katie becoming engaged, I revised and re-posted. It was to tie in the theme a little more, but I feel I could have done better on that. I also had to re-post the Epilogue: I forgot to put in the detail of Elrohir wearing the garnet cross necklace! For those of you who missed this: In elven weddings, the couple is married by the groom's father and the bride's mother. In some situations, this can be altered: Galadriel, as Arwen's maternal grandmother, represented the absent Celebrían in her granddaughter's wedding to Aragorn. So Elrohir's maternal grandfather Celeborn represented Elrond (in absence of Elrohir's paternal grandfather) and Katie's maternal grandmother Vivian represented her mother. It was a custom for the father of the groom to give a necklace to the bride and for the mother of the bride to give one to the groom. You may recognize Elrohir's garnet cross pendant as belonging to Vivian—she wore it in earlier parts.
One of the questions I've gotten several times is, Why does Katie hear bells when she travels from one world to another? The answer is, I put it in the first chapter, before I had any idea what I was doing or even any plot, and then just kept it. I like to think it has something to do with a change in air pressure, but I really have no idea. However, I found this in my notes, apparently copied from a website:
Valmar, the city of the Valar: The city of many bells in the east of Valinor where many of the Valar dwelt. The Two Trees of Valinor grew nearby on the mound of Ezellohar
There's also plenty of funny random quotes in my brainstorming documents, like:
"SOMEBODY gets their hair cut off"
"Hobbits are like, you know, we decide to come to Lake Evendim for some fellowship and relaxation, and instead we get another adventure!"
Etc.
Random Trivia: Being an English major, a poetry lover, and a freak, I made all the titles from quotations or allusions to works of literature. "There's something rotten in Rivendell" alludes to Hamlet's similar assertion about the state of Denmark—both of them are corrupted by "murder most foul". Interestingly, I just randomly put that title on after I'd written the first chapter, not knowing exactly how appropriate it would be!
"That is the question" is another Hamlet quote, and I'm sure you know how it begins: "To be or not to be: That is the question". Hamlet is considering suicide. Elrohir faces the same question of to be or not to be in this piece.
"Dark and deep" is from one of my favorite poems, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost. I thought that sounded a lot like Katie's abrupt entrance into the woods by Rivendell! Most of the chapter titles are also lines from this poem.
"A Mysterious Way" of course refers to that line Vivian's always quoting: "God works in a mysterious way". The full text of the poem is in the last chapter.
"All Who See These Times" is actually from Lord of the Rings itself: When Frodo says he wishes the ring had never come to him and that none of it had happened. Gandalf replies, "So do all who see these times, but that is not for them to decide. All they have to decide is what to do with the time that is given them." I thought it was appropriate for a girl suddenly ending up in Middle-earth in the time of the War of the Ring.
And of course, "Prospice" is the title of that wonderful poem of Browning's about death, given in full in the author's notes of Chapter 13. It works quite well with the theme of the series (which again, I need to bring out more fully in the end of Prospice!)
I have a few very vague ideas for sequels, involving other people from our time ending up in Middle-earth, kidnappings, secret passages and suchlike, but the more I work on my other fiction, the more I think that I'm probably done writing Katie stories. The themes have all been tied up, and it's come to a satisfying ending. Any more would be gilding the lily. I will probably go back and edit and revise the whole thing sometime, but I wouldn't expect any sequels if I were you.
However, I don't mind at all if you write your own! Just send me a link, and give credit where credit is due!. :)
Thank you to my lovely reviewers, who have made checking my inbox such a rewarding experience!
—Ashley (jennyjoy4)