The Yuletide 2017 Fanfic Commentary Post

[calliopes_pen]

-Several moments (and the title, of course) were inspired by The Dream, by Lord Byron. In a post before stories were revealed, I mentioned going back and forth on the title, before deciding The Book of Night Was Opened Wide was the right one after all. That second title (also from the same poem) that I pondered was The Sweet Moon On The Horizon's Verge.

-A site that I found interesting in my research: Victorian Travel Times. For getting a few dates right, I used The Dracula Project, and jotted down a timeline for everything. There was also this map, from Whitby, to Hillingham.

-Originally, the fanfic was going to only be the Lucy/Mina dream sequence that appears in chapter 2. Along the way, a plot fell on top of me and the word count continued to climb. As of the final time I tallied it, the story had reached 61,506 words. For my sake, as well as Sean’s sake, I’m hoping that next time around it won’t be even longer. So much beta reading was done on this one, and I’m thankful for all he managed.

I put everything into Google Docs, by the way, and that seemed to make the process easier; I also had it in a Word document. Whenever we edited something on the Google Docs side, I updated the Word document. Except for one or two times, and then I went through both to find discrepancies. And then the Ao3 upload was edited, too, if it had already been uploaded. I think everything matches.

-There were a couple of deleted scenes, which the overview made unnecessary when Mina is thinking back on things following the dream sequence. The first was Jonathan returning home, bitten by Lucy for the first time and confused, and a few things that followed. The second was a rather uneventful attempt (aside from Lucy making the gas lights go out) on Jonathan’s part to sleepwalk away, before Mina just nudged him away from the stairs. I already had that he was disgusted by the lights, somewhere in the depths of the overview in chapter 2. As I previously said, I’ll be posting those deleted scenes and a few other quick little moments that didn’t make the cut later.

-It took a while, but I realized that I think the first line is half falling back on Crimson Peak (2015). In that movie, Edith starts the movie by saying “Ghosts are real,” whereas I started this story with the line “Vampires were real.”

-Millicent would have originally had a larger role than being part of an overview, before I reduced her to getting out while she could, so that she could live to work another day for someone else. She is also a reference to a Dark Shadows character. If I had thought of it sooner, she could have become Mina’s first meal. She was going to be bitten by Dracula, before I finally just had her leave.

-Simmons is the same attendant that found Renfield in the novel, after his altercation with Dracula that left him at the brink of death.

-The coachman is Dr. Patrick Hennessey. In the novel, Hennessey gave Seward written updates on Renfield’s exploits. In my story, Dracula would have most likely grabbed him so that he could have someone else on the inside…and because it gave him a kick to have a doctor doing menial tasks for him. Hennessey might eventually get back to Seward’s asylum if he’s retained his mind, since Dracula and the rest left him behind to deliver a note in Whitby. Van Helsing wouldn’t make the connection unless he met him in person; Seward wouldn’t point it out unless Van Helsing gave him the man’s card, and he has no reason to do so.

-I considered having Mina get Jonathan to a doctor. It might have given Lucy and Dracula easier access to him. However, Mina is, at heart, terrified that someone might think Jonathan is still mentally unwell, given his behaviors. If I had gone so far as getting him to a hospital of that era, and if the story had gone another way, I planned to put Dr. Vincent in charge of his case. He’s the doctor that Seward and Van Helsing took the kids bitten by Lucy to see. He would have seen the marks, and reported the case to them, thus making the rush to track them down no longer necessary.

-Yes, Mina is a Sherlock Holmes fan; she referenced The Hound of the Baskervilles.

-When Jonathan discusses his brain fever, that’s partially transplanted from a scene I wrote in 2016, when I was trying to get Van Helsing’s voice right for Dracula (1968), and ended up doing a novel version of the character instead of the correct one. I eventually managed to get the right one at the time. It was a writing exercise for me back then, but I kept most of it on the external hard drive. During that exercise, Dracula’s castle gets haunted post-Dracula’s death by…something that his will had kept in check, while everyone is hiding out there from a snowstorm. Jonathan gets possessed and almost kills Mina, and Seward just starts probing right after to ask if possession is anything like a mental collapse, and wants to know what it feels like. And then wonders if he thinks he’s going to have another breakdown.

Cue that speech about blood raining from the sky, with a few mild alterations to suit the situation and person he’s speaking with. It felt like it worked when Mina just wanted to understand, and stopped telling herself he would break if she talked about it.

-When the mind controlled Jonathan ever so slowly creeps down the bed, just as Mina passes out from the influence of Lucy and Dracula: I was inspired by Renfield in Dracula (1931), as he stalks towards an unconscious maid. He had the same eyes as in that gif. That’s how Jonathan is moving as Mina loses consciousness. So, yeah--that is the last thing she sees for a while. And yet, despite her genuine terror of seeing him like that, she still rushes to find him when she revives. You’ll also note that while Jonathan can’t fight back for himself, he won’t hurt Mina when she’s unconscious.

- When I did my outline of Mina reading the journal, she was going to fixate on the brides going all “Yours is the right to begin.” In the writing of it, that felt wrong. I realized she would be far more worried by Jonathan’s swoon.

-When Jonathan realizes he must have been not fully insane, he gets a paraphrased line of Renfield’s from the novel. The line in the novel was this: “Don't you know that I am sane and earnest now; that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting for his soul?” Jonathan’s line in the story is: "It wasn't a normal brain fever at all, then, was it? I was but a sane man fighting for his soul, as phantasms chortled and cajoled, holding dominion over my reason."

-During a moment between Lucy and Mina, when Mina is trying to decide what to do—Lucy’s “closer than sisters” line is pretty apt. It’s also a subconscious reference to Penny Dreadful from me.

-During Mina’s decision, I’m partially referencing how Jonathan thought in the novel. Mina’s thought: “If the myths were correct, such was the way of it. If the myths were right, what better reason to be damned than for love?” Jonathan’s journal entry, from chapter 22 of the novel: “To one thing I have made up my mind. If we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many. Just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.”

-“It was more a token gesture of their deep friendship, and how far they were willing to go for each other, than a kiss of a married couple.” I feel like between Jonathan’s weakness in the convent, his slow recovery from brain fever, coming home only to learn of the death of Mr. Hawkins, and being in a hurry to work in the firm prior to being bitten by Lucy, that Jonathan and Mina never really had an official honeymoon. So a deep friendship is pretty much it for them around then.

-“It was no King Laugh situation,” is a reference to Van Helsing’s hysteria in the graveyard at Lucy’s funeral. Only Seward was witness to it.

-There were at least four different versions of Jonathan and Mina awakening, and some were more peaceful than others. There was one where Jonathan ended up perched on top of a coffin, staring at everything in wonder and freaking out from noises outside, until Lucy and Mina soothed him. None were very developed, but one might end up in the deleted scenes post.

-“You would be upset by the mice stomping their tiny feet like elephants floors above us.” That is a slight reference to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), where Lucy was beginning to change, and told Seward that she could hear the mice stomping about, as well as the servants gossiping.

-When Lucy is trying to drag Jonathan out of his mind, and is thinking of poetry, the poem in question is Invictus, by William Ernest Henley. The way Dracula wakes Jonathan is a bit of a reference to Fright Night (1985).

-In the scene where Mina and Lucy go hunting: Originally the scene began at the point that it says “Mina was eager for fresh blood.” However, during the beta process I reread The Dream, and randomly wrote everything before that in the scene, and then rewrote that paragraph. And so we have Mina and Lucy embracing the night, and walking amongst the wreckage of Carfax, sort of dancing and quoting lines to each other prior to hunting. It just flowed well, and it was likely right after I had Mina say the quote that I started thinking of changing the title.

-Moira and Gerard. Ah, those two, and the nameless chimney sweep. The last was originally going to be a police officer, but I felt like he might blow his little whistle and draw attention to them after I wrote it. Moira was originally named Evelyn, but that didn’t feel right. I changed it, and also learned that one meaning of the name Moira is “to share,” and share Mina and Lucy certainly did. Gerard was a reference in name only to a character from the original Dark Shadows.

-“John, the words in these pages may be worth many lives!” The line in the novel was this: “"There is no time to lose. His words may be worth many lives.” Hey, Van Helsing said it when Renfield was dying in the novel, so he gets a version in my fanfic in regards to Mina’s journal. Renfield would be too dead to ask a few minutes later.

-When Renfield is killed in his cell, originally it sort of took a weirder turn when I was trying to hammer out the details. Nobody interrupts Jonathan. One of the attendants keeps going to the door, and then leaving to do something else. Jonathan picks up the corpse gently, and tucks it in so that it will fool people into thinking that Renfield is sleeping for a while. Then, he chuckles and leaves as mist. He perches outside the cell, and waits for someone to come in, and waits to hear their reaction. It felt way too much like an Angelus thing than him, even as a vampire.

-Yes, Quincey was out shooting bats, just like in the novel. Just in case.

-When Jonathan drapes himself across Renfield’s body when Arthur interrupts—that is a reference to how Dracula’s lady positioned herself on the floor upon being struck in Horror of Dracula (1958), when she bit that canon’s Jonathan. Yeah, my brain took a quick snarl of outrage, and gave Jonathan a snarling hell-beast that’s protective of his meal sort of moment.

-The pulsating face Jonathan gets as he begins to change into a wolf was inspired by The Howling (1981). He transforms faster than the scene I’m thinking about.

-Seward made a passing comment about trying to locate a date on his phonograph. Without Mina around, that’s impossible since nobody was around to transcribe those cylinders, and he won’t even think of doing that himself. Also, Seward mentioning “a bygone age,” was my little way of referencing Dracula (1968).

-Jonathan’s movements as he enters Carfax via the window are a mixture of lizard in the style of Dracula from earlier in the book, and Linda Blair in The Exorcist, scuttling backwards into the room and across the floor. That is the best way to describe it.

-Keep in mind that Seward absolutely loved the word euthanasia in the novel, as well as the concept of vivisection. He wanted to keep Renfield at the edge of his delusions, just to see what would happen. Is it any wonder he would muse about being allowed to keep (and pickle) Renfield’s brain? Granted, due to the vampire aspect the first time there’s an exposure to sunlight, it would have been a jar of dust.

-The Demeter brought Dracula to Whitby. The Czarina Catherine is the ship that Dracula escaped on in the novel. He doesn’t pick the ship here, and instead Jonathan charters The Desdemona. When I wrote the story, I didn’t bother to look up real ships, and just went with a Shakespearean character reference that I believe Lucy made at one point in the novel. Therefore, I was not aware that it was also the name of a cargo ship that ran aground in Argentina in 1985. There’s some trivia for everyone.

-Despite being turned, Mina will always remain a train fiend. Jonathan might be hanging out near the docks if there’s one nearby, sneakily memorizing schedules for all the ships just in case they ever need to make a getaway from another city. He would also be eating a sailor or two on the side. Dracula did well for himself by turning geeks. As I had Van Helsing point out, something of the host survives.

-The Ruthven Inn is a reference to Lord Ruthven from The Vampyre, which was written by John Polidori. The character was based on Lord Byron, and originally attributed to being written by him for a brief time, thus linking it all back to those quotes I used by Byron. Being well read, Van Helsing finds humor in the coincidental name.

-Jonathan’s letter was rather fun to write, if only for how it ended up shocking Van Helsing. He slipped into solicitor mode at least once, and halfway quoted Dracula from his time in the castle. I suspect that Van Helsing will have Jonathan’s letter framed after the others have read it, just so he’ll always remember just how well he learns from failure, and that they do not all have “child brains.”

-Quincey might be startled by the emotional display from Van Helsing, but at least it didn’t go the way of him bouncing on his leg and shrieking about Lucy being “the devil’s concubine.” Looking at you, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

-At some point, Van Helsing refers to Lucy (in his thoughts) as a "she-devil nosferatu," which was inspired by/an obscure reference to the song She-Devil Nosferatu from a West End musical of Dracula.

-Wismar is a reference to the city used in Nosferatu (1979). And, yes, once the youngest ones have been broken in and taught to hunt in the wild of Transylvania with discretion, Jonathan, Mina, Lucy, and Dracula will go there.

-Graz is a reference to one of the places that performed the Frank Wildhorn Dracula musical. It was one of the better versions. There are a few other references to that musical sprinkled in there.

-No, the brides won’t really get along with Jonathan now that he’s like them. However, I feel that they may fascinate Lucy, while Mina is uncertain, but protective and ready to maul if the three mess with either of the other two. I suspect the three women from the castle will leave before Van Helsing can make it there, long after the others have gone. If not, he’ll stake them just as he did in the novel.

-Even if Renfield didn’t last to the end of the story, Quincey and all of the Szgany did.

-And lastly, there is the trivia that I also put at the end of the fanfic. Renfield’s date of death in the story accidentally ended up aligning with his death in the novel. Given the time it takes between Jonathan being bitten so many times, Mina and Jonathan getting fully turned, and reviving, it’s bound to be right around October 2nd or 3rd.

If there is anything that wasn't answered by the above, feel free to ask in the comments. Deleted scenes will be posted tomorrow, and afterwards I'll link back to everything in the end notes of the Ao3 upload.