To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

themerovingian wants to hear about To Sleep, Perchance to Dream, particularly about how I came up with the plot and the narrative structure.

Unfortunately for her, I don't have that much to say about either.

The seed was the random_hundreds community, which one early week had Buffy/Galadriel for its topic. Since Tolkien's Middle Earth is supposed to be our world very long ago and so presumably everyone who ever went to Valinor still lives there, it didn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine that Slayers get to go there after they die, since they basically are supernatural creatures. And the main thing that makes Buffy different from all other Slayers (at that point in time, at least) is that she gets called back to life, so that felt like a natural thing to focus on.

As for the structure... I've never consciously thought about it before. There's the full-circle thing of morning-day-night-morning, which works even though they're not all consecutive in the story's timeline. *ponder* No, make that that it works better because they're not consecutive. There's also a bit of mirrored symmetry, with Buffy dancing at the beginning and Galadriel at the end, which just seemed neat.

I liked writing Galadriel. Ever since I read the Silmarillion when I was fifteen she's been my favourite Tolkien character. Not sure why, really. Some of it is that she's so insanely old. She's of the second generation of elves ever to get born (third if you count the ones who were created whole and adult). She's older than almost all other living things. She's older than some mountain ranges. How does someone like that think? What does she feel?