12/6/01
"Hey, did you ever get the feeling that it’s really a joke.
You think you’ve got it figured out and then you find that you don’t.
So you say goodbye to the world and now you’re floating in space.
You got no sense of nothing, not even a time or a place,
Then suddenly you hear it, it’s the beat of your heart,
And for the first time in your life you know your life is about to start....
Oh, yeah, bring it on...."
-- "Walk the Walk" by Poe
"NEVERMORE" AUTHOR’S NOTES
It's still hard to believe that it’s done....
As I finished "Long, Long Way from Home," I already had ideas for a follow-up, but I didn’t decide to write "Nevermore" until LaT and Kasha convinced me that I should while we were driving around avoiding a con in Maryland in March 2000. So... I’m blaming them for this. That’s the ticket.
My unconscious mind played a lot of games with me on this one, more than usual. I was completely surprised by Turnbull, for example. I named Ray’s partner for a friend of mine, only later thinking about the fact that the guy’s name was "Stan." Ray Walker’s tattoo was the Eye of Horus before I found out that it worked with the raven mythology: Horus’ eyes are the sun and the moon.
Someone did suggest that I make Ray Walker "Rae" to make things easier on myself. The only problem was that "Rae" isn’t her name....
Some things I know about Ray Walker that didn’t fit into the fic are:
1] For a few months in her teens she was the drummer for what she’s sure was the world’s most mediocre garage punk band,
2] She was tempted to try for the Airborne Rangers but didn’t want an Army career, and
3] Some of the constellations on her bedroom ceiling have names, like Cornerboy and This Little Piggy.
The thing with the crow and the egg was based off something I saw once while waiting for the morning train. Talk about starting your morning off right. The crow story involving the graveyard is also for real.
The action figure sitting on Walker’s desk comes with the accessories mentioned and more. She’s Typhoid Mary--a Marvel Comics super-villain who had four different personalities (Mary, Typhoid, Bloody Mary, and Walker) last time I kept track of her--and she stands near my laptop too. It’s just a coincidence that her surname is Walker, I swear, because I actually took "Walker" from the Irish-Anglo-Norman side of my family.
I bought the black-feathered mask for a costume thinking that it looked cool and realized only when I got home that it was actually a cat mask, complete with whiskers, under the feathers. Which made me even happier, actually.
Once again I’d like to thank realitycek, LaT, Kass, Kit, Kasha, Beth, and Pares. Particularly LaT and Kit for final beta and realitycek, LaT, Kass, and Kasha for looking at bits and pieces of this story at varying stages without killing me for sending them new layers and small changes I’d added to material they’d seen hundreds of times before.
Something this long needs a lot of music to get through. Switchblade Symphony’s The Three Calamities--especially "Naked Birthday," parts of which could be used as a summary for the series--is the official soundtrack of Borderlands (One for Sorrow). Aside from that one, "Nevermore" mostly used Pig’s Wrecked, The Crow: Salvation soundtrack, Chris Isaak’s Forever Blue, Chemlab’s remastered Burn Out at the Hydrogen Bar, The Heads’ No Talking Just Head, Delerium’s Poem, and some bits of Dido’s No Angel. I wish I’d discovered Poe’s Haunted earlier, because it’s perfect, but it had a big role in writing the final bits and editing.
As far as I know, this is the conclusion of the Borderlands series proper, which somehow managed to drag in "In a Box," the Things Once Linked stuff, and even a few ideas that have been floating around in my head since I did my senior seminar paper on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Not bad for a series that started with a story in which I originally said in the author’s notes that I wasn’t going to write a sequel, don’t ask me.
Though someday I might write the much shorter, X-Files-ish AU follow-up to "Long, Long Way from Home" that came to me during jury duty in January. But I’d have to find out what kind of official paperwork would be necessary for the Canadian version of the CIA or FBI (and I don’t know what these organizations would be called either) to haul Ray away and have Fraser think it’s legit first.
Yeah. I’m cursed.