Story notes for "The Teeth of the Hydra" by Resonant Posted to Ex-Wood on July 13, 2002
Believe it or not, this whole sprawling thing resulted from multiplying Ray Kowalski by T.Rex's "Bang a Gong."
Ces gave me tons of help here, from the earliest stage of trying to tease out the implications of punk rock to the last typo check. I'm also grateful to many, many others. I've been soliciting help in chat since February, so I'm terribly afraid I've forgotten someone, but here's the list as best I can remember it:
Te told me what it felt like to get a tattoo. Gearbox managed to solve a tricky POV problem for me without ever reading a single word of the story, which is a neat trick. Alanna helped me out of a tight spot when I made Ray's wall of denial a little too well-constructed. Ces and Beth provided crucial punk timeline reality checks, and where I got stuff wrong, it's because I ignored their advice. Beth, Ces, Fox, and Mia all gave me beautifully detailed beta help.
La Mere Vipere fits so beautifully into the snake theme that you might assume I made it up, but it was a real place. The Punkin' Donuts is real, too, though it's probably an anachronism to send Ray and Chip there back in 1977.
I mocked up a very rough image of the hydra tattoo; you can see it here.
Since I couldn't think of any way to fit it into the story, I'm going to put this quote here; it's Theseus describing his first meeting with Pirithous, from Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea, and it's what I had in mind as part of Fraser's sexual imprinting. (Mine, too, as it happens.)
"I knew then, as one sometimes may, that I had met a daimon of my fate. Whether he came for good or ill to me, I could not tell; nor, it may be, could a god have told me plainly. But good in himself he was, as the lion is good for beauty and for valor though he eats one's herds. He roars at the spears upon the dike-tops, while the torchlight strikes forth fire from his golden eyes; and one's heart must love him, whether one will or no."As a reward for reading this far, here's a bonus: I made the mistake of writing a sex scene quite early in the story process, and when the story went off in a different direction, that scene no longer worked. But I can't bear to throw it away, because, you know, sex -- so here it is in all its orphaned glory.
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