Some explanation on Midnight Pirouette:

 

    First of all, HERE is the story.

    Second, I'd like to apologize for the slight delay in putting this out.  Well, perhaps a little more than slight -- five years.  I didn't even realize anybody had remembered about it until I received an email a few months ago asking when or if it would be released.  I suppose I owe a little explanation.  Life, work, drifting away from the BSSM scene -- all of these, of course, had their influence in my latest excuse for procrastination.  It had, after all, been sitting around 95% complete for this past half-decade.  There was actually a pretty good reason for this:  I didn't want to release it.

    This was probably my most difficult story to write.  It's a troublesome story on many levels.  Not due to the length, mind you, but rather the overall story concept.  I was completely satisfied with The Weakest Link.  I thought it was an acceptable standalone story, and I honestly did not see any reason to continue it.  I thought there was resolution there.  I almost felt it would be disingenuous to the original ending to change it or add to it.  I also tried to make it a human story.  I think the characters are at their best when they are girls rather than magical superheroes -- all of that magical stuff is just a flashy "McGuffin" to get the real human plot going rather than being the plot in itself.  In all of my previous stories I made it a point never to have them engage in a fight, never to call out an attack, never to actually have an enemy, to portray them as simply interesting teenagers with complicated night jobs.  This story required that I change that viewpoint to some degree, which might have been part of the reason I felt uncomfortable with it.  At several points, I was tempted to say, "Forget it -- the first one's good enough," and erase what I had done to that point.  But I also said, "What if?", and kept on writing regardless, almost as a mental exercise.  And that's also, why at the top of the story, it says "the following story might or might not have taken place."  So I kept writing: a sentence this week, a paragraph the next, four months off, then a page, etc.  And then, oddly enough, I got to a point where I found it complete.

    What resulted is something I can't easily say whether I like or hate.  And I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing.  All I can say is that, if I had written Sailor Moon, this is how I would have ended their story. I guess, in the end, that's what fanfiction's all about, Charlie Brown.

    If you like The Weakest Link on its own, then there's no particular reason to read Midnight Pirouette, but if you do, I do hope you get at least a little entertainment out of it.

    Thanks for your time.

    +G        1 August 2004

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ASSORTED ODDS AND ENDS (But don't read these until you've finished the story):

Charles Gounod -- "Ave Maria" taken from Méditation sur le 1er Prélude de piano de S. Bach (1853) and adapted from the first prelude of Das Wohltemperirte Clavier by J.S. Bach (1722).

You can listen to one of the best versions I've heard of this by clicking HERE. (MP3)  Not bad for listening to while reading at certain points, either.

The "Cottleston Pie" Principle -- from Eeyore has a Birthday and Gets Two Presents (1911) by A. A. Milne:

"Oh!" said Pooh. He thought for a long time, and then asked, "What mulberrybush is that?"
"Bon-hommy," went on Eeyore gloomily. "French word meaning bonhommy," he explained.
"I'm not complaining, but There It Is."
Pooh sat down on a large stone, and tried to think this out. It sounded to him like a riddle,
and he was never much good at riddles, being a Bear of Very Little Brain.
So he sang Cottleston Pie instead:

Cottleslon, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
"Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie."

That was the first verse. When he had finished it, Eeyore didn't actually say that he didn't like it,
so Pooh very kindly sang the second verse to him:

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
"Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie."

Eeyore still said nothing at all, so Pooh hummed the third verse quietly to himself:

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken, I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
"Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie."

"That's right," said Eeyore. "Sing. Umty-tiddly, umty-too. Here we go gathering Nuts and May.
Enjoy yourself."
"I am," said Pooh.

The Four Rivers of the Greek Underworld and the quote from Virgil:

AKHERON, THE RIVER OF PAIN

PYRIPHLEGETHON, THE RIVER OF FIRE

KOKYTOS, THE RIVER OF WAILING

LETHE, THE RIVER OF FORGETFULNESS

"Now did Aeneas descry deep in a valley retiring, a wood, a secluded copse whose branches soughed in the wind, and the Lethe River drifting past the tranquil places. Hereabouts were flitting a multitude [of phantoms] without number .. Aeneas moved by the sudden sight, asked in his ignorance what it might mean, what was that river over there and all that crowd of people swarming along its banks. The his father, Ankhises said: - They are the souls who are destined for Reincarnation; and now at Lethe's stream they are drinking the waters that quench man's troubles, the deep draught of oblivion .. They come in crowds to the river Lethe, so that you see, with memory washed out they may revisit the earth above." -Aeneid 6.705

Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas:

Two quotes by Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus):

The footsteps are terrifying, all coming towards you and none going back again.  (Latin: Vestigia terrent omnia te adversum spectantia, nulla retrorsum.)  -- Epistles (bk. I, 1, 74)

The muse does not allow the praise-deserving here to die: she enthrones him in the heavens. (Latin: Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori; Coelo Musa beat.) -- Carmina (IV, 8, 28)

A Linguistic Quote:

"Perhaps we have had a shared hunch about our real origin longer than we think. It is there like a linguistic fossil, buried in the ancient root from which we take our species' name. The word for earth, at the beginning of the Indoeuropean language thousands of years ago (no one knows for sure how long ago) was dhghem. From this word, meaning simply earth, came our word humus, the handiwork of soil bacteria. Also, to teach us the lesson, humble, human, and humane. There is the outline of a philological parable here."  -- Lewis Thomas, Foreword to Microcosmos, p 12

By the way, based on the derivation from "dhghem", "human" originally meant something closer to "earthling."

The ending quote by Henry David Thoreau:

Sources disagree as to who actually said this.  Some give it as Thoreau, others Ralph Waldo Emerson, and still others Oliver Wendell Holmes.  I picked to attribute it Thoreau just because.

Ogura Hyakunin Isshu #68:

三条院                                Sanjo In                            Emperor Sanjo

心にも                                Kokoro ni mo                    Though I do not want
あらで浮世に                  Arade ukiyo ni                   To live on in this floating world,
ながらへば                       Nagaraeba                        If I remain here,
恋しかるべき               Koishikaru beki                 Let me remember only
夜半の月かな                  Yowa no tsuki kan             This midnight and this moonrise.

Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws:

Clarke's First Law:  "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Clarke's Second Law:  "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

Clarke's Third Law:  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

And yes, for those who have already read the story, my favorite science-fiction book (and actually, one of the few of them I've ever read) is indeed Childhood's End.

The rest should be pretty obvious.

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