What are you doing right now?

[EndOfTheEarth]

Besides posting on here and replying to this thread. Original credit for this goes back to Fate and Nathan on MX.

[Xuut]

MEMORY LANE OH GOD. 

Drive-thru records has released waaaaay too much music and I like it all too much. 

Hi bandwidth, prepare to hate me. And hi iTunes, you will be getting way bigger today. :) 

[EndOfTheEarth]

All the modern mummy stories treat resurrection as a bad thing, and something which brings down a great calamity, and that only ignorant people do.

But the Victorian British people in Bram Stokers Jewel of the Seven Stars go about it with all the excitement and organization of a trip to Disney world, and the project turns out well for everyone involved.

Victorian-era people were awesome like that.

[nathan_p]

Fuck yes I love that book.

(Also I thought it turned into a total shitstorm at the end, but I don't remember.)

[EndOfTheEarth]

There was a modern film adaptation where it turned into a total shitstorm. In the original though, the spirit of the mummy is released to elsewhere after a brief, slightly tense 'strange magic' bit, the scientists enjoy huge success, and the guy and gal live Happily Ever After.

Though, I can see how you can mistake Victorian people in gas masks, half of them fainting under green gas and dim lighting while the female protagonist is in the process of extracting bits of a four-thouand-year-old-soul from her body as a shitstorm. Tense, but everyone, mummy spirit included, were on the same page going into it, and everyone was satisfied leaving it, so I figure the scene in between to be tense, but not bad. Sort of like watching the dual shuttle launch at the beginning of Armageddon.

[nathan_p]

Like, I remember specifically the last line being all "all my friends are dead and Something Weird is loose in England".

 

Edit: Oh shit, what the fuck. I checked Project Gutenberg and the ending is nothing like I remember it. I remember a much longer ending sequence, complete with demon resurrected cat throwing a shitfit in the kitchen and Margaret being possessed/disembodied by Queen Tera. Fuck.

 

If I can find my copy when I get home, I'll throw up some scans from any parts I see that are totally different. What the hell.

 

Edit: Scans won't be necessary. You, and Project Gutenberg, have the 1912 revised edition: I read a reprint of the first edition.

 

See, Stoker's original ending was evidently deemed too gruesome, and he deleted the offending chapter to comply with his publisher's requests. Then he whipped up a happy new ending and that's what went to print in 1912.

 

Here's an online copy of the edition I read and remember, complete with the last lines I was referring to:

 

I did what I could for my companions; but there was nothing that could avail. There, in that lonely house, far away from aid of man, naught could avail.


It was merciful that I was spared the pain of hoping.

[EndOfTheEarth]

In reading it I don't feel that the ending was so much revised because it was "sad" as due to the fact that the original ending is vague and ties up nothing; we do not know what the result of the great experiment was, we do not know what became of anyone other than that they died at some point (Remember my old arguments about Fang dieing? Same applies here.), and the altered-soul conflict with Margaret Trelawny is never resolved...she is possessed in both versions to some degree, but the latter one solves it.

The endings are almost identical, up to the point where Ross asks if he can turn the lights back on.

[nathan_p]

I admit I have a good deal of nostalgia for the 1903 ending, though :V When you're ten years old, the two main characters getting married is boring: one of them getting vanished by an Egyptian queen who might have stolen her body is awesome.

[EndOfTheEarth]

Ah, but that isn't what happened in the 1903 ending. She's standing there terrified, and it was never suggested that it was Margaret that Ross picked up and later vanished.

[nathan_p]

I've never been too great with subtext, me.

Also, vanished by Egyptian queen is far superior to "fell in a plothole".

[EndOfTheEarth]

But my reading sugested that hers was the body that Ross brought back into the other room, not Margarets, so the queen vanishes, just not Margaret.

Though, if you're interested, in the film version I saw on hulu, the mummy does steal her body. Not Victorian though.

At your leisure:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/104564/bram-stokers-legend-of-the-mummy

[Fake Fang]

Currently story-outlining (Story boarding?) my most convulted story to date. Not sure how I'm going to build its timeline, as time doesn't really apply to the events happening in the story. :/

 

Basically, its about philosophy and theoretical quantum physics, narrated by a guy who's inconsistent about what he thinks in regards to said topics, with the backdrop of several different stories going on at the same time with the same person, all connected through one big story that isn't revealed until the end.

 

This is primarily pulled off through a rather odd variant on time travel and the multiverse theory.

 

Check out my blog for the prologue. Or not.

[EndOfTheEarth]

What's your record so far for completing one of these projects?