Quote:I wince a little when I reread this, because I really can't envision Doug being enough at a loss for words to actually respond with "Surely you're not serious", but I so want to use the punchline for this scene. (And because, oddly enough, it sets up something for well down the road in the final chapter.)I figured out how to make this work without wincing at it. It was quite simple...
As she stood there expectantly, the voice of Terry Jones floated
through my mind: "And that, my liege, is how we know the earth
to be banana-shaped." I valiantly resisted the urge to imitateGraham Chapman's follow-up and ask her how sheep's bladders couldbe used to prevent earthquakes. Gods help me, she might have hadan answer prepared! Instead, I decided to feed her a straightline, just to see what would happen. So I fixed her with a sterngaze and said, "Surely you're not serious."
She turned her wandering gaze more or less back to me, tilted herhead slowly, then replied, "Of course I'm not serious. StubbyBoardman is. And don't call me Shirley."
I resisted the urge to grin. Oh, she was good, and not half ascrazy as she made herself out to be. I could get to like MissLuna Lovegood, I could. Oh, yes, indeed.
The setup for the later thing... well, I realized over the weekend that as cool as the idea was, it introduced a plot hole a mile wide. Basically, I had the idea that Doug could, thanks to his inadvertent connections with the Norns/Fates/etc., change Names. He would declare that since they couldn't have two Looneys in Hogwarts and he clearly had seniority, Luna would just have to become "Shirley". And suddenly everyone's calling her Shirley instead of "Loony", because "well, that's her name, innit?" And the payoff would have been telling Bellatrix Lestrange in the middle of combat that she was no Warrior (bellatrix=female warrior), and stripping that name from her without really being aware he's doing it, leaving her memory forever associated with the insulting nickname he gives her.
But then my inner editor, after musing on this for months, said, "Well, then, why isn't everyone -- including Lord Voldemort himself -- calling Voldemort 'Lord Emo' now?"
And that sank that idea.
Still going to do the Shirley and Bellatrix things, though. Just without the 100-monkeys auto-renaming effect.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.