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Jan. 1st, 2012 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeThreshold and Hall
And I'm at the point where... when did I get this? The 23rd, Okay. After a while it all blurs. No, this one I grabbed because I love de Carabas. Love. And by this point I'd already written and posted "He's Off, You See, The Wizard" and suddenly I had the thought De Carabas, Jareth, and Gold need to play poker together. This needs to happen. I did not write that fic. Although I was sorely tempted. This was also after much, much staying up late and having to work six days that week, so I told myself I was not allowed to be punchy at a recipient who might neither know nor care for either of those characters.
But the Marquis came easy. A dance or a ball, where he could interact with many people and be his snarky knowing self, and set before the events of the book/miniseries so I coul explore his relationship with Lord Portico and Lady Portica. Door was told to go to Carabas, that must mean the family trusted him deeply, on some level. The Marquis being the Marquis, he's not entirely to be trusted, of course. I did manage to throw both Jareth and Once Upon A Time's Rumplestiltskin in and, apparently, make them not too intrusive, you can probably find them if you look. There was also a stealth reference to Islington being an angel, particularly an angel not in favor with God.
And then, of course, ending with Old Bailey, and the Marquis setting him up to owe him favors and so on.
Killing is Company
The title comes from a song by Raymond Watts, called Ojo por Ojo. It's more than a little creepy, I highly recommend you go find it.
When I first got this pinch hit I wasn't entirely sure what to do with it. I grabbed it kind of on a whim, kind of because they specified Richard III and I'm a Richard III fangirl, and kind of because I've been reciting Shakespeare since I was 6. Literally, a friend of mine was in high school in the play Midsummer Night's Dream and she had me help her go over her lines, so she recited Hermia and I recited everything else to cue her. I still have the bulk of Hermia memorized to this day, despite never performing it.
Anyway, so I got this bug up my butt and decided, screw it, since I can't come up with an actual theme to write fanfic on... and I couldn't, I could not figure out how to translate the play into prose fiction, although I've come up with an idea or three since. But since I couldn't do that, I got the bright idea of doing it as a monologue from a play. Or a dialogue, but it ended up being a monologue. And I looked at my beta and said "I want to do this in iambic pentameter. There is no way this can end well." And she looked at me and went "DO IT."
"So, then I realized I'd gone straight into RP."
"I haven't RP'd at you in ages."
"That has far less to do with intent and far more to do with distance."
"I can't hear you over the sound of how telepathic I am."
And, well, you see what you see. It took about three days which, if you know me at all, is a really long time for a 1,000 word fic. But it turned out pretty well, I think.
Towards the end I figured, and being a bit punchy, if I can perform Shakespeare in plays, forget lines, and cover for it by babbling in Shakespearean type language about the subject at hand till I get to a line or a cue I remember, hell, I can write a Ricky III fanfic monologue.
(No, seriously, my friends and I used to do that in plays all the time. Up to final dress.)
Lullaby
I'll freely admit, I have a hard time writing hardcore slash for a lot of characters that fandom slashes freely and with great smut; I tend not to interpret characters the same way fandom does. That said, I will easily and willingly write nominal gen that is so heavy with subtext it's beating you over the head with it. And put the subtext in on purpose. This is one of my two usual approaches to people requesting slash that makes me blink; the other is to treat it as a writing challenge, but that often requires me to set up the pairing in some extensive way and most of these didn't allow me the luxury of that time. So, Eddie/Roland, gen with a heaping dollop of subtext. I can do this in my sleep.
I dragged it back to Eddie and Roland on the beach, because the Drawing of the Three is probably my favorite book of the series; Waste Lands and the original The Gunslinger are tied for second. And I knocked Eddie down to the vulnerable, recovering junkie that he was, because I wanted Roland to be strong for him and to care for him. There had to have been moments. Roland wouldn't be comfortable at this point with any major physical display of comfort, but he can still see most of the chinks in Eddie's armor. It's not like they're not obvious.
I picked Eddie's point of view because I felt it would be easier to grasp both for me and for the reader. Eddie's just a mess at this point; his body is suffering the effects of withdrawal, his mind is under assault by his own biochemicals as a result, plus culture shock from Roland drawing him through the door, plus his self esteem was kind of in the crapper to begin with. If he were an internet picture he'd be the one going "FFUUUUUUUUUUU". Eddie uses humor as a shield against people realizing he's vulnerable because most of the people who would see that would be the kind to take advantage; thankfully, Roland doesn't. Especially since he doesn't understand Eddie's constant pop culture references. I suspect Eddie's like me, absorbing vast amounts of random details that just stick. And his mind is quicker than most people think, but because he grew up in an environment where being smarter than his brother was showing off and putting his brother down, he got used to playing the fool. Now, he's slowly coming out of that. Even if he can't shut up with the wisecracks.
And Roland does help. Because in his own way, he realizes that Eddie's trying. And in the middle of the night things are a little soft around the edges, even for him. So he can reach out in his own way and offer praise and something solid to listen to, because of all people Roland Deschain does know what it's like to struggle after an idea of being a man. And to fail.
Never Have I Ever
Hey, it's not a pinch hit! This started out as a scene in a longer fic I was writing, became a deleted scene, reappeared a week or so later as a story in and of itself and then since I'd seen some pinch hits and prompts go by for people wanting Ruby fic, I thought I'd write it out. Originally started as a baby shower for Janet Carter (yes, that one) in the Once Upon A Time way of things, it turned into a way for Ruby to first shock the girls with her sexual exploits and then hold forth on her stance on sexual freedom.
I didn't have enough young female characters from Once Upon a Time to really fill out the population of a baby shower, so I made some up. Scheherezade is in there, and Marie from the Nutcracker, and Janet of course.
And Long Ago
Once upon a time and long ago, I heard someone singing soft and low. The prompt was for Emma and Archie interaction, which I figured I could do, but I was stuck for an overarching theme so I decided to put them in a coffee shop and let them deal with it. About two lines of dialogue in I realized exactly why, considering the last episode aired, Emma would be talking to a psychiatrist. Or a psychiatrist would be talking to her.
Emma's had a lot of crap dumped on her lately. First the son she thought she didn't have (for a certain value of didn't have, didn't have responsibility for or a connection to) turns up, then he tells her that everything she knows about her world is a lie and she's really the daughter of two fictional characters. Just for a fun exercise, imagine some long disappeared relative of yours comes up and tells you you're the secret, hidden away lovechild of Aragorn and Arwen. Think about how you'd react to that. Go on, I'll wait.
But the boy seems to earnestly believe it, so she takes him back to his adoptive mother, because he's ten, and at first she seems like a decent enough woman and then she seems just a little bit sociopathic. So now, being a compassionate person if somewhat rusty in the area of interpersonal connections, she hangs around to make sure the boy really is safe and happy with his mother. While his mother goes completely apeshit and overboard trying to get Emma kicked out of town. Meanwhile Henry's going "And your mother is this woman who's about your age if not younger, and your father's in a coma..." which doesn't help Emma, Queen of the Deeply Buried Abandonment Issues. She settles in, gets a job, works on dealing with everything that Henry's throwing at her which for her seems to mean suppressing everything, and then her budding romantic interest, also the person who gave her the job, up and dies after what probably was an emotional rollercoaster of a day trying to get him to calm down and make sense. Oh, and she has issues with making friends and letting people in, so she doesn't have anyone she can go to to talk about this. Or the fairy tale parents, or even the possibility of finding her parents again, or her son coming to seek her out.
Deeply Buried Issues.
All of that would be a bit overweening to bring out all at once, so I didn't. But I had it in my mental subroutines while they talked, while Archie gently poked holes in her defenses because Archie is, at heart, a good guy. He doesn't want to hurt her, he wants to build her up. Gently. Make her better. Unfortunately to do that he has to get in some where the damage is, which means breaking down some of her walls. The rest...
I have no actual training in psychology or psychiatry. If there is either of that type of doctor in one of my stories his or her behavior is likely to come from one of the shrinks I've talked to for brief periods over the years or my more extensive experience with what my mother called co-counseling or RC as a child. Reciprocal peer counseling or Re-evaluation Counseling is different from more common forms of psychiatric therapy. The underlying belief (described by wiki much better than my hazy memory can come up with) is that "the process of developing distress patterns that dissolve through emotional discharge in the context of appreciative attention is simply a natural process that does not imply either psychopathology on the part of the individual or the need for professional treatment." What I remember most about this was growing up with the impression that all emotions are valid, and that what you should strive to control and determine are your ultimate actions, not your emotional reactions, i.e. it's all right to be angry but you shouldn't punch someone in the face. All of this is by way of informing why Archie acts the way he does.
Tishina
This one came at the last minute; Elyn fed me a list of fandoms and was all "I don't know if you're familiar with these fandoms" and I was all "OH NIJINSKI NOT THAT I USED TO WANT TO BE HIM WHEN I WAS A KID OR ANYTHING." I grew up watching the Bolshoi and the Kirov ballet companies on videos, studying everything I could about the major dancers in ballet history, I took ballet from the time I was 6 till I was 18. At one place or another. I was all over that.
Of course when I got the assignment I stared at it and went "I have no idea where to start!" So I reached for inspiration, grabbed the first ready ballet music I could find which ended up being TSO's A Mad Russian's Christmas (electric pastiche of pieces from the Nutcracker) and bounced around my living room on my toes. And pictured what it had looked like when I'd seen it, performed it, etc. I plastered my browser windows with pictures of the dances he'd created and people performing them, pulled out my Book of the Courtesans and opened it to his little entry, and it wasn't until I sat back down five minutes later that I knew where I wanted to begin. The backs of my ankles ached. That was where I started.
I have no idea what it was like in the Ballet Russes, obviously, in the day to day stuff. But I remember rehearsing for performances, Giselle, Peter and the Wolf, and yes, interimnable, interminable performances of the Nutcracker every holiday season. And I remember my ballet teachers, I even remember some of their names from when I was 8. And I remember the stick rapping time on the floor, I remember how we fidgeted in line. And I remember how we used to, when we were little pink and white level dancers (the youngest) look at the older black and maroon level dancers (the oldest) and how much I wanted to be them. I never ended up dancing professionally, as I got older the risk of ending your career with one untimely injury freaked me out more and more, but I remember a lot of that time. So I poured all that into a story, imagining what it would have been like to be a chorus girl back then, and to watch this incredible soloist and choreographer with his erratic behavior and his awkward aloofness, and to try to understand so you could be that great someday.
The title is the transliteration of the Russian for 'silence', I wanted to riff on silence for the title because that was what you did. You could complain all you liked in the changing room but once you were in the studio or on the dance floor, unless you had a real medical problem to report, you kept silent. Because it would break the beauty of the dance.
Duke Ex Machina
Elyn needed a story for organizing this. This is what I do, I like you, I write you stories. And lucky for me her Dear Yulegoat letter had one I could do: Nathan and Duke! I can do Nathan and Duke. I spent the better part of ... what, October? And a bit of November, maybe, mainlining episodes of Haven. Yeah, I can do Nathan and Duke.
By this point I don't remember why I started where I did. Possibly I was listening to Ailein Duinn, possibly it was just where Nathan ended up, with Duke coming looking for him. Because of course Duke comes looking for him, because he's Duke. I actually can't put it any clearer than that, it just fit into my idea of the pattern of Duke. And Duke comes up, and Nathan's his usual taciturn, withdrawn, hiding from the world self, so Duke does what he does best. He annoys the shit outta Nathan until Nathan reacts. And back and forth this goes for a bit, until Duke can't come up with any other way to get under Nathan's skin than to start really prying.
The question is something I've often wondered, but Duke being Duke and always asking questions I figured it was a safe bet that he wondered too. Dwight gets bullet magnetism. Someone else got poison at a distance. Audrey gets immunity, somebody gets to raise ghosts, Duke gets super strength, and Nathan gets... a neurological condition. If I were writing this story and I really wanted to twist it, Nathan wouldn't be Troubled at all. He'd just have a sucky neurological condition. But the other thing is, since this is Haven, well...
So, Duke succeeds in pissing Nathan off. Because he's Duke, and he pisses Nathan off a lot. This time, though, he didn't mean to piss Nathan off about that, because he cares for Audrey too. He doesn't want to see her hurt either, he doesn't want to see Nathan hurting over her. He tries to reassure Nathan, who comes back with shit doesn't just happen, which brings it back to Duke and Nathan's power of suck. It's not really a power at all. Duke can guess this. He has super strength, the ability to cleanse a bloodline of their power by killing someone with that power in the bloodline, and a box of weapons that's generations old. This magical kill to cure power wasn't random. Which implies that Nathan's power isn't. And they have that conversation, and it touches on the requirement of Duke's power, that someone has to die. I don't imagine Duke would hesitate for a second to blow someone away if they were actively threatening him or his friends, but cold and meticulous and pre-meditated murder is a whole other thing. I don't believe he could do that. Neither does Nathan. It's simply a fact with him, Maine is cold 9 months out of the year, water is wet, Duke is an obnoxious pain in the ass and a smuggler but he's not a cold-blooded killer. End of story. Duke, for all that he does dislike cops and lives in a world where everything is questionable, negotiable, or outright false, takes comfort because Nathan is a cop, he is a stand-up guy, he is everything that Duke isn't and while Duke might feel the fluidity of his identity because he has to, he can rely on Nathan's firm stand. This is just the way things are. Nathan knows him.
And then of course it ends in silliness, because Duke is constitutionally incapable of being serious for more than maybe 20 minutes at a time. "I liked you so much better when you were locked up in your cupcake room!" Yeah.
I Will Go No More A-Roving
I'm really trying to remember where the idea for this one came up. It became a Yuletide treat because first I got curious if anyone had requested Plunkett and Macleane, and then I got curious what those requests were, and then I went "Plunkett and Macleane in America? With Rebecca? Post-movie fic? I HAVE SOME OF THAT." and finished it up and tossed it over. I was actually really attached to this fic, it felt a little weird afterwards, like it wasn't my own.
I still can't remember where it started. I remember thinking that Plunkett and Macleane would need some sort of lodging when they got in, and I think I was listening to sad mournful Celtic sea music. And there was something in there about the boys having to deal with a pregnant woman, because it would amuse me to see Macleane have no idea what to do and Plunkett roll his eyes and snark some more. I think at that point it also struck me that Plunkett mentions (presumably) a wife, but no children. For that matter, we don't even know that "Mary" was a wife. Just that there was a significant female in his life named Mary who died and it still hurts. For all we know Mary was his ten year old daughter he was taking care of. Anyway, I got them as far as America, and set them up in an inn with a woman who was quickly widowed by a convenient storm. Less for the reasons one might think and more because otherwise they'd have to go looking for a real job (or start robbing people again, but Plunkett didn't seem too keen on that) and then I'd have to start looking for a job for them. Apothecaries take a considerable amount of startup money, and Macleane doesn't have much in the way of riches. Or sense. And Rebecca ran off without her own fortune, one would imagine.
So then they were innkeepers. And I carried it through the woman's pregnancy because it gave a nice timeline, long enough for everyone to settle in and decide to stay, not too long. It took Plunkett, by necessity, out of the fog of no longer having bloodthirsty vengeance to occupy him (because at least in my interpretation of him, the man was fueled by anger and sarcasm) and put him in the position of taking care of everyone. Macleane, by contrast, got to learn what laboring for your daily bread was like, so although he retained his sometimes idiotic optimism, he also did learn how to help Plunkett and Rebecca. Rebecca always struck me as a very determined young woman, and I didn't see her shying away from hard work as long as there were folk to share it with her and help and be supportive. I rather like the dynamic between her and Plunkett, since we didn't see much of that in the movie. It ended up sort of somewhere between older brother and surrogate father figure. And of course, the widowing of Betty gave Plunkett a way to revisit his own grief and maybe put it away in a way that was a little more healthy.
Ghost Writer
I first saw Thunderheart when it first came out, years and years ago. This was also when I was spending a great deal of time in the Appalachias, both with friends and going and visiting the Cherokee reservation, which made watching it interesting. It also made coming back home to DC interesting, which is part of the reason why I started with Ray where I did. Coming back from all that, everything in DC felt like it had the volume turned down a little, been swaddled in cotton, not as bright. It was a little weird. And by this point I'd been coming out here every summer for many years, and Ray had just had a lot of things turned upside down for him and then he'd gone back to DC. So he probably had it worse. Felt distant, alienated. He'd been changed, maybe not permanently but certainly deeply. And keeping ties with Crow Horse kept him changed longer.
Maggie's diaries interested me because she seemed like the type of person who would sit down somewhere with her thoughts and write them down. The river I threw in ... I don't remember why I threw in, actually. Somehow it just made sense that she always knew the river was significant to her, or perhaps it always has been.
I don't have a particular name for the kinds of feelings that Ray has for Maggie. I know they're deep and I know they're strong and still present, but whether it's romantic love or filial or fraternal love, or respect and loyalty for what she tried to do and who she was, I don't know. I think I prefer it undefined like that. Crow Horse, of course, knows they're connected. The wind told him.
Purgatory
I love Carnivale. And like most fans, I much prefer first season to second season. Management is sort of near to my favorite (for a skewed value of favorite) character type, and Scudder always fascinated me as being the dark Avatar but also being fairly genial and genuinely caring for his son. And one of my favorite parts of the show is the idea that they all have a shared dreamscape, using that for a conversation between them as people rather than having to always fulfill their duties as Avatara.
Writing Carnivale always makes me nervous because the mood and environment is so rich, I fear I can't do it justice. Choosing Management and that setting was partly an out because I felt I could write him better, and because his conversation with Scudder in the Dreamscape would by necessity be shortish and self-contained. Although now I do kind of want to rewatch it.
Ever After
This ended up being very last minute because of reasons and I had no idea where to start it, although I knew I could write it. Except then my cat, who had been cat-helping (where a cat is all LOOK AT ME I'M HELPING and you're all NO YOU'RE REALLY NOT) leaped up into my lap and started kneading my legs. And then I thought of Zakath and his kittens. And then I thought of Zakath after the books. And the rest just sort of rolled on down.
I picked Zakath and Taiba to start with because I thought where they ended up after the books would have a lot of interesting consequences beyond what the Eddings' would show. How would Zakath's people feel, after his ambitions to become God-Emperor or whatever he wanted, then he changed his mind, then he ends up as Overlord of Angarak after all? How would Taiba feel, having a home and a family she loves but still being, essentially, relegated to brood mare status? She clearly loves being a mother, but she questions her role -- I thought playing her like that gave her a little more dimension. I don't believe in motherhood being its own reward; I don't believe in any one thing being a happy-ending reward, I believe that sometimes every role you play in life is hard and you go "Dammit I should have been a beekeeper" or something. So it is with Taiba.
Silk and Velvet are just in there because I love their voices and their banter, there is no underlying point.
The High Priestess
So, between all the pinch hits I did have some time to write some other random things, and I wanted to do some for the fandoms I knew but hadn't seen anything for. Now, let's be clear, I thought Priest was a terrible movie. The dialogue was 75% composed of cliches, the sequence of events was predictable and boring, the action scenes were passable but the bar's been raised pretty high on those lately. The worldbuilding, on the other hand, was highly intriguing. And this person wanted something about the Priestess, so, double intriguing.
Why was she the one to come after Paul Bettany's brooding Priest? Especially when she didn't seem the type who was going to blindly follow orders even before the entirely predictable romantic twist. And how intimate had they gotten, really? I posited that she was a little bit different from the get go, and went from there.
Writing the physical training reminded me a bit of when I'd started scaling up my own workout plans, multiplying that by doing it all day rather than just for two hours in the morning. Running along a track, up and over things, push-ups, crunches, stretching, over and over until your whole body aches and you feel all trembly. Some of that, and of course there would be fighting practices as well, and the church would indoctrinate everyone in their beliefs until they were perfect little soldiers. Which makes the inclusion of a young man old enough to (hopefully) make a decision to father a child all the more confusing because he is an already formed person, and most of the rest of the Priests were probably indoctrinated from childhood.
Both of them stand out from the others; she must, because she convinced the Priesthood to be allowed to go after the rogue Priest and the sheriff person, she had some form of relationship with the rogue Priest, she pushes forward and dares and does. He stands out simply by being older, to start, and probably by being good enough that they decided the hazards of keeping someone outside the norm were outweighed by the benefits. And so we have them finding a balance that's more their own than the collective to which they belong, individualizing them a fair bit.
The Price of Rubies
I don't remember when I decided I wanted to write a Gold/Ruby thing. Sometime fairly recently. I do remember grumbling quite a bit over no one getting Gold's characterization right, and I should learn never ever to read Hulu's discussion forums. But after a rousing tirade on how he is manipulating everyone in town and flailing at the forums a bit, I decided to write my own Gold story. Well, another one, this one more Gold and less Gold-and-Jareth.
I actually started out writing a much longer story; it was late and I was going back and forth between writing pinch hits and writing my own stories when I finished bashing out the outline with Anna. And I gave up on getting it in as a Treat and went to bed and woke up and showered and had a bunch of revelations and stuck those into the outline, and then when she woke up we discussed it some more and by this time there was about a 10k fic here at least. That I wasn't going to get written in time for Madness. So I put all that to one side and started a new doc with just a few paragraphs of a scene: Gold in his shop, pondering his artifacts. And I slid the background in as something that informed his mood and thoughts, but not as something I was going to outright describe.
Then Ruby walked in. I suspect the unpacked version of that is, and then the stories collided and I realized I could write a semi-character piece about Gold and do the Ruby/Gold thing all at once. Ruby is probably my second favorite character anyway. And by now you've noticed that Never Have I Ever involves the consequences of this, and the dynamic of the two of them just intrigues me. Ruby doesn't take shit from anyone. She lies and manipulates almost as smoothly as he does, just look at the one episode where she had more than five minutes' screen time and how she did with Emma. And if I really want to get fanatical about it they exchanged a look in the pilot, although reasonably I think that was more of a "Nod of greeting" "You loan shark scum" kind of an exchange of looks.
Most of it was fairly straightforward. Gold sleazes and schemes, having a young woman with as much strength of personality as she does could be useful. Ruby doesn't take shit from anyone, and won't allow him to hurt her friends either. Bag of hammers was definitely my favorite threat. There's also an element of real bonding between them, just for a moment, towards the end. He knows she doesn't want him because she's attracted to him, she offers sex because she believes it's what he wants. He denies her at first and points out that everyone else believes it's what she gives, and she's making the same assumptions based on reputation that everyone makes about her, neither of them really know each other. It does make me kind of want to explore their relationship a little more. Not sure what I'd hang it on, though.
On the Rights of Women
Sadly, this year the pinch hitters who hadn't signed up mostly requested fandoms I wasn't familiar with. But this one I was familiar with, and could do. I knew it started with Emily Lake, but the rest of it didn't come for about twelve hours. I started it the night before Madness opened, couldn't get anywhere on it, couldn't get anywhere on it, finally went to bed rather than beat my head against a brick wall and I'd set it to churning at night, get up in the morning and finish.
So I got up the next morning, had something of a better idea. It started with Emily Lake and went into a parallel conversation she'd had with her own daughter, back when her daughter would have been not in school but subject to private tutors and things. I wrote the Emily Lake part and then I sat down and set the scene and pretty much just let the characters run with it. Helena has some very strong opinions and her pattern is pretty firmly embedded in my mind, her voice came out clear. Christina's, not so much, I had to be more careful with her. The end result was definitely Helena from a very overtly misogynistic world, where she came from, but I also hope it was a good demonstration of her bonding with her daughter and encouraging the young woman to grow up and do amazing things all of her own.
And then concluding with back to Emily Lake, because that is still a conversation that many, many daughters (in my opinion of having been one) need to hear today.
Castaway
Elyn came into chat all "I NEED A STORY" and I was all "I WILL WRITE YOU STORIES. If I know the fandoms." And she gave me the fandoms and if I remember all this right, one of them was DS9, which I had seen but there is so much canon there I didn't remember too much of it. And one of them was Adventures of Sinbad.
Now, Adventures of Sinbad could mean many things, but given the context and the characters in the request I knew which one it was. It was that terrible, terrible show from back when Hercules and Xena had been on. Some company had gotten the bright idea to play follow the leader, and if they'd gotten better writers and maybe better actors it might have worked. As it was, they didn't, and it didn't. Oh I cannot begin to tell you how terrible it was. I've seen high school -- no, I've seen middle school dramas done better. It was really terrible. It also featured hot men and pretty women and decent scenery, which is about all I needed back then. I ate it up like candy. I probably wrote piles of Mary Sue Sinbad-loving fic that is now quietly and justifiably decomposing in some landfill or has already been recycled to make far worthier paper products. Yeah, I remembered this series. I pulled up a wiki just in case I didn't remember it as well as I thought (I did) and went to work.
... The really sad part is, I can still see most of the main cast's face... actually, all their faces, pretty clearly in my head, and hear most of their voices. Those that had them, anyway.
I started off with Maeve on the desert island because really. She's either going to drown or wash ashore likely somewhere where she's not going to be able to find help. And I picked a desert island because it's Fantasy-Land. Fantasy-Land is lousy with desert islands. And from there it was pretty smooth, although I did go back and forth on whether or not to have Sinbad rescue her or whether to have her go befriending sea turtles. I decided to have Sinbad rescue her because it was easier than arranging her getaway and dealing with her inevitable psychological changes as she spent at least a few days hollowing out a canoe, assuming the trees were wide enough, or somehow otherwise converting things on the island into a watercraft. And even after that there's the question of is there land close enough for her to get to, being as she has no major navigational tools and probably not much in the way of navigational practice.
I did touch some on both her training and her personal habits. It's an old trope that black magic costs less and takes less time than white magic, I gave her a bit of a reminisce on what she had been trained to do. Meditations, physical exercises, memory exercises, things to keep her sane because with being almost entirely on her own on the island her sanity would start to erode after time, and she would know this. Maybe not how, but she would know it. Her isolation would be her greatest enemy. So, practice. And explaining away the time she was gone in the 2nd season by having them not find her because she was in from the direct beach recovering from various toxins.
Of course Dermott sees them first, and the terror of being left alone on the island is overwhelming. Thankfully, it's also short lived. And they're reunited and everything is happy, but not too happy of course, because she hates Sinbad with the fire of a thousand primary school girls with boys pulling their hair. And it's by their bickering that we know everything is all right again.
Skin Deep
I was, literally, getting ready for bed and Elyn was going to bed and I commented in yulechat "So, everyone got their stories now? No last minute pinch hits? ;)" and then I get a PM window going "Funny you should ask that..." I about died. I really did. And I knew one of the fandoms, so I told her I could have something up, eh, reasonably quick. Within a day. Mutter grumble facedesk laugh.
So, that was how I mainlined three episodes of Dexter earlyMonday Tuesday morning, slurped up the patterns (this is my new term, pattern slurping), masticated them for a bit and added some things of my own, and wrote a fic about a smirky serial killer.
The hardest part was coming up with the serial killer he would have been hunting. Coming up with the body was easy. From there it was a long succession of why's, why was she dressed like that (because the killer dressed her that way), why had the killer dressed her that way (because the killer believed she was a bad woman and that that outfit was what bad women wore), why did the killer believe this (because the killer and the woman had interacted) and so on and so forth until I arrived at, the killer thinks these women use their looks and their bodies to take advantage. But this isn't hate or resentment, it's jealousy.
It honestly didn't occur to me not to make the killer a woman. Women can be incredibly, horrifically vicious about other women as far as looks go, jealous and resentful. In this case, her husband's philandering led her to believe that other women were prettier than she was and they should be punished for it, etc etc. Downward, devolving spiral of hate and resentment. Dexter being a sociopath doesn't entirely understand it, but I think he does feel some sympathy for her, being as close as he is to his sister and probably having heard her make similar complaints about not being X enough or being too Y. And then the rest was either logistics of how he would cover his ass or closing my eyes and hearing their voices, seeing their body language and writing down what I heard and saw.
Stories and Pinch Hits Part I || Behind the Scenes in General
And I'm at the point where... when did I get this? The 23rd, Okay. After a while it all blurs. No, this one I grabbed because I love de Carabas. Love. And by this point I'd already written and posted "He's Off, You See, The Wizard" and suddenly I had the thought De Carabas, Jareth, and Gold need to play poker together. This needs to happen. I did not write that fic. Although I was sorely tempted. This was also after much, much staying up late and having to work six days that week, so I told myself I was not allowed to be punchy at a recipient who might neither know nor care for either of those characters.
But the Marquis came easy. A dance or a ball, where he could interact with many people and be his snarky knowing self, and set before the events of the book/miniseries so I coul explore his relationship with Lord Portico and Lady Portica. Door was told to go to Carabas, that must mean the family trusted him deeply, on some level. The Marquis being the Marquis, he's not entirely to be trusted, of course. I did manage to throw both Jareth and Once Upon A Time's Rumplestiltskin in and, apparently, make them not too intrusive, you can probably find them if you look. There was also a stealth reference to Islington being an angel, particularly an angel not in favor with God.
And then, of course, ending with Old Bailey, and the Marquis setting him up to owe him favors and so on.
Killing is Company
The title comes from a song by Raymond Watts, called Ojo por Ojo. It's more than a little creepy, I highly recommend you go find it.
When I first got this pinch hit I wasn't entirely sure what to do with it. I grabbed it kind of on a whim, kind of because they specified Richard III and I'm a Richard III fangirl, and kind of because I've been reciting Shakespeare since I was 6. Literally, a friend of mine was in high school in the play Midsummer Night's Dream and she had me help her go over her lines, so she recited Hermia and I recited everything else to cue her. I still have the bulk of Hermia memorized to this day, despite never performing it.
Anyway, so I got this bug up my butt and decided, screw it, since I can't come up with an actual theme to write fanfic on... and I couldn't, I could not figure out how to translate the play into prose fiction, although I've come up with an idea or three since. But since I couldn't do that, I got the bright idea of doing it as a monologue from a play. Or a dialogue, but it ended up being a monologue. And I looked at my beta and said "I want to do this in iambic pentameter. There is no way this can end well." And she looked at me and went "DO IT."
"So, then I realized I'd gone straight into RP."
"I haven't RP'd at you in ages."
"That has far less to do with intent and far more to do with distance."
"I can't hear you over the sound of how telepathic I am."
And, well, you see what you see. It took about three days which, if you know me at all, is a really long time for a 1,000 word fic. But it turned out pretty well, I think.
Towards the end I figured, and being a bit punchy, if I can perform Shakespeare in plays, forget lines, and cover for it by babbling in Shakespearean type language about the subject at hand till I get to a line or a cue I remember, hell, I can write a Ricky III fanfic monologue.
(No, seriously, my friends and I used to do that in plays all the time. Up to final dress.)
Lullaby
I'll freely admit, I have a hard time writing hardcore slash for a lot of characters that fandom slashes freely and with great smut; I tend not to interpret characters the same way fandom does. That said, I will easily and willingly write nominal gen that is so heavy with subtext it's beating you over the head with it. And put the subtext in on purpose. This is one of my two usual approaches to people requesting slash that makes me blink; the other is to treat it as a writing challenge, but that often requires me to set up the pairing in some extensive way and most of these didn't allow me the luxury of that time. So, Eddie/Roland, gen with a heaping dollop of subtext. I can do this in my sleep.
I dragged it back to Eddie and Roland on the beach, because the Drawing of the Three is probably my favorite book of the series; Waste Lands and the original The Gunslinger are tied for second. And I knocked Eddie down to the vulnerable, recovering junkie that he was, because I wanted Roland to be strong for him and to care for him. There had to have been moments. Roland wouldn't be comfortable at this point with any major physical display of comfort, but he can still see most of the chinks in Eddie's armor. It's not like they're not obvious.
I picked Eddie's point of view because I felt it would be easier to grasp both for me and for the reader. Eddie's just a mess at this point; his body is suffering the effects of withdrawal, his mind is under assault by his own biochemicals as a result, plus culture shock from Roland drawing him through the door, plus his self esteem was kind of in the crapper to begin with. If he were an internet picture he'd be the one going "FFUUUUUUUUUUU". Eddie uses humor as a shield against people realizing he's vulnerable because most of the people who would see that would be the kind to take advantage; thankfully, Roland doesn't. Especially since he doesn't understand Eddie's constant pop culture references. I suspect Eddie's like me, absorbing vast amounts of random details that just stick. And his mind is quicker than most people think, but because he grew up in an environment where being smarter than his brother was showing off and putting his brother down, he got used to playing the fool. Now, he's slowly coming out of that. Even if he can't shut up with the wisecracks.
And Roland does help. Because in his own way, he realizes that Eddie's trying. And in the middle of the night things are a little soft around the edges, even for him. So he can reach out in his own way and offer praise and something solid to listen to, because of all people Roland Deschain does know what it's like to struggle after an idea of being a man. And to fail.
Never Have I Ever
Hey, it's not a pinch hit! This started out as a scene in a longer fic I was writing, became a deleted scene, reappeared a week or so later as a story in and of itself and then since I'd seen some pinch hits and prompts go by for people wanting Ruby fic, I thought I'd write it out. Originally started as a baby shower for Janet Carter (yes, that one) in the Once Upon A Time way of things, it turned into a way for Ruby to first shock the girls with her sexual exploits and then hold forth on her stance on sexual freedom.
I didn't have enough young female characters from Once Upon a Time to really fill out the population of a baby shower, so I made some up. Scheherezade is in there, and Marie from the Nutcracker, and Janet of course.
And Long Ago
Once upon a time and long ago, I heard someone singing soft and low. The prompt was for Emma and Archie interaction, which I figured I could do, but I was stuck for an overarching theme so I decided to put them in a coffee shop and let them deal with it. About two lines of dialogue in I realized exactly why, considering the last episode aired, Emma would be talking to a psychiatrist. Or a psychiatrist would be talking to her.
Emma's had a lot of crap dumped on her lately. First the son she thought she didn't have (for a certain value of didn't have, didn't have responsibility for or a connection to) turns up, then he tells her that everything she knows about her world is a lie and she's really the daughter of two fictional characters. Just for a fun exercise, imagine some long disappeared relative of yours comes up and tells you you're the secret, hidden away lovechild of Aragorn and Arwen. Think about how you'd react to that. Go on, I'll wait.
But the boy seems to earnestly believe it, so she takes him back to his adoptive mother, because he's ten, and at first she seems like a decent enough woman and then she seems just a little bit sociopathic. So now, being a compassionate person if somewhat rusty in the area of interpersonal connections, she hangs around to make sure the boy really is safe and happy with his mother. While his mother goes completely apeshit and overboard trying to get Emma kicked out of town. Meanwhile Henry's going "And your mother is this woman who's about your age if not younger, and your father's in a coma..." which doesn't help Emma, Queen of the Deeply Buried Abandonment Issues. She settles in, gets a job, works on dealing with everything that Henry's throwing at her which for her seems to mean suppressing everything, and then her budding romantic interest, also the person who gave her the job, up and dies after what probably was an emotional rollercoaster of a day trying to get him to calm down and make sense. Oh, and she has issues with making friends and letting people in, so she doesn't have anyone she can go to to talk about this. Or the fairy tale parents, or even the possibility of finding her parents again, or her son coming to seek her out.
Deeply Buried Issues.
All of that would be a bit overweening to bring out all at once, so I didn't. But I had it in my mental subroutines while they talked, while Archie gently poked holes in her defenses because Archie is, at heart, a good guy. He doesn't want to hurt her, he wants to build her up. Gently. Make her better. Unfortunately to do that he has to get in some where the damage is, which means breaking down some of her walls. The rest...
I have no actual training in psychology or psychiatry. If there is either of that type of doctor in one of my stories his or her behavior is likely to come from one of the shrinks I've talked to for brief periods over the years or my more extensive experience with what my mother called co-counseling or RC as a child. Reciprocal peer counseling or Re-evaluation Counseling is different from more common forms of psychiatric therapy. The underlying belief (described by wiki much better than my hazy memory can come up with) is that "the process of developing distress patterns that dissolve through emotional discharge in the context of appreciative attention is simply a natural process that does not imply either psychopathology on the part of the individual or the need for professional treatment." What I remember most about this was growing up with the impression that all emotions are valid, and that what you should strive to control and determine are your ultimate actions, not your emotional reactions, i.e. it's all right to be angry but you shouldn't punch someone in the face. All of this is by way of informing why Archie acts the way he does.
Tishina
This one came at the last minute; Elyn fed me a list of fandoms and was all "I don't know if you're familiar with these fandoms" and I was all "OH NIJINSKI NOT THAT I USED TO WANT TO BE HIM WHEN I WAS A KID OR ANYTHING." I grew up watching the Bolshoi and the Kirov ballet companies on videos, studying everything I could about the major dancers in ballet history, I took ballet from the time I was 6 till I was 18. At one place or another. I was all over that.
Of course when I got the assignment I stared at it and went "I have no idea where to start!" So I reached for inspiration, grabbed the first ready ballet music I could find which ended up being TSO's A Mad Russian's Christmas (electric pastiche of pieces from the Nutcracker) and bounced around my living room on my toes. And pictured what it had looked like when I'd seen it, performed it, etc. I plastered my browser windows with pictures of the dances he'd created and people performing them, pulled out my Book of the Courtesans and opened it to his little entry, and it wasn't until I sat back down five minutes later that I knew where I wanted to begin. The backs of my ankles ached. That was where I started.
I have no idea what it was like in the Ballet Russes, obviously, in the day to day stuff. But I remember rehearsing for performances, Giselle, Peter and the Wolf, and yes, interimnable, interminable performances of the Nutcracker every holiday season. And I remember my ballet teachers, I even remember some of their names from when I was 8. And I remember the stick rapping time on the floor, I remember how we fidgeted in line. And I remember how we used to, when we were little pink and white level dancers (the youngest) look at the older black and maroon level dancers (the oldest) and how much I wanted to be them. I never ended up dancing professionally, as I got older the risk of ending your career with one untimely injury freaked me out more and more, but I remember a lot of that time. So I poured all that into a story, imagining what it would have been like to be a chorus girl back then, and to watch this incredible soloist and choreographer with his erratic behavior and his awkward aloofness, and to try to understand so you could be that great someday.
The title is the transliteration of the Russian for 'silence', I wanted to riff on silence for the title because that was what you did. You could complain all you liked in the changing room but once you were in the studio or on the dance floor, unless you had a real medical problem to report, you kept silent. Because it would break the beauty of the dance.
Duke Ex Machina
Elyn needed a story for organizing this. This is what I do, I like you, I write you stories. And lucky for me her Dear Yulegoat letter had one I could do: Nathan and Duke! I can do Nathan and Duke. I spent the better part of ... what, October? And a bit of November, maybe, mainlining episodes of Haven. Yeah, I can do Nathan and Duke.
By this point I don't remember why I started where I did. Possibly I was listening to Ailein Duinn, possibly it was just where Nathan ended up, with Duke coming looking for him. Because of course Duke comes looking for him, because he's Duke. I actually can't put it any clearer than that, it just fit into my idea of the pattern of Duke. And Duke comes up, and Nathan's his usual taciturn, withdrawn, hiding from the world self, so Duke does what he does best. He annoys the shit outta Nathan until Nathan reacts. And back and forth this goes for a bit, until Duke can't come up with any other way to get under Nathan's skin than to start really prying.
The question is something I've often wondered, but Duke being Duke and always asking questions I figured it was a safe bet that he wondered too. Dwight gets bullet magnetism. Someone else got poison at a distance. Audrey gets immunity, somebody gets to raise ghosts, Duke gets super strength, and Nathan gets... a neurological condition. If I were writing this story and I really wanted to twist it, Nathan wouldn't be Troubled at all. He'd just have a sucky neurological condition. But the other thing is, since this is Haven, well...
So, Duke succeeds in pissing Nathan off. Because he's Duke, and he pisses Nathan off a lot. This time, though, he didn't mean to piss Nathan off about that, because he cares for Audrey too. He doesn't want to see her hurt either, he doesn't want to see Nathan hurting over her. He tries to reassure Nathan, who comes back with shit doesn't just happen, which brings it back to Duke and Nathan's power of suck. It's not really a power at all. Duke can guess this. He has super strength, the ability to cleanse a bloodline of their power by killing someone with that power in the bloodline, and a box of weapons that's generations old. This magical kill to cure power wasn't random. Which implies that Nathan's power isn't. And they have that conversation, and it touches on the requirement of Duke's power, that someone has to die. I don't imagine Duke would hesitate for a second to blow someone away if they were actively threatening him or his friends, but cold and meticulous and pre-meditated murder is a whole other thing. I don't believe he could do that. Neither does Nathan. It's simply a fact with him, Maine is cold 9 months out of the year, water is wet, Duke is an obnoxious pain in the ass and a smuggler but he's not a cold-blooded killer. End of story. Duke, for all that he does dislike cops and lives in a world where everything is questionable, negotiable, or outright false, takes comfort because Nathan is a cop, he is a stand-up guy, he is everything that Duke isn't and while Duke might feel the fluidity of his identity because he has to, he can rely on Nathan's firm stand. This is just the way things are. Nathan knows him.
And then of course it ends in silliness, because Duke is constitutionally incapable of being serious for more than maybe 20 minutes at a time. "I liked you so much better when you were locked up in your cupcake room!" Yeah.
I Will Go No More A-Roving
I'm really trying to remember where the idea for this one came up. It became a Yuletide treat because first I got curious if anyone had requested Plunkett and Macleane, and then I got curious what those requests were, and then I went "Plunkett and Macleane in America? With Rebecca? Post-movie fic? I HAVE SOME OF THAT." and finished it up and tossed it over. I was actually really attached to this fic, it felt a little weird afterwards, like it wasn't my own.
I still can't remember where it started. I remember thinking that Plunkett and Macleane would need some sort of lodging when they got in, and I think I was listening to sad mournful Celtic sea music. And there was something in there about the boys having to deal with a pregnant woman, because it would amuse me to see Macleane have no idea what to do and Plunkett roll his eyes and snark some more. I think at that point it also struck me that Plunkett mentions (presumably) a wife, but no children. For that matter, we don't even know that "Mary" was a wife. Just that there was a significant female in his life named Mary who died and it still hurts. For all we know Mary was his ten year old daughter he was taking care of. Anyway, I got them as far as America, and set them up in an inn with a woman who was quickly widowed by a convenient storm. Less for the reasons one might think and more because otherwise they'd have to go looking for a real job (or start robbing people again, but Plunkett didn't seem too keen on that) and then I'd have to start looking for a job for them. Apothecaries take a considerable amount of startup money, and Macleane doesn't have much in the way of riches. Or sense. And Rebecca ran off without her own fortune, one would imagine.
So then they were innkeepers. And I carried it through the woman's pregnancy because it gave a nice timeline, long enough for everyone to settle in and decide to stay, not too long. It took Plunkett, by necessity, out of the fog of no longer having bloodthirsty vengeance to occupy him (because at least in my interpretation of him, the man was fueled by anger and sarcasm) and put him in the position of taking care of everyone. Macleane, by contrast, got to learn what laboring for your daily bread was like, so although he retained his sometimes idiotic optimism, he also did learn how to help Plunkett and Rebecca. Rebecca always struck me as a very determined young woman, and I didn't see her shying away from hard work as long as there were folk to share it with her and help and be supportive. I rather like the dynamic between her and Plunkett, since we didn't see much of that in the movie. It ended up sort of somewhere between older brother and surrogate father figure. And of course, the widowing of Betty gave Plunkett a way to revisit his own grief and maybe put it away in a way that was a little more healthy.
Ghost Writer
I first saw Thunderheart when it first came out, years and years ago. This was also when I was spending a great deal of time in the Appalachias, both with friends and going and visiting the Cherokee reservation, which made watching it interesting. It also made coming back home to DC interesting, which is part of the reason why I started with Ray where I did. Coming back from all that, everything in DC felt like it had the volume turned down a little, been swaddled in cotton, not as bright. It was a little weird. And by this point I'd been coming out here every summer for many years, and Ray had just had a lot of things turned upside down for him and then he'd gone back to DC. So he probably had it worse. Felt distant, alienated. He'd been changed, maybe not permanently but certainly deeply. And keeping ties with Crow Horse kept him changed longer.
Maggie's diaries interested me because she seemed like the type of person who would sit down somewhere with her thoughts and write them down. The river I threw in ... I don't remember why I threw in, actually. Somehow it just made sense that she always knew the river was significant to her, or perhaps it always has been.
I don't have a particular name for the kinds of feelings that Ray has for Maggie. I know they're deep and I know they're strong and still present, but whether it's romantic love or filial or fraternal love, or respect and loyalty for what she tried to do and who she was, I don't know. I think I prefer it undefined like that. Crow Horse, of course, knows they're connected. The wind told him.
Purgatory
I love Carnivale. And like most fans, I much prefer first season to second season. Management is sort of near to my favorite (for a skewed value of favorite) character type, and Scudder always fascinated me as being the dark Avatar but also being fairly genial and genuinely caring for his son. And one of my favorite parts of the show is the idea that they all have a shared dreamscape, using that for a conversation between them as people rather than having to always fulfill their duties as Avatara.
Writing Carnivale always makes me nervous because the mood and environment is so rich, I fear I can't do it justice. Choosing Management and that setting was partly an out because I felt I could write him better, and because his conversation with Scudder in the Dreamscape would by necessity be shortish and self-contained. Although now I do kind of want to rewatch it.
Ever After
This ended up being very last minute because of reasons and I had no idea where to start it, although I knew I could write it. Except then my cat, who had been cat-helping (where a cat is all LOOK AT ME I'M HELPING and you're all NO YOU'RE REALLY NOT) leaped up into my lap and started kneading my legs. And then I thought of Zakath and his kittens. And then I thought of Zakath after the books. And the rest just sort of rolled on down.
I picked Zakath and Taiba to start with because I thought where they ended up after the books would have a lot of interesting consequences beyond what the Eddings' would show. How would Zakath's people feel, after his ambitions to become God-Emperor or whatever he wanted, then he changed his mind, then he ends up as Overlord of Angarak after all? How would Taiba feel, having a home and a family she loves but still being, essentially, relegated to brood mare status? She clearly loves being a mother, but she questions her role -- I thought playing her like that gave her a little more dimension. I don't believe in motherhood being its own reward; I don't believe in any one thing being a happy-ending reward, I believe that sometimes every role you play in life is hard and you go "Dammit I should have been a beekeeper" or something. So it is with Taiba.
Silk and Velvet are just in there because I love their voices and their banter, there is no underlying point.
The High Priestess
So, between all the pinch hits I did have some time to write some other random things, and I wanted to do some for the fandoms I knew but hadn't seen anything for. Now, let's be clear, I thought Priest was a terrible movie. The dialogue was 75% composed of cliches, the sequence of events was predictable and boring, the action scenes were passable but the bar's been raised pretty high on those lately. The worldbuilding, on the other hand, was highly intriguing. And this person wanted something about the Priestess, so, double intriguing.
Why was she the one to come after Paul Bettany's brooding Priest? Especially when she didn't seem the type who was going to blindly follow orders even before the entirely predictable romantic twist. And how intimate had they gotten, really? I posited that she was a little bit different from the get go, and went from there.
Writing the physical training reminded me a bit of when I'd started scaling up my own workout plans, multiplying that by doing it all day rather than just for two hours in the morning. Running along a track, up and over things, push-ups, crunches, stretching, over and over until your whole body aches and you feel all trembly. Some of that, and of course there would be fighting practices as well, and the church would indoctrinate everyone in their beliefs until they were perfect little soldiers. Which makes the inclusion of a young man old enough to (hopefully) make a decision to father a child all the more confusing because he is an already formed person, and most of the rest of the Priests were probably indoctrinated from childhood.
Both of them stand out from the others; she must, because she convinced the Priesthood to be allowed to go after the rogue Priest and the sheriff person, she had some form of relationship with the rogue Priest, she pushes forward and dares and does. He stands out simply by being older, to start, and probably by being good enough that they decided the hazards of keeping someone outside the norm were outweighed by the benefits. And so we have them finding a balance that's more their own than the collective to which they belong, individualizing them a fair bit.
The Price of Rubies
I don't remember when I decided I wanted to write a Gold/Ruby thing. Sometime fairly recently. I do remember grumbling quite a bit over no one getting Gold's characterization right, and I should learn never ever to read Hulu's discussion forums. But after a rousing tirade on how he is manipulating everyone in town and flailing at the forums a bit, I decided to write my own Gold story. Well, another one, this one more Gold and less Gold-and-Jareth.
I actually started out writing a much longer story; it was late and I was going back and forth between writing pinch hits and writing my own stories when I finished bashing out the outline with Anna. And I gave up on getting it in as a Treat and went to bed and woke up and showered and had a bunch of revelations and stuck those into the outline, and then when she woke up we discussed it some more and by this time there was about a 10k fic here at least. That I wasn't going to get written in time for Madness. So I put all that to one side and started a new doc with just a few paragraphs of a scene: Gold in his shop, pondering his artifacts. And I slid the background in as something that informed his mood and thoughts, but not as something I was going to outright describe.
Then Ruby walked in. I suspect the unpacked version of that is, and then the stories collided and I realized I could write a semi-character piece about Gold and do the Ruby/Gold thing all at once. Ruby is probably my second favorite character anyway. And by now you've noticed that Never Have I Ever involves the consequences of this, and the dynamic of the two of them just intrigues me. Ruby doesn't take shit from anyone. She lies and manipulates almost as smoothly as he does, just look at the one episode where she had more than five minutes' screen time and how she did with Emma. And if I really want to get fanatical about it they exchanged a look in the pilot, although reasonably I think that was more of a "Nod of greeting" "You loan shark scum" kind of an exchange of looks.
Most of it was fairly straightforward. Gold sleazes and schemes, having a young woman with as much strength of personality as she does could be useful. Ruby doesn't take shit from anyone, and won't allow him to hurt her friends either. Bag of hammers was definitely my favorite threat. There's also an element of real bonding between them, just for a moment, towards the end. He knows she doesn't want him because she's attracted to him, she offers sex because she believes it's what he wants. He denies her at first and points out that everyone else believes it's what she gives, and she's making the same assumptions based on reputation that everyone makes about her, neither of them really know each other. It does make me kind of want to explore their relationship a little more. Not sure what I'd hang it on, though.
On the Rights of Women
Sadly, this year the pinch hitters who hadn't signed up mostly requested fandoms I wasn't familiar with. But this one I was familiar with, and could do. I knew it started with Emily Lake, but the rest of it didn't come for about twelve hours. I started it the night before Madness opened, couldn't get anywhere on it, couldn't get anywhere on it, finally went to bed rather than beat my head against a brick wall and I'd set it to churning at night, get up in the morning and finish.
So I got up the next morning, had something of a better idea. It started with Emily Lake and went into a parallel conversation she'd had with her own daughter, back when her daughter would have been not in school but subject to private tutors and things. I wrote the Emily Lake part and then I sat down and set the scene and pretty much just let the characters run with it. Helena has some very strong opinions and her pattern is pretty firmly embedded in my mind, her voice came out clear. Christina's, not so much, I had to be more careful with her. The end result was definitely Helena from a very overtly misogynistic world, where she came from, but I also hope it was a good demonstration of her bonding with her daughter and encouraging the young woman to grow up and do amazing things all of her own.
And then concluding with back to Emily Lake, because that is still a conversation that many, many daughters (in my opinion of having been one) need to hear today.
Castaway
Elyn came into chat all "I NEED A STORY" and I was all "I WILL WRITE YOU STORIES. If I know the fandoms." And she gave me the fandoms and if I remember all this right, one of them was DS9, which I had seen but there is so much canon there I didn't remember too much of it. And one of them was Adventures of Sinbad.
Now, Adventures of Sinbad could mean many things, but given the context and the characters in the request I knew which one it was. It was that terrible, terrible show from back when Hercules and Xena had been on. Some company had gotten the bright idea to play follow the leader, and if they'd gotten better writers and maybe better actors it might have worked. As it was, they didn't, and it didn't. Oh I cannot begin to tell you how terrible it was. I've seen high school -- no, I've seen middle school dramas done better. It was really terrible. It also featured hot men and pretty women and decent scenery, which is about all I needed back then. I ate it up like candy. I probably wrote piles of Mary Sue Sinbad-loving fic that is now quietly and justifiably decomposing in some landfill or has already been recycled to make far worthier paper products. Yeah, I remembered this series. I pulled up a wiki just in case I didn't remember it as well as I thought (I did) and went to work.
... The really sad part is, I can still see most of the main cast's face... actually, all their faces, pretty clearly in my head, and hear most of their voices. Those that had them, anyway.
I started off with Maeve on the desert island because really. She's either going to drown or wash ashore likely somewhere where she's not going to be able to find help. And I picked a desert island because it's Fantasy-Land. Fantasy-Land is lousy with desert islands. And from there it was pretty smooth, although I did go back and forth on whether or not to have Sinbad rescue her or whether to have her go befriending sea turtles. I decided to have Sinbad rescue her because it was easier than arranging her getaway and dealing with her inevitable psychological changes as she spent at least a few days hollowing out a canoe, assuming the trees were wide enough, or somehow otherwise converting things on the island into a watercraft. And even after that there's the question of is there land close enough for her to get to, being as she has no major navigational tools and probably not much in the way of navigational practice.
I did touch some on both her training and her personal habits. It's an old trope that black magic costs less and takes less time than white magic, I gave her a bit of a reminisce on what she had been trained to do. Meditations, physical exercises, memory exercises, things to keep her sane because with being almost entirely on her own on the island her sanity would start to erode after time, and she would know this. Maybe not how, but she would know it. Her isolation would be her greatest enemy. So, practice. And explaining away the time she was gone in the 2nd season by having them not find her because she was in from the direct beach recovering from various toxins.
Of course Dermott sees them first, and the terror of being left alone on the island is overwhelming. Thankfully, it's also short lived. And they're reunited and everything is happy, but not too happy of course, because she hates Sinbad with the fire of a thousand primary school girls with boys pulling their hair. And it's by their bickering that we know everything is all right again.
Skin Deep
I was, literally, getting ready for bed and Elyn was going to bed and I commented in yulechat "So, everyone got their stories now? No last minute pinch hits? ;)" and then I get a PM window going "Funny you should ask that..." I about died. I really did. And I knew one of the fandoms, so I told her I could have something up, eh, reasonably quick. Within a day. Mutter grumble facedesk laugh.
So, that was how I mainlined three episodes of Dexter early
The hardest part was coming up with the serial killer he would have been hunting. Coming up with the body was easy. From there it was a long succession of why's, why was she dressed like that (because the killer dressed her that way), why had the killer dressed her that way (because the killer believed she was a bad woman and that that outfit was what bad women wore), why did the killer believe this (because the killer and the woman had interacted) and so on and so forth until I arrived at, the killer thinks these women use their looks and their bodies to take advantage. But this isn't hate or resentment, it's jealousy.
It honestly didn't occur to me not to make the killer a woman. Women can be incredibly, horrifically vicious about other women as far as looks go, jealous and resentful. In this case, her husband's philandering led her to believe that other women were prettier than she was and they should be punished for it, etc etc. Downward, devolving spiral of hate and resentment. Dexter being a sociopath doesn't entirely understand it, but I think he does feel some sympathy for her, being as close as he is to his sister and probably having heard her make similar complaints about not being X enough or being too Y. And then the rest was either logistics of how he would cover his ass or closing my eyes and hearing their voices, seeing their body language and writing down what I heard and saw.
Stories and Pinch Hits Part I || Behind the Scenes in General