“God Save the Queen”, End notes
[ Endnotes posted 14 Jan 2017 ]
Authorial preface: Since this story was a collaboration, sroni and I are doing back-and-forth in answering the customary questions. Should make for a few little differences from normal.
Where did the idea for the story come from?
SRoni: Honestly, I wrote so many variations of the basic idea for years … literally years. What finally gave me the impetus to finish the story was aadler using my Cordelia in a fic. Then, when it was time to do “ Queen’s Gambit” (which stayed half-finished for another year and a half), aadler had to do a massive rewrite to make QG work.
Aadler: As I’ve observed in other LJ entries, I almost raised my kids on Buffyfic; sroni was barely 13 when I did my first one, and even aside from my own writings, I shared with them stories that I’d found and enjoyed. sroni made attempts of her own now and then, but she was still so young that it took time for her abilities to form. The germ that would become this story was the first of those attempts that I actually remember, because it was the first that went beyond imaginings and looked like it could become something. So I took what she’d done - just a beginning - and rewrote it to show her some of those possibilities. She liked it, but was still growing and learning, so it wasn’t happening quickly.
In 2003, while I was in Iraq, I got the idea that would turn into “ Each Proud Division”, a story of four Slayers from four different realities landing in Sunnydale and having to be dealt with by an unlikely team. I chose across the board: one of my own (Joyce from “ Point of Focus”), one from canon (scarred-Buffy from the Season 3 episode “the Wish”), one from a fanfic favorite of mine (Dawn from Brighid’s “Beats a Cruel December” … and rounded it out with the Cordelia from sroni’s still unfinished fic. That served to prod her a bit, seeing her creation in actual ‘print’. When I signed us up for the first WriterCon, in 2004, she wanted to have something of her own posted so she’d be one of the authors, so she worked to finish GSQ and I helped her somewhat with the editing.
Then, as she said, when it was time to do the sequel to this story, years later, the improvement her writing had undergone in the interim meant GSQ needed substantial revision to bring it up to the same level; and, since this second story was a collaboration, I put in most of the work on the revision. sroni is still the primary author, but I made enough difference in the finished result that I can fairly consider myself co-author.
Is there any particular significance to the title?
SRoni: Cordelia is Queen C, of course, so I wanted something with Queen in the title. I believe the original title was “Dancing with Myself”, but then Mediancat titled a story that, and it also had Cordelia as Slayer and no. He doesn’t own the song nor the concept, but I’m not going to go out of my way to invite comparisons, either (I’ll lose, by the way, and lose hard).
Aadler: I didn’t even know sroni had a title in mind when she showed me the first opening of the story; when I rewrote to show her what was possible, I gave it the tentative title of “Double or Nothing” (since, at that time, the idea of non-Slayer-Buffy impersonating Cordelia-the-Slayer looked to be the main focus). I don’t even remember how the title changed or how it got to be the way it became; it just seemed right by the time the story was actually done.
What is the thing I like most about this story? the thing I like least, or about which I feel most doubtful?
SRoni: The thing I like most is Angelus being Angelus and pulling the switch.
The thing I like least … I tried to fix a lot of problems I saw in the Scoobies, in terms of how they went about things. There’s a way to do that, but I don’t think I went about it in that right way. Luckily, I’m pretty sure aadler fixed a lot of that in his rewrite.
Aadler: I most liked the character of this Cordelia, identifiably the same person we’d known but manifesting very differently from the effects of bereavement and imposed responsibility. (I also liked the fight scenes, because I just like fight scenes, and this one had a couple of humdingers.) The ending, Cordelia’s realization that not only was she being blamed but it actually was her fault, also appealed to me more than a little.
As for what I liked least, that’s a difficult one. This was a fairly ambitious story - once rewritten enough to accommodate the sequel, it was the second-longest of ‘my’ fics up to that time - and the process had taken long enough that most of the wrinkles had been ironed out. I’ll go on and say that I was never really sure about Owen’s characterization here … but then, he was present in only one canon episode, so there wasn’t a heck of a lot for either of us to work with.
Is there anything I think I could have done better, or might do differently if I had it to do over?
SRoni: All of it? To clarify, I probably wouldn’t “fix” the end result if I did it over. But if we were writing it now instead, I’d give aadler a better base story to work with. I was eighteen when I finished it, and pretty darn good for that age, in my not-so-humble-opinion, but it’s twelve years later and I’ve worked hard on my craft since then.
Aadler: As I said, this story probably had more total work put into it than almost any other in our repertoire. Collaboration is far from painless under the best of circumstances, and - even given that I raised her and taught her as much as I could about writing - sroni’s style was enough different from mine that it was difficult getting them to mesh. Given these differences, I’m not sure either of us really could have done a lot better.
Do I have any plans to follow up on this story, or to use the character(s) or situation in a subsequent fic?
SRoni: Been done, in “ Queen’s Gambit”!
Aadler: And, of course, the ‘guest’ appearance in “ Each Proud Division”, which in our-world chronology came first, but in aadler/sroni ‘canon’ falls between this story and “ Queen’s Gambit”. (There’s also a sideways reference in “ Glass Ceiling” to other-universe versions of Cordelia ‘gaining power from a kiss’, which would include this Cordelia when she saved Buffy with CPR.)
Any observations to add at the end?
SRoni: I am really bad at doing things in anything resembling a reasonable time frame.
Aadler: We like each other a lot. We don’t necessarily work well together. Sometimes, though, the results come out pretty okay.