[fic] Standing on the Shoreline (Severus/Harry)
I am now free to confess to having written Standing on the Shoreline for 
snape_potter's First Time for Everything fest. I am here, I have arrived! I'm busy going through all the comments and try to find coherent ways to respond to all the incredibly lovely things people have said to me about it now. *laugh* Let's just tweak the header from the fest:
Title: Standing on the Shoreline
Pairings: Snape/Harry, Snape/OMCs
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 20,000
Content: (highlight for spoilers) *crossdressing; semi-public sex; a considerable quantity of alcohol, much of it illicit; dubious mental health; EWE and conspicuous but unexplained lack of one canon character death*
Summary: In which Snape balances uneasily between worlds. Dresses, books and a little herblore. Autumn 2012 and Winter 2013, Cokeworth.
A/N: Although this story has very much gone its own way in terms of both style and content I feel as though it owes some sort of conceptual debt to Rinsbane's The Fire Escape [locked to registered users] anyway; points of resemblance duly acknowledged. Further debts are owed to crystalusagi for beta work, and to firescribble for discussion of herbs and books, and to both of them for very necessary motivational arse-kicking.
Standing on the Shoreline @ AO3
At 20,000 words this is actually the longest story I've ever completed! Possibly also the most thematically coherent, but arguably not the strangest, although it certainly is strange. Snape being pulled between worlds fascinates me, because it's something that must be a point of internal conflict but that we don't really get to see very much of. He's made of all these contradictions; class conflict and muggle/magical conflict and the mess that is his loyalties. It's one of the things that draws me to him. And I always end up seeing him as somewhat queer, inevitably. Some sort of combination of that is where this story comes from; not really belonging anywhere. (Although I have to admit, it was actually prompted by Val and Crystal, who are an unstoppable force when actually in the same room, daring me to write Snape wearing a dress and having a lot of sex. I estimated that I'd write about five thousand words of fairly pointless porn and emotional tension and be done. I honestly should have known better.)
The alcohol traditions I played with here are actually Swedish (and there are some Swedish-isms in the text, as well - speak of trolls and they stand in the hall), for reasons that are partly pragmatic - I live in Sweden and have access to several libraries with well-stocked shelves on folklore and brännvin. I also wanted to create a certain level of cultural dissonance, though. The home distillation is actually based on my grandfather, who was neither English nor Swedish. So are the loose implications about Tobias' father. We are running a thoroughly multicultural outfit here.
(I also gifted Snape with some sort of combination of every shitty, freezing cold house I've ever lived in. It was far more satisfying than it should have been.)
The books have variable levels of meaning, of course, but I'm afraid the one that amuses me most is still The True Deceiver, which is a novel about a rather vague but charming elderly artist and an abrasive young woman who makes everyone around her uncomfortable, and a sort of covert battle of wills that takes place between them over the course of a winter. Who is being honest, and who is being deceptive? I feel like it's probably quite a useful lense to examine Snape through in general, actually; he does have that very curious combination of brutal honesty and extensive deception. I'll probably be returning to it. It may merit being the model for an entire fic in its own right.
The title of this story is from a song called Shoreline, by Broder Daniel; there's also an excellent cover of it by Anna Ternheim, with a very different mood, and both versions were a big part of the soundtrack I used to write this fic. Anna Ternheim's version; Broder Daniel's original. ("Oh, this town kills you when you're young.")
snape_potter's First Time for Everything fest. I am here, I have arrived! I'm busy going through all the comments and try to find coherent ways to respond to all the incredibly lovely things people have said to me about it now. *laugh* Let's just tweak the header from the fest:
Title: Standing on the Shoreline
Pairings: Snape/Harry, Snape/OMCs
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 20,000
Content: (highlight for spoilers) *crossdressing; semi-public sex; a considerable quantity of alcohol, much of it illicit; dubious mental health; EWE and conspicuous but unexplained lack of one canon character death*
Summary: In which Snape balances uneasily between worlds. Dresses, books and a little herblore. Autumn 2012 and Winter 2013, Cokeworth.
A/N: Although this story has very much gone its own way in terms of both style and content I feel as though it owes some sort of conceptual debt to Rinsbane's The Fire Escape [locked to registered users] anyway; points of resemblance duly acknowledged. Further debts are owed to crystalusagi for beta work, and to firescribble for discussion of herbs and books, and to both of them for very necessary motivational arse-kicking.
Standing on the Shoreline @ AO3
At 20,000 words this is actually the longest story I've ever completed! Possibly also the most thematically coherent, but arguably not the strangest, although it certainly is strange. Snape being pulled between worlds fascinates me, because it's something that must be a point of internal conflict but that we don't really get to see very much of. He's made of all these contradictions; class conflict and muggle/magical conflict and the mess that is his loyalties. It's one of the things that draws me to him. And I always end up seeing him as somewhat queer, inevitably. Some sort of combination of that is where this story comes from; not really belonging anywhere. (Although I have to admit, it was actually prompted by Val and Crystal, who are an unstoppable force when actually in the same room, daring me to write Snape wearing a dress and having a lot of sex. I estimated that I'd write about five thousand words of fairly pointless porn and emotional tension and be done. I honestly should have known better.)
The alcohol traditions I played with here are actually Swedish (and there are some Swedish-isms in the text, as well - speak of trolls and they stand in the hall), for reasons that are partly pragmatic - I live in Sweden and have access to several libraries with well-stocked shelves on folklore and brännvin. I also wanted to create a certain level of cultural dissonance, though. The home distillation is actually based on my grandfather, who was neither English nor Swedish. So are the loose implications about Tobias' father. We are running a thoroughly multicultural outfit here.
(I also gifted Snape with some sort of combination of every shitty, freezing cold house I've ever lived in. It was far more satisfying than it should have been.)
The books have variable levels of meaning, of course, but I'm afraid the one that amuses me most is still The True Deceiver, which is a novel about a rather vague but charming elderly artist and an abrasive young woman who makes everyone around her uncomfortable, and a sort of covert battle of wills that takes place between them over the course of a winter. Who is being honest, and who is being deceptive? I feel like it's probably quite a useful lense to examine Snape through in general, actually; he does have that very curious combination of brutal honesty and extensive deception. I'll probably be returning to it. It may merit being the model for an entire fic in its own right.
The title of this story is from a song called Shoreline, by Broder Daniel; there's also an excellent cover of it by Anna Ternheim, with a very different mood, and both versions were a big part of the soundtrack I used to write this fic. Anna Ternheim's version; Broder Daniel's original. ("Oh, this town kills you when you're young.")