Age(s) of the Geek, 5/7 - Leverage / Supernatural crossover

[deepbluemermaid]

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Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 5: Leverage / Supernatural, part 1.

Summary: Alec's been having strange dreams for months; now a shadowy figure is stalking him. And when he starts investigating his own family history, things get even worse.

Genre: gen AU crossover.
Rating / Warnings: R for angst, non-graphic violence, and canonical character death

Comments

[themonkeytwin]

Oh, ouch. :(

Did you have that in mind from the beginning? And any idea how he bounces back from this and works through it all before becoming the Hardison we know and love? I kind of wouldn't mind seeing a darker Hardison like this, although that's not the tone of the show, really, so it wouldn't suit it I guess - and it would throw the balance of personalities on the team off, too. Still, interesting.

[deepbluemermaid]

Yep - this is actually the first story I wrote in the series, and everything else got built around it. Quite a lot changed in the process, but it was always going to lead here.

The epilogue, set a few years in the future, won't have such a downer ending...I promise!

[cactus_cat]

Yays, now I can read the first part properly! :)

(p.s. I read that SPN fic you linked me to - AWESOME. Any further links you might care to provide would be appreciated!)

[payperv_iew]

Oh this was great! One grammar thing: you use too many exclamation marks. In fact, you use exclamation marks at all. I totally suffer the same problem, I'd go back through and change every exclamation point to a period that isn't in the dialogue, because other than that this is epic. I'm really excited for the epilogue. Will there be another geek? Possibly Garcia from Criminal Minds? Or is it just going to be an amalgam of the previous geeks? Cause the whole 'new geek a chapter' concept is awesome. :D

[deepbluemermaid]

Thanks for the feedback - epic is a lovely compliment :)

Out of curiosity: would you mind telling me why having *counts* 7 non-dialogue exclamation marks, in a 6000 word fic, is a bad thing from your standpoint? I've had several such comments, so - in the interests of improving my writing - I'd really like to understand the problem.

The epilogue is a continuation of the Heroes crossover, but also a wrap-up of Alec's whole journey.

I did think of many other geeks Alec could meet...but this whole thing is really a ridiculously overgrown '5 Times' fic, so I'm sticking with the ones I've already got.

[payperv_iew]

Think of it this way: when you're writing on you're own, you think, okay, to add emphasis to this sentence, I need an exclamation point. But when other people are reading it they think, 'Oh, it's important, we already understood that. Why is there extra emphasis?' Your words should (and in your case DO) speak for themselves. When you add the extra emphasis it feels too much like telling your readers how they should be taking a new piece of information, rather than them seeing for themselves. Also, it breaks up the flow of a paragraph. I've started to think of exclamation points as the equivalent of Dean's shout when Sam's stabbed in the back at the end of season 2. Nobody should be using that much power to state a fact. Nobody does that outside of dialogue or inner monologue. It's like a semi-colon, you may understand the basics of it's use, but it can always be exchanged with a comma, and that's just simpler on all fronts

[payperv_iew]

And as I'm sure you can see, the exclamation point is basically the only grammatical concept I've ever managed to grasp.