Fanfic Commentary Meme: "Sealed In Wax, Signed In Blood"
Last part of this meme, finally. (Wow, what, you think it took me long enough to get this done?? I swear I meant to be a lot quicker and better about it than this...well, in any case, at least it's over with now. Unfortunately I fear I may have forgotten some things I initially planned to say on this segment in consequence of all my dawdling...but, eeee, I guess we'll find out.)
derevko_child requested some thoughts on the following passage from Sealed In Wax, Signed In Blood (warning: spoilers for later parts of the Waking 'verse, including the ending):
He doesn’t remember why he even has a waffle-iron (he probably could, if he tried - Nicole’s always given him the most random presents - but he doesn’t want to think about that). The first batch comes out burned because he forgets to grease it first. And he knows Adelle prefers her eggs sunny-side-up, but she’ll just have to cope with scrambled because he’s never been able to figure out how not to break the yolk.
“Laurence?”
He whirls around to find her standing there, hair slightly rumpled, giving him an incredibly bemused expression. He puts down the spatula he was poking at the frying pan with.
“What,” he smirks, “surprised?”
Glancing at the mess spread out across the countertops, she says dryly: “That anyone could make such an elaborate disaster area from such a small amount of ingredients? Most definitely.”
But she’s smiling as she says it.
“Okay,” he admits, with good-natured grousing; “so I’m not exactly ‘homey’-”
“No.” She takes a step closer, slipping her arms around his waist. “But I think it’s wonderfully meaningful, that you’d even try.”
She looks up at him and he gazes back down at her, and after a moment he leans in to kiss her on the lips.
When they separate though, he groans, remembering. “Damn.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Teabags. I was gonna get some, but I forgot-”
He trails off as, smiling secretively, she goes over and finds where she left her purse the night before. She pulls out a small box of instant tea.
Then she comes back over, reaching past him to open up the cabinet and put it right next to where he keeps the coffee.
He stares at it for a minute. “Well, now.”
“After all, you aren’t the only one capable of planning ahead,” she reminds him.
He smiles back at her. “No,” he agrees.
* A comment I tended to get a lot throughout this series was how my take on D/D was a lot fluffier than they are...pretty much anywhere else. And it's true. I'm well aware that I took a ship that, in most other fanworks, is pretty much 100% about the angst and darkness and betrayal, and had them setting aside their "issues" with relative swiftness and getting to the good, snuggly parts, with a mild extra chaser of kittens and roses. I'm...fairly unashamed of this fact. At the least, I see no point in denying it - it's sort of an odd way to write them, all considered.
However, since the second half to that particular comment also tended to be something on the lines of "...and I really like seeing them this way"...I choose to intrepret it as my spin on things still didn't seem out of character, or hopefully too far off canon ^^;;
IDK. I love angsty DeWitt/Dom. Really I do. Obviously, I wouldn't be into the pairing if I didn't. But for some reason, it just felt refreshing and right to have them fairly early on reach this place of "You know what? Staying mad at each other is fucking pointless", and see where it went from there. Explore what they'd be like in an actual **relationship**, not just bitter UST or unspoken subtext or even hot semi-hate sex. (And...sometimes I worry I almost didn't emphasis the time element at the beginning of this storyline quite enough before jumping to the rest of it. Because, yeah, I'll admit, I kind of did a writer's fast-forward in, say, the first four parts - in my defense, it wasn't actually a series before then. But guys, Dominic was stuck body-surfing for months there before he got as broken in as he did. Sometimes I worry that didn't come across clearly enough.) As strong as the pull between these two is, I felt like once they actually got down to that, they would indeed end up in a place like this: with constant bed-sharing, and little quiet moments like partially successful attempts at surprising one another with breakfast.
I think whenever a writer ends up putting their favorite pairing in a place where they're doing coupley stuff together (not just having sex, or fighting, or other more dramatic things), there's always this accusation lurking that they're just pasting them into this happily-ever-after mold, picturing a typical scenario and jamming them in there, because "happiness = this", or whatever (see: the reaction to JKR's epilogue). And while I admit there is a temptation to do something along those lines, I for one know I at least gave it a lot of serious thought and tried to have them at a certain point and in a certain scenario that it felt like they built to natually, and that seemed in character and true to them.
I feel like I was sucessful in all this. No one ever really complained about it among my readers so really, I don't know, but I'm reasonably optimistic it all worked.
* “Okay,” he admits, with good-natured grousing; “so I’m not exactly ‘homey’-”
Random only semi-related author thought-vent: where did this weird unwritten rule come up that it's considered *impressive* or *unusual* if a single guy knows how to cook *anything*? I mean, what the heck? Maybe if it was 1955...or we were in a setting where there are still very strong gender roles, and cooking is "woman's work"...or if the guy in question is young enough it's reasonable to believe he's pretty much always had his momma cooking for him before. But in this day and age, if a man has spent any significant time as a solitary bachelor, and he's not of a slacker mindset where you could believe he only lives off of takeout/microwaveables, I am going to assume he has at least the capabilities to A) make anything from a mix, B) boil an egg, and C) throw together some goddamned spaghetti. Seriously, y'all, it's not that hard. No ovaries or even an extra amount of implied initiative required, no really, I promise.
I mean, seriously, this is only related by a dangling half-eaten thread, because it's not like anyone left any comments on this part saying "ZOMG DOM CAN COOK??" or anything (which, thank you Jesus, because I like being able to believe I have smart fans), but looking back on it, it's easy to see how it could have come up. Because yeah: I've seen that kind of reaction before. For the sake of me breaking it down, irregardless of whether anyone needs to be convinced, let's think this through - he's in his late thirties, presumably spent most of that time solitary and independent, and, if the way the lines of his suits fit him is any indication, clearly not living off of fast food burgers. I think it can be assumed that he can handle waffle mix and scrambled eggs. (Lord knows I can, and really, I do not have the words to describe how I am not a master chef.) We start getting into souffles and hand-squeezing the orange juice territory, then you are allowed to raise an eyebrow.
* He doesn’t remember why he even has a waffle-iron (he probably could, if he tried - Nicole’s always given him the most random presents - but he doesn’t want to think about that).
No one ever commented on it, so I have no way of knowing - but I wonder if anyone remembered this scene when they were reading "Give The Dog A Bone", and Nicole does indeed give him the waffle-iron as a Christmas present. It was obviously my intention to connect the two moments like that...but nobody ever stated that they caught it. So I'm sort of stuck wondering if I was succesful or not, and it makes me kind of sad. (Just like how I wonder if anyone remembered that same Christmas flashback scene, and that whole conversation about future kids named after foreign cities, when they found out that Nicole had named her daughter Madras.)
And in case you're wondering: yes, I was indeed picturing the flashback to when Dom first got that waffle iron from her when I first introduced it in this part. I had that much planned out that far in advance. When it comes to this series, and the entire Nicole Dominic storyline in particular, I had perhaps a ridiculous amount of detail already mapped out in my head before the story got there. In fact: in the very first part Nicole appears in, when we're only just introduced to her character in passing and given the knowledge that the rest of Dominic's family is also NSA - I already knew I was going to kill her. I even had most of the details of her death planed out - I knew she was going to commit suicide rather than give herself up to the Dollhouse, I had this image of her slicing her throat with a piece of glass, I knew her brother was going to be there and she would die right in front of him. I already had an inkling of what it was going to do to her brother afterwards, I already had at least a general idea of most if not all of the "Give The Dog A Bone" flashbacks in my head (makes sense, given chronilogically they would have happened *before*) - by the time I got to "Falling Just To (Crash Bang Boom)", I'm fairly certain I was already playing with the idea of Nicole having secretly had a daughter that Dominic and DeWitt would end up raising, and I had in my head this scene of Mitchell Dominic calling his son's girlfriend a whore at his own stepdaughter's funeral. Nicole's death was a huge part of this story in my head that I was constantly building to and around. It was kind of surreal, actually, to have so much of it so intricately worked out in advance - to be writing these much earlier parts in the story I had already completely told myself, knowing what was to come.
* He trails off as, smiling secretively, she goes over and finds where she left her purse the night before. She pulls out a small box of instant tea.
You know, I think at the time I wrote this, if you had asked me just what, exactly, I was trying to say about them with this moment, I couldn't have really explained it.
Looking back on it now, though, I think I get it better - I was trying to demonstrate how, once again, they're always on the same page of thought without even trying, just naturally :D
derevko_child requested some thoughts on the following passage from Sealed In Wax, Signed In Blood (warning: spoilers for later parts of the Waking 'verse, including the ending):
He doesn’t remember why he even has a waffle-iron (he probably could, if he tried - Nicole’s always given him the most random presents - but he doesn’t want to think about that). The first batch comes out burned because he forgets to grease it first. And he knows Adelle prefers her eggs sunny-side-up, but she’ll just have to cope with scrambled because he’s never been able to figure out how not to break the yolk.
“Laurence?”
He whirls around to find her standing there, hair slightly rumpled, giving him an incredibly bemused expression. He puts down the spatula he was poking at the frying pan with.
“What,” he smirks, “surprised?”
Glancing at the mess spread out across the countertops, she says dryly: “That anyone could make such an elaborate disaster area from such a small amount of ingredients? Most definitely.”
But she’s smiling as she says it.
“Okay,” he admits, with good-natured grousing; “so I’m not exactly ‘homey’-”
“No.” She takes a step closer, slipping her arms around his waist. “But I think it’s wonderfully meaningful, that you’d even try.”
She looks up at him and he gazes back down at her, and after a moment he leans in to kiss her on the lips.
When they separate though, he groans, remembering. “Damn.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Teabags. I was gonna get some, but I forgot-”
He trails off as, smiling secretively, she goes over and finds where she left her purse the night before. She pulls out a small box of instant tea.
Then she comes back over, reaching past him to open up the cabinet and put it right next to where he keeps the coffee.
He stares at it for a minute. “Well, now.”
“After all, you aren’t the only one capable of planning ahead,” she reminds him.
He smiles back at her. “No,” he agrees.
* A comment I tended to get a lot throughout this series was how my take on D/D was a lot fluffier than they are...pretty much anywhere else. And it's true. I'm well aware that I took a ship that, in most other fanworks, is pretty much 100% about the angst and darkness and betrayal, and had them setting aside their "issues" with relative swiftness and getting to the good, snuggly parts, with a mild extra chaser of kittens and roses. I'm...fairly unashamed of this fact. At the least, I see no point in denying it - it's sort of an odd way to write them, all considered.
However, since the second half to that particular comment also tended to be something on the lines of "...and I really like seeing them this way"...I choose to intrepret it as my spin on things still didn't seem out of character, or hopefully too far off canon ^^;;
IDK. I love angsty DeWitt/Dom. Really I do. Obviously, I wouldn't be into the pairing if I didn't. But for some reason, it just felt refreshing and right to have them fairly early on reach this place of "You know what? Staying mad at each other is fucking pointless", and see where it went from there. Explore what they'd be like in an actual **relationship**, not just bitter UST or unspoken subtext or even hot semi-hate sex. (And...sometimes I worry I almost didn't emphasis the time element at the beginning of this storyline quite enough before jumping to the rest of it. Because, yeah, I'll admit, I kind of did a writer's fast-forward in, say, the first four parts - in my defense, it wasn't actually a series before then. But guys, Dominic was stuck body-surfing for months there before he got as broken in as he did. Sometimes I worry that didn't come across clearly enough.) As strong as the pull between these two is, I felt like once they actually got down to that, they would indeed end up in a place like this: with constant bed-sharing, and little quiet moments like partially successful attempts at surprising one another with breakfast.
I think whenever a writer ends up putting their favorite pairing in a place where they're doing coupley stuff together (not just having sex, or fighting, or other more dramatic things), there's always this accusation lurking that they're just pasting them into this happily-ever-after mold, picturing a typical scenario and jamming them in there, because "happiness = this", or whatever (see: the reaction to JKR's epilogue). And while I admit there is a temptation to do something along those lines, I for one know I at least gave it a lot of serious thought and tried to have them at a certain point and in a certain scenario that it felt like they built to natually, and that seemed in character and true to them.
I feel like I was sucessful in all this. No one ever really complained about it among my readers so really, I don't know, but I'm reasonably optimistic it all worked.
* “Okay,” he admits, with good-natured grousing; “so I’m not exactly ‘homey’-”
Random only semi-related author thought-vent: where did this weird unwritten rule come up that it's considered *impressive* or *unusual* if a single guy knows how to cook *anything*? I mean, what the heck? Maybe if it was 1955...or we were in a setting where there are still very strong gender roles, and cooking is "woman's work"...or if the guy in question is young enough it's reasonable to believe he's pretty much always had his momma cooking for him before. But in this day and age, if a man has spent any significant time as a solitary bachelor, and he's not of a slacker mindset where you could believe he only lives off of takeout/microwaveables, I am going to assume he has at least the capabilities to A) make anything from a mix, B) boil an egg, and C) throw together some goddamned spaghetti. Seriously, y'all, it's not that hard. No ovaries or even an extra amount of implied initiative required, no really, I promise.
I mean, seriously, this is only related by a dangling half-eaten thread, because it's not like anyone left any comments on this part saying "ZOMG DOM CAN COOK??" or anything (which, thank you Jesus, because I like being able to believe I have smart fans), but looking back on it, it's easy to see how it could have come up. Because yeah: I've seen that kind of reaction before. For the sake of me breaking it down, irregardless of whether anyone needs to be convinced, let's think this through - he's in his late thirties, presumably spent most of that time solitary and independent, and, if the way the lines of his suits fit him is any indication, clearly not living off of fast food burgers. I think it can be assumed that he can handle waffle mix and scrambled eggs. (Lord knows I can, and really, I do not have the words to describe how I am not a master chef.) We start getting into souffles and hand-squeezing the orange juice territory, then you are allowed to raise an eyebrow.
* He doesn’t remember why he even has a waffle-iron (he probably could, if he tried - Nicole’s always given him the most random presents - but he doesn’t want to think about that).
No one ever commented on it, so I have no way of knowing - but I wonder if anyone remembered this scene when they were reading "Give The Dog A Bone", and Nicole does indeed give him the waffle-iron as a Christmas present. It was obviously my intention to connect the two moments like that...but nobody ever stated that they caught it. So I'm sort of stuck wondering if I was succesful or not, and it makes me kind of sad. (Just like how I wonder if anyone remembered that same Christmas flashback scene, and that whole conversation about future kids named after foreign cities, when they found out that Nicole had named her daughter Madras.)
And in case you're wondering: yes, I was indeed picturing the flashback to when Dom first got that waffle iron from her when I first introduced it in this part. I had that much planned out that far in advance. When it comes to this series, and the entire Nicole Dominic storyline in particular, I had perhaps a ridiculous amount of detail already mapped out in my head before the story got there. In fact: in the very first part Nicole appears in, when we're only just introduced to her character in passing and given the knowledge that the rest of Dominic's family is also NSA - I already knew I was going to kill her. I even had most of the details of her death planed out - I knew she was going to commit suicide rather than give herself up to the Dollhouse, I had this image of her slicing her throat with a piece of glass, I knew her brother was going to be there and she would die right in front of him. I already had an inkling of what it was going to do to her brother afterwards, I already had at least a general idea of most if not all of the "Give The Dog A Bone" flashbacks in my head (makes sense, given chronilogically they would have happened *before*) - by the time I got to "Falling Just To (Crash Bang Boom)", I'm fairly certain I was already playing with the idea of Nicole having secretly had a daughter that Dominic and DeWitt would end up raising, and I had in my head this scene of Mitchell Dominic calling his son's girlfriend a whore at his own stepdaughter's funeral. Nicole's death was a huge part of this story in my head that I was constantly building to and around. It was kind of surreal, actually, to have so much of it so intricately worked out in advance - to be writing these much earlier parts in the story I had already completely told myself, knowing what was to come.
* He trails off as, smiling secretively, she goes over and finds where she left her purse the night before. She pulls out a small box of instant tea.
You know, I think at the time I wrote this, if you had asked me just what, exactly, I was trying to say about them with this moment, I couldn't have really explained it.
Looking back on it now, though, I think I get it better - I was trying to demonstrate how, once again, they're always on the same page of thought without even trying, just naturally :D