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
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Explore what they'd be like in an actual **relationship**, not just bitter UST or unspoken subtext or even hot semi-hate sex.
I really love your take on DeWitt/Dom. The first four parts of the series were filled with bitter UST (for me, anyway), so I'm not complaining about the lack of it in the latter parts. Sometimes it's frustrating to read bitter UST fics and there times that I feel like it's mega-difficult to write bitter UST fics all the time (not just in Dollhouse).
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.
Lol :))
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.
To tell the truth, I noticed that bit, but I sorta forgot about it when I was commenting. Or is this the part where I thought I commented, but didn't? -_- The naming-after-cities bit, went totally over my head, but now that you've mentioned it, I think I remember that now (I will do a major reread of this series when I'm finished with the Constitution. Heh).
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.
I was wondering if you jot them all down, or if they're just floating in your head... Did you ever feel at some point that you wanted to change what was to come because you got attached to Nicole?
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
That part is my favorite of all my favorites, actually. Hee.
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I try not to write too much down in advance, because I've found in the past that if I try to write things "out of order", before the story has actually reached that point, it drains my inspiration to actually write the scene when I get there. But I do have a couple notebooks where I jot down little reminders to myself, just a couple words here and there to remind me of scenes or elements I want to include so I don't forget, and I did use them pretty frequently for this series, mainly for organizational timeline purposes. (For example, I just picked it up, and there's this long, scrawled list on one page of various moments/scene ideas I wanted to try and include in "Give The Dog A Bone" [FWW, it looks like all but maybe two of what I have written ended up making it in], which, judging from other things written around it, I can only assume must have been compiled, god, as early as June or July - months before the storyline had even reached that point.)
Did you ever feel at some point that you wanted to change what was to come because you got attached to Nicole?
I don't think I ever felt like I had much of a choice, to be honest. So much of the storyline was building toward that moment in my mind; there really seemed to be no other way it could go. It's like in Stranger Than Fiction, where after meeting him the author decides to change the ending of her story to spare Will Ferrell's character, and Dustin Hoffman's character quickly points out to her that, by doing this, she will literally have to rewrite the entire rest of her book. I did grow mildly concerned, at a point, that it was possibly bad writing on my part to be making so much of the plot around a character's inevitable (to me) death - that I was afraid I had created Nicole only to destroy her, that she was my very own Woman In The Refridgerator, in existance for the sole purpose of giving another character, in this case, her brother, my admitted almost sole focus of the story, something to anguish and feel emotion over. But I was able to mostly ease my anxieties because, really, how else could Nicole's story be resolved? From my standpoint, this is how I saw it - there were only three options. To have their story (Nicole and Laurence's) end unresolved, the two of them not coming to any real conclusion by the completion of the storyline, just didn't really feel like a good ending at all. Or an ending, period. There needed to be an actual concrete resolution, it couldn't just end with him going one way and her going another, her still hating him and the two likely to never meet again. One of two things had to happen, in this kind of storyline: either Nicole would be killed somehow, or she would be eventually won over to the other side. And as happier as that second option might have been for her stepbrother, it didn't seem at all realistic or right or even believable for everything I had built into their situation and her character. To me, that felt like crossing the line one step too far into happily ever after territory; you have to maintain at least some element of tragedy, for the story to feel at all compelling and real. Not everything can end perfectly.
And...I don't know, after a certain point, just because I had imagined and visualized these events and thought about them so damn much, it didn't even feel like I was writing a story anymore, it felt like I was reporting. Or writing a recap. To me, these things had happened, and I had hashed them out in my brain so many times, I sometimes had to take a step back and remind myself that the readers didn't know. That what seemed so concrete and inarguable to me was still in the realm of things they hadn't heard about yet.
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