Fandom Snowflake Challenge - Day One
I’ve never done 
snowflake_challenge before, but it looks like a fun way to start off 2013!
In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.
(Okay, so this started off as self-recs and slipped into fic commentary and year-end reflections and then turned into rambly opinionated White Collar character meta? Um. I have opinions, apparently ...)
Penelope Weaving
Characters/Pairings: Neal/Kate, Fowler, Mozzie, Peter, Keller, Adler
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 78,000
Spoilers: Through 4.03
Warnings: Some violence.
Summary: She’s never liked chess, and this is chess played in the dark and blindfolded, and all the pieces are broken glass. (Kate’s POV of season 1.)
She thinks about Penelope, and the kind of cold steel nerve it takes to wait, in one place and under the constant eyes of your enemies and his, fighting the lonely rearguard action while your resources dwindle and your escape routes close off; she thinks about what happens when the loom comes unstrung and the suitors won’t take no for an answer anymore and he’s not back and waiting is no longer an option.
… and I wrote a novel. Um. How did that happen? *stares at Giant Epic Plotbunny*
*Giant Epic Plotbunny stares back with wide-eyed innocent look*
This is The Giant Epic Kate Novel, aka my White Collar Big Bang fic.
I … could ramble about this fic all day. I am still sitting here kind of stunned that I managed to write a story this long with a coherent plot and everything. Much less a story that I really, really like. And it’s got art! sholio made me absolutely gorgeous cover art to go with it!
I’ve been reading year-end posts, and thinking about how to describe my 2012, what I’ve accomplished and what I want to do better next year and I could describe 2012 as my first full year in my very own apartment, or my first year working 20 hours a week and going to grad school full time at the same time, or the year I finished my next-to-last semester of grad school, or the year I developed a number of very bad habits like not sleeping nearly enough. And I could list the things I’ve accomplished at school, or the things I’ve learned at work, or the things I should be doing to save more money, or all the ways I need to do better in my last semester if I want to graduate on time.
But when I think about the highlights of 2012 … this is the year that I wrote a fucking novel. And it’s not as good as it could have been if I’d had more time to work on it - I think it would benefit greatly from another two months of careful revision, on a line-editing and a macro scene-by-scene level. But at the same time, if I hadn’t had the deadline to get it posted I probably wouldn’t have finished it in the first place.
And people liked it, which was surprising and absolutely delightful. Not only is it about a character who barely gets any screen time and a ‘ship that canon never fleshed out as much as it really should have, but it’s mostly centered on a relationship between two characters (Kate and Fowler) who don’t ever actually appear on screen together in the same scene in canon. But in my head they’ve turned into this sharper-edged, dark-mirror version of Neal and Peter, almost, and they’re a truly ridiculous amount of fun to write together.
And I remember rewatching Point Blank for, like, the twelfth time one day back in March or April and I’m watching Fowler talk about Kate’s plan to fake their own deaths (which makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE in light of 4.10 - she’s seen Neal fake his death to escape before!) and I’m sitting there thinking … okay, they’re going to need parachutes. They’re going to need a boat. And wetsuits, probably, since it’s going to be cold. It's snowing. And that’s a tiny plane - it’s not going to fly them all the way to the Caribbean. And I’m wondering okay so how was the logistics of this supposed to actually work?
And at this point the OMG KATE WAS A TOTAL BADASS light went on in my head.
Fowler thinks Kate was a total badass, and he’s a) ex-Special Forces and so not easy to impress b) a far more objective source of information on Kate’s character and personality than either Neal or Peter and c) pretty much at the end of his rope by the back half of 2.09 and so extremely unlikely to be trying to lie to them about anything.
This one scene in Peter’s office in 2.09 is the backbone of my entire conception of Kate as a character. This is a woman who, by herself, went toe-to-toe with a corrupt internal affairs agent with considerable power and the willingness to abuse it and forced him to make a deal with her, so she could get herself and Neal away from someone even more powerful and dangerous who had every reason to want them both dead. A woman who came up with a plan that is, on the face of it, incredibly desperate and unlikely to succeed - but who managed to convince someone with far more experience at jumping out of airplanes in harsh conditions that she actually had a chance in hell of pulling it off.
Fowler knows how to jump out of airplanes, and he'd be very familiar with the logistical issues and specific dangers involved in a trained military team jumping into the Atlantic in November and having to get themselves safely to shore with no backup in the water waiting to pick them up, much less a pair of untrained civilians trying to do the same thing. My friend and fabulous beta LC jumps out of airplanes for the Army - I can still remember the first time I called her up to ask about technical details for all this. There is a lot of complicated logistical planning Fowler is glossing over in a sentence or two in that scene - there was a lot more going on there than just him handing her a pair of parachutes and saying “good luck”.
And I wanted to tell Kate’s story, and I wanted to flesh out her relationship with Neal, but really the seed of an idea that started the whole thing was this image of Fowler as jump instructor. He’s ex-Special Forces. (This is canon.) She’s a twenty-something female civilian art thief with no experience in skydiving and no formal training in water survival or cold weather survival. And somehow, through a combination of (in my headcanon) intelligent argument and blackmail and sheer bloody-minded stubbornness she manages to convince him to set up what to any trained military team would look like the stupidest, most desperate plan ever, and train her for it in the expectation that she had some very slim chance of actually pulling it off.
I started this fic with a clear image in my head of the look on Fowler’s face when she first proposes this, of you want to do WHAT NOW?
And yet.
And yet, there he is in 2.09 saying I don’t think she was wrong.
He thought this plan of hers was her and Neal’s best shot at survival. Which says both that he had a hell of a lot of respect for her nerve and her resourcefulness, and also that Kate really did have very good reasons for believing that she and Neal were both going to be killed if they didn’t succeed at completely disappearing.
This is, IMO, the best thing I have ever written, and it’s something I’m ridiculously proud of, and something that brings me joy - both to think that I wrote it and just to reread it for fun.
there is a crack in everything
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Neal, Peter
Warnings/Spoilers: Season 2
Word Count: 2150
Summary: A week ago he thought he'd be dead by now, or else back in prison for good; he hadn't much cared which.
He doesn’t know how to say this, that in all the pain and doubt and grief there was one razor-bright moment of clarity, one moment between firing that first shot and pulling back the hammer for a second when everything made sense; one moment when all the world collapsed into a funnel, a clean straight line down the end of a gun sight, and he knew who he was and what it all meant and everything he had to do.
I have a thing for revenge arcs, apparently, and White Collar IMO does them particularly well (both of them). And where Neal’s head is at in early S2 is endlessly fascinating for me to explore. This is a short fic but it’s one of my favorites; it says a lot of what I’ve always wanted to say about Neal, and Peter, and Neal&Peter and Neal/Kate and Neal&Mozzie in the wake of 2.09. That Peter isn’t angry, here, at all. And that Neal and Kate had something real.
Someday I will write the longer post about how 2.09 is everything I love about Neal and Peter, and how the most important thing Peter does for Neal is not about changing him, or teaching him new morals, or giving him "a set of principles that weren't there six years ago" - Peter is Neal's anchor because he reminds Neal of Neal's own morals when Neal forgets them.
It's this isn't who you are, not this isn't who I think you should be.
And how this is something that gets completely forgotten in S3, which is part of why I find S3 so frustrating.
And I could go on for weeks about how the entire early S2 arc doesn’t work, IMO, unless it’s accepted that Neal and Kate had something real - not the perfect fairy-tale romance Neal thought it was, but not the deluded fixation on “the idea of a person” that Peter and El think it was, either. Neal does not come that close to shooting an unarmed man in the face for "the idea of a person". She was the center of Neal’s life for eight years; for three and a half years she visited him every week in prison. They had a real relationship with real flaws and issues like real relationships have, and she was someone he could have and would have built a real and lasting future with if they’d gotten the chance.
And what Neal does in 2.09 is partly about being out of his head with grief … and partly not. It’s both completely unlike him and absolutely inevitable at the same time, which is why I love it. It's two of Neal's most important moral principles coming into conflict with each other and one of them has to give way. Non-violence is a huge part of who Neal is but he also strongly believes that you take care of your people. And if something bad happens to one of his people it is his job to do something about it. Not the law’s job. Justice is not something that’s ever been on his side, or Kate’s side, in most of his experience, and according to his code of ethics you have to take care of your own because no one else will.
(And we see this somewhat with Ellen in S4, too - he’s not trying to shoot people this time, but he still very much believes it’s his job, and his responsibility, not the Marshals’, to find out who killed her.)
Keep your memories (but keep your powder dry too)
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: June, Peter, Neal, Mozzie
Warnings/Spoilers: Through 4.01 Wanted
Word Count: 7200
Summary: June has been a lookout and a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on and a getaway driver; now when nothing else is left she knows how to hold the retreat.
Some things don’t change; she knows the light of runrunrun in Neal’s eyes, knows the instinct to fly is always just below the surface. June raised two daughters in this house, watched her grandchildren play in its halls, buried three beloved dogs in the narrow grassy courtyard at the back. She travels these days with three suitcases, and waits on a valet to carry them. But she still keeps a small satchel with three passports and a few thousand in cash tucked behind her vanity table. Old instincts die hard, and if she had to leave all of this on a moment’s notice, she could.
I spent a lot of time editing this. And cutting bits out and putting them back in again. But this is another fic I’m proud of, and it says a number of things I wanted to say, and that I think needed to be said, about season 3 and about Neal as a character.
I absolutely adore June. She’s a fascinating character and she has a very different perspective on Neal, and Peter, and life in general than any of the other characters. But I spent a lot of time, while writing this, fighting the urge to have her pull her punches. Because I like Peter, and I know he loves Neal, but this is something that June has a much harder time accepting or believing.
She's kind and she's wise and she loves Neal (and Mozzie) and I think she is genuinely fond of Peter. Still she’s very much a retired con artist, not a reformed one, and she’s got sharp edges. She’s fiercely loyal to her people and she’s lived a long time on the wrong side of the law and she does not trust cops, as a rule. The idea of Neal and Peter’s friendship, and of trusting anyone in law enforcement to protect someone she loves, is very new to her and difficult for her to get used to.
... and that got long. Um.
Happy New Year to everyone! *hugs the flist*
snowflake_challenge before, but it looks like a fun way to start off 2013!
In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.
(Okay, so this started off as self-recs and slipped into fic commentary and year-end reflections and then turned into rambly opinionated White Collar character meta? Um. I have opinions, apparently ...)
Penelope Weaving
Characters/Pairings: Neal/Kate, Fowler, Mozzie, Peter, Keller, Adler
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 78,000
Spoilers: Through 4.03
Warnings: Some violence.
Summary: She’s never liked chess, and this is chess played in the dark and blindfolded, and all the pieces are broken glass. (Kate’s POV of season 1.)
She thinks about Penelope, and the kind of cold steel nerve it takes to wait, in one place and under the constant eyes of your enemies and his, fighting the lonely rearguard action while your resources dwindle and your escape routes close off; she thinks about what happens when the loom comes unstrung and the suitors won’t take no for an answer anymore and he’s not back and waiting is no longer an option.
… and I wrote a novel. Um. How did that happen? *stares at Giant Epic Plotbunny*
*Giant Epic Plotbunny stares back with wide-eyed innocent look*
This is The Giant Epic Kate Novel, aka my White Collar Big Bang fic.
I … could ramble about this fic all day. I am still sitting here kind of stunned that I managed to write a story this long with a coherent plot and everything. Much less a story that I really, really like. And it’s got art! sholio made me absolutely gorgeous cover art to go with it!
I’ve been reading year-end posts, and thinking about how to describe my 2012, what I’ve accomplished and what I want to do better next year and I could describe 2012 as my first full year in my very own apartment, or my first year working 20 hours a week and going to grad school full time at the same time, or the year I finished my next-to-last semester of grad school, or the year I developed a number of very bad habits like not sleeping nearly enough. And I could list the things I’ve accomplished at school, or the things I’ve learned at work, or the things I should be doing to save more money, or all the ways I need to do better in my last semester if I want to graduate on time.
But when I think about the highlights of 2012 … this is the year that I wrote a fucking novel. And it’s not as good as it could have been if I’d had more time to work on it - I think it would benefit greatly from another two months of careful revision, on a line-editing and a macro scene-by-scene level. But at the same time, if I hadn’t had the deadline to get it posted I probably wouldn’t have finished it in the first place.
And people liked it, which was surprising and absolutely delightful. Not only is it about a character who barely gets any screen time and a ‘ship that canon never fleshed out as much as it really should have, but it’s mostly centered on a relationship between two characters (Kate and Fowler) who don’t ever actually appear on screen together in the same scene in canon. But in my head they’ve turned into this sharper-edged, dark-mirror version of Neal and Peter, almost, and they’re a truly ridiculous amount of fun to write together.
And I remember rewatching Point Blank for, like, the twelfth time one day back in March or April and I’m watching Fowler talk about Kate’s plan to fake their own deaths (which makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE in light of 4.10 - she’s seen Neal fake his death to escape before!) and I’m sitting there thinking … okay, they’re going to need parachutes. They’re going to need a boat. And wetsuits, probably, since it’s going to be cold. It's snowing. And that’s a tiny plane - it’s not going to fly them all the way to the Caribbean. And I’m wondering okay so how was the logistics of this supposed to actually work?
And at this point the OMG KATE WAS A TOTAL BADASS light went on in my head.
Fowler thinks Kate was a total badass, and he’s a) ex-Special Forces and so not easy to impress b) a far more objective source of information on Kate’s character and personality than either Neal or Peter and c) pretty much at the end of his rope by the back half of 2.09 and so extremely unlikely to be trying to lie to them about anything.
This one scene in Peter’s office in 2.09 is the backbone of my entire conception of Kate as a character. This is a woman who, by herself, went toe-to-toe with a corrupt internal affairs agent with considerable power and the willingness to abuse it and forced him to make a deal with her, so she could get herself and Neal away from someone even more powerful and dangerous who had every reason to want them both dead. A woman who came up with a plan that is, on the face of it, incredibly desperate and unlikely to succeed - but who managed to convince someone with far more experience at jumping out of airplanes in harsh conditions that she actually had a chance in hell of pulling it off.
Fowler knows how to jump out of airplanes, and he'd be very familiar with the logistical issues and specific dangers involved in a trained military team jumping into the Atlantic in November and having to get themselves safely to shore with no backup in the water waiting to pick them up, much less a pair of untrained civilians trying to do the same thing. My friend and fabulous beta LC jumps out of airplanes for the Army - I can still remember the first time I called her up to ask about technical details for all this. There is a lot of complicated logistical planning Fowler is glossing over in a sentence or two in that scene - there was a lot more going on there than just him handing her a pair of parachutes and saying “good luck”.
And I wanted to tell Kate’s story, and I wanted to flesh out her relationship with Neal, but really the seed of an idea that started the whole thing was this image of Fowler as jump instructor. He’s ex-Special Forces. (This is canon.) She’s a twenty-something female civilian art thief with no experience in skydiving and no formal training in water survival or cold weather survival. And somehow, through a combination of (in my headcanon) intelligent argument and blackmail and sheer bloody-minded stubbornness she manages to convince him to set up what to any trained military team would look like the stupidest, most desperate plan ever, and train her for it in the expectation that she had some very slim chance of actually pulling it off.
I started this fic with a clear image in my head of the look on Fowler’s face when she first proposes this, of you want to do WHAT NOW?
And yet.
And yet, there he is in 2.09 saying I don’t think she was wrong.
He thought this plan of hers was her and Neal’s best shot at survival. Which says both that he had a hell of a lot of respect for her nerve and her resourcefulness, and also that Kate really did have very good reasons for believing that she and Neal were both going to be killed if they didn’t succeed at completely disappearing.
This is, IMO, the best thing I have ever written, and it’s something I’m ridiculously proud of, and something that brings me joy - both to think that I wrote it and just to reread it for fun.
there is a crack in everything
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Neal, Peter
Warnings/Spoilers: Season 2
Word Count: 2150
Summary: A week ago he thought he'd be dead by now, or else back in prison for good; he hadn't much cared which.
He doesn’t know how to say this, that in all the pain and doubt and grief there was one razor-bright moment of clarity, one moment between firing that first shot and pulling back the hammer for a second when everything made sense; one moment when all the world collapsed into a funnel, a clean straight line down the end of a gun sight, and he knew who he was and what it all meant and everything he had to do.
I have a thing for revenge arcs, apparently, and White Collar IMO does them particularly well (both of them). And where Neal’s head is at in early S2 is endlessly fascinating for me to explore. This is a short fic but it’s one of my favorites; it says a lot of what I’ve always wanted to say about Neal, and Peter, and Neal&Peter and Neal/Kate and Neal&Mozzie in the wake of 2.09. That Peter isn’t angry, here, at all. And that Neal and Kate had something real.
Someday I will write the longer post about how 2.09 is everything I love about Neal and Peter, and how the most important thing Peter does for Neal is not about changing him, or teaching him new morals, or giving him "a set of principles that weren't there six years ago" - Peter is Neal's anchor because he reminds Neal of Neal's own morals when Neal forgets them.
It's this isn't who you are, not this isn't who I think you should be.
And how this is something that gets completely forgotten in S3, which is part of why I find S3 so frustrating.
And I could go on for weeks about how the entire early S2 arc doesn’t work, IMO, unless it’s accepted that Neal and Kate had something real - not the perfect fairy-tale romance Neal thought it was, but not the deluded fixation on “the idea of a person” that Peter and El think it was, either. Neal does not come that close to shooting an unarmed man in the face for "the idea of a person". She was the center of Neal’s life for eight years; for three and a half years she visited him every week in prison. They had a real relationship with real flaws and issues like real relationships have, and she was someone he could have and would have built a real and lasting future with if they’d gotten the chance.
And what Neal does in 2.09 is partly about being out of his head with grief … and partly not. It’s both completely unlike him and absolutely inevitable at the same time, which is why I love it. It's two of Neal's most important moral principles coming into conflict with each other and one of them has to give way. Non-violence is a huge part of who Neal is but he also strongly believes that you take care of your people. And if something bad happens to one of his people it is his job to do something about it. Not the law’s job. Justice is not something that’s ever been on his side, or Kate’s side, in most of his experience, and according to his code of ethics you have to take care of your own because no one else will.
(And we see this somewhat with Ellen in S4, too - he’s not trying to shoot people this time, but he still very much believes it’s his job, and his responsibility, not the Marshals’, to find out who killed her.)
Keep your memories (but keep your powder dry too)
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: June, Peter, Neal, Mozzie
Warnings/Spoilers: Through 4.01 Wanted
Word Count: 7200
Summary: June has been a lookout and a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on and a getaway driver; now when nothing else is left she knows how to hold the retreat.
Some things don’t change; she knows the light of runrunrun in Neal’s eyes, knows the instinct to fly is always just below the surface. June raised two daughters in this house, watched her grandchildren play in its halls, buried three beloved dogs in the narrow grassy courtyard at the back. She travels these days with three suitcases, and waits on a valet to carry them. But she still keeps a small satchel with three passports and a few thousand in cash tucked behind her vanity table. Old instincts die hard, and if she had to leave all of this on a moment’s notice, she could.
I spent a lot of time editing this. And cutting bits out and putting them back in again. But this is another fic I’m proud of, and it says a number of things I wanted to say, and that I think needed to be said, about season 3 and about Neal as a character.
I absolutely adore June. She’s a fascinating character and she has a very different perspective on Neal, and Peter, and life in general than any of the other characters. But I spent a lot of time, while writing this, fighting the urge to have her pull her punches. Because I like Peter, and I know he loves Neal, but this is something that June has a much harder time accepting or believing.
She's kind and she's wise and she loves Neal (and Mozzie) and I think she is genuinely fond of Peter. Still she’s very much a retired con artist, not a reformed one, and she’s got sharp edges. She’s fiercely loyal to her people and she’s lived a long time on the wrong side of the law and she does not trust cops, as a rule. The idea of Neal and Peter’s friendship, and of trusting anyone in law enforcement to protect someone she loves, is very new to her and difficult for her to get used to.
... and that got long. Um.
Happy New Year to everyone! *hugs the flist*