To Better Suit Your Moves - Notes and Acknowledgments
First off, everyone go here and stare at all the pretty shiny things insane_songbird made for me. I was absolutely thrilled when she chose my story to do art for, and she more than delivered. She's been amazing, and a wonderful cheerleader whenever I was having trouble. Give her lots of love.
Next, thanks to ldyghstwhisprer for helping me with the fanmix. A lot of this story depended on the music and was written with certain songs in mind, so I had to do a soundtrack. The only problem was, while I had the music, I'd never put together an actual playlist before. She was kind enough to help me on the technical details, so now the music is available as a .rar file for download HERE. Thanks so much, hon.
Now for the tl;dr notes:
I love dancing. I've done ballet, interpretive dance, and Israeli folk dancing as well as some salsa and merengue. Strictly Ballroom has always been a favorite of mine, despite the slight cheesiness, and I love watching Dancing with the Stars. In fact, the J's final dance was inspired by this segment. My sisters go salsa dancing every weekend, and my oldest sister is actually an amateur salsa state champion who was trained by the salsa national champions that year. She also choreographs and teaches a little. I was able to go to her for lots of information about the music and the moves and some of the politics involved in competition dancing. Obviously what I wrote here is not true to real life, but I mixed some reality with the movie version.
I'd originally conceived this story thanks to the abouttwoboys challenge back in January 2008, and planned to do it for that. But plans and real life don't mix very well. I didn't realize how long this was going to end up being, and I got 15k words done and realized I was only halfway through. Throw in a Europe trip, a cross-country move, two news jobs, an inconvenient illness, and a fickle muse, and this story went on the backburner. It languished in my hard drive for a while, and I pulled it up on occasion just to look through it, make a few tweaks, but didn't make any serious progress.
But this year, I decided to change a lot of things, and one of the first was in regards to writing and the list of unfinished ideas I'd kept. So I signed up for au_bigbang to make myself finish this fic and finally get it out of my head. I think having the deadlines as well as an enthusiastic artist really helped, as well as finally figuring out what about the story I'd done wrong and why it stalled. So I solidified the plot, dropped a few tangential points, and suddenly it flowed. Then it was just the matter of making myself write every day, bouncing back and forth between this one and my spn_j2_bigbang (which I'm posting in August).
*headdesk*
Note to self -- it was a busy weekend, and you have every right to be tired. But don't fall asleep in the middle of posting your Big Bang. That just makes you look stupid. Grab some coffee and finish the coding, instead of drooling all over the keyboard with things half-finished. Just saying.