Yuletide 2017 Reveal Post: What I Wrote!
This year I wrote 5 things for yuletide! This was, erm, not intentional.
- And I Think My Spaceship Knows Which Way To Go. (The Martian/Wonder Woman): AO3, DW
- Use Both Lanes To Merge Point. (Baby Driver). Merge Point #1. - AO3, DW
- Let's All Meet Up In The Year 2000. (Baby Driver). AO3, DW
- Baby Sitter. (Baby Driver). Merge Point #2. - AO3, DW
- I Saw Tail Lights Last Night. (Baby Driver). Merge Point #3. - AO3, DW
Assignment Fic: And I Think My Spaceship Knows Which Way To Go.
My assignment!
OKAY, THIS FIC WAS HARD TO WRITE. There's little tiny details about Beth sprinkled throughout the book, but, um, I have ranted before about the sense of time scale in this book and how none of the details in this make it seem like it's 2035 and oh my god. So I basically had to reconcile how Beth only liked things that predate her by half a century. She's into the Beatles! She likes Agatha Christie! Because it's a fic about her, so I may as well only use the canon details we get, except I had to tie myself into fucking knots over it.
The Beatles bit was actually helped a lot by Relatives Who Will Remain Nameless. I was in the car with them on various times on Thanksgiving weekend and they had on the Beatles satellite radio station going a couple times and that saved me. I pulled out my phone and typed out some notes and so that's how I resolved the Beatles. I also had to do various math to figure out which Beatles-related anniversary would fit best into Beth's life (at this point, I'd already decided she was 32 -- the 32 years old was basically the first thing I actually did have, see below about moving the beginning to be the end -- but I was willing to change that. The 32 just came from trying to figure out, okay, at what age might she have been at selection, how long it's been, and etc.) So, yes, thank you Relatives, and thank you Beatles sirius radio station for playing Blackbird. (Relative W later told me that the Beatles sirius station does not play only the Beatles, it also plays other related artists, but handwave :P )
I did so much canon review for this, I ended up massively hating the canon. Which happens sometimes, I guess. But wow did I end up massively hating the entire canon by the end of it. :P (NO CHARACTER IN THIS BOOK HAS CONTEMPORARY INTERESTS, WHYYYYY) (seriously, I was fucking alive when Happy Days was on the air and I would not recognize that pose that apparently everyone recognizes immediately) (anyway, still not over any of this) (also all the third person stuff is so stiltingly written) (also after enough repeats, I want to shout at Mark to stop fucking calling people nerds) (There was a cut line where Beck tells Mark to stop calling them nerds, they went to Mars, they're all nerds, because I was Venting My Feelings.) (basically, having to do so much canon review took all the things that bothered me before and just made them even worse, because I had to keep looking over them.)
So yeah, this fic happened. It happened slowly and painfully. I wanted to make sure I wasn't repeating myself repeating myself repeating myself when it comes to Martian fic, so I want to do something different, and the whole moon colony thing sort of came out of nowhere, but I went with it.
It originally started with the ending bit at the beginning, so I was like, oh fuck, I've set up this story to be progressing from Beth's decision to go to the Moon, except it's not working, that wasn't how it was going at all. Which I then solved by moving the beginning to the end so it was progressing *to* the decision, and I didn't have to actually figure out a moon colony, yay, go me.
I did have a vague idea of maybe do a drabble follow-up once the moon colony is established, so I can have it be on the moon and also not to have figure out any of the logistics. I'd probably call it If You Believe They Put A Man On The Moon, because if I'm going to steal song lyrics, it's about time I stole from REM.
References: This is the John Glenn obit being referenced: NY Times: John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95
Fun fact! The original summary was, and remained until basically the last minute: "Beth Johanssen is thirty-two years old and her eventual obituary is going to read 'Mars Astronaut Dies, Once Hijacked A Spaceship'." I only changed it at last minute in a panic because I felt like it did not Accurately & Adequately Describe What The Fic Was About, as a summary should. ...aaaaand the first bookmark on the fic was that quote. There have been comments appreciating that line. I should not have changed that summary, clearly :P (Is it too late for me to sneakingly change the summary back, is a thought I have had repeatedly for the last fucking week.)
This fic would have failed and failed utterly were it not for the wonderful, life-saving beta by
melannen. I was really struggling with the getting the Wonder Woman stuff to work and had a moment of weakness near the end where I was tempted to yank it all out and pretend it never happened. The recipient requested The Martian and Wonder Woman, so I figured, hey, why not mash them up a little bit? Except it was hard. Melannen gave a lot of really great suggestions for it, and then I wrote like 400 more words for it and felt better.
(In the interest of full disclosure about canon review and how it makes me feel: I did not canon review Wonder Woman for this. In my defense, I'd also originally intended for it to be a stealth crossover, but, uh, that was not how it ended up.)
The Merge Point Fics: 1) Use Both Lanes To Merge Point. 2) Baby Sitter. 3) I Saw Tail Lights Last Night.
Okay the Baby Driver stuff. I saw the movie on a Sunday. AND THEN I WROTE FOUR FICS IN A WEEK. As you do. It was a whirlwind affair for the ages.
Throughout yuletide, I was thinking that, uh, yeah, probably wasn't gonna manage a treat, because I did not have bunnies for the various tabs I'd had open, and then on Sunday 17 December, I watched Baby Driver, and then on Monday there was a Baby Driver pinch hit, iirc, and I was like "hmm, I have Idea, I feel very Tempted but I don't think it would fit this request" and "hmm, I would like to write dirtybadwrong baby/doc fic, but you should only give dirtybadwrong fic to people who would like dirtybadwrong fic and this does not seem to be that person" and then I searched the letters database and then I found this amazing prompt of amazingness from Largishcat and BOOM, behold, dirtybadwrong Baby/Doc!
It did not actually turn out as dirtybagwrong as I had intended it to turn out, on account on it not having as much dirtybadwrong smut as I had dreamed it would. :( So naturally I had to write a third one to make it even more dirtybadwrong, after, of course, writing a second one to highlight some of the dirtybadwrong. This is natural and makes perfect sense.
Honestly, how this happened: I wrote the first one in a couple days. I posted it on Thursday, and then on Thursday night, I wrote the second treat in about an hour, not letting myself get up until I was done, in case I lost the idea.
And then I wrote another one, managing at least *some* kind of porn, so that's all right. :P
Anyway, as is possibly v. v. obvious, I really enjoyed writing dirtybadwrongfic again, even if it didn't end up as filthy as I'd wanted it to. I was really hoping for some filthybadwrong.
The first one went through a bunch of titles, and I went with Use Both Lanes To Merge Point essentially because it would make a good series name... and then went and changed it a few million more times to other options before going back to it. The second one only ever had that title. The third one got that title so I could slide Great Expectations by the Gaslight Anthem into the soundtrack. ;)
A million thanks go to Trialia who made an amazing Spotify playlist of songs with great beats when I was asking for music recs and good beats to write porn to, because I needed that and also song recs for songs for Baby to listen to in-fic, and that really helped, I totally recommend the playlist. It gave me some good songs to check out for myself and contributed to me putting Poker Face and Good Girls as soundtrack songs for fics.
I was really concerned about the first one (well, I was concerned about other ones, but the first one was the important one) and tried to get a beta in the Discord IRC server, but no one bit on the hippo request. :( Which I totally understand, since I was asking for a tiny fandom with dubcon problems and an inherently dirtybadwrong pairing and wanting canon knowledge. But the whole couldn't-get-a-beta-in-discord thing was a little concerning to me as I kept, um, writing more and more in the series. There was that Harry Potter bais yaakov fic squib fic time where I wrote a full series and posted it all at once, but this time was different in that it was written for someone and for a brand-new fandom, and also that series was one complete fic and two outtakes/continuations. I was a bit concerned about posting it without having any one look at it. Usually when things span a series, I've got some kind of feedback on if people like it or things like that or what they reacted to most. This time it was just... what did I want to write? But is it coherent? Does it make any sense to anyone else to have an interlude with Nephew Sam in the middle? *concern concern concern* At least because it was a treat and not an assignment, I knew I wasn't Ruining Yuletide(tm)?
Of course, because this had eaten my brain and why should it stop, on Monday, when everyone was reading all the newly revealed yuletide fics... I started #4 in the series to finish it up. (Hopefully?) (In the interest of full disclosure, I started this post on 28 Dec. By the end of 30 Dec, I had two more going, with one that really really really should finish it all actually up.)
Considering I didn't know how people perused yuletide fics, since people do it their own way, I did have several moments of feeling like I should probably tag it No Daddy Kink just in case having a character named Baby caused any confusions or false hopes, but... anyway, there's no daddy kink and no underage or age play.
(I was also having a massive panic attack over basically everything on the 24th before fics were revealed, which culminated in ibble pointing out in chat late at night that there was an ao3 bug thing where if you had a series where every fic in it was anonymous, that series would still show on your dashboard/series page, because you can't mark a series itself as anonymous. And then I checked that in a private window and, yes, a series that had no author showing in it itself because everything was anon, still had it listed on my page and people-other-than-me could see it, like, behold "Merge Point by Anonymous", and started burbling. Soooo I basically decided I was not going to worry about things I cannot change. But, yes, I did basically anon fail by doing a series, with the hope that no one scrolled down that far on my dashboard to notice that.) (I aim to anon fail in newer and more interesting ways each time!)
The requisite Usual Suspects references: Doc is rumored to be either Hungarian or Turkish, got his start in the drug trade, and his first name is Roger.
Treat Fic: Let's All Meet Up In The Year 2000.
Meanwhile, during all this angst and shenanigans, I wrote Debora gen for Baby Driver.
The song Disco 2000 had been bugging me when I was watching the movie, since it's clearly about a Deb-o-ra (h optional?) and it wasn't listed in their Debora vs Debra songs. SO THIS HAPPENED.
And clearly if it was bugging me that much, I might as well use it for a title and write a Debora fic. In some ways this was easier than Merge Point and in some ways it was a lot harder, because we get Baby's POV in the movie, but we know mostly nothing about Debora and her motivations, other than that she's bored with her life and wants to run away from it all. So I wrote a fic about Debora having fun mini-trips around and living her life and absolutely not waiting for Baby, but open to the possibility of something happening in the future with him.
Also I wasn't the biggest fan of Disco 2000 to begin with, but I listened to it a million times when writing this and disliked it more and more, so this might match the Martian bit for "canon review made me hate something" except I can't really call this canon review. :P
And to end this post on a tasty note:
I was joking around with ibble/
donutsweeper last night and I basically incepted myself into doing this: A Summary Of These Fandoms As If They Were Donuts, as an enticement for those who are not in the fandoms and would like a totally summary of what they are:
The Martian: a sad potato-flour donut
Wonder Woman: glazed donut inconsistently covered with sprinkles
Baby Driver: powdered sugar munchkins
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/993851.html.