author's notes - In Plain Sight

[lfvoy]

• I don't usually write DS9 fic, and I doubt I'm about to pick it up at any level.
  • "In Plain Sight" was a one-shot that started here. (Scroll down a bit to see the Tain/Mila prompt.)
  • I ended up completing it way too far after the deadline, and it would have disqualified anyway because it's set at a point where one or both of them are likely still under age 40.
  • The first sentence occurred to me the minute I saw the prompt.
• To write this I borrowed some material from Andrew J. Robinson's book A Stitch in Time.
  • The most obvious item was the idea that Mila was Elim Garak's mother, which was never explicit in the series.
  • I also took all of my source material about Tolan Garak from this book.
    • I wrote Tolan with a somewhat different personality than he displayed toward Elim Garak. My feeling here is that he never would have held Elim responsible for the situation and thus would have kept some of the more...pointed...opinions to himself.
      • The relationship between Mila and Tolan was directly patterned off my relationship with my brother. We routinely have nasty arguments and have gone months without speaking to each other. But we'll both jump right in - as a fully united front - if an external party seems to be causing problems for the other one.
    • I also had to do a rework at one point because I'd forgotten that Tolan was a follower of the Oralian Way. In one draft of this, the "family shame" was that he was homosexual. I removed that because his religious beliefs were enough to accomplish my purpose.
  • Interestingly enough, my copy of this is in storage. I hit Memory Beta for the information.
• The tone and pacing of this story strongly reminds me of "The Dance," a Voyager story I wrote several years ago.
  • That's also in present tense, and has a bit of formality to the language.
  • I can't imagine that Mila would address Enabran informally under most circumstances. There are two places in the story when she does, and I did it quite deliberately both times. I was trying to demonstrate that she'd been pushed out of her normal "place."
  • This is also a deliberate reference to A Stitch in Time, though admittedly very oblique.
• This was not beta-read.
  • I'm more interested in response than usual. I'm curious to see what I'll get, if anything.
  • That being said, I still wrote it for myself. And I don't need response to feel pride in finishing.