Wherein I talk Body & Soul [too much]...
See, I shoulda thought this up before I opened the timestamp meme: WARNING! If you encourage Body & Soul at all, you are encouraging my most self-indulgent story EVER. I put my goddamn senior thesis in that fic, it is purely intellectual masturbation.
The thing about Body & Soul is I originally thought of doing some vignettes, the past lives mentioned in the story shown in little snips, it was also going to be part of the original. I wanted to slip them in in-between the end and the epilogue but then it just seemed like I'd be doing a LOT of saying the same thing over and over, and by that point the epilogue* was already written and felt fine without them.
*[Two in fact! There's another epilogue that I first wrote that never got used, and I've thought about posting whenever I go back to revisit B&S. It's essentially the same story with the J's, just a slightly different cold open, and a WAAAAY different ending. I'm actually glad I never used it, because it would have destroyed this story I'm telling now.]
So I decided to shelve the vignettes for a coda-like follow-up involving them interspersed with the J2 epilogue-universe, layering in-between the action like I did for the 5th chapter.
I especially wanted to do the WWI past-life, and make it one big reference to Mrs. Dalloway, (and if you know what storyline I'm talking about, yes! Them!) And in thinking about what COULD happen next, I decided there was definitely another story waiting to be told involving Jared/Sam and Jensen/Dean. I gave a tiny little hint to what that might be in the epilogue, but I won't spoil it. There's definitely more trials and tribulations down the road for them though, it's not as a simple ending as it can be, because there really is something different this time around.
But in looking at the requests for a sequel, first I had to put them all in chronological order, and really force myself to start defining a timeline. jamesinboots wanted 100 years after the end in Greece, so I needed to decide what year that was, it's something I danced around, but Sam is roughly 22 in 400 BCE; I think the Greece-story ends in 399 (Socrates' death was that year, and where I left off he'd just been thrown into prison. I forget what day he was executed…) so a hundred years later is 299 BCE. And I'm not sure if it will be Greece, or somewhere else (my instinct is leaning towards trading my Greek-philosophy geekery for Confucianism, but I'm really not that comfortable with the Zhou dynasty era). I might scrap that and focus away from the waking world-which my interpretation of myths, Plato and the underworld would support-reincarnation not being so instantaneous. I'd really love to revisit Persephone for that one, she's quite plainly my favorite non-SPN character I introduced (I tried to make her Jo, but then Ellen would've been a lousy Demeter, Ellen is Artemis if she's there at all-in spirit). We'll see what goes through my head when I start writing.
karmicunderpath wanted Sam's death scene, so that is definitely going in there somewhere, I'd been thinking of that one for a while. I don't think it'll be long or drawn out, I think it could do well as a supporting piece though. You can't really tell the story of Eros Dean and Sam without acknowledging how I had my version of Psyche retain his mortality. I mean, what did Dean do after? What were they like in the moments leading up to it?
(Proof that I'm a super-nerd: I decided that Sam died on July 20th, 356 BCE. dark_reaction will probably know why right away.)
And then, there's the post-epilogue stuff requests; one year, two years, five years; I know what happens next in the epilogue, I know the story that unfolds for that, but I didn't know until I really hassled myself what 5 years down the line would be. The year-later story focuses more on Jared (and Sam, in a way). Two years may just be a snippet of something. Five years will definitely focus in on Dean, and relate to issues I brought up about Dean-specifically about his heritage-in the original fic. (Go back to chapter 5 and read his conversations with Athena and Justice again if you're curious).
So, yeah. And when I lay it all out, it can't just be little snippets of 100 words or drabbles. There's too much weaving and sewing I need to do. So everything will get told, in or out of order. There's definitely going to be a centralizing theme or story set in the present time that the epilogue exists. The flashbacks are going to be what helps to explicate more of the central story… Huh.
Holy shit I love writing meta. I always end up with epiphanies that just fix EVERYTHING I think I'm having problems with.
The thing about Body & Soul is I originally thought of doing some vignettes, the past lives mentioned in the story shown in little snips, it was also going to be part of the original. I wanted to slip them in in-between the end and the epilogue but then it just seemed like I'd be doing a LOT of saying the same thing over and over, and by that point the epilogue* was already written and felt fine without them.
*[Two in fact! There's another epilogue that I first wrote that never got used, and I've thought about posting whenever I go back to revisit B&S. It's essentially the same story with the J's, just a slightly different cold open, and a WAAAAY different ending. I'm actually glad I never used it, because it would have destroyed this story I'm telling now.]
So I decided to shelve the vignettes for a coda-like follow-up involving them interspersed with the J2 epilogue-universe, layering in-between the action like I did for the 5th chapter.
I especially wanted to do the WWI past-life, and make it one big reference to Mrs. Dalloway, (and if you know what storyline I'm talking about, yes! Them!) And in thinking about what COULD happen next, I decided there was definitely another story waiting to be told involving Jared/Sam and Jensen/Dean. I gave a tiny little hint to what that might be in the epilogue, but I won't spoil it. There's definitely more trials and tribulations down the road for them though, it's not as a simple ending as it can be, because there really is something different this time around.
But in looking at the requests for a sequel, first I had to put them all in chronological order, and really force myself to start defining a timeline. jamesinboots wanted 100 years after the end in Greece, so I needed to decide what year that was, it's something I danced around, but Sam is roughly 22 in 400 BCE; I think the Greece-story ends in 399 (Socrates' death was that year, and where I left off he'd just been thrown into prison. I forget what day he was executed…) so a hundred years later is 299 BCE. And I'm not sure if it will be Greece, or somewhere else (my instinct is leaning towards trading my Greek-philosophy geekery for Confucianism, but I'm really not that comfortable with the Zhou dynasty era). I might scrap that and focus away from the waking world-which my interpretation of myths, Plato and the underworld would support-reincarnation not being so instantaneous. I'd really love to revisit Persephone for that one, she's quite plainly my favorite non-SPN character I introduced (I tried to make her Jo, but then Ellen would've been a lousy Demeter, Ellen is Artemis if she's there at all-in spirit). We'll see what goes through my head when I start writing.
karmicunderpath wanted Sam's death scene, so that is definitely going in there somewhere, I'd been thinking of that one for a while. I don't think it'll be long or drawn out, I think it could do well as a supporting piece though. You can't really tell the story of Eros Dean and Sam without acknowledging how I had my version of Psyche retain his mortality. I mean, what did Dean do after? What were they like in the moments leading up to it?
(Proof that I'm a super-nerd: I decided that Sam died on July 20th, 356 BCE. dark_reaction will probably know why right away.)
And then, there's the post-epilogue stuff requests; one year, two years, five years; I know what happens next in the epilogue, I know the story that unfolds for that, but I didn't know until I really hassled myself what 5 years down the line would be. The year-later story focuses more on Jared (and Sam, in a way). Two years may just be a snippet of something. Five years will definitely focus in on Dean, and relate to issues I brought up about Dean-specifically about his heritage-in the original fic. (Go back to chapter 5 and read his conversations with Athena and Justice again if you're curious).
So, yeah. And when I lay it all out, it can't just be little snippets of 100 words or drabbles. There's too much weaving and sewing I need to do. So everything will get told, in or out of order. There's definitely going to be a centralizing theme or story set in the present time that the epilogue exists. The flashbacks are going to be what helps to explicate more of the central story… Huh.
Holy shit I love writing meta. I always end up with epiphanies that just fix EVERYTHING I think I'm having problems with.