This feels pretty self-indulgent, but I wanted to write some extended Author's Notes for
All the Way Home.
All the Way Home was the first story of any substance I started and was serious about in a long time. It's not the first story I posted under this name or in this fandom but it's the first one I started, the first I was serious about, and it's the one that got the creative juices flowing after a very long dry spell.
I just discovered Supernatural fandom and J2 fanfiction last summer, then proceeded to hoover it up for weeks. Something about these boys in particular, and the amazing writers in this fandom (SPN and SPN RPF) sparked for me. Before I knew it, I was sitting at the computer, writing: "Grandpa Miller was a natural born romantic at heart," a sentence that was vised and revised, moved, removed, and worked back in again for purely sentimental reasons during the editing process.
I was really writing about my grandparent's ranch in Oklahoma, and a lot about my childhood, and about my dad who inherited that ranch and built a new house there... On a hill… Where there's a lot of wind I'm not terribly original, okay?
This is the house. Feel free to forget you saw it if you were nice enough to read the story and imagined something better. My mind's-eye version of the story has a steeper hill, a wraparound porch, and, obviously, an actual barn with a detached garage out back instead of the shed my dad has here.
Jensen and Jared's story grew out of that and on its own and however these things present themselves. I don't really know.
The story title doesn't sound like much; I got it from a Springsteen song of the same name, weeks after the story was done. That makes it retrofitted songfic, I guess. The opening verses sound like they were made for it:
I know what it's like to have failed, baby
With the whole world lookin' on
I know what it's like to have soared
And come crashin' like a drunk on a bar room floor
Now you got no reason to trust me
My confidence is a little rusty
But if you don't feel like bein' alone
Baby, I could walk you all the way home
I'm a Springsteen fan. I find he usually says it better than most and in fewer words.
Finally ---- I thanked
greybhan311 in my initial post but I have to thank her again. When I "advertised" for a beta reader on spn_beta back in December, with about 8k of the story written, she was kind enough to respond. That was when I thought the whole thing would be about 20k and didn't have any idea what the Big Bang was. She encouraged me every step of the way. And she's a grammar queen! I'm very lucky she responded.
Here's the little slideshow I cobbled together for inspiration while I was writing...