Meta: Aral Vorkosigan's Dog
AKA today I am extremely tired and incapable of writing fics and therefore will write about writing instead.
This is pretty much the first Vorkosigan fanfic I wrote. I started it about five years ago, wrote about two-thirds of it and then had a baby and got thoroughly distracted. I added a few things here and there once I got back into writing, and then picked it up properly a year or so ago and decided to finish it off. That I actually managed to do so is mostly through the help of Tel, because I had to keep finishing off the chapters to send them to her to beta-read--I suspect that otherwise my natural inertia would have kept me tinkering with it endlessly. So I managed to finish and post the story at last, and was very proud of myself for finally finishing an almost-novel-length piece of fiction.
The basic idea was compelling enough for me that I managed to hold onto it for five years, and the idea I had then is pretty much what you see in the finished fic. When I first read the books, the thing that jumped out and walloped me between the eyeballs was the character of Illyan, and of that, the repeated mentions of his loyalty to Aral. Which probably drifted by most other readers, but as you can't have failed to spot, I adore stories about loyalty, and so I sit up and pay attention when a canon gives me half a dozen repetitions of 'and as we all know, Illyan would do anything for Aral'. So when I was pregnant, I was rereading 'Cordelia's Honor' compulsively, and I started noticing Illyan and Aral in SoH. And what I noticed most was that Illyan stopped Aral from rescuing Elena Visconti. And then I noticed that he was sweeping Aral's cabin for bugs. And then that he was following behind when Aral went off to kill Ges. And I started going 'hang on a minute, what's going on here? How is Illyan doing these things? And why?'
So I wrote down the scene where Illyan sweeps the bugs. And the scene where he talks Aral down from rescuing Elena. And the scene where he apologises. And the scene where he tells Aral that Ges has another woman. And then I looked at what I had, and thought 'aha! a long fic of Illyan throughout the Escobaran War!' And then I wrote a ton of scenes from the fic in a frenzy of creativity. And then, as I said, I had a baby and that was the end of writing for a while.
As you can see, I wrote the story inside-out and back-to-front. This is my normal MO for writing--I seem to be entirely incapable of starting at the beginning and keeping going till I get to the end. I just danced around and around until I had the skeleton of the fic, then started thinking more analytically about what else needed to be in it and wrote those scenes, then figured out the timeline with much referring to canon (and still got a ton of it wrong and had to do a lot of fixing-up once Tel disentangled me) and wrote all the other scenes that the timeline required that seemed likely to be interesting.
And once I started thinking analytically about the structure of the fic, I realised that it was a kind of love story. And that it had, and ought to have, a structure that parallels the structure of a typical romance novel. So that's what happened. The fic starts with Aral disliking and distrusting Illyan, and Illyan cold and neutral and professional towards Aral, and then events and their unfolding characters cause them to become more friendly. Illyan debugging Aral's cabin becomes the first pivotal moment, when he takes a deliberate step to help Aral. Then we have the mess with Ensign Beauregard, when Illyan really puts his neck out for Aral, and then scares himself into backing off. Which destroys Aral's beginning friendship and trust in him. Then Illyan apologises, and Aral accepts the apology when he saves Illyan's life in the next chapter, and they're nicely lined up for Cordelia's arrival, when Illyan makes his silent oath to Aral and lays it all on the line for him. Then Illyan tap-dances on broken glass for Aral, then starts to realise about the plot and thinks he's been betrayed, then we have a bit of devastated Illyan, and then he understands the whole plot and that makes things a bit better. Except they're not, because now Aral is suicidal and falling to pieces, and there's very little Illyan can do about it until Cordelia returns. And then they fall into the final feudal relationship that we see in canon.
There were some scenes that took absolutely ages to get sorted out. All of chapter six was a complete nightmare to write (battle scenes!), and everything from chapter eleven onwards apart from the scene with Alys gave me terrible headaches trying to make it line up with Shards. The scenes which directly overlap with Shards were the hardest of all to write, because I needed to convey some of the same stuff that canon has, but didn't want to repeat more than the absolute minimum of canon dialogue and actions. It took a long time to figure out how to slot my story into the tiny gaps left in Shards and still make it hold together without contradicting anything. There's only one place in the fic where I have deliberately contradicted canon, and that's Illyan bringing the news of Cordelia's capture to Aral; in canon it's the guard who goes directly to Aral instead of to Illyan (the one I named Angelov). But that was absolutely essential to my fic, and nobody seems to have minded, or even noticed, so that got to stay.
And then there was the ending, my God the ending. And the prison camp scene, which got written and rewritten and rewritten again. And the trouble with making chapter nine work, for which my father-in-law deserves thanks. And then there were all the things that Tel and Avantika made me rewrite (quite rightly!)... I always find the last 10% of a fic is the hardest, and this was no exception. But I got there in the end, and there are only a few things I'm tempted to go back and edit and improve now.
So that's the mechanics of writing it. Then there's the why.
I gave long and hard thought to writing this as slash. I like the idea of Aral/Illyan slash, and it makes a great deal of sense. But in the end I decided to stay with my original conception of this as a story about loyalty rather than an actual romance. There were a couple of reasons. First is that I wanted a happy ending, and there isn't really a happy ending to an Aral/Illyan slashfic. At least, not without going down some variation of the Dira route and writing a poly fic, and that just doesn't work in my head (I've tried, from time to time, but it always founders on the fact that Illyan is scared of Cordelia and Cordelia isn't all that fond of Illyan and the only thing they can agree on is that they both adore Aral). So if I wanted a happy ending, it had to be the loyalty version, which has a perfect ending. And then there's the other reason, which is that there are lots and lots of epic slashfics out there, but there aren't very many epic loyalty fics, and loyalty is my thing. Though I admit that I have this collection of slashy outtakes from when my imagination got carried away, and I had to stop and go 'hang on, this fic is meant to be gen' and cut out the slashy scenes...
Another thing I love is the sidekick's point of view, and not unnaturally, most stories tell the hero's story. But the sidekick always appeals to me, all the things he quietly does to make the hero's journey possible, all the things he sees and does and thinks about it all. Turning Illyan the sidekick into the central character of the story and making it about his journey whilst still keeping the plot from Shards--which is Aral and Cordelia's plot--was a real challenge. I know I spent a lot of time wrestling with it and going 'but Illyan's not doing anything and he's supposed to be doing something because he's the hero of this story - oh wait ... hmm'. Trying to strike the right balance, so that it wouldn't be boring (I was terrified of this story being boring to read; since the main thing people have commented on is the tension, I guess I managed to avoid boringness) and not lose the essential sidekick-ness of Illyan was a struggle.
And what I love most, as I say, is loyalty. And conflicted loyalties, and the story of how someone becomes loyal to someone else. Which is another thing that isn't normally getting top billing in books and movies (you get it as a secondary or minor plot, but it's not generally the point of the story). So I wrote a long story about loyalty. I had no idea how to do this, precisely because it's not really one of the standard plot templates, so in the end I borrowed liberally from a romance plot template and gave it a generous twist to make it a loyalty plot instead of a love plot. Which is thematically right anyway, because loyalty is a lot like love. I expect this won't be the last story along these thematic lines I write, so hopefully I'll figure out more about how to do it.
This fic, more than anything else I've written, was really written for me, and it contains pretty much everything I love in fiction somewhere. The fact that apparently other people liked it, and even liked it a lot, means a huge amount to me, because - well, this fic is everything I love tied up with a big bow, and I'm aware that my tastes don't always align with other people's. So every single one of you who said that you loved the idea and the story or anything at all about it - well, you completely warm my heart, because yay! I'm not the only one!
And now, if you've survived all the way through reading this, have a bonus scene that I couldn't squeeze in anywhere, but that amused me greatly, on the theme of 'Aral Vorkosigan's Dog':
His status aboard the flagship was a major gossip-point amongst the men, judging from the number of sudden silences that followed his arrival in the officers' mess or the wardroom. Mostly he judged it to be harmless, a natural response to an outsider amongst them. However, a few unsubtle remarks about the Commodore's pet and ImpSec fairies suggested a less desirable set of rumours. Several days running, one of the Prince's ImpSec men did a weak imitation of a dog, barking and fawning whenever he saw Illyan in Vorkosigan's wake. Illyan ignored it, and Vorkosigan only flinched slightly. However, one morning, Vorkosigan said in a conversational tone when Illyan came to meet him outside his cabin before a conference, "I hear that Joris from the Prince's bodyguard had an upsetting experience last night."
Illyan did not have any trouble keeping his face straight. "Oh?"
"Yes. He was found in his underwear, tied up with a collar and lead, and a bone in his mouth, outside his mates' mess."
"Really," Illyan said. "I saw him imitating a dog yesterday. Perhaps he needs psychological examination."
Vorkosigan's lip curled. "He claims he was attacked. Says he never saw the person who did it."
"Ah?"
"Finding a stray bone in a battle cruiser must be quite a challenge."
"There are all sorts of odd things around on board, sir."
Vorkosigan grinned then. "Remind me never to piss you off."
But it was noticeable that the Prince's bodyguard gave Illyan a wide berth from then on.
Crossposted at http://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/50343.html
This is pretty much the first Vorkosigan fanfic I wrote. I started it about five years ago, wrote about two-thirds of it and then had a baby and got thoroughly distracted. I added a few things here and there once I got back into writing, and then picked it up properly a year or so ago and decided to finish it off. That I actually managed to do so is mostly through the help of Tel, because I had to keep finishing off the chapters to send them to her to beta-read--I suspect that otherwise my natural inertia would have kept me tinkering with it endlessly. So I managed to finish and post the story at last, and was very proud of myself for finally finishing an almost-novel-length piece of fiction.
The basic idea was compelling enough for me that I managed to hold onto it for five years, and the idea I had then is pretty much what you see in the finished fic. When I first read the books, the thing that jumped out and walloped me between the eyeballs was the character of Illyan, and of that, the repeated mentions of his loyalty to Aral. Which probably drifted by most other readers, but as you can't have failed to spot, I adore stories about loyalty, and so I sit up and pay attention when a canon gives me half a dozen repetitions of 'and as we all know, Illyan would do anything for Aral'. So when I was pregnant, I was rereading 'Cordelia's Honor' compulsively, and I started noticing Illyan and Aral in SoH. And what I noticed most was that Illyan stopped Aral from rescuing Elena Visconti. And then I noticed that he was sweeping Aral's cabin for bugs. And then that he was following behind when Aral went off to kill Ges. And I started going 'hang on a minute, what's going on here? How is Illyan doing these things? And why?'
So I wrote down the scene where Illyan sweeps the bugs. And the scene where he talks Aral down from rescuing Elena. And the scene where he apologises. And the scene where he tells Aral that Ges has another woman. And then I looked at what I had, and thought 'aha! a long fic of Illyan throughout the Escobaran War!' And then I wrote a ton of scenes from the fic in a frenzy of creativity. And then, as I said, I had a baby and that was the end of writing for a while.
As you can see, I wrote the story inside-out and back-to-front. This is my normal MO for writing--I seem to be entirely incapable of starting at the beginning and keeping going till I get to the end. I just danced around and around until I had the skeleton of the fic, then started thinking more analytically about what else needed to be in it and wrote those scenes, then figured out the timeline with much referring to canon (and still got a ton of it wrong and had to do a lot of fixing-up once Tel disentangled me) and wrote all the other scenes that the timeline required that seemed likely to be interesting.
And once I started thinking analytically about the structure of the fic, I realised that it was a kind of love story. And that it had, and ought to have, a structure that parallels the structure of a typical romance novel. So that's what happened. The fic starts with Aral disliking and distrusting Illyan, and Illyan cold and neutral and professional towards Aral, and then events and their unfolding characters cause them to become more friendly. Illyan debugging Aral's cabin becomes the first pivotal moment, when he takes a deliberate step to help Aral. Then we have the mess with Ensign Beauregard, when Illyan really puts his neck out for Aral, and then scares himself into backing off. Which destroys Aral's beginning friendship and trust in him. Then Illyan apologises, and Aral accepts the apology when he saves Illyan's life in the next chapter, and they're nicely lined up for Cordelia's arrival, when Illyan makes his silent oath to Aral and lays it all on the line for him. Then Illyan tap-dances on broken glass for Aral, then starts to realise about the plot and thinks he's been betrayed, then we have a bit of devastated Illyan, and then he understands the whole plot and that makes things a bit better. Except they're not, because now Aral is suicidal and falling to pieces, and there's very little Illyan can do about it until Cordelia returns. And then they fall into the final feudal relationship that we see in canon.
There were some scenes that took absolutely ages to get sorted out. All of chapter six was a complete nightmare to write (battle scenes!), and everything from chapter eleven onwards apart from the scene with Alys gave me terrible headaches trying to make it line up with Shards. The scenes which directly overlap with Shards were the hardest of all to write, because I needed to convey some of the same stuff that canon has, but didn't want to repeat more than the absolute minimum of canon dialogue and actions. It took a long time to figure out how to slot my story into the tiny gaps left in Shards and still make it hold together without contradicting anything. There's only one place in the fic where I have deliberately contradicted canon, and that's Illyan bringing the news of Cordelia's capture to Aral; in canon it's the guard who goes directly to Aral instead of to Illyan (the one I named Angelov). But that was absolutely essential to my fic, and nobody seems to have minded, or even noticed, so that got to stay.
And then there was the ending, my God the ending. And the prison camp scene, which got written and rewritten and rewritten again. And the trouble with making chapter nine work, for which my father-in-law deserves thanks. And then there were all the things that Tel and Avantika made me rewrite (quite rightly!)... I always find the last 10% of a fic is the hardest, and this was no exception. But I got there in the end, and there are only a few things I'm tempted to go back and edit and improve now.
So that's the mechanics of writing it. Then there's the why.
I gave long and hard thought to writing this as slash. I like the idea of Aral/Illyan slash, and it makes a great deal of sense. But in the end I decided to stay with my original conception of this as a story about loyalty rather than an actual romance. There were a couple of reasons. First is that I wanted a happy ending, and there isn't really a happy ending to an Aral/Illyan slashfic. At least, not without going down some variation of the Dira route and writing a poly fic, and that just doesn't work in my head (I've tried, from time to time, but it always founders on the fact that Illyan is scared of Cordelia and Cordelia isn't all that fond of Illyan and the only thing they can agree on is that they both adore Aral). So if I wanted a happy ending, it had to be the loyalty version, which has a perfect ending. And then there's the other reason, which is that there are lots and lots of epic slashfics out there, but there aren't very many epic loyalty fics, and loyalty is my thing. Though I admit that I have this collection of slashy outtakes from when my imagination got carried away, and I had to stop and go 'hang on, this fic is meant to be gen' and cut out the slashy scenes...
Another thing I love is the sidekick's point of view, and not unnaturally, most stories tell the hero's story. But the sidekick always appeals to me, all the things he quietly does to make the hero's journey possible, all the things he sees and does and thinks about it all. Turning Illyan the sidekick into the central character of the story and making it about his journey whilst still keeping the plot from Shards--which is Aral and Cordelia's plot--was a real challenge. I know I spent a lot of time wrestling with it and going 'but Illyan's not doing anything and he's supposed to be doing something because he's the hero of this story - oh wait ... hmm'. Trying to strike the right balance, so that it wouldn't be boring (I was terrified of this story being boring to read; since the main thing people have commented on is the tension, I guess I managed to avoid boringness) and not lose the essential sidekick-ness of Illyan was a struggle.
And what I love most, as I say, is loyalty. And conflicted loyalties, and the story of how someone becomes loyal to someone else. Which is another thing that isn't normally getting top billing in books and movies (you get it as a secondary or minor plot, but it's not generally the point of the story). So I wrote a long story about loyalty. I had no idea how to do this, precisely because it's not really one of the standard plot templates, so in the end I borrowed liberally from a romance plot template and gave it a generous twist to make it a loyalty plot instead of a love plot. Which is thematically right anyway, because loyalty is a lot like love. I expect this won't be the last story along these thematic lines I write, so hopefully I'll figure out more about how to do it.
This fic, more than anything else I've written, was really written for me, and it contains pretty much everything I love in fiction somewhere. The fact that apparently other people liked it, and even liked it a lot, means a huge amount to me, because - well, this fic is everything I love tied up with a big bow, and I'm aware that my tastes don't always align with other people's. So every single one of you who said that you loved the idea and the story or anything at all about it - well, you completely warm my heart, because yay! I'm not the only one!
And now, if you've survived all the way through reading this, have a bonus scene that I couldn't squeeze in anywhere, but that amused me greatly, on the theme of 'Aral Vorkosigan's Dog':
His status aboard the flagship was a major gossip-point amongst the men, judging from the number of sudden silences that followed his arrival in the officers' mess or the wardroom. Mostly he judged it to be harmless, a natural response to an outsider amongst them. However, a few unsubtle remarks about the Commodore's pet and ImpSec fairies suggested a less desirable set of rumours. Several days running, one of the Prince's ImpSec men did a weak imitation of a dog, barking and fawning whenever he saw Illyan in Vorkosigan's wake. Illyan ignored it, and Vorkosigan only flinched slightly. However, one morning, Vorkosigan said in a conversational tone when Illyan came to meet him outside his cabin before a conference, "I hear that Joris from the Prince's bodyguard had an upsetting experience last night."
Illyan did not have any trouble keeping his face straight. "Oh?"
"Yes. He was found in his underwear, tied up with a collar and lead, and a bone in his mouth, outside his mates' mess."
"Really," Illyan said. "I saw him imitating a dog yesterday. Perhaps he needs psychological examination."
Vorkosigan's lip curled. "He claims he was attacked. Says he never saw the person who did it."
"Ah?"
"Finding a stray bone in a battle cruiser must be quite a challenge."
"There are all sorts of odd things around on board, sir."
Vorkosigan grinned then. "Remind me never to piss you off."
But it was noticeable that the Prince's bodyguard gave Illyan a wide berth from then on.
Crossposted at http://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/50343.html