Story of the Timebomb Story (2)
Anyways, so around that time in 2015, I kind of had a “Enough is Enough” moment. This story had been plaguing my brain for years now, and it showed no signs of leaving me alone. I constantly, constantly circled back to it, poked at it, fiddled. I whined to friends, I got copious encouragement. I was fed up with each passing movie making my idea less and less plausible and decided that I had to do it. I just had to find a way, now, and get it out of my system.
I had to figure out a way to get it out, and stop idly adding to it every few months with no clear idea of anything. So I dragged all my notes and plot ideas and nonsense over the years into one big folder, called “Timebomb 2015”. I sorted each Avenger into folders and documents with their separate stories. I made myself art to motivate and inspire (seen at the beginning of each fic, now).
The mass organization looks like this, btw, all color coordinated and everything. XD
And each Avenger's folder had a main doc file, a junk file, an outline file, and research file. rip.
(btw, something that sadly won't be possible in AO3 or FF.net, but each person's name was colored at the beginning of each of their sections, in case you wanted to know. Like so:
Probably because I tend to be visual?? So it just made more sense to see the colored names?? Anyways.)
I talked it through with members of a lovely little writing forum I was part of at the time, The Beta Branch (which alas, has since gone stone dead). My biggest problem, aside from the overwhelming hugeness of wrangling six novel length stories, was how on earth to format it, even if I could wrangle each story. Because combining all 6 into one gigantic novel seemed insane - with each Avenger’s story separate and their separate POV, it would be 5-6 chapters at a time between each viewpoint, and each chapter would likely be a few thousand words. So if Clint was chapter 1, you wouldn’t see his second chapter until chapter 6. And if each "single Avenger" story was even as “low” as 8-10 chapters total, then the whole story put together was going to be insanely, unreadably long.
10 times 6 ... times how many words each ... over how many weeks of posting ...
I thought about fully separating them, then - posting just Tony as a standalone, then maybe just Clint, and so on, in whatever order I decided on. I worried about leaving each story on a cliffhanger to avoid “giving away” the ending - if Bruce was going to be last, and Bruce resets the timeline, then either the ending of the first 5 stories would leave them hanging in peril (which I didn’t like) or would show them back home and okay, which I felt would make Bruce’s story moot - how could there be tension in getting the machine built if you already know it happens? I thought about combining them into sets of 3, or into pairs, and talked and talked, and I made myself actively work on Tony - dedciding he'd be first, regardless - and I thought and brainstormed and reasoned it all out and began forming actual plots…
And finally, as you can see, I settled on pairs.
It seemed the fairest way to do it, since the Avengers were somewhat naturally linked already: Tony and Nat’s stories were themed around survival and adaptation, Steve and Clint’s stories were themed around the trials of messing with/not messing with history. Thor and Bruce were themed around basically managing a crisis while also up to their neck in self-doubt (though both of their stories took a relativly large change once I finally got to them, the theme ultimately remained the same).
And as for the endings, I still didn’t love the cliffhanger idea, as it felt unfair. First because I feel like a cliffhanger on a "real novel" is like, disingenuous. You make a promise at the beginning to offer a complete story, so leaving it on a cliffhanger feels cheap to me. (Note that this is distinctly different from an open ending or mostly concluded ending that still leaves the door wide open for the next installment).
Second, especially because I knew it could be months on end between each pair/each major story part going up, it felt bad to have to leave things on a cliffie for months on end. But I despertaely did NOT want to give away the ending. Writing each set to conclusion meant leaving out huge chunks of interaction at the end to maintain a fraction of mystery - ultimately not possible, since I wanted to do things like have Tony talk to Bruce or Clint talk to Natasha, and if I was to show that all at the end of Part 1, then there's no reason for tension in Part 2 or 3.
And to exclude those or dance around them would have been so awkward to read - to show Tony back home and bonding with the team but specifically not naming them or showing those scenes in order to preserve some mystery? Nope, I hated that even more than forcing things to be a on a cliff hanger.
In the end, however, I tried to do a little bit of both, and tried to balance it. It was a cliffie, and it did show each pair getting home, but not the others, and not a full conclusion. So when Tony arrives back, he sees Nat, who we also know got out. We don’t know if either of them are okay, per say, only that they’re back in New York, and we don’t know the status of the others.
The same then went for Steve and Clint, leaving Bruce’s story to eventually confirm that everyone was okay... or not...
(you'll find out when the end of part 3 is posted next month, ehehe.)
And so I wrote and plotted and wrote.
It was still very stop-and-go, as I pretty much always have to switch my brain between projects to make any sort of progress. But it started to happen, started to really form and take shape and come together. I focused on Part 1 - Tony and Nat, I decided, partially because they were the "farthest out" in time, partially because they were dealing with such opposite worlds, and partially because I realized they both themed very specifically around, as I've said, survival and adaptation.
I signed up for Marvel Bang in 2016 to force myself into a deadline - and I got art out of the deal!!
(p.s. it's still my fav thing i've ever been gifted online and i literally printed out the picture of garret and natasha to hang on my wall and it's still there and it fills me with warm fuzzies every single time i see it)
And so Part 1, containing Tony and Nat went LIVE (with lots of apologies about the nebulous, cliffhanger-y ending, lol).
In general, I prefer to have a thing fully written before I start posting, so I don’t leave people hanging. Because I know sometimes life gets in my way or I lose steam or a million other things and I have to switch tracks and come back to projects later. This is fine when it's just me, but when something is half-posted, I feel like it literally haunts me while I don't work on it, lol. I can never be and will never be an author who abandons a published project. There are some I've written and never published and those are fine to be left to dust, but if it's POSTED, it MUST be finished.
For Part 2, I had like 80% of it written, so I went ahead and started posting, ignoring my own rule, because I figured I had enough time to finish while I posted, and I didn’t want to leave people hanging too long on part 1's cliffy. Except, you know, the universe had a good giggle and my entire life changed, pretty much. I ended up going to University in 2017, which stopped my writing cold and dead in its tracks.
To put it lightly, that first year was the most intense, insane experience of my life. And the short version is: by the end of it, I was absolutely burnt to a crisp - a total zombie, a shell, utterly spent physically and creatively.
I spent the summer recovering (so much sleep and so much tv), and had exactly zero in the tank to do anything creative. So Part 2 was left half-published and endlessly hanging. I felt so guilty about it but I had nothing left in me to do anything about it, so there it hung for months.
At the very end of August, my soul finally began to return to my body. XD I managed, right before the new term started and my creativity began to wake back up, to put up one more chapter. The next term was literally 8000% less soul-crushing (thank Jesus, literally), but still left no room for writing. I think I managed a chapter at Christmas that year, between semesters, but then it was back to the grind. I wasn't dead like before, but I just had no capacity or time for anything except school.
Happily, once that second year/semester was over, I was not a hollowed out, dead zombie, and after a much, much shorter recovery, I actually felt like I could handle writing. I wanted to write and I wasn't dead!! So that summer, I signed up for WIP Big Bang - for the deadline and for the art!!! And Part 2, blissfully, was finished. And I got an absolutely rockin' playlist from Ragna/afteriwake (who, btw, is the most incredible human for the amount of things she does for so many people in fandom, all the while going through insane, rough RL stuff. <3)
Then I entered my third year, which was a mixed bag and a total roller coaster.
Basically it worked out that I had extra classes (too much - no idea how I lived) and giant workload and it sort of went in waves - sometimes I could get a little writing in, sometimes I couldn’t, and either way, I was not going to post a single word until I was finished so I didn’t accidentally repeat the massive gap in posting that I had in the middle of Part 2. That one ended on the same nebulous ending, apologies and promises, but I knew that Part 3 would come, I just couldn’t promise how swiftly.
(And mid-third year, right before Christmas, things basically reached a peak I hadn't had to deal with since first year, and finals week essentially boiled down to 3+ presentations, 5+ final projects, a couple exams, a royal crapton of baking for fundraising purposes, and about 8 hours of sleep total over 5-6 days - yes you read that right, it was so, so bad, guys).
Anyways, the second part of third year seemed overall better (one less class and a royal crapton of fundraising taken off my plate!), and I found some nooks and crannies to write in.
And then COVID happened. And that semester of school just sort of...trickled down to a bizarre anti-climactic end??? And we all entered this weirdest period of time?????
But with little else to do, and school done, I was able to get a lot of writing done. When WIP Bang came around again, I signed up, because: you guessed it, for the deadline and for the art. ;D
So that's basically where we are today!?
My posting date is officially Sept 17, though we're allowed to start posting chapters from Aug 8 on. Part 3 is completely written (!!!!!), and the last half is with betas. I have no idea how on earth university is going to work this coming fall with the semester being for sure all online (ugggh) but I'll manage??
And regardless, the full conclusion is finally, finally coming. Hopefully all the questions get answered - I will say that once upon a time, I had intended that we wouldn't really follow up with all the OCs because there wasn't necessarily a good way to do so (like there's not really great records of who lived in Scotland 1120-whatever, you know, so it's not like Tony could research whatever happened to Alric and Dommal, and if Garrett is in a future that may or may not happen, there's no way we or Nat would ever know what happened to him).
I think I had either a friend or a commenter ask if we would ever find out what happened to Alric and Dommal specifically, and I think I answered that no, we wouldn't. But then it kind of never left me - in my head, I knew everybody's fates, so why couldn't I figure out a way to show it? Especially after I got such lovely, lovely feedback from people who really fell in love with my OCs, then all the more reason to see what happened after the Avengers leave them, right?
So... without being spoilery... you're going to find out what happened to them all after the Avengers leave them. ;)
The other thing I wanted to add about the writing of the whole thing:
In each instance, I tried to go for the “side” that I thought was going to be the hardest first. I generally flipped between each side of the story as I went, but usually ended up focusing harder on one side over the other because I thought it’d be harder. So I poured the gas on Nat’s side, because I thought a future dystopia I had to fully make up was going to be way harder than medieval times that I “only” had to research. Turns out, when you’re making up an alternate universe, it’s actually way easier than trying to be accurate with one that already exists. Tony's side ended up being a lot harder???
For Steve and Clint, I thought Clint’s would be harder because I needed to balance it with Peggy and weave together a murder case that would ultimately need Clint’s help, therefore intertwining the two. Turns out, past dropping Steve in the 70s with a notion about helping a kid and seeing Star Wars, I didn’t actually have a plot, and couldn’t seem to come up with one. Out of desperation - and I'm talking like literally weeks of flailing around, fruitlessly brainstorming about what he would do except help a kid and see Star Wars - I ended up scrolling through my movie catalogue, trying to find any semblance of an idea or story to build Steve around.
And then I latched onto Beverly Hills Cop: Axel ends up working on the murder of a friend, which leads him to Victor Maitlin, supposed philanthropist but actual shady drug lord. And thus, Underwood was born (he’s straight up, 100% Victor Maitlin in my head - just a different name. I might as well just admit that. XD). So Steve's side was harder for a long while, until I managed to get the gist of his Beverly Hills Cop -ish story laid out, and then I stalled out for a while trying to connect the dots in my Clint+Peggy one (while also slipping Howard in there, beacuse how could I not, and Angie because how could I not).
For Thor and Bruce, I thought trying to BS my way through Bruce’s science mumbo-jumbo and do a whole future!Jane romance was going to be way harder than my Doctor Who crossover and alien gladiator battle. Turns out, that first, like I said, Bruce's romance with Jane just kind of disappeared by the time I actually got to writing it, and then it was mostly just discovering more peril and angst for him as I went. XD
And by the time I got to Thor, Ragnarok had happened, which, you know, is basically an alien gladiator battle. Even if the lead up, actual battle, and aftermath were intended to be quite different in my fic than what happened in the movie, I still felt like the general idea was too similar. Worse, Thor no longer fit with the other 5 stories - all the others had a roller coaster of events coupled with an emotional journey, landing with them realizing the Avengers were their family and home. As it stood, Thor’s was basically being cut off from everybody except Rose, then fighting a battle, and calling it a day, bob's your uncle. Not an emotional journey, no space to come to the realization Avengers = family/home.
So I brainstormed endlessly with a variety of pals, but nothing stuck. Over and over. Nothing struck me as the right plot. Once again, pals can attest, I kept whining and flailing around and struggling. After weeks (months...?????), eventually, things formed and formed and … then, finally, grabbing a bit of this and that, I had more or less, a plot. I won't spoil you on what happens, but... I've already had one piece of feedback that there was some feels smashing going on, so. ;D
ENJOY THE FEELS SMASHING.
And the ending, guys.
When I wrote “the end”, I almost cried because this beast has been plaguing me - and by extension, allllll the writer friends who’ve betaed and cheerleaded and brainstormed and listened to me whine/complain/explode/word vomit/ramble/hum-and-haw/whatever and everything else - since 2012.
I already gush a bunch in every Part's opening and closing a/n's, but the thanks you to the army over the years are endless. I never would have finally conquered this without every single one of you (and y'all know who you are). I can barely believe anybody has stuck with me this long - even the 4-5 years it's taken from the first Part's publishing to now. Like. a;sldkjf. This may sound weird, but finishing this legit gives me a big boost of hope to finishing my original fiction project(s) (which have been going on, on-and-off, for eve longer, RIP me) - that they'll someday see the light of day, past beta friends and such.
And thanks to the Avengers for basically derailing my entire life. XD
Anyways, if you managed to read any of this giant rambling novel of how the Timebomb epic came to be, congrats. XD I promise I'll shut up now, and I hope the conclusion to this insane beast is worth the wait I put everybody through. I hope y'all are staying safe out there in this very bizarre time and I hopefully never will put myself through this insanity for a fic ever again. XD
-Red Bess
I had to figure out a way to get it out, and stop idly adding to it every few months with no clear idea of anything. So I dragged all my notes and plot ideas and nonsense over the years into one big folder, called “Timebomb 2015”. I sorted each Avenger into folders and documents with their separate stories. I made myself art to motivate and inspire (seen at the beginning of each fic, now).
The mass organization looks like this, btw, all color coordinated and everything. XD
And each Avenger's folder had a main doc file, a junk file, an outline file, and research file. rip.
(btw, something that sadly won't be possible in AO3 or FF.net, but each person's name was colored at the beginning of each of their sections, in case you wanted to know. Like so:
Probably because I tend to be visual?? So it just made more sense to see the colored names?? Anyways.)
I talked it through with members of a lovely little writing forum I was part of at the time, The Beta Branch (which alas, has since gone stone dead). My biggest problem, aside from the overwhelming hugeness of wrangling six novel length stories, was how on earth to format it, even if I could wrangle each story. Because combining all 6 into one gigantic novel seemed insane - with each Avenger’s story separate and their separate POV, it would be 5-6 chapters at a time between each viewpoint, and each chapter would likely be a few thousand words. So if Clint was chapter 1, you wouldn’t see his second chapter until chapter 6. And if each "single Avenger" story was even as “low” as 8-10 chapters total, then the whole story put together was going to be insanely, unreadably long.
10 times 6 ... times how many words each ... over how many weeks of posting ...
I thought about fully separating them, then - posting just Tony as a standalone, then maybe just Clint, and so on, in whatever order I decided on. I worried about leaving each story on a cliffhanger to avoid “giving away” the ending - if Bruce was going to be last, and Bruce resets the timeline, then either the ending of the first 5 stories would leave them hanging in peril (which I didn’t like) or would show them back home and okay, which I felt would make Bruce’s story moot - how could there be tension in getting the machine built if you already know it happens? I thought about combining them into sets of 3, or into pairs, and talked and talked, and I made myself actively work on Tony - dedciding he'd be first, regardless - and I thought and brainstormed and reasoned it all out and began forming actual plots…
And finally, as you can see, I settled on pairs.
It seemed the fairest way to do it, since the Avengers were somewhat naturally linked already: Tony and Nat’s stories were themed around survival and adaptation, Steve and Clint’s stories were themed around the trials of messing with/not messing with history. Thor and Bruce were themed around basically managing a crisis while also up to their neck in self-doubt (though both of their stories took a relativly large change once I finally got to them, the theme ultimately remained the same).
And as for the endings, I still didn’t love the cliffhanger idea, as it felt unfair. First because I feel like a cliffhanger on a "real novel" is like, disingenuous. You make a promise at the beginning to offer a complete story, so leaving it on a cliffhanger feels cheap to me. (Note that this is distinctly different from an open ending or mostly concluded ending that still leaves the door wide open for the next installment).
Second, especially because I knew it could be months on end between each pair/each major story part going up, it felt bad to have to leave things on a cliffie for months on end. But I despertaely did NOT want to give away the ending. Writing each set to conclusion meant leaving out huge chunks of interaction at the end to maintain a fraction of mystery - ultimately not possible, since I wanted to do things like have Tony talk to Bruce or Clint talk to Natasha, and if I was to show that all at the end of Part 1, then there's no reason for tension in Part 2 or 3.
And to exclude those or dance around them would have been so awkward to read - to show Tony back home and bonding with the team but specifically not naming them or showing those scenes in order to preserve some mystery? Nope, I hated that even more than forcing things to be a on a cliff hanger.
In the end, however, I tried to do a little bit of both, and tried to balance it. It was a cliffie, and it did show each pair getting home, but not the others, and not a full conclusion. So when Tony arrives back, he sees Nat, who we also know got out. We don’t know if either of them are okay, per say, only that they’re back in New York, and we don’t know the status of the others.
The same then went for Steve and Clint, leaving Bruce’s story to eventually confirm that everyone was okay... or not...
(you'll find out when the end of part 3 is posted next month, ehehe.)
And so I wrote and plotted and wrote.
It was still very stop-and-go, as I pretty much always have to switch my brain between projects to make any sort of progress. But it started to happen, started to really form and take shape and come together. I focused on Part 1 - Tony and Nat, I decided, partially because they were the "farthest out" in time, partially because they were dealing with such opposite worlds, and partially because I realized they both themed very specifically around, as I've said, survival and adaptation.
I signed up for Marvel Bang in 2016 to force myself into a deadline - and I got art out of the deal!!
(p.s. it's still my fav thing i've ever been gifted online and i literally printed out the picture of garret and natasha to hang on my wall and it's still there and it fills me with warm fuzzies every single time i see it)
And so Part 1, containing Tony and Nat went LIVE (with lots of apologies about the nebulous, cliffhanger-y ending, lol).
In general, I prefer to have a thing fully written before I start posting, so I don’t leave people hanging. Because I know sometimes life gets in my way or I lose steam or a million other things and I have to switch tracks and come back to projects later. This is fine when it's just me, but when something is half-posted, I feel like it literally haunts me while I don't work on it, lol. I can never be and will never be an author who abandons a published project. There are some I've written and never published and those are fine to be left to dust, but if it's POSTED, it MUST be finished.
For Part 2, I had like 80% of it written, so I went ahead and started posting, ignoring my own rule, because I figured I had enough time to finish while I posted, and I didn’t want to leave people hanging too long on part 1's cliffy. Except, you know, the universe had a good giggle and my entire life changed, pretty much. I ended up going to University in 2017, which stopped my writing cold and dead in its tracks.
To put it lightly, that first year was the most intense, insane experience of my life. And the short version is: by the end of it, I was absolutely burnt to a crisp - a total zombie, a shell, utterly spent physically and creatively.
I spent the summer recovering (so much sleep and so much tv), and had exactly zero in the tank to do anything creative. So Part 2 was left half-published and endlessly hanging. I felt so guilty about it but I had nothing left in me to do anything about it, so there it hung for months.
At the very end of August, my soul finally began to return to my body. XD I managed, right before the new term started and my creativity began to wake back up, to put up one more chapter. The next term was literally 8000% less soul-crushing (thank Jesus, literally), but still left no room for writing. I think I managed a chapter at Christmas that year, between semesters, but then it was back to the grind. I wasn't dead like before, but I just had no capacity or time for anything except school.
Happily, once that second year/semester was over, I was not a hollowed out, dead zombie, and after a much, much shorter recovery, I actually felt like I could handle writing. I wanted to write and I wasn't dead!! So that summer, I signed up for WIP Big Bang - for the deadline and for the art!!! And Part 2, blissfully, was finished. And I got an absolutely rockin' playlist from Ragna/afteriwake (who, btw, is the most incredible human for the amount of things she does for so many people in fandom, all the while going through insane, rough RL stuff. <3)
Then I entered my third year, which was a mixed bag and a total roller coaster.
Basically it worked out that I had extra classes (too much - no idea how I lived) and giant workload and it sort of went in waves - sometimes I could get a little writing in, sometimes I couldn’t, and either way, I was not going to post a single word until I was finished so I didn’t accidentally repeat the massive gap in posting that I had in the middle of Part 2. That one ended on the same nebulous ending, apologies and promises, but I knew that Part 3 would come, I just couldn’t promise how swiftly.
(And mid-third year, right before Christmas, things basically reached a peak I hadn't had to deal with since first year, and finals week essentially boiled down to 3+ presentations, 5+ final projects, a couple exams, a royal crapton of baking for fundraising purposes, and about 8 hours of sleep total over 5-6 days - yes you read that right, it was so, so bad, guys).
Anyways, the second part of third year seemed overall better (one less class and a royal crapton of fundraising taken off my plate!), and I found some nooks and crannies to write in.
And then COVID happened. And that semester of school just sort of...trickled down to a bizarre anti-climactic end??? And we all entered this weirdest period of time?????
But with little else to do, and school done, I was able to get a lot of writing done. When WIP Bang came around again, I signed up, because: you guessed it, for the deadline and for the art. ;D
So that's basically where we are today!?
My posting date is officially Sept 17, though we're allowed to start posting chapters from Aug 8 on. Part 3 is completely written (!!!!!), and the last half is with betas. I have no idea how on earth university is going to work this coming fall with the semester being for sure all online (ugggh) but I'll manage??
And regardless, the full conclusion is finally, finally coming. Hopefully all the questions get answered - I will say that once upon a time, I had intended that we wouldn't really follow up with all the OCs because there wasn't necessarily a good way to do so (like there's not really great records of who lived in Scotland 1120-whatever, you know, so it's not like Tony could research whatever happened to Alric and Dommal, and if Garrett is in a future that may or may not happen, there's no way we or Nat would ever know what happened to him).
I think I had either a friend or a commenter ask if we would ever find out what happened to Alric and Dommal specifically, and I think I answered that no, we wouldn't. But then it kind of never left me - in my head, I knew everybody's fates, so why couldn't I figure out a way to show it? Especially after I got such lovely, lovely feedback from people who really fell in love with my OCs, then all the more reason to see what happened after the Avengers leave them, right?
So... without being spoilery... you're going to find out what happened to them all after the Avengers leave them. ;)
The other thing I wanted to add about the writing of the whole thing:
In each instance, I tried to go for the “side” that I thought was going to be the hardest first. I generally flipped between each side of the story as I went, but usually ended up focusing harder on one side over the other because I thought it’d be harder. So I poured the gas on Nat’s side, because I thought a future dystopia I had to fully make up was going to be way harder than medieval times that I “only” had to research. Turns out, when you’re making up an alternate universe, it’s actually way easier than trying to be accurate with one that already exists. Tony's side ended up being a lot harder???
For Steve and Clint, I thought Clint’s would be harder because I needed to balance it with Peggy and weave together a murder case that would ultimately need Clint’s help, therefore intertwining the two. Turns out, past dropping Steve in the 70s with a notion about helping a kid and seeing Star Wars, I didn’t actually have a plot, and couldn’t seem to come up with one. Out of desperation - and I'm talking like literally weeks of flailing around, fruitlessly brainstorming about what he would do except help a kid and see Star Wars - I ended up scrolling through my movie catalogue, trying to find any semblance of an idea or story to build Steve around.
And then I latched onto Beverly Hills Cop: Axel ends up working on the murder of a friend, which leads him to Victor Maitlin, supposed philanthropist but actual shady drug lord. And thus, Underwood was born (he’s straight up, 100% Victor Maitlin in my head - just a different name. I might as well just admit that. XD). So Steve's side was harder for a long while, until I managed to get the gist of his Beverly Hills Cop -ish story laid out, and then I stalled out for a while trying to connect the dots in my Clint+Peggy one (while also slipping Howard in there, beacuse how could I not, and Angie because how could I not).
For Thor and Bruce, I thought trying to BS my way through Bruce’s science mumbo-jumbo and do a whole future!Jane romance was going to be way harder than my Doctor Who crossover and alien gladiator battle. Turns out, that first, like I said, Bruce's romance with Jane just kind of disappeared by the time I actually got to writing it, and then it was mostly just discovering more peril and angst for him as I went. XD
And by the time I got to Thor, Ragnarok had happened, which, you know, is basically an alien gladiator battle. Even if the lead up, actual battle, and aftermath were intended to be quite different in my fic than what happened in the movie, I still felt like the general idea was too similar. Worse, Thor no longer fit with the other 5 stories - all the others had a roller coaster of events coupled with an emotional journey, landing with them realizing the Avengers were their family and home. As it stood, Thor’s was basically being cut off from everybody except Rose, then fighting a battle, and calling it a day, bob's your uncle. Not an emotional journey, no space to come to the realization Avengers = family/home.
So I brainstormed endlessly with a variety of pals, but nothing stuck. Over and over. Nothing struck me as the right plot. Once again, pals can attest, I kept whining and flailing around and struggling. After weeks (months...?????), eventually, things formed and formed and … then, finally, grabbing a bit of this and that, I had more or less, a plot. I won't spoil you on what happens, but... I've already had one piece of feedback that there was some feels smashing going on, so. ;D
ENJOY THE FEELS SMASHING.
And the ending, guys.
When I wrote “the end”, I almost cried because this beast has been plaguing me - and by extension, allllll the writer friends who’ve betaed and cheerleaded and brainstormed and listened to me whine/complain/explode/word vomit/ramble/hum-and-haw/whatever and everything else - since 2012.
I already gush a bunch in every Part's opening and closing a/n's, but the thanks you to the army over the years are endless. I never would have finally conquered this without every single one of you (and y'all know who you are). I can barely believe anybody has stuck with me this long - even the 4-5 years it's taken from the first Part's publishing to now. Like. a;sldkjf. This may sound weird, but finishing this legit gives me a big boost of hope to finishing my original fiction project(s) (which have been going on, on-and-off, for eve longer, RIP me) - that they'll someday see the light of day, past beta friends and such.
And thanks to the Avengers for basically derailing my entire life. XD
Anyways, if you managed to read any of this giant rambling novel of how the Timebomb epic came to be, congrats. XD I promise I'll shut up now, and I hope the conclusion to this insane beast is worth the wait I put everybody through. I hope y'all are staying safe out there in this very bizarre time and I hopefully never will put myself through this insanity for a fic ever again. XD
-Red Bess