story reveals (at last!)
Happy New Year, and all that! Now on to important stuff... Yuletide reveals! Finally! Will it always be this hard to wait for the author reveals?
I wrote two stories for Life. The only two stories in that fandom for this year's Yuletide.
I've written a story for Life before; it's the first fandom outside of Battlestar Galactica that I tried writing. Aside from that What Not to Wear crossover. I didn't want to mention that I was writing in a known fandom, because that would make it far too easy to guess what I wrote. It's not like I've written stuff for many other fandoms.
Before I link to the individual stories, remember: extravagant praise is always acceptable. *grins*
For my assigned recipient, sprl1199, who requested Charlie Crews, gen, I wrote just what you'll say when you get home, a post-finale fic, Ted's POV about Charlie and Dani (and Olivia and Amanda).
This ended up being a delight to write, though I was a nervous wreck before I began. I rewatched all of season one and most of season two before starting. Having just a character and 'gen' in the prompt left a lot of room for... anything. I'm glad I decided on Ted's POV; it hasn't been explored much in post-finale stories and I think it works well here.
One observation about the show: it is truly weird how often Charlie and Ted say each other's names in conversation. I kept wincing each time I wrote a name in the dialogue, because people don't normally talk like that. *laughs* But they did on Life, so I had to do it in the story. Oh, and Ted's voice... Adam Arkin has this delivery of his dialogue that's very specific. It's not the usual direct way of addressing a line. He made Ted rather fumbling, a bit stuttery. That's hard to capture; difficult to know what's the right amount of stumbling in speech and what's too much.
I'm not sure I managed to make it clear that the biggest part of what's haunting Charlie is being responsible for Nevikov's death. Tricky to get that across when Charlie can't/won't talk about it with the POV character.
Most of the story was written in small bits, a couple hundred words per day. I had a basic idea of where to go when I started, but some things came later--like the breakfast at the end. Originally I was going to end with the pool scene, after the conversation about Batman.
Many thanks to daybreak777 and
grimorie for cheering me on and to thespatz (and her sister) for a fantastic job beta-reading. Their help resulted in a much stronger story.
(Side note: I am completely startled and thrilled at how much feedback it has received.)
Don't let this stifle you if you feel any inclination to praise it. Heh.
After rewatching so many episodes, I thought it was only logical to find another Life prompt, since I had some time before the stories went public.
musesfool linked her request letter to the big database--it was the only request letter mentioning the show that I could find. (There may have been others making requests for Life fic, but they didn't link a request letter to the Yuletide comm.) Her request specified Rachel Seybolt/Charlie Crews, mentioning Daddy issues and guilt and the bad-wrongness of that pair. I thought, "Eeep, no, I can't write that."
I started writing the next day (hah!), and in two and a half days I finished All Fall Down. It's mostly gen, about Rachel after Charlie sent her away for her protection. Does contain some Rachel/Charlie, though it's unrequited.
I think there are two reasons why I wrote a story after my initial negative reaction. 1) Patron saint of neglected female characters. It's a semi-facetious name I put on my livejournal profile, but it's not entirely baseless. Rachel is definitely a neglected character on the show, yet she has this fascinating, horrifying story.
2) It's very plausible that Rachel will have massive daddy issues. Her backstory rivals Charlie's for trauma and angst.*
Okay, and 3) Charlie Crews has orange eyelashes and a crease in his lower lip. My Charlie Crews crush was dormant, not departed, and watching many hours of him standing in the L.A. sun (that hair!) wearing those suits did a lot to rekindle that crush.
I'm not sure I could have managed writing so many words in such a short amount of time (for me, anyway) without previous experience making up backstory for very minor characters. Really, what do we know about Rachel? She looks like a black-haired Jessy Schram and... oh, a few other things. Stubbornness. A certain degree of truculence. Canon gives her reasons to feel resentment at Charlie and at her own past. Not much else, really.
Rachel's line in the story about using what she learned from those Bourne movies is exactly what I did while writing--nearly everything I know about staying unnoticed comes from those films. Hah!
Thanks again to thespatz, who did a quick read-through and pronounced the story 'quietly disturbing.' Just what I wanted to achieve, hurrah! (Have some disturbing fic for Christmas, everyone!)
I have so many questions about Rachel now. (Done with the story-writing stuff. Lots of minor character speculation ahead.)
*Here's what we know. Rachel was young--maybe 5 to 8 years old**--when her parents and sibling were murdered by Kyle Hollis. Mickey Rayborn, Jack Reese and Carl Ames knew about it; it was part of a plan gone wrong to 'dirty up' Tom Seybolt in order to get influence over a young Charlie Crews, co-owner of a bar with the Seybolts. (Don't expect this to make much sense. It's TV show logic, and this story arc, such as it was, took two seasons.)
Rachel caught a glimpse of Hollis, but Ames made sure that she didn't have to testify; he lied and said she was away from home, at a sleepover. (That's part of why I speculate that she was at least five; she had to be old enough for that lie to be semi-plausible.)
She spent the next two years in foster care. During that time she comes to believe that her "Uncle" Charlie committed the crime.
Jack Reese steps in and puts Rachel in Kyle Hollis' care. By then Hollis was 'reborn' as the Reverend Orson Parker. We don't know if he was married; we don't know if he had any kind of stable home environment to offer a traumatised girl. I'm assuming she kept the first name Rachel.
More speculation: a man who has committed murder isn't going to be able to offer much of a happy home environment, no matter how he 'got right' with the Lord. (Notice that 'getting right with the Lord' didn't involve helping to free the man serving time for the crime he committed.) Rachel already had lots of reasons to experience depression, guilt and rage; her ten years with Orson Parker were probably difficult. We do know that she felt an attachment to Parker, though, and lots of loyalty to Jack Reese.
I could imagine that Hollis/Parker would see raising Rachel as a way to atone for what he'd done. Possibly he wasn't the horrible parent I've envisioned. As a murderer who hasn't taken public responsibility for his actions, he would still have an inherent motivation to repress Rachel's understanding and memories of her parents' murder, however.
I didn't put much of these thoughts in the story; it was already nearly 4,000 words long without adding in more. Longer than the story I wrote for my assigned recipient. But hopefully the idea that Rachel isn't at a truly healthy place is obvious from what I wrote, even though I think she takes some steps in the right direction. (And some steps in the wrong direction, too.)
**Wikipedia says Rachel was five when the murders happened, but that's rather young for a girl who's old enough to go on sleepovers. I can't remember her age being mentioned on the show, but that doesn't prove anything. Jessy Schram was twenty-two or so when she played the part of Rachel. (Oh my goodness, she was twenty when she had her stint on Veronica Mars. She was playing a freshman in high school, if I remember correctly.)
Posted at Dreamwidth: http://rose-griffes.dreamwidth.org/194203.html. Comment where you wish.
I wrote two stories for Life. The only two stories in that fandom for this year's Yuletide.
I've written a story for Life before; it's the first fandom outside of Battlestar Galactica that I tried writing. Aside from that What Not to Wear crossover. I didn't want to mention that I was writing in a known fandom, because that would make it far too easy to guess what I wrote. It's not like I've written stuff for many other fandoms.
Before I link to the individual stories, remember: extravagant praise is always acceptable. *grins*
For my assigned recipient, sprl1199, who requested Charlie Crews, gen, I wrote just what you'll say when you get home, a post-finale fic, Ted's POV about Charlie and Dani (and Olivia and Amanda).
This ended up being a delight to write, though I was a nervous wreck before I began. I rewatched all of season one and most of season two before starting. Having just a character and 'gen' in the prompt left a lot of room for... anything. I'm glad I decided on Ted's POV; it hasn't been explored much in post-finale stories and I think it works well here.
One observation about the show: it is truly weird how often Charlie and Ted say each other's names in conversation. I kept wincing each time I wrote a name in the dialogue, because people don't normally talk like that. *laughs* But they did on Life, so I had to do it in the story. Oh, and Ted's voice... Adam Arkin has this delivery of his dialogue that's very specific. It's not the usual direct way of addressing a line. He made Ted rather fumbling, a bit stuttery. That's hard to capture; difficult to know what's the right amount of stumbling in speech and what's too much.
I'm not sure I managed to make it clear that the biggest part of what's haunting Charlie is being responsible for Nevikov's death. Tricky to get that across when Charlie can't/won't talk about it with the POV character.
Most of the story was written in small bits, a couple hundred words per day. I had a basic idea of where to go when I started, but some things came later--like the breakfast at the end. Originally I was going to end with the pool scene, after the conversation about Batman.
Many thanks to daybreak777 and
grimorie for cheering me on and to thespatz (and her sister) for a fantastic job beta-reading. Their help resulted in a much stronger story.
(Side note: I am completely startled and thrilled at how much feedback it has received.)
Don't let this stifle you if you feel any inclination to praise it. Heh.
After rewatching so many episodes, I thought it was only logical to find another Life prompt, since I had some time before the stories went public.
musesfool linked her request letter to the big database--it was the only request letter mentioning the show that I could find. (There may have been others making requests for Life fic, but they didn't link a request letter to the Yuletide comm.) Her request specified Rachel Seybolt/Charlie Crews, mentioning Daddy issues and guilt and the bad-wrongness of that pair. I thought, "Eeep, no, I can't write that."
I started writing the next day (hah!), and in two and a half days I finished All Fall Down. It's mostly gen, about Rachel after Charlie sent her away for her protection. Does contain some Rachel/Charlie, though it's unrequited.
I think there are two reasons why I wrote a story after my initial negative reaction. 1) Patron saint of neglected female characters. It's a semi-facetious name I put on my livejournal profile, but it's not entirely baseless. Rachel is definitely a neglected character on the show, yet she has this fascinating, horrifying story.
2) It's very plausible that Rachel will have massive daddy issues. Her backstory rivals Charlie's for trauma and angst.*
Okay, and 3) Charlie Crews has orange eyelashes and a crease in his lower lip. My Charlie Crews crush was dormant, not departed, and watching many hours of him standing in the L.A. sun (that hair!) wearing those suits did a lot to rekindle that crush.
I'm not sure I could have managed writing so many words in such a short amount of time (for me, anyway) without previous experience making up backstory for very minor characters. Really, what do we know about Rachel? She looks like a black-haired Jessy Schram and... oh, a few other things. Stubbornness. A certain degree of truculence. Canon gives her reasons to feel resentment at Charlie and at her own past. Not much else, really.
Rachel's line in the story about using what she learned from those Bourne movies is exactly what I did while writing--nearly everything I know about staying unnoticed comes from those films. Hah!
Thanks again to thespatz, who did a quick read-through and pronounced the story 'quietly disturbing.' Just what I wanted to achieve, hurrah! (Have some disturbing fic for Christmas, everyone!)
I have so many questions about Rachel now. (Done with the story-writing stuff. Lots of minor character speculation ahead.)
*Here's what we know. Rachel was young--maybe 5 to 8 years old**--when her parents and sibling were murdered by Kyle Hollis. Mickey Rayborn, Jack Reese and Carl Ames knew about it; it was part of a plan gone wrong to 'dirty up' Tom Seybolt in order to get influence over a young Charlie Crews, co-owner of a bar with the Seybolts. (Don't expect this to make much sense. It's TV show logic, and this story arc, such as it was, took two seasons.)
Rachel caught a glimpse of Hollis, but Ames made sure that she didn't have to testify; he lied and said she was away from home, at a sleepover. (That's part of why I speculate that she was at least five; she had to be old enough for that lie to be semi-plausible.)
She spent the next two years in foster care. During that time she comes to believe that her "Uncle" Charlie committed the crime.
Jack Reese steps in and puts Rachel in Kyle Hollis' care. By then Hollis was 'reborn' as the Reverend Orson Parker. We don't know if he was married; we don't know if he had any kind of stable home environment to offer a traumatised girl. I'm assuming she kept the first name Rachel.
More speculation: a man who has committed murder isn't going to be able to offer much of a happy home environment, no matter how he 'got right' with the Lord. (Notice that 'getting right with the Lord' didn't involve helping to free the man serving time for the crime he committed.) Rachel already had lots of reasons to experience depression, guilt and rage; her ten years with Orson Parker were probably difficult. We do know that she felt an attachment to Parker, though, and lots of loyalty to Jack Reese.
I could imagine that Hollis/Parker would see raising Rachel as a way to atone for what he'd done. Possibly he wasn't the horrible parent I've envisioned. As a murderer who hasn't taken public responsibility for his actions, he would still have an inherent motivation to repress Rachel's understanding and memories of her parents' murder, however.
I didn't put much of these thoughts in the story; it was already nearly 4,000 words long without adding in more. Longer than the story I wrote for my assigned recipient. But hopefully the idea that Rachel isn't at a truly healthy place is obvious from what I wrote, even though I think she takes some steps in the right direction. (And some steps in the wrong direction, too.)
**Wikipedia says Rachel was five when the murders happened, but that's rather young for a girl who's old enough to go on sleepovers. I can't remember her age being mentioned on the show, but that doesn't prove anything. Jessy Schram was twenty-two or so when she played the part of Rachel. (Oh my goodness, she was twenty when she had her stint on Veronica Mars. She was playing a freshman in high school, if I remember correctly.)
Posted at Dreamwidth: http://rose-griffes.dreamwidth.org/194203.html. Comment where you wish.