Meta Post: The Roots of Rhythm Remain
I don't really like doing meta posts, because I think they're honestly a little wanky. But this story is… more than just another story to me.
The idea came from two sources: one, housefic_pens and their damn irresistible song title drabble challenge, and two, Mule Variations, a Jet/Faye fic I had always planned to write after finishing The Late Spike Spiegel Blues (we see how that turned out). It was very much in the same vein as The Rhythm of the Saints, only it was a cohesive story instead of the collection of concatentative stories that RotS ended up being. RotS was a success (by my standards, anyway), but there was still more I wanted to do, so Heaven's Only Daughter was quite easy to write.
Around this time, there was one of those "tell me what you think I would never write" memes going around. I remember someone (leiascully, I think? I am her groupie, after all) being prompted to write two thirds of House/Cuddy/Wilson where the other partner had left (or died or something), and I was really intrigued, albeit from the other direction. I was struck by the image of House holding his daughter's hand, walking away alone.
This idea spawned Graceland, which I don't think ever had another title. It's the only portion of the series where the title song influenced the plot of the story. Originally, the plot involved Wilson and Cuddy having gotten married without House. This was eventually scrapped, because I couldn't find any good, IC reason for it to happen, and I couldn't see House really caring that badly about the legal distinction. The other problem was that, with that, the universe would be over. I couldn't write them getting back together after that (I wrote that drabble already).
I'm pretty sure I originally started writing Negotiations and Love Songs as an alternative. It was going to be choose your own adventure as to how the universe played out- they got married and lived amicably-ever-after, or they didn't. My Father's Old Coat clearly belongs to the Negotiations and Love Songs universe. Sometime after it was finished, Graceland was fleshed out a bit more and significantly altered, and the two universes went back to being one.
The next two things to be started were Run That Body Down and Peaceful as a Hurricane Eye. Run That Body Down was originally in the same drabble style as RotS and Heaven's Only Daughter, though it was going to be 2000 words. Like Negotiations and Love Songs (which later ended up with a solitary line), RotS, and Heaven's Only Daughter, it had no dialogue (Graceland pretty much always did).
Peaceful as a Hurricane Eye was built off a suggestion that angelfirenze gave me right after Heaven's Only Daughter- she wanted to see Evan and John House interacting. It was eventually pared down into Rather Be a Hammer Than a Nail, because I felt it was necessary to see the two of them together, but it was so goddamned hard to write.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, Big Bang was declared, and I signed up. I toyed very briefly with the idea of doing something new, but I had no ideas. I also really liked the idea of tying up the verse all at once and just being done with it. Being shed of a universe is a subject I have mixed feelings about. A lot of work goes into an AU, even when it's not very different from the canon universe, so it's really tempting to stay in it. At the same time, however, I think it's a bad trap to get caught in. The more you work on an AU, the farther it gets from canon (I have read some brilliant examples where everything ended up back to normal after huge swings, but generally speaking), and the easier it gets to explain away bad characterization. After twenty years and twenty thousand words, yeah, there are things that RotS!Greg would say that 3rd season!House wouldn't. And then if you leave the verse open, there's a huge temptation to keep writing in it, getting farther and farther away from what you're supposedly deriving from. It's a very slippery slope, and pretty soon you're just writing original fic with all the serial numbers filed off. And if I wanted to do that, I have seven original, saleable sandboxes I should be playing in instead.
So part of writing this for Big Bang was a means to force myself out of it, to move on to bigger and better things. As part of this (and though I always find it so self-important when people do this), I'm opening up the universe to outside writers. I think there's a lot more to be done with it; I’m just not the person to do it anymore.
Anyway. I took the 1500ish words I had actually written and started prettying them up, starting with de-drabbling (I like to think of it as "fluffing up") Run That Body Down.
The first thing to go was the lack of dialogue. I really liked the effect in the original series, but it just wasn't sustainable for 20000 words. It's still sparingly used in the longer bits, but I liked the contrast of the short dialogue-only passages. I feel like there still is a continuity with the original series, not in small part due to the (over) use of parenthetical narration. I'm always really hesitant to use the style, because I so rarely see anyone do it well. Whenever one sees parentheses, one is apt to wonder if the work would be improved by their removal. In fanfiction, it seems they're always either camouflaged author's notes or painfully useless bits of explanation from insecure writers. I just hope that the same can't be said for me (because as you can see, I think with them, and I don't want to think I'm badly written).
I couldn't decide where to end it for a long time. The series owes a whole lot to deelaundry's My Fathers' Son for obvious reasons, so it couldn't end with a death (whoops, spoiler); plus, it really didn't match the feel of what I was doing. I did toy with the idea of killing Greg during a liver transplant, but that's just because I wish the show would acknowledge that ole boy just ain't got one no more. For a time, Run That Body Down was the end, then The Book of My Vanishing Memory, but they didn't feel right. Once Negotiations and Love Songs became the beginning, though, it was easy.
Incidentally, the original beginning was House/Cuddy porn, but it never did come out right. I can write porn, I can write plot, but they're not supposed to mix.
Originally, the plan was for ten chapters of two thousand words each:
Negotiations and Love Songs
Peaceful as a Hurricane Eye
"blatant porn", as my notes put it
The Automatic Earth (later The Chemistry of Crying)
Run That Body Down
The Book of My Vanishing Memory
To Trim Your Wedding Gown (later The Roots of Rhythm remain)
And, I suppose, three other ones that didn't get planned fully. That never did work, in practice. I haven't written many stand alone fics that are over a thousand words, and even fewer chapterfics. I'm a whore for the short and punchy.
In truth, I've never seen it as one continuous story (because if I did, I would still be hyperventilating over the concept of writing a 20000 word story). I suppose you could call it a continual story- the pieces are linked by themes and other elements, and they happen in chronological order in the same universe; but there isn't a central plot, and there never was. I think the reason for that is that it's an "and then what?" story. They get together, have this baby… and then what? It's kind of a quotidian story, and I don't know about yours, but my life doesn't really have a plot.
After the ten chapter idea was scrapped, the all-dialogue chapters came into it. I'm pretty sure it started with I'm Gonna Stand Guard, and I think And The Music Seeping Through was the second one. That was also when the stories started becoming more interconnected; in the ten chapter idea, each chapter was set off from the next one, ten absolutely separate moments in time. When the "blatant porn" chapter ended up being right after Graceland, it started to expand- briefly, the idea was to have two bookend chapters for each big chapter.
And then I didn't work on it for like… three months, or something ridiculous like that. I don't really remember why.
It was good, though, because when I restarted it, I had a lot of new ideas to put in. That's when Jacob and Brinker came in, along with expanded roles for surgeon!Chase and Ethan. It's also when I started doing some stuff that I’m not real sure about still- it was like two weeks from the original deadline, and I had to go with whatever was in my head at the time. Some of it was really good (After the Dream of Falling, more character development for Evan), and some of it wasn't so great (One-trick Pony).
The part I was always uneasiest about was The Man with the Girl by His Side. I always thought having Evan and Chase as buddies was 1) really cute 2) kinda Sueish 3) a little pedo. I do like the story a lot, though, because I like the feeling that so much of it takes place above Evan's head.
The question of whether or not Evan is a Mary Sue bothers me. I think, for starters, she wouldn't fit in on the show; but the story isn't the show, and I'm well aware of that. Older Evan and I have a lot in common, too- she's in the SCA, we see her doing anthropology, etc. She only scores a 13 on the Mary Sue Litmus Test though, so… that's something.
One thing I never thought when I was getting ready to start this venture was, "Do I have enough material?" I think I could have gone on for fifty, a hundred thousand words. Wouldn't be that great, necessarily, but I could have done it.
I wasn't at a very good place in my life when I wrote this. It's tl;dr, and would require far too much sharing for author's notes, but last year was one of the worst of my life. My world (and this is not hyperbole) was shaken down to its foundations, and I had to go back and start again practically from scratch. While I tried to deal with it in some of my other writing (see: Ouroboros, you're a mean old daddy but I like you, the impossibly and probably indefinitely delayed Somnophilia, etc, etc, etc) it was really comforting to have the RotS verse to come back to. The story would probably be stronger if more bad things happened to them (maybe not, maybe it would just be sadder), but I couldn't have kept writing it if that had happened.
It's really hard to put something like this out. Not to finish it, if NaNo has taught us anything (it hasn't), but to release it. Maybe you get to the end, and it doesn't make any sense, or everyone thinks your characterization is off, or no one but you likes it. If you don't show it to anybody, what does it matter? Or say you do put it out, and not a single person reviews it. No matter how much you're writing to please yourself, it stings, don't it? But I've always been too much of an egotist to keep it in.
This isn't the story that I'm the proudest of (though I'm proud of it), or the one that took me the longest to write (though it was a very long time coming), or the one I worked the hardest on (though it was, at some points, like pulling teeth). It's just a story. But I hope you like it.
I do.
Sabine Gordon
March 13, 2008