(Untitled)

[serai1]

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I'm taking a couple of days to put up my archive at AO3. What will happen after that, I don't know.

I haven't eaten at all today. I have no appetite. Been crying a lot.

Don't leave me, don't leave me, please.
I need you, I need you, I need you, I need you.
Don't go, please don't go. Please?

Comments

[serai1]

It wasn't a mistake, sweetheart. You write as well, so you know that when you're inside a story, it's hard to remember that readers don't know what you know. As a writer, I think what upset me so much is that I put a lot of care into conveying what kind of person she is, within the confines of what the story is saying, even though not much is said. I think the comments made me feel that you and Gabi didn't seem to trust not only her, but Zeke as well. He wasn't upset, he didn't hate her, he wasn't even angry in any discernible way. To me, that said there was no rancor there - whatever had separated them, it wasn't meanness or coldness or bitchiness or lack of love. It was clearly something else, at least to my eyes. I keep going back to the movie, and how Josh and Robert made the decision not to have Zeke be bitter or angry about this. He just kinda shrugs about it; the second mention of his parents, in his lab, even sounds like he thinks it's funny. Having done some acting, I tend to pick up on those tiny little nuances and expand them in my mind - why isn't he mad? I'd be mad. I'd hate them. So he must have some reason for not hating them.

He is opening up again a little bit, and like I said, I'm finding he loves his mother deeply, but he does hate his stepfather, so now I'm wondering if he isn't the cause of Zeke's solitude, and not his mother. Zeke is illegitimate, after all, so it would make sense - most men wouldn't want to have the child of an affair in the house with them. So that means also that Zeke's mother is torn and in pain about the whole thing, which is something I was trying to convey without having this new wrinkle to make the writing clearer. Those two pieces weren't about the past, but about its influence now. I get that it doesn't come across as well as I'd like, but I don't know how to make it plainer within the confines of where the story is going, without larding the stories with details that aren't asking to be included, maybe yet, maybe never.

Now I'm seeing why chapter fics never happened for me before. This shit is far more complicated than I had anticipated, and somehow I find it easier to hear people misinterpreting a one-off than this thing, which is longer and has parts that I hope will fit together well. I don't know why that is. Perhaps it's because once a thing is done, it's done - I know what it means to me, and if others don't understand it, well whatever. More likely it's just the delicate house-of-cards nature of my writing, where one wrong word at the wrong moment will derail it. ARGH FUCKING ARGH.