The Big One - The Process Thus Far
I wrote a Marvel story that focuses on an alternative dimension, wherein the major differences to the MCU (which this story mostly uses as a touch stone) are that Darcy Lewis is Tony Starks younger sister and I’ve sort of lost 15 or so years, I’m thinking somewhere around the mid to late 60s and the 70s - not that I ever address it in the story. So, please, suspend your disbelief surrounding the numbers. I did try to keep everything else very consistent with dates and times, I spun myself in circles getting Darcy and Tony’s timelines to match up with various ‘historical’ events in Marvel cannon.
So, last year for Nanowrimo I succeeded in writing what is (for me) a monster of a fic, over the 50 000 word goal. I was so proud, but too burnt out afterwards that I had to put it away for a while as I just couldn’t look at it again without feeling exhausted.
I was concerned as I’d written this story that I was so proud of and I’d worked so hard on it, but I didn’t want anything to do with it. It was a rather paradoxical feeling that I’d never encountered before.
Thankfully, two months ago, I took a stab at having a look at it and, you know what, I could look at it fondly again. It was a huge relief. Even though it had taken me seven months before I was okay with looking at it again, I COULD look at it again. All was not lost!
Then began the rewrite, the bit where you go through and find the most ridiculous errors, where I find for some reason through one scene I keep mistyping ‘Tony’ as ‘Tong’. Where I find there is a massive plothole that makes one of the main conflicts of the story kind of meaningless.
But one must power on!
I think the main thing I’ve been attending to in the rewrite is adding in the characters thoughts and emotions. A lot of nano was about getting the worlds down, having the actions and various scenes that I wanted shoved in the order I liked so I wouldn’t forget.
I’ve also put in a few more little Easter Eggs, I greatly enjoyed including them. There are references to the various Marvel movies (of course), but there are also shootouts to the numerous comic verses, fads from the last few decades and there may or may not be certain inspirations take from the 2 Broke Girls series as Kate Dennings deserves more recognition than she gets in the Marvel universe. I kept a record in my chapter notes of what I’ve added in just for a bit of a lark really, but I’ll be delighted if people read the story and point them out to me. Serious kudos to whoever gets all of them. As I said, I tried to be mostly faithful to what I did include. Though I should mention, I've tried to make it so that it shouldn't matter if the reader doesn't know anything beyond the first wave of Marvel movies, after the first Avengers movie my story deviates; I'm not sure if I'll ever write more of it, but it probably won't coincide with any of the others perfectly.
The main concern I’ve had with the story is the amount of prologue and set up this story has needed. I enjoy reading about the Stark siblings childhood together and how Tony dealt with his parents death, taking over SI and then his interactions with the Avengers. I could have just skipped it and started with the main interaction between Tony and Steve, as this is a stony fic and that will be the core of half of the story. But the first scene, where Tony looses his mother and then meets Darcy for the first time, was partly what inspired the story initially. I found that once I started writing their childhood I had all these ideas and got to excited about it, I couldn’t stop. In the editing process I’ve since had to remove some of those scenes, purely because they didn’t really add too much to the story other than cute sibling bonding time, of which there already was a lot. If people end up liking the story as much as I hope they will, I might post them later as little extras, but we’ll see.
It’s been an interesting experience thus far, especially as I’ve done it without outside input. It’s self planning, editing and writing. It’s a lot of work along with everything else I need to do in my life, but I find it incredibly rewarding. I think of the various inserted images, like the newspaper articles I’ve done up and such as a bit of a break from the writing. I’m not sure I’d do them again though, they’re very fiddly, but I guess that’s rewarding in its own way.
Honestly, I’m just so excited that I will be able to start posting it soon on AO3 as I love it and want to share it with others.