“the Final Cut”, End notes
[ Endnotes posted 09 Oct 2016 ]
Where did the idea for the story come from?
For once, I have an easy answer to this one.
As has been noted elsewhere, I started watching Buffy during the separation from my wife (something my kids and I could share while we were together), and I began doing fanfiction shortly after that. As a result, my kids were essentially raised on Buffy, and my daughter sroni eventually became a relatively accomplished ficcer on her own. Her brother, while sharing our pleasure with the show and enjoying my stories, never quite got into the writing side … but he did have an idea once, and he told me about it, and we discussed different ways it might be approached and things that could come about in the course of events, and he never did anything with it (he’s only recently begun to attempt writing at all) but I remembered the idea because I thought it had promise. And when I signed up for my third summer_of_giles, this seemed like a good time to address it, since the first proposal had come maybe ten years before.
Is there any particular significance to the title?
Certainly: like a few other things in the story it’s the title (of course) of a Pink Floyd song.
What is the thing I like most about this story? the thing I like least, or about which I feel most doubtful?
The thing I like most (no surprise) is Ethan himself; I always enjoy playing with the unscrupulous but highly entertaining Mr. Rayne. Right after that is the tripartite byplay among Ethan, Giles, and ‘Nathan’, and the way the two Ethans - alternate versions of one another - nonetheless managed to behave so differently.
Though I don’t dislike it, the thing about which I feel most insecure is the interior and denizens of the involution wherein the action took place. It was a necessary environment, but I uneasily wonder sometimes if I painted it in sparse strokes because what was happening was what mattered to me. (If so, that would be an outer-world analogue to Rack ‘phoning it in’ in the construction of that environment.)
Is there anything I think I could have done better, or might do differently if I had it to do over?
Aside from the above uncertainty regarding how vivid (or perfunctory) was my description of the ‘game’ environment, I also wonder a bit at just how well Giles’s internal realizations at the end were connected to the rest of the events and story structure. Those things were unquestionably good enough in themselves, but were they properly integrated into the story as a whole? I’ll no doubt need time to come to any firm conclusions there.
Was there a different direction I might have wanted to take the story, and what would have been some of the advantages of the not-taken path?
There was a major one, actually, and for some weeks while planning the story in my mind (after signing up for summer_of_giles but before beginning) I considered making a duplicate of Giles the fourth member of the party. This one would have ostentatiously embodied the ‘Ripper’ persona that Giles himself had determinedly left behind, and the interactions - Ripper with Giles, Ripper with Ethan, even Ripper with Xander - could have been very interesting indeed. I don’t regret going back to the original concept, but it would have been fun to read that alternative approach. (Not that I’m hinting …)
Any observations to add at the end?
Just one, and it’s really an aside. I’d pretty much always planned for Xander’s ‘Star Trek switch’ strategy to be part of the narrative, but ‘867-5309’ was a late inspiration/addition. I hope they were both successful in their intent.