Fool for Lesser Things (Notes and Acknowledgments)
So you made it this far, eh? Well, either that or you skipped to the end (silly you). I hope you enjoyed the madcap adventure that (I hope) is Fool for Lesser Things. First up, because I will babble at length and I don't want to make those who are looking for their kudos sift through my craziness, the acknowledgments:
Naturally, thanks must go to the mod-crew over at spn_j2_bigbang. This is, what, the third year they've put this challenge together, and it just keeps getting more massive, and more exciting, and they just keep cheering us on and they are wonderful, wonderful awesome people.
Major kudos go to maisfeeka and lilacsigil, my betas for this monster, who pulled the double duty of a) letting me know that the fic was interesting enough to be read by other people and b) letting me know how to make it so, so much better. Both of them did an amazing job, everything from "that doesn't make sense" to "you want 'led' there, not 'lead'" to "okay, here's why that bit is rough". Which, after living with a fic in your head for so long, is completely and utterly indispensible. Thank you guys so much! I swear, I'll get those things in the mail just as soon as I figure out where the post office is around here!
And last but very, very, very much not least, charlies_dragon, who made all of the wonderful art, pestered me to think about a soundtrack and thus think about the fic on yet another level, and put up with the fact that I moved the weekend before this sucker was due to be posted, and then proceeded to near panic the day before it was due because I still had lots of rewrites to do, and threw in some cheerleading and did I mention the amazing art? to boot. Seriously, if you haven't gone to look yet, check it out. It's gorgeous.
And now to the babble (wait, you mean that wasn't you babbling? Are you sure you're typically a short form writer?)
This fic started its life as a brief experiment back before the 2009 spn_j2_bigbang challenge even quite got started, inspired by avant-garde film of the 1930s and 40s. I got a bit of a scene about a crazy carousel done and then abandoned the sucker for greener -- or at least, more sensical -- pastures, and didn't resdiscover it until I sat down to attempt to write a crack fic of at least 20,000 words.
Don't ask why I decided that my big bang this year had to be a crack fic. I don't know.
Anyway, over the course of the months, I drew more and more on early 20th century avant-garde and surrealism, with a particular focus on the Dada movement (which fascinates me), throwing myself headlong into "fiction of the absurd" and thinking I was being very high brained when in fact I was just writing a really long crack fic. Many of the more absurd and/or more specifically art history related elements of the fic were scrapped (for awhile, Sam really was going to turn into a giant psychic red rubber playground ball, but then I realized I was disturbing even myself), and I remembered one of my other favorite odd little completely self-instructed areas of interest: environmental theory. And the sucker took off again, turning into what you see here.
Hopefully, the end result of all that mixing together is entertaining -- or at the very least, comprehensible.
Thanks so much for reading. You all rock.
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