"waiting for a dream", torchwood, owen/martha

[paperclipbitch]

title: waiting for a dream
fandom: torchwood
pairing: owen/martha
challenge/prompt: philosophy_20 #4. inertia and fanfic100, 020. colourless
rating: pg-15
word count: 8778 (according to ms word)
genre: gen/het
spoilers: 2x08 a day in the death (kind of a tie-in)
copyright: waiting for a dream by rufus wainwright
summary: owen doesn't want it to be easy.
author’s

Comments

[persiflage_1]

This is pretty damned fantastic !

Well done.

I'd quote the bits I liked, but it'd take AGES (and probably require several comments) !

[paperclipbitch]

*grins* Aw, thank you so much honey!

xx

[persiflage_1]

I want to try my hand at a Martha&Owen fic - but it's at the back of the queue of WiP !

[paperclipbitch]

I've been meaning to write it for about a year now - before I even found out she was going to be on Torchwood in the first place, and just somehow never found the time until now.

It would be very awesome if you did write it :D *puppydog eyes*

[puddle_of_light]

That was amazing. The lack of capitals and anything resembling decent grammar is certainly disorienting, but it's a testament to your skill as a writer that I could easily tell which was speech and what was narrative.

I love how you capture the relationship between Owen and Martha and especially your take on Owen. Few fanfic writers seem to get him, but have his character dead on (not trying to pun!)

Favourite line - i wouldn't have given in, martha says, amusement fading from her eyes. i do have a boyfriend, you know.

she doesn't get it.

- that really doesn't matter, owen replies. you'd have done it anyway. everyone always does.

[paperclipbitch]

I normally try and be somewhat of a Grammar Nazi, so this was weird for me to write, but I'm glad it paid off anyway.

The unintentional pun made me laugh. Oh no, poor Owen...

Thank you so, so much!

xxx

[unsentimentalf]

Very good. I thought the decapitalisation worked very well- particularly the way that you can't immediately tell whether a character is speaking out loud or thinking. And the way that in the background no-one there else is helping Owen at all. Getting him to make the coffee- what were they thinking?

[paperclipbitch]

Thank you very much honey!

No one helped him out in the episode at all... much as I loved the Coffee Machine Scene (as it shall forever be known), as it was Owen/Ianto in canon at its best, it just seemed insensitive and above all cruel to do that to Owen!

... yeah, I might be a little bit defensive of him ;)

xxx

[karaokegal]

Oh so very beautiful! Once again, you get to the heart of the characters and give them all the shades and depth and nuance that the actual show always manages to deprive us of.

Your Owen voice is pitch-perfect, especially as he relates to being dead and the clear-eyed brutal honesty with which he sees himself and everybody else. I loved you Martha as well, and how she's both detached but not so much.

The sensory is stuff is absolutely brilliant, and utterly painful in sussing out exactly what it would be like to not feel, which must have been incredibly difficult to write. It's like proving a negative, right?

I'd still love to see you tackle some Jack/Dead!Owen as well since I rewatched Dead Man Walking last night and the fuckin' subtext was killing me, but this was an amazing piece of work, one of those "screw the phone-calls, I'm unavailable until I finish reading this" things because there was no way I could wait until later to devour it.

And of course:
ianto gets all touchy and trigger-happy if you refer to him as jack's

[paperclipbitch]

Writing Martha still scares the hell out of me since I don't play with her very often, so I'm glad you liked her :)

The sensory stuff was very weird, I ended up wearing gloves and poking things for a while to see what you'd feel and what you wouldn't. It was very method!

I still want to tackle some Jack/Dead!Owen, and I want to tackle some Ianto/Dead!Owen, so don't worry, things will be on their way :) I am in no way finished playing with my new, terribly broken Owen.

Thanks so much sweetie :D And, yes, of course, I had to get my obligatory Jack-and-Ianto-don't-really-work in there! I'm so glad you enjoyed this.

xxx

[remindmeofthe]

Yes! Someone else exploring the implications of Owen's sense of touch going missing! It's one of the things that intrigues me most about his condition, so it's awesome to see someone else's take on it.

Sadly, my brain filtered your tricks of grammar right out, probably because I just read No Country for Old Men, and Cormac McCarthy does the same thing with the missing quote marks. I had to learn to filter it or die of annoyance, because that trick just doesn't hold up as well in a novel. It does work better in a fanfic, though, for many reasons including the length of the work, and I like your playing with the visual effects of the text in order to better pull the reader into Owen's fucked up new world.

I liked the look at Owen and Martha's interactions here, and Martha working at keeping her cool with varying degrees of success. You write a great Owen, and I'm glad you wrote something addressing this whole mess. Thanks for the good read!

[paperclipbitch]

The sense of touch thing really interests me as well - I ended up going method to write this and sitting around with gloves on poking things to see a bit of what it would be like :D

I've read novels which don't use speech marks, and they can be kind of maddening. Is that something Cormac McCarthy does a lot? I was going to have a try at reading some of his stuff, but I might not now...

Thank you so much :D

xxx

[remindmeofthe]

Ha, the method thing didn't even occur to me! I was too occupied with how much it affected what I was writing. I never noticed before how often things happen because a character felt something, rather than seeing or hearing it.

Yeah, I had a peek into one of his other novels and saw no quote marks, so I guess it's his Thing. Once I got used to it, I didn't mind, because he made it easy to follow who was talking when, but then I found I was not a fan of his writing style in general. If I hadn't seen the No Country movie, I would never have been able to follow the book, because the way he writes just kept losing me. I'm not even going to bother with any of his other stuff, which is too bad, because when I did manage to focus on what I was reading, there was some really good, interesting stuff there. Maybe you'd have better luck with it.