Paris in the Early Days Author's Note
J2 RPS AU
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
I think this is the first bigbang for which I could not tell you how I got the idea. I can say that last year, while I was still writing bigbang 2013 (That Daring Young Man, aka the circusbang), for some reason I was flipping back through the 2012 bangs - I think I might have been trying to write the summary and wanted to remind myself how other people did it - and I don't even know what I saw or what I read, but suddenly I wanted to send Jared and Jensen to Paris in the late 1800s or early 1900s. Jared would be a painter and they'd live wherever the bohemian arty types lived (I thought Montparnasse and I was wrong), and they'd be poor and happy.
And then of course I wanted to write that story instead of the one I was trying to finish, because I am nothing if not distractable. I whined a bit on LJ and dear-tiger made the mistake of saying I could email her and tell her about it, so I did. At length. Several times.
(Thankfully I did not scare her off and we're still friends. :D )
I made some notes. I wrote the morning-after-the-night-before bit where Jared wakes up in bed with Sandy and Jensen, after they all drink absinthe and get royally smashed at a bar. And I forced myself to finish the circusbang, because I had to, and because I really did want to.
(This almost wasn't the story I wrote, thanks to the neighborhood where I work and the Edes and Gill print shop and the morning I ran into corruptviridian on the bus and a probably offhand comment someone made in my LJ about colonial Boston. It was almost the same story but set in the 20s, thanks to the day I found Midnight in Paris on TV. If I'd written that story I would have made Jared a photographer, because I don't really like that era of contemporary art. But the pull of Belle Époque Paris was strong, and here we are.)
Seven years ago I took myself to Paris for my birthday, and the hotel where I stayed in the Latin Quarter was down the block from the building where Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley lived in 1921 and 1922. There's a plaque. I don't actually like Hemingway - I was always more of an F Scott Fitzgerald girl, if we're talking 1920s American writers - but there was a quote on the plaque from A Moveable Feast, in French of course, and I took a picture of it because that's a little piece of literary history right there, and I was staying right down the street from it. (I took a picture of the front of one of Picasso's studios too, and I don't really like his work either.)
I've never read A Moveable Feast, although now part of me wants to.
When I was there I went to Montmartre twice - once for dinner with ephemera, who came from London to spend a day with me (we sloped around Pére-Lachaise Cemetery and I took so many pictures my camera batteries died), and the next night in the dark to see Sacré-Coeur. All I remember is that it was dark and hilly and crowded with people and the night I went back I got rained on and my camera batteries died again. None of that helped me visualize anything. I googled for a lot of random pictures - a lot of windmills (Montmartre was still a little village-y, rather than city-of-Paris-y, in 1896, and there were still a bunch of windmills altho they were being turned into bars and cafés and restaurants and cabarets) and a lot of paintings, and I learned that Van Gogh and his brother lived there in the 1880s. I tried to google art prices, in case I needed to get specific about how much Jared was making off his paintings. I actually found a bunch of stock books from the art dealers Goupil & Cie, but I couldn't decipher them so they weren't as useful as I'd hoped. I tried to google cabarets and dance halls so I'd have an idea what the Green Door looked like on the inside and how cramped the dressing room might have been. I sat on the floor of the Boston Public Library and read about the painter Maurice Utrillo and an art dealer named Ambroise Vollard for a couple of hours, and took notes on my laptop until the library closed and they kicked me out. I found photos of portable easels and painters' palettes and paintboxes, and photos of late 19th-century baby carriages, and I tried to find interior photos of artists' studios to help me picture Jared and Jensen's place, but I only found four, and two of those were hallways of the building. I did find a painting of the interior of a bar, which helped me picture the Cherokee a little bit. I found an online listing for an apartment for rent that used to be one of Picasso's Montmartre studios, now converted into a small and cute flat, and snagged a couple photos of the views and the windows.
And of course I found Mucha prints and a Seurat and a Van Gogh and a John Singer Sargent and an online gallery of Steinlen's work and Toulouse-Lautrec's posters and paintings of cancan dancers and a cabaret called the Moulin de la Galette. Also a photo of Paul Gauguin playing the piano in Mucha's studio in his underwear, because why not.
I tried to research money - how much would dinner cost? rent? one of Jared's paintings? what was a sou worth? - five centimes, it turns out - and the process by which an artist would sell his or her work and how did Parisians get around the city (the Métro with its iconic art nouveau signs didn't open until 1900) and where did the rich people live and what produce would be in season in the summer and what did women wear, dancing girls and upper-class ladies both, and what kind of flowers would grow in a Paris garden and how do you make ratatouille, anyway?
I tried to read up on queer Paris and Paris at the turn of the last century and life in Montmartre. At one point I thought it was important to know where the nearest churches were, in case Jensen felt the need to attend a service. Sacré-Coeur hadn't been consecrated yet - it was finished in 1914 but not consecrated until 1919, after the war - so he wouldn't have gone there, even though it was right up the hill. I read a little about the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries and the Bois de Boulogne, and I'd read a story called Do Not Touch, by Prudence Shen, parts of which were set in a slightly earlier Paris with a circus and the elephant in the beer garden of the Moulin Rouge.
I had a hard time physically siting things - I figured out where Jared and Jensen lived, but I couldn't place the Cherokee or the Green Door or Galerie Sheppard (where the Salon of Nine is held) or Galerie Collins. I read travel sites and blogs enough to learn about some of the arrondissements, eventually determining that Misha lives in the 6th Arrondissement, near the Latin Quarter (which wouldn't become artisically hopping for probably twenty years at least), and the Bs live in the 16th. I found a massive map from 1890 that was actually kind of hard to read (and was thus not very helpful) on account of the major detail it's missing is street names.
The former linen factory where Jared and Jensen live is based on the Bateau-Lavoir, a dark, dirty, creaky, thin-walled pile of wood on Rue Ravignan that became famous as the home of a whole bunch of early 20th-century painters and writers and musicians. (Picasso moved there in 1904.) The former linen factory in my fic isn't quite as dark or as ramshackle, but it's in the same place and has about the same shape, and is full of arty types.
Before I found out about the Bateau-Lavoir, I had Jared and Jensen living in an artist's garret on the top floor of what was probably a very 1870s/1880s building, the kind of garret with tall windows in a sloping wall and no heat in the winter and a little old landlady on the first floor. She would sit at her front window and have completely incomprehensible conversations with Jared in French, and sometimes she'd take a painting in lieu of rent. She survived, sort of, as the landlady of their studio in the linen factory, altho you never meet her. But she lives nearby.
The blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Mr B's ancestral home and gardens outside Durham is a nod to my 2012 nanonovel, which contained a secondary character who bore a striking resemblance to Paul Bettany in A Knight's Tale, and whose family came from Durham, where his dad lived in the ancestral pile out in the country and his mom lived in a posh house in the city.
Misha is Russian because he was Russian in the circusbang, and he has a hedgehog partly so he can comment about Russian hedgehog jokes that don't translate well - which was a character trait in the circusbang as well - and partly because I though it would be weird and cute. There's always going to be something in my bigbang that exists for no other reason than to make me laugh at myself. Jared has never encountered a hedgehog before because they hadn't come to the US yet, and Misha calls her Yozhik because that's an affectionate form of "yozh", which is "hedgehog" in Russian. It's like calling your cat Kitty. Blame dear-tiger for the continued existence of Russians with hedgehogs in my fics. I do.
I don't know who the French artists are at the Salon of Nine, and I don't know what mad Moroccan gifted Misha with the hedgehog (she's a North African hedgehog, so I figured a North African gifter made sense), and the nameless poet who takes up space in the Cherokee really is nameless. Give him whatever face you want, I don't mind. :D But everyone else is a real person except for Mackenzie's fiancé, because I don't know if he really exists or not.
(If you've been hanging around my LJ the past couple of months, Sebastian of the face is not the artist Sebastian in the fic. But if that's who you want to picture, you may feel free. :D )
The Green Door is named after the classic porn movie Behind the Green Door, although the dancing girls are just dancers, and dancers who remain clothed at that. The existence of prostitutes on the Rue d'Amboise - and my knowledge of the name of the street - comes from a book called Bohemian Paris, by Dan Franck, which I found in the BPL the day I went to do research in person.
The little pink house that Jared paints as Mackenzie's wedding present is based on an existing Montmartre café called La Maison Rose, but back in 1896 it was just a house with plaster-colored walls.
A major reason I set the fic in 1896 was because I like Belle Époque art. Jared's style is kind of Mucha, kind of John Singer Sargent, kind of very early Maxfield Parrish. Kind of post-Impressionist. I'm not an art historian by any stretch, and I don't know much about what exactly was selling and what wasn't, what styles were the bleeding edge, what other painters in Montmartre were doing. This past December I went to a Sargent exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts and took a bunch of pictures of the watercolors with my phone, even though I already knew Jared's watercolors weren't as good as his oils, and even though the art in the exhibit was all produced at least fifteen years later than I wanted. But Sargent, I really like him, and I knew he was popular and had even had a scandal with his Madame X, and I could do worse as a template for Jared's style.
All of the chapters, except for Chapter Four, are named after Jared's paintings.
A thing I have not had to think about during previous bangs - sometimes your artist illustrates a scene in a slightly different way than you wrote, but early enough in the editing process that you can fix the fic to match. Occasionally your artist (by which I mean my artist :D ) has a clearer idea of what things look like than you do. I'm ok with this. After petite-madame finished the pic of Jared and Jensen in the Caterpillar, I added a mention of the two of them sitting on a sofa - well, Jared is sitting on the sofa, Jensen is sitting on him - and speculation that Jensen stuck the roses in Jared's hair. Ditto for PM's pic of the Green Door after Jensen rescues Anton and gets hit in the face - Genevieve wasn't originally in that scene, and now she is. To be honest, I'm not sure why I didn't write her in in the first place.
One of the things I wanted to write into the fic, but which ultimately didn't fit, was the Cabaret de l'Enfer, which was in Montmartre and more or less within walking distance of Jared and Jensen's studio. It was decorated like the pits of hell, with musicians dressed as demons to entertain the patrons and servers dressed as red imps to dance around and bring them drinks. Next door was a place called Le Ciel, which made them Heaven and Hell. Heh. I don't know when Le Ciel closed, but L'Enfer shut down in 1952.
(Down the street was the Cabaret du Néant, or the Cabaret of Nothingness. It had coffins for tables, and patrons could drink their contagion-themed cocktails out of fake skulls.)
I'd also intended to give the girls at the Green Door stage names, on the order of Jane Avril (whose real name was Jeanne Beaudon) and La Goulue and Nini Legs-in-the-Air, who all danced at the Moulin Rouge, but none of that made it into the fic except for the detail that they call Genevieve "Le Poisson d'Avril" - April fool - because they think she's such a fool for chasing after Danneel.
For a long time I didn't know what to do with Jensen - originally I'd made him a poet, but the more I thought about it the less I liked it, and when I unloaded all my story babble on beadslut at Wincon, she made a face when I got to that bit. All I knew was that I didn't want him to also be an artist, but I did want him to be a creative of some stripe. I think it might have been gnomi's idea to make him a prose writer or a playwright, but I don't remember. If I'd had more time to work on the fic, and if I'd been less determined to make it the story of Jared's art, you might have gotten to read some of Jensen's work. But that is now a different story.
Alona has gotten dialogue in every single J2 AU I've written - four previous bigbangs and a fic for spn_cinema - and finding a space for her in this was one was hard. I don't know why I decided to make her an opera singer in training, and in retrospect it may or may not be believable that Jared would ask her to model for him after having only known her a couple of hours, or that she'd say yes, but it worked for me.
All my previous bangs started with Jared and Jensen as strangers, and among other things those fics told the story of how the boys got to know each other. But for once I wanted to write a story in which they already knew each other and their relationship was a known quantity. It was kind of nice to be able to concentrate on other things besides the process by which they fell in love.
I don't know everything that happens to the girls, or to Christian and Steve. I know that Sandy eventually meets a nice boy, gets married, becomes a dance teacher. I just don't know where. Some time after the turn of the century, Genevieve fetches up in San Francisco. Mr and Mrs B have another baby and Danneel stays on to nanny that one. They go to London and she goes with them. I don't know how long she and Genevieve stay together, or how they manage it. About when artists start deserting Montmartre for Montparnasse, somewhere in the teens, Christian sells the Cherokee and he and Steve go back to the States and he opens a bar there. Photography as an art form eventually catches up to Aldis, and he can actually make a career at it. Edwin gets some commissions. I don't know what happens to Anton. I think Misha stays in Paris showing and selling art, sometimes on the leading edge of what's new and exciting, and sometimes just behind it.
And Jared and Jensen go back to Texas after a while, when cubism starts to take over, but they're too used to living in the kind of permissive, exciting place that Paris was for them, and Texas isn't a good place to be. They end up in New York, in the bohemian cauldron of Greenwich Village, Jared painting and doing illustrations and producing posters, and Jensen writing and directing plays. In Paris Jared builds a bit of a reputation as a queer painter of queer subjects, and it kind of follows him to New York. They're never wealthy and they don't see great continuous fame in their lifetimes - their work goes in and out of fashion, as sometimes happens - but they're happy and productive and reasonably successful as working creative people, and at least Jared no longer needs Jensen to translate what people are saying to him. And they learn to cook for themselves. :D
I am happy-ending girl. Of course they live happily ever after.
Especially compared to previous bangs, writing this one was fairly stress-free. I didn't start to panic until the end of April, when the draft deadline loomed and I realized I had no idea how to end my fic. (Unique among bangs, I never knew how this one ended until I actually got to the ending. Usually I know a lot earlier.) And I panicked a little in June when I wasn't sure if I'd have it edited in time. But overall? Writing it was fun and I enjoyed it, and at the end of the day that's really all I ask for.
Aside from the occasional detail I didn't use, this is pretty much the fic I wanted to write, when I finally decided I wanted to write it. It has about as much edge as an angora bunny after a few turns in a clothesdryer set on super-fluff, and I don't care.
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
I think this is the first bigbang for which I could not tell you how I got the idea. I can say that last year, while I was still writing bigbang 2013 (That Daring Young Man, aka the circusbang), for some reason I was flipping back through the 2012 bangs - I think I might have been trying to write the summary and wanted to remind myself how other people did it - and I don't even know what I saw or what I read, but suddenly I wanted to send Jared and Jensen to Paris in the late 1800s or early 1900s. Jared would be a painter and they'd live wherever the bohemian arty types lived (I thought Montparnasse and I was wrong), and they'd be poor and happy.
And then of course I wanted to write that story instead of the one I was trying to finish, because I am nothing if not distractable. I whined a bit on LJ and dear-tiger made the mistake of saying I could email her and tell her about it, so I did. At length. Several times.
(Thankfully I did not scare her off and we're still friends. :D )
I made some notes. I wrote the morning-after-the-night-before bit where Jared wakes up in bed with Sandy and Jensen, after they all drink absinthe and get royally smashed at a bar. And I forced myself to finish the circusbang, because I had to, and because I really did want to.
(This almost wasn't the story I wrote, thanks to the neighborhood where I work and the Edes and Gill print shop and the morning I ran into corruptviridian on the bus and a probably offhand comment someone made in my LJ about colonial Boston. It was almost the same story but set in the 20s, thanks to the day I found Midnight in Paris on TV. If I'd written that story I would have made Jared a photographer, because I don't really like that era of contemporary art. But the pull of Belle Époque Paris was strong, and here we are.)
Seven years ago I took myself to Paris for my birthday, and the hotel where I stayed in the Latin Quarter was down the block from the building where Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley lived in 1921 and 1922. There's a plaque. I don't actually like Hemingway - I was always more of an F Scott Fitzgerald girl, if we're talking 1920s American writers - but there was a quote on the plaque from A Moveable Feast, in French of course, and I took a picture of it because that's a little piece of literary history right there, and I was staying right down the street from it. (I took a picture of the front of one of Picasso's studios too, and I don't really like his work either.)
I've never read A Moveable Feast, although now part of me wants to.
When I was there I went to Montmartre twice - once for dinner with ephemera, who came from London to spend a day with me (we sloped around Pére-Lachaise Cemetery and I took so many pictures my camera batteries died), and the next night in the dark to see Sacré-Coeur. All I remember is that it was dark and hilly and crowded with people and the night I went back I got rained on and my camera batteries died again. None of that helped me visualize anything. I googled for a lot of random pictures - a lot of windmills (Montmartre was still a little village-y, rather than city-of-Paris-y, in 1896, and there were still a bunch of windmills altho they were being turned into bars and cafés and restaurants and cabarets) and a lot of paintings, and I learned that Van Gogh and his brother lived there in the 1880s. I tried to google art prices, in case I needed to get specific about how much Jared was making off his paintings. I actually found a bunch of stock books from the art dealers Goupil & Cie, but I couldn't decipher them so they weren't as useful as I'd hoped. I tried to google cabarets and dance halls so I'd have an idea what the Green Door looked like on the inside and how cramped the dressing room might have been. I sat on the floor of the Boston Public Library and read about the painter Maurice Utrillo and an art dealer named Ambroise Vollard for a couple of hours, and took notes on my laptop until the library closed and they kicked me out. I found photos of portable easels and painters' palettes and paintboxes, and photos of late 19th-century baby carriages, and I tried to find interior photos of artists' studios to help me picture Jared and Jensen's place, but I only found four, and two of those were hallways of the building. I did find a painting of the interior of a bar, which helped me picture the Cherokee a little bit. I found an online listing for an apartment for rent that used to be one of Picasso's Montmartre studios, now converted into a small and cute flat, and snagged a couple photos of the views and the windows.
And of course I found Mucha prints and a Seurat and a Van Gogh and a John Singer Sargent and an online gallery of Steinlen's work and Toulouse-Lautrec's posters and paintings of cancan dancers and a cabaret called the Moulin de la Galette. Also a photo of Paul Gauguin playing the piano in Mucha's studio in his underwear, because why not.
I tried to research money - how much would dinner cost? rent? one of Jared's paintings? what was a sou worth? - five centimes, it turns out - and the process by which an artist would sell his or her work and how did Parisians get around the city (the Métro with its iconic art nouveau signs didn't open until 1900) and where did the rich people live and what produce would be in season in the summer and what did women wear, dancing girls and upper-class ladies both, and what kind of flowers would grow in a Paris garden and how do you make ratatouille, anyway?
I tried to read up on queer Paris and Paris at the turn of the last century and life in Montmartre. At one point I thought it was important to know where the nearest churches were, in case Jensen felt the need to attend a service. Sacré-Coeur hadn't been consecrated yet - it was finished in 1914 but not consecrated until 1919, after the war - so he wouldn't have gone there, even though it was right up the hill. I read a little about the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries and the Bois de Boulogne, and I'd read a story called Do Not Touch, by Prudence Shen, parts of which were set in a slightly earlier Paris with a circus and the elephant in the beer garden of the Moulin Rouge.
I had a hard time physically siting things - I figured out where Jared and Jensen lived, but I couldn't place the Cherokee or the Green Door or Galerie Sheppard (where the Salon of Nine is held) or Galerie Collins. I read travel sites and blogs enough to learn about some of the arrondissements, eventually determining that Misha lives in the 6th Arrondissement, near the Latin Quarter (which wouldn't become artisically hopping for probably twenty years at least), and the Bs live in the 16th. I found a massive map from 1890 that was actually kind of hard to read (and was thus not very helpful) on account of the major detail it's missing is street names.
The former linen factory where Jared and Jensen live is based on the Bateau-Lavoir, a dark, dirty, creaky, thin-walled pile of wood on Rue Ravignan that became famous as the home of a whole bunch of early 20th-century painters and writers and musicians. (Picasso moved there in 1904.) The former linen factory in my fic isn't quite as dark or as ramshackle, but it's in the same place and has about the same shape, and is full of arty types.
Before I found out about the Bateau-Lavoir, I had Jared and Jensen living in an artist's garret on the top floor of what was probably a very 1870s/1880s building, the kind of garret with tall windows in a sloping wall and no heat in the winter and a little old landlady on the first floor. She would sit at her front window and have completely incomprehensible conversations with Jared in French, and sometimes she'd take a painting in lieu of rent. She survived, sort of, as the landlady of their studio in the linen factory, altho you never meet her. But she lives nearby.
The blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Mr B's ancestral home and gardens outside Durham is a nod to my 2012 nanonovel, which contained a secondary character who bore a striking resemblance to Paul Bettany in A Knight's Tale, and whose family came from Durham, where his dad lived in the ancestral pile out in the country and his mom lived in a posh house in the city.
Misha is Russian because he was Russian in the circusbang, and he has a hedgehog partly so he can comment about Russian hedgehog jokes that don't translate well - which was a character trait in the circusbang as well - and partly because I though it would be weird and cute. There's always going to be something in my bigbang that exists for no other reason than to make me laugh at myself. Jared has never encountered a hedgehog before because they hadn't come to the US yet, and Misha calls her Yozhik because that's an affectionate form of "yozh", which is "hedgehog" in Russian. It's like calling your cat Kitty. Blame dear-tiger for the continued existence of Russians with hedgehogs in my fics. I do.
I don't know who the French artists are at the Salon of Nine, and I don't know what mad Moroccan gifted Misha with the hedgehog (she's a North African hedgehog, so I figured a North African gifter made sense), and the nameless poet who takes up space in the Cherokee really is nameless. Give him whatever face you want, I don't mind. :D But everyone else is a real person except for Mackenzie's fiancé, because I don't know if he really exists or not.
(If you've been hanging around my LJ the past couple of months, Sebastian of the face is not the artist Sebastian in the fic. But if that's who you want to picture, you may feel free. :D )
The Green Door is named after the classic porn movie Behind the Green Door, although the dancing girls are just dancers, and dancers who remain clothed at that. The existence of prostitutes on the Rue d'Amboise - and my knowledge of the name of the street - comes from a book called Bohemian Paris, by Dan Franck, which I found in the BPL the day I went to do research in person.
The little pink house that Jared paints as Mackenzie's wedding present is based on an existing Montmartre café called La Maison Rose, but back in 1896 it was just a house with plaster-colored walls.
A major reason I set the fic in 1896 was because I like Belle Époque art. Jared's style is kind of Mucha, kind of John Singer Sargent, kind of very early Maxfield Parrish. Kind of post-Impressionist. I'm not an art historian by any stretch, and I don't know much about what exactly was selling and what wasn't, what styles were the bleeding edge, what other painters in Montmartre were doing. This past December I went to a Sargent exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts and took a bunch of pictures of the watercolors with my phone, even though I already knew Jared's watercolors weren't as good as his oils, and even though the art in the exhibit was all produced at least fifteen years later than I wanted. But Sargent, I really like him, and I knew he was popular and had even had a scandal with his Madame X, and I could do worse as a template for Jared's style.
All of the chapters, except for Chapter Four, are named after Jared's paintings.
A thing I have not had to think about during previous bangs - sometimes your artist illustrates a scene in a slightly different way than you wrote, but early enough in the editing process that you can fix the fic to match. Occasionally your artist (by which I mean my artist :D ) has a clearer idea of what things look like than you do. I'm ok with this. After petite-madame finished the pic of Jared and Jensen in the Caterpillar, I added a mention of the two of them sitting on a sofa - well, Jared is sitting on the sofa, Jensen is sitting on him - and speculation that Jensen stuck the roses in Jared's hair. Ditto for PM's pic of the Green Door after Jensen rescues Anton and gets hit in the face - Genevieve wasn't originally in that scene, and now she is. To be honest, I'm not sure why I didn't write her in in the first place.
One of the things I wanted to write into the fic, but which ultimately didn't fit, was the Cabaret de l'Enfer, which was in Montmartre and more or less within walking distance of Jared and Jensen's studio. It was decorated like the pits of hell, with musicians dressed as demons to entertain the patrons and servers dressed as red imps to dance around and bring them drinks. Next door was a place called Le Ciel, which made them Heaven and Hell. Heh. I don't know when Le Ciel closed, but L'Enfer shut down in 1952.
(Down the street was the Cabaret du Néant, or the Cabaret of Nothingness. It had coffins for tables, and patrons could drink their contagion-themed cocktails out of fake skulls.)
I'd also intended to give the girls at the Green Door stage names, on the order of Jane Avril (whose real name was Jeanne Beaudon) and La Goulue and Nini Legs-in-the-Air, who all danced at the Moulin Rouge, but none of that made it into the fic except for the detail that they call Genevieve "Le Poisson d'Avril" - April fool - because they think she's such a fool for chasing after Danneel.
For a long time I didn't know what to do with Jensen - originally I'd made him a poet, but the more I thought about it the less I liked it, and when I unloaded all my story babble on beadslut at Wincon, she made a face when I got to that bit. All I knew was that I didn't want him to also be an artist, but I did want him to be a creative of some stripe. I think it might have been gnomi's idea to make him a prose writer or a playwright, but I don't remember. If I'd had more time to work on the fic, and if I'd been less determined to make it the story of Jared's art, you might have gotten to read some of Jensen's work. But that is now a different story.
Alona has gotten dialogue in every single J2 AU I've written - four previous bigbangs and a fic for spn_cinema - and finding a space for her in this was one was hard. I don't know why I decided to make her an opera singer in training, and in retrospect it may or may not be believable that Jared would ask her to model for him after having only known her a couple of hours, or that she'd say yes, but it worked for me.
All my previous bangs started with Jared and Jensen as strangers, and among other things those fics told the story of how the boys got to know each other. But for once I wanted to write a story in which they already knew each other and their relationship was a known quantity. It was kind of nice to be able to concentrate on other things besides the process by which they fell in love.
I don't know everything that happens to the girls, or to Christian and Steve. I know that Sandy eventually meets a nice boy, gets married, becomes a dance teacher. I just don't know where. Some time after the turn of the century, Genevieve fetches up in San Francisco. Mr and Mrs B have another baby and Danneel stays on to nanny that one. They go to London and she goes with them. I don't know how long she and Genevieve stay together, or how they manage it. About when artists start deserting Montmartre for Montparnasse, somewhere in the teens, Christian sells the Cherokee and he and Steve go back to the States and he opens a bar there. Photography as an art form eventually catches up to Aldis, and he can actually make a career at it. Edwin gets some commissions. I don't know what happens to Anton. I think Misha stays in Paris showing and selling art, sometimes on the leading edge of what's new and exciting, and sometimes just behind it.
And Jared and Jensen go back to Texas after a while, when cubism starts to take over, but they're too used to living in the kind of permissive, exciting place that Paris was for them, and Texas isn't a good place to be. They end up in New York, in the bohemian cauldron of Greenwich Village, Jared painting and doing illustrations and producing posters, and Jensen writing and directing plays. In Paris Jared builds a bit of a reputation as a queer painter of queer subjects, and it kind of follows him to New York. They're never wealthy and they don't see great continuous fame in their lifetimes - their work goes in and out of fashion, as sometimes happens - but they're happy and productive and reasonably successful as working creative people, and at least Jared no longer needs Jensen to translate what people are saying to him. And they learn to cook for themselves. :D
I am happy-ending girl. Of course they live happily ever after.
Especially compared to previous bangs, writing this one was fairly stress-free. I didn't start to panic until the end of April, when the draft deadline loomed and I realized I had no idea how to end my fic. (Unique among bangs, I never knew how this one ended until I actually got to the ending. Usually I know a lot earlier.) And I panicked a little in June when I wasn't sure if I'd have it edited in time. But overall? Writing it was fun and I enjoyed it, and at the end of the day that's really all I ask for.
Aside from the occasional detail I didn't use, this is pretty much the fic I wanted to write, when I finally decided I wanted to write it. It has about as much edge as an angora bunny after a few turns in a clothesdryer set on super-fluff, and I don't care.