Quartet for a Haunting Author's Note
J2 RPS AU
R
Author's Note
Master post
Art
So this is kind of a weird one. Technically this story is my third idea, although I never wrote any of the first one. I did start the second idea, though, hit a point where I couldn't figure out what the actual story was - it was a cute premise but where was the conflict? - asked for help, got help, and then for no apparent reason had a mental image of a mattress sitting in the middle of the stage in an empty theater, made up with sheets and blankets and a pillow.
That new image didn't have anything behind it - no story, no characters, no explanation, no nothing - but it was more intriguing than the current wip, so I ran with it.
Unfortunately I had this brainstorm the middle of February, giving myself two and a half months to plan, plot, cast, draft, and title a bang. Which is not a lot of time. Especially since I didn't know what the story was. Which is a theme with me, to be honest. I should be used to it by now.
(Also my landlady told me the beginning of February that she was selling the building, so I had to find a new apartment and start planning to move. Fortunately I didn't have to start packing until May, after I turned in the draft. I can only do one big thing at a time - either move house OR write a bang. Not both.)
At first Jensen was just a garden-variety squatter, but I couldn't settle on a reason for him to be squatting that I liked. So then I thought well, what if he was cursed (and dear-tiger suggested I watch Groundhog Day, which I had coincidentally already seen), but I didn't love that either, because why was he cursed? And why would the curse get him stuck in an abandoned theater? And how would either he or Jared or both break said curse? Especially since the story was supposed to be from Jared's POV? There were some dumb ideas along the way. And then - and then! - I thought wait, what if he's a ghost? What if he's dead? And he just doesn't know it? I'd seen "The Haunting of Bly Manor", even though haunted-house stories scare the crap out of me (I had to watch it with all the lights on) (I blame Rahul Kohli who is just the cutest), and Mrs Grose made an impression.
The problem with writing a ghost story is that in the end the ghost has to be banished. And if your main character is falling in love with the ghost? You don't get a happy ending. And I am happy-ending girl. And I wasn't sure I really wanted to write a ghost story, where the ghost boy ultimately moves on and the living boy doesn't, and I changed my mind twice about it. After having already changed my mind over what this particular story was, after having changed my mind over what I wanted to write for the bang, after having changed my mind - you get the picture. If I wasn't always scrapping one idea for another I wouldn't be me.
But the other thing about writing a ghost story - because I'm happy-ending girl, writing a story where the boys don't end up together is a whole new thing, and every so often I have to write something I've never written before. Like, last year was my first (and likely only) political bang, and the year before was my first space bang (and I think the only one where J&J are legitimately and without deliberate UST purely platonic friends). So this year is my first sad ending bang.
This is also my twelfth bang. Good lord.
Anyway. I said I got the ghost who doesn't know he's dead from "The Haunting of Bly Manor". The hand gestures people use to cast their spells come from "The Magicians", because I always loved that that was such an important component and I just thought it looked really cool. The thing Jared tells Jensen about his student film, where the cops think a scene they're shooting is about to be an actual crime, is lifted wholesale from an episode of "The Deuce", in which Maggie Gyllenhaal's character is guerrilla-shooting her first porn film on the late-night streets of Manhattan, and because it's an updating of Little Red Riding Hood, and because Red is played by a white girl and the wolf is played by a black man, the cops pull their car in front of the guy - and because he's running he falls over the hood - and try to arrest him. And everyone manages to explain that no, it's not a crime in progress, it's a movie, see, we have a camera and a sound guy, an actress and an actor and a director, really, this is all deliberate, let us go. And the cops let them go so they can continue filming.
That bit also owes a debt to something I read about an episode of "Friday Night Lights", that it was shot in New York without a permit and presumably without permission, I think just the director and the cameraperson following Taylor Kitsch and Scott Porter down the sidewalk. I love that kind of movie-making (or TV-making) - just you and the camera and the actors, shooting the scene without permission or permit among people just going on about their lives, totally unaware that media is being made right in front of them.
"The Deuce" is a good show, by the way. Kind of grim, because it's about sex workers and pimps and the porn industry in New York in the 70s and 80s, back when Times Square was the home of XXX movie theaters and peep shows and streetwalkers and not the family-friendly hyper-touristy neighborhood it is today, but it's non-judgemental and, for a show about sex, not particularly porny.
I got the idea that Jared was only allowed one audio track for his student film, and that he used it for the soundtrack rather than dialogue, from a friend of mine who, millions of years ago, got a graduate degree that required a student film, which was only allowed... one audio track. :D And he likewise used it for music.
I legitimately do not know the final form of the film Jared is working on all through the fic. I was thinking about movies like Metropolis, in terms of the way it looks - monumental sets, stark lighting - and very early-days horror films. Although the only one of those I know off-hand is Nosferatu, which I've actually never seen - the closest I've come is renting Shadow of the Vampire for Halloween one year, back when video stores were still a thing. I saw Metropolis a bunch of years ago at a local theater, but that and a religious-themed movie that I can't remember the name of (it had been recently restored and had some nifty special effects) are kind of the sum total of my experience with early 20th century movies. I'm familiar with films of the era mostly through stills and clips. Compared to The Wild Night of Mr Fright, which is supposed to look realistic, Jared's mip (movie in progress :D ) is intended to be more stylized and artificial. The idea that you never really see the creature in the creature feature is mostly taken from The Blair Witch Project, specifically the fact that you never see what's menacing the main characters. I saw that movie twice and both times it was terrifying.
I'm not a huge fan of horror movies. I don't like being scared. So why did I make that Jared's cinematic focus? I don't know. It made sense at the time.
I came up with the title for The Wild Night of Mr Fright when I was trying to fall asleep one night, and I was so convinced I'd stolen it from somewhere that I had to look it up on IMDB the next morning, and when that didn't turn up anything I googled it to be sure. I'm still not entirely convinced I made it up out of my own head, but so far I haven't been able to find out where else I might have heard or read it.
Originally this fic was set in October and November, for the simple reason that I wanted to include Halloween. Ghosts, liminal spaces, kids in costume. :D dear-tiger pointed out that in that case, Jared might be concerned about the heating in the theater, and why it's not on, and why the squatter never seems to be bothered by the cold. And while the fact that Jensen - well, Ross - being a ghost is in the summary and thus not a surprise to the reader, I didn't want to give it away too soon in the fic. So, spring. Fewer liminal spaces, but with a ghost wandering around the theater bringing his ghostly cold spots with him, and with Jared thinking the interior of a theater wouldn't heat up too quickly (no windows, for one thing), fewer chances for him to start questioning things too early.
The magic was also originally something that most people are born with, but every so often someone will be born with an excess of talent. This leads to magic families, who are the folks with the power and the wealth. Jensen came from one of these families, but he was unlucky enough to have not inherited the strong magic along with the money. But if strong magic power is a purely genetic inheritance, wouldn't that lead to inbreeding? If people are trying to keep their magic - and thus their power - in the family. So that went out, and now it's like anything else - you learn some spells in elementary or middle school along with math and reading and social studies and science and maybe a language, and if you want to really get into it and make it a career, you go to college for it. Like becoming an accountant or a teacher or an engineer or a painter. Or a composer. :D
The fic is very vaguely set in the mid-late 60s (I described it to amberdreams as late mod, early hippie) for no other reason than I wanted to picture the girls in miniskirts, and I could give the guys sideburns. And I was thinking about gritty realistic kinds of movies from the late 60s and 70s, although I'm not enough of a movie buff and to be honest didn't really do any research into which specific movies those would be. And anything from the 70s would be too late on the timeline anyway. I didn't want to write a contemporary fic, but I didn't want to do a ton of historical research either. (See: the time crunch.) I wanted pre-internet, pre-making a movie on your phone, pre-digital, but also art house theaters and little independent cinemas and the kinds of places that show big studio blockbusters and romcoms and whatever. A little bit of everything, and that strain of DIY that makes people go "Let's open our own theater and put on our own shows!" Because the plays you write are a tch too weird for most local theaters, and you don't want to have to a. put them on in your back yard, or b. run an underground one-off theater where you get one night to do your show and then whoever owns the property boots your ass. Which turns out to not be a problem when apparently no one owns the property. (Someone probably does, but I don't know who.)
I was also vague on the city because, like last year, I didn't want to set it in a real place because I didn't want to have to fit the story I wanted to tell, and the visuals I had in my head, with actual historical events and settings. Sometimes you just want to make everything up. Sunflower House is a brownstone, basically, in a neighborhood like a lot of gentrified neighborhoods in New York or Boston - only not gentrified yet - with a long, slightly overgrown back yard. But I'd already set a fic in New York in the late 70s, early 80s, and I didn't want to do that again. And I didn't want to set it in Boston (which I've done twice). So it's a northernish US city, not huge - not New York City - but big enough to be the big city where a young man might arrive with a shiny new film degree and a desire to make movies. Maybe Jared already knew someone living there. Who knows.
There's exactly two ridiculous cameos in this - the excitable Italian and his curly-haired friend who show up at Genevieve's bakery on Memorial Day. They were actually lifted from idea #2 for this bang, the first one I started writing. If you know who they are, and honestly I don't think they're that well disguised, I'll send you cookies. :D The excitable Italian is in the US researching a cookbook. I think his friend, who's Dutch, is mostly along for the ride and for translation services when necessary, because his English is better.
Is this the story I wanted to write, when I got a bug up my butt and threw out the other idea? It's more coherent, certainly. You could tell from the draft I submitted May 1 that I changed my mind halfway through what the story was. But it is ultimately a love story, because they're always love stories, and I wrote a ghost, although how successful I was isn't for me to say, and I still really like the image of a mattress sitting in the middle of the stage in an abandoned theater, made up with sheets and blankets and a pillow, surrounded by pages torn from notebooks with sketches and drawings and musical compositions, with tiny lights like Christmas lights hanging in the air overhead. What can I say - I like the romance of it. I hope you did too.
R
Author's Note
Master post
Art
So this is kind of a weird one. Technically this story is my third idea, although I never wrote any of the first one. I did start the second idea, though, hit a point where I couldn't figure out what the actual story was - it was a cute premise but where was the conflict? - asked for help, got help, and then for no apparent reason had a mental image of a mattress sitting in the middle of the stage in an empty theater, made up with sheets and blankets and a pillow.
That new image didn't have anything behind it - no story, no characters, no explanation, no nothing - but it was more intriguing than the current wip, so I ran with it.
Unfortunately I had this brainstorm the middle of February, giving myself two and a half months to plan, plot, cast, draft, and title a bang. Which is not a lot of time. Especially since I didn't know what the story was. Which is a theme with me, to be honest. I should be used to it by now.
(Also my landlady told me the beginning of February that she was selling the building, so I had to find a new apartment and start planning to move. Fortunately I didn't have to start packing until May, after I turned in the draft. I can only do one big thing at a time - either move house OR write a bang. Not both.)
At first Jensen was just a garden-variety squatter, but I couldn't settle on a reason for him to be squatting that I liked. So then I thought well, what if he was cursed (and dear-tiger suggested I watch Groundhog Day, which I had coincidentally already seen), but I didn't love that either, because why was he cursed? And why would the curse get him stuck in an abandoned theater? And how would either he or Jared or both break said curse? Especially since the story was supposed to be from Jared's POV? There were some dumb ideas along the way. And then - and then! - I thought wait, what if he's a ghost? What if he's dead? And he just doesn't know it? I'd seen "The Haunting of Bly Manor", even though haunted-house stories scare the crap out of me (I had to watch it with all the lights on) (I blame Rahul Kohli who is just the cutest), and Mrs Grose made an impression.
The problem with writing a ghost story is that in the end the ghost has to be banished. And if your main character is falling in love with the ghost? You don't get a happy ending. And I am happy-ending girl. And I wasn't sure I really wanted to write a ghost story, where the ghost boy ultimately moves on and the living boy doesn't, and I changed my mind twice about it. After having already changed my mind over what this particular story was, after having changed my mind over what I wanted to write for the bang, after having changed my mind - you get the picture. If I wasn't always scrapping one idea for another I wouldn't be me.
But the other thing about writing a ghost story - because I'm happy-ending girl, writing a story where the boys don't end up together is a whole new thing, and every so often I have to write something I've never written before. Like, last year was my first (and likely only) political bang, and the year before was my first space bang (and I think the only one where J&J are legitimately and without deliberate UST purely platonic friends). So this year is my first sad ending bang.
This is also my twelfth bang. Good lord.
Anyway. I said I got the ghost who doesn't know he's dead from "The Haunting of Bly Manor". The hand gestures people use to cast their spells come from "The Magicians", because I always loved that that was such an important component and I just thought it looked really cool. The thing Jared tells Jensen about his student film, where the cops think a scene they're shooting is about to be an actual crime, is lifted wholesale from an episode of "The Deuce", in which Maggie Gyllenhaal's character is guerrilla-shooting her first porn film on the late-night streets of Manhattan, and because it's an updating of Little Red Riding Hood, and because Red is played by a white girl and the wolf is played by a black man, the cops pull their car in front of the guy - and because he's running he falls over the hood - and try to arrest him. And everyone manages to explain that no, it's not a crime in progress, it's a movie, see, we have a camera and a sound guy, an actress and an actor and a director, really, this is all deliberate, let us go. And the cops let them go so they can continue filming.
That bit also owes a debt to something I read about an episode of "Friday Night Lights", that it was shot in New York without a permit and presumably without permission, I think just the director and the cameraperson following Taylor Kitsch and Scott Porter down the sidewalk. I love that kind of movie-making (or TV-making) - just you and the camera and the actors, shooting the scene without permission or permit among people just going on about their lives, totally unaware that media is being made right in front of them.
"The Deuce" is a good show, by the way. Kind of grim, because it's about sex workers and pimps and the porn industry in New York in the 70s and 80s, back when Times Square was the home of XXX movie theaters and peep shows and streetwalkers and not the family-friendly hyper-touristy neighborhood it is today, but it's non-judgemental and, for a show about sex, not particularly porny.
I got the idea that Jared was only allowed one audio track for his student film, and that he used it for the soundtrack rather than dialogue, from a friend of mine who, millions of years ago, got a graduate degree that required a student film, which was only allowed... one audio track. :D And he likewise used it for music.
I legitimately do not know the final form of the film Jared is working on all through the fic. I was thinking about movies like Metropolis, in terms of the way it looks - monumental sets, stark lighting - and very early-days horror films. Although the only one of those I know off-hand is Nosferatu, which I've actually never seen - the closest I've come is renting Shadow of the Vampire for Halloween one year, back when video stores were still a thing. I saw Metropolis a bunch of years ago at a local theater, but that and a religious-themed movie that I can't remember the name of (it had been recently restored and had some nifty special effects) are kind of the sum total of my experience with early 20th century movies. I'm familiar with films of the era mostly through stills and clips. Compared to The Wild Night of Mr Fright, which is supposed to look realistic, Jared's mip (movie in progress :D ) is intended to be more stylized and artificial. The idea that you never really see the creature in the creature feature is mostly taken from The Blair Witch Project, specifically the fact that you never see what's menacing the main characters. I saw that movie twice and both times it was terrifying.
I'm not a huge fan of horror movies. I don't like being scared. So why did I make that Jared's cinematic focus? I don't know. It made sense at the time.
I came up with the title for The Wild Night of Mr Fright when I was trying to fall asleep one night, and I was so convinced I'd stolen it from somewhere that I had to look it up on IMDB the next morning, and when that didn't turn up anything I googled it to be sure. I'm still not entirely convinced I made it up out of my own head, but so far I haven't been able to find out where else I might have heard or read it.
Originally this fic was set in October and November, for the simple reason that I wanted to include Halloween. Ghosts, liminal spaces, kids in costume. :D dear-tiger pointed out that in that case, Jared might be concerned about the heating in the theater, and why it's not on, and why the squatter never seems to be bothered by the cold. And while the fact that Jensen - well, Ross - being a ghost is in the summary and thus not a surprise to the reader, I didn't want to give it away too soon in the fic. So, spring. Fewer liminal spaces, but with a ghost wandering around the theater bringing his ghostly cold spots with him, and with Jared thinking the interior of a theater wouldn't heat up too quickly (no windows, for one thing), fewer chances for him to start questioning things too early.
The magic was also originally something that most people are born with, but every so often someone will be born with an excess of talent. This leads to magic families, who are the folks with the power and the wealth. Jensen came from one of these families, but he was unlucky enough to have not inherited the strong magic along with the money. But if strong magic power is a purely genetic inheritance, wouldn't that lead to inbreeding? If people are trying to keep their magic - and thus their power - in the family. So that went out, and now it's like anything else - you learn some spells in elementary or middle school along with math and reading and social studies and science and maybe a language, and if you want to really get into it and make it a career, you go to college for it. Like becoming an accountant or a teacher or an engineer or a painter. Or a composer. :D
The fic is very vaguely set in the mid-late 60s (I described it to amberdreams as late mod, early hippie) for no other reason than I wanted to picture the girls in miniskirts, and I could give the guys sideburns. And I was thinking about gritty realistic kinds of movies from the late 60s and 70s, although I'm not enough of a movie buff and to be honest didn't really do any research into which specific movies those would be. And anything from the 70s would be too late on the timeline anyway. I didn't want to write a contemporary fic, but I didn't want to do a ton of historical research either. (See: the time crunch.) I wanted pre-internet, pre-making a movie on your phone, pre-digital, but also art house theaters and little independent cinemas and the kinds of places that show big studio blockbusters and romcoms and whatever. A little bit of everything, and that strain of DIY that makes people go "Let's open our own theater and put on our own shows!" Because the plays you write are a tch too weird for most local theaters, and you don't want to have to a. put them on in your back yard, or b. run an underground one-off theater where you get one night to do your show and then whoever owns the property boots your ass. Which turns out to not be a problem when apparently no one owns the property. (Someone probably does, but I don't know who.)
I was also vague on the city because, like last year, I didn't want to set it in a real place because I didn't want to have to fit the story I wanted to tell, and the visuals I had in my head, with actual historical events and settings. Sometimes you just want to make everything up. Sunflower House is a brownstone, basically, in a neighborhood like a lot of gentrified neighborhoods in New York or Boston - only not gentrified yet - with a long, slightly overgrown back yard. But I'd already set a fic in New York in the late 70s, early 80s, and I didn't want to do that again. And I didn't want to set it in Boston (which I've done twice). So it's a northernish US city, not huge - not New York City - but big enough to be the big city where a young man might arrive with a shiny new film degree and a desire to make movies. Maybe Jared already knew someone living there. Who knows.
There's exactly two ridiculous cameos in this - the excitable Italian and his curly-haired friend who show up at Genevieve's bakery on Memorial Day. They were actually lifted from idea #2 for this bang, the first one I started writing. If you know who they are, and honestly I don't think they're that well disguised, I'll send you cookies. :D The excitable Italian is in the US researching a cookbook. I think his friend, who's Dutch, is mostly along for the ride and for translation services when necessary, because his English is better.
Is this the story I wanted to write, when I got a bug up my butt and threw out the other idea? It's more coherent, certainly. You could tell from the draft I submitted May 1 that I changed my mind halfway through what the story was. But it is ultimately a love story, because they're always love stories, and I wrote a ghost, although how successful I was isn't for me to say, and I still really like the image of a mattress sitting in the middle of the stage in an abandoned theater, made up with sheets and blankets and a pillow, surrounded by pages torn from notebooks with sketches and drawings and musical compositions, with tiny lights like Christmas lights hanging in the air overhead. What can I say - I like the romance of it. I hope you did too.