she looks right at you and bolts
Jan. 1st, 2012 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lostinapapercupI'm pretty sure anyone who knows me and happened to read either of these stories will not be surprised, but...
For Yuletide this year I wrote If I Only Had a Heart, pre-canon Kate/Justin from Fairly Legal, and I also wrote Someone You Don't Know, a fairy tale-infused Yuletide Madness fic inspired by The Airborne Toxic Event's "Sometime Around Midnight."
Yuletide was interesting from the beginning because I've never been assigned someone I've had any previous interaction with, and suddenly I felt kind of like I needed to try to inch around my recipient, which was a little awkward since I'd joined a community we have in common less than two weeks before assignments went out and we have similar BSG-related interests. So even though I assumed it would be pretty easy for her to narrow down the short list of suspects once she realized she had Fairly Legal fic, I've spent the past six weeks generally interacting with her only if first spoken to. What's funny is that my first fic of 2011 was written for a prompt she made elsewhere, so there was something weirdly circular about it.
Truthfully, I'm not very into Kate/Justin even though they're the romance in Fairly Legal, but they are canon and I like Justin and love Trucco. I was more than willing to offer to write them. What made it a real challenge is that they're so dysfunctional. Kind of stupidly dysfunctional. So trying to balance believable character voices and true-to-canon characterization while still making my pre-canon events seem realistic was something I worried about a lot. While I didn't ignore Kate's flaws, I almost felt like she was too nice in the story, but I had to keep two things in mind. The first is that in other areas of his life Justin seems pretty straightforward, and if she makes him unreasonable and conflicted and less no-nonsense she needed to have had a chance to get under his skin in order to do that. If she was going around all the time doing the kind of stuff she does on the show I'm not convinced he would've fallen for her in the first place. This is directly tied to the second thing I tried to keep in mind while writing: it's not uncommon for people to be on better behavior in early stages of a relationship. You're more likely to feel a need to impress early on, and you're more likely to take someone for granted as time passes. I think that happened pretty quickly for Kate.
The good news is it seemed pretty well-received by the person who mattered, and elsewhere a total stranger called it in-character.
When Yuletide Madness opened I tried to retell Sleeping Beauty (scifi with a female protagonist rescuing her sweetheart), but the story kept growing and growing. Between being short on free time around Christmas and coming down with this cold that's finally just about gone, I couldn't turn it into what I wanted by the deadline. Then I realized I had one more night than I thought I did, so I took another look at the letters, saw one of the other people I'd originally thought I could end up writing for this time around, looked at her profile again, and got to work on the second story. I don't really think of it as songfic, but that's because I always think of songfic as having lyrics sprinkled throughout. I don't know if that matches general fandom consensus, so between this story potentially being considered songfic and being told in second-person, which apparently carries a stigma (but not quite like the one I tend to see first-person getting!), I have to say I expected no extra attention for it. I thought it could work pretty well for the recipient, though, and she did seem to like it. I'm pleasantly surprised that it's had a small audience.
As always, thank you toin_the_blue for playing beta. One day I'm going to end up getting her requests in my inbox when assignments go out, and I'll have to do this elaborate song and dance to make her believe I'm writing for someone else.
For Yuletide this year I wrote If I Only Had a Heart, pre-canon Kate/Justin from Fairly Legal, and I also wrote Someone You Don't Know, a fairy tale-infused Yuletide Madness fic inspired by The Airborne Toxic Event's "Sometime Around Midnight."
Yuletide was interesting from the beginning because I've never been assigned someone I've had any previous interaction with, and suddenly I felt kind of like I needed to try to inch around my recipient, which was a little awkward since I'd joined a community we have in common less than two weeks before assignments went out and we have similar BSG-related interests. So even though I assumed it would be pretty easy for her to narrow down the short list of suspects once she realized she had Fairly Legal fic, I've spent the past six weeks generally interacting with her only if first spoken to. What's funny is that my first fic of 2011 was written for a prompt she made elsewhere, so there was something weirdly circular about it.
Truthfully, I'm not very into Kate/Justin even though they're the romance in Fairly Legal, but they are canon and I like Justin and love Trucco. I was more than willing to offer to write them. What made it a real challenge is that they're so dysfunctional. Kind of stupidly dysfunctional. So trying to balance believable character voices and true-to-canon characterization while still making my pre-canon events seem realistic was something I worried about a lot. While I didn't ignore Kate's flaws, I almost felt like she was too nice in the story, but I had to keep two things in mind. The first is that in other areas of his life Justin seems pretty straightforward, and if she makes him unreasonable and conflicted and less no-nonsense she needed to have had a chance to get under his skin in order to do that. If she was going around all the time doing the kind of stuff she does on the show I'm not convinced he would've fallen for her in the first place. This is directly tied to the second thing I tried to keep in mind while writing: it's not uncommon for people to be on better behavior in early stages of a relationship. You're more likely to feel a need to impress early on, and you're more likely to take someone for granted as time passes. I think that happened pretty quickly for Kate.
The good news is it seemed pretty well-received by the person who mattered, and elsewhere a total stranger called it in-character.
When Yuletide Madness opened I tried to retell Sleeping Beauty (scifi with a female protagonist rescuing her sweetheart), but the story kept growing and growing. Between being short on free time around Christmas and coming down with this cold that's finally just about gone, I couldn't turn it into what I wanted by the deadline. Then I realized I had one more night than I thought I did, so I took another look at the letters, saw one of the other people I'd originally thought I could end up writing for this time around, looked at her profile again, and got to work on the second story. I don't really think of it as songfic, but that's because I always think of songfic as having lyrics sprinkled throughout. I don't know if that matches general fandom consensus, so between this story potentially being considered songfic and being told in second-person, which apparently carries a stigma (but not quite like the one I tend to see first-person getting!), I have to say I expected no extra attention for it. I thought it could work pretty well for the recipient, though, and she did seem to like it. I'm pleasantly surprised that it's had a small audience.
As always, thank you to
in_the_blue for playing beta. One day I'm going to end up getting her requests in my inbox when assignments go out, and I'll have to do this elaborate song and dance to make her believe I'm writing for someone else.
