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(For me at least) it’s the 23rd of December, which is a special day. And no, it has nothing to do with impending holidays or it being the anniversary of the day Van Gogh cut of his ear – it all about me. It is the one year anniversary of the very first piece of fanfic (No One You Can Save) being uploaded onto the net.
To mark the occasion, I thought I would do some sort of special features type thing and reveal some things about some of the fics I’ve written over the past year.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
le_parapluie once remarked in a comment to a writing meme I did that while a lot of us met through writing, we very rarely talk about it and I really want to talk about it.
So today we’ve got tales of the original concepts, deleted subplots, ongoing themes, where I got inspiration from, how I managed to get a novel length fic from the first verse of an Oasis song and answers to commonly asked questions such as “WTF was with No One You Can Save?” and “Was Tonks taking her clothes off a supposed to be a sexual thing?” (Yes, yes it was).
Absence and Memory
This was one of those annoying fic that sprung into mind nearly perfectly formed when writing an essay. The essay in question happened to be on the Whig ascendancy from 1714, which explains why there is a line about Walpole, Whigs, Tories and the Old Pretender got in there.
Absence holds the record for the fic with the most requests for a sequel, which mystifies me since I think it’s very self contained. After what occurs, canon takes over and Norrington and Elizabeth become free from the constraints of society and their relationship becomes less an exercise in manners and hidden emotion more about their own personal agendas and bitterness towards each other. Since they have become free to say what they think about each other, I can’t really follow the same sort of story.
Auror Disciplinary Committee Case 1229
Possibly the worst title in the history of fanfic bar Growing.
The origin of this fic could come down to me catching strep throat during exams. I never got the chance to study for a particular exam and got a crap mark. This was an outlet to prove to myself that I do in fact know something of the subject.
That and I wanted to explore the fact that Tonks in OotP was in fact acting against her employer. A lot of Tonks fic sees her running around defying the Ministry without a care in the world about the implications of it and with it having very few repercussions. I wanted to get it across that running around joining rebel groups is not something a civil servant would do lightly; it’s a theme I carried on into Familiar Debate as well.
It was also a response to the various criticisms of Tonks made post HBP. Though I don’t think we need a “Tonks’ depression was bloody well justified” rant right now.
Beneath the Sheets
I use a lot of music when writing characters and emotions and Neil Finn has been particularly influential in that respect (dude writes the best love songs). So even though Private Universe is not one of my favourite Crowded House songs, I couldn’t resist giving writing a fic to it a try.
My fics to that point had been very dialogue heavy. I hate describing things; I’m a rather lazy writer in that respect so writing this with all of six lines of dialogue was quite a challenge.
Beneath is the fic which has elicited the most criticism, mostly about my decision to have Tonks get naked. Some did not like the sexual aspect of the nudity. Personally, I would have been offended if she didn’t get her kit off. If she kept her clothes on, then Tonks would have been acting as Remus nurse. I wanted to emphasis that she cares for him because she loves him, not because she is subservient to him. By removing her clothes, Tonks gained power in the relationship.
Familiar Debate
I came up for the idea of this fic in July however it fell victim to the Pirate movie that came and ate Meddow’s brain. It got revived after I spent an hour in my brother’s presence. Family can be a wonderful thing.
I don’t generally have characters swear in fanfiction. I like to capture the spirit of the source material and not the spirit of truck stop. But I think this one called for it. I was aiming for the “fuck you” scene in The American President - that whole defeated, you may be right and I don’t want to admit it desperation.
Ghosts in the Interrogation Room
I owe a lot of Ghosts. I think it is the fic that put me out there on the map. Though to be honest, when I first posted it I thought it was awful and though others would also think it was awful, so much so that I didn’t pimp it out anywhere on LJ.
Current events do have quite a heavy influence on some of what I write and ne of the issues that has been floating around a lot lately is if we know a person has information that could save lives, is torture justified? My inner liberal says no, never. My inner pragmatist is not so sure.
Peter was not initially in the fic, it was Draco. And the torture was going to be real torture. Tonks was going to run down and rant against it. So basically, it started off life as a PSA and it was, in one word, awful. It then occurred to me that to really write characters well, sometimes you have to let your characters do something you find repugnant. Also, in initial stages there was more emphasis on the twist ending and Tonks part at the end was only a few lines long. But another one of my pet issues came up, the loss of a generation to war.
Growing
Growing can pretty much be blamed on me listening to too much Oasis, particularly Live Forever.
Maybe
I don’t really want to know
How your garden grows
‘Cause I just want to fly
That song reminded me Tonks which lead to Andromeda becoming a herbologist. Naturally, being the canon herbology geek, Neville then stepped in and plot was born.
A lot of emotions from my own life have been put in the chapters, a lot more than any other fic I’ve ever written. Current events again have a heavy influence and you can find 9/11 and the Boxing Day Tsunami in there.
Growing was originally set up for another novel fic which will probably now never be written, in which contains in it Voldemort launching an all out attack on London.
There is a theme with the chapter titles. If anyone has picked up it, they haven’t said.
There are also a few deleted subplots. Originally, at one point, Andromeda was going to be hauled in by the Ministry for questioning regarding her family leading to Tonks quitting her job. Harry and Tonks were going to get into a fight because Harry had to find out second hand that Tonks was a Slytherin. Also Tonks had half her hand blasted off in a battle and re-grew it.
I’ve been giving serious consideration to renaming Growing How Your Garden Grows lately. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea renaming a fic though.
Hostile Takeover
I have this guilt complex about Hostile Takeover. It is my most popular fic and has been niffled, reced and translated. Yet it really did take me less than two hours to writ and I posted it on the same day I got the idea. I wish that more hard work had gone into it, then I could feel better about it.
I’ve also never been comfortable with the fact that it is so capitalist. If you’ve ever heard my opinions on large corporations, profits and shareholders (which usually come out in the context of drug companies) you’d understand.
No One You Can Save
Seriously what happens when I watch Saw and then listen to The Beatles.
I commonly get asked in reviews how Tonks and Remus ended up in that room together. There is actually a reason and I’ve been meaning to put it in an R/T fic and maybe will one of these days.
As to who put them there, well it could be Death Eaters, it could be some enemy in the future, but I like the idea that it was Umbridge.
Paper Aeroplanes
Probably owe a lot to my father for this one. He loves Lancaster Bombers.
Penance More Will Do
I’m not Catholic, or even Christian these days, but I’ve always liked the idea of purgatory, some place between heaven and hell. However writing purgatory, as I found out, nearly killed my muse dead.
Obviously, there is a heavy influence of the Coleridge in Penance. There is also a side of Life of Pi and Dracula in there as well. It is unusual as I normally get inspiration from music, movies, current events etc, but Penance is the only fic I purely got ideas from poetry and books. Probably why really don’t like Penance, since the medium never changed and it can only pale in comparison to my sources of inspiration.
Potential
This is the fic that has changed life more times than any other from conception to completion. It was originally going to be called “The Man Who Sold the World” (go the Bowie) and be a fic with basically contains my Tonks knew Snape was going to kill Dumbledore theory. Can’t remember what made me change it to what it was.
It is sort of my manifesto of the Snape/Tonks relationship, he’s a skody old man with an obsession with the Black family and she’s rightly creeped out by him. That’s how I read them in canon, that’s how I write them.
The Admiral
The Admiral is one of those fics that evolved from a line of dialogue that sprung into my head - “I will hunt you down like the dog you are and hang you right here from the rafters.”
This fic also amuses me since I’ve had favourable reviews from both sides of the Norrington fangirl rift (for those outside PotC fandom, there are those that love DMC!Norrington and some that hate it so much they have refuse to have anything to do with Dead Man’s Chest).
The Illusion of Whole
Not much to say about this one other that it is my favourite of everything I’ve written this year. It contains many of the things I love, completeness, symmetry, me arsing around with space time continuum and an exploration of a theme I’ve been preoccupied with all year - how one act of hate can have so many consequences which is why I see it as a companion piece to Ghosts in the Interrogation Room.
Also like Ghosts, one of the characters changed from the original idea. Bellatrix was going to be the one who died, not Greyback. But I decided it would be more interesting to have Tonks defeat Remus’ demon rather than her own.
Illusion also happens to contain the greatest typo ever. I mean to put “sole witness to the act,” and instead wrote “soul witness to the act” and it still works.
The Ropes
The Ropes is part of my great big complicated R/T back story, the vast majority of which is still in my head, but I’ve been working on it since October last year. I had the original idea of writing four novel length fics that deal with Remus and Tonks until OotP. But I’m too lazy and I’ve decided I quite like doing it this way, with the odd one shot emerging every now and again.
Another theme which I seem to be preoccupied with is this entire issue of the difference perception, appearance and reality. It can also be seen in Illusion, Penance, the Admiral, Truth and Absence. Like probably everyone out there, I hate it when people treat me a certain way because they have made a judgment about who I am based on my appearance (oh, she must have stolen it, she’s a teenager etc) and this is just my way of ranting about it.
The Truth of the Matter
While I have said that this was possibly the result of watching too much Coupling, I think there is also a hint of House (“everybody lies”) and The Princess Bride in Truth.
You know, there is also lot of commentary on fandom in the Truth of the Matter. I didn’t place that in purposely, it just sort of happened.
In the cut subplot department: Kathy was originally to have a broken arm and Norrington had entered the pub to tell her that he had seen to it that the man who had done it was now suffering from his own broken arm. Though, having Norrington act like a gangster just didn’t seem to fit.
Unravelling
Half the fun of writing is that you get to defy the laws of physics arse around with the space-time continuum. I love flashbacks and I love non-linear storylines and I particularly love them when it gets used in the context of a love story, so I did it myself. The idea was that both time and a relationship are one piece of string that has been held in the midde and had the two sides twisted together. So I started in the middle and worked my way to the end.
It was a bitch to write though, since I had to try and make the jumps make some sort of sense. At one point I had to colour code the text based on which steam the scenes were running with. There was about four months between when I started writing it and when I posted it.
Walking Down Corridors
There were two possible ending to this fic. There was the nice one and the depressing one and it took me forever to choose the later.
An early version of this had a day in the life of Narcissa while she was in hiding at Hogwarts after having betrayed Voldemort for the safety of her husband and son. Another early draft had Narcissa and Molly living out their normal lives, but I thought that was too boring. But in all the versions there was going to be a line about Lucius damning the entire Malfoy family.
Obviously, that hasn’t been everything I’ve written in the past year, but not everything I’ve written has much of a story behind it. I think I’ll leave the floor open, if there are any questions relating to anything I’ve written, fell free to ask them. In case you were wondering where to find any of the mentioned fics, my fanfic master list is here
To mark the occasion, I thought I would do some sort of special features type thing and reveal some things about some of the fics I’ve written over the past year.
le_parapluie once remarked in a comment to a writing meme I did that while a lot of us met through writing, we very rarely talk about it and I really want to talk about it. So today we’ve got tales of the original concepts, deleted subplots, ongoing themes, where I got inspiration from, how I managed to get a novel length fic from the first verse of an Oasis song and answers to commonly asked questions such as “WTF was with No One You Can Save?” and “Was Tonks taking her clothes off a supposed to be a sexual thing?” (Yes, yes it was).
Absence and Memory
This was one of those annoying fic that sprung into mind nearly perfectly formed when writing an essay. The essay in question happened to be on the Whig ascendancy from 1714, which explains why there is a line about Walpole, Whigs, Tories and the Old Pretender got in there.
Absence holds the record for the fic with the most requests for a sequel, which mystifies me since I think it’s very self contained. After what occurs, canon takes over and Norrington and Elizabeth become free from the constraints of society and their relationship becomes less an exercise in manners and hidden emotion more about their own personal agendas and bitterness towards each other. Since they have become free to say what they think about each other, I can’t really follow the same sort of story.
Auror Disciplinary Committee Case 1229
Possibly the worst title in the history of fanfic bar Growing.
The origin of this fic could come down to me catching strep throat during exams. I never got the chance to study for a particular exam and got a crap mark. This was an outlet to prove to myself that I do in fact know something of the subject.
That and I wanted to explore the fact that Tonks in OotP was in fact acting against her employer. A lot of Tonks fic sees her running around defying the Ministry without a care in the world about the implications of it and with it having very few repercussions. I wanted to get it across that running around joining rebel groups is not something a civil servant would do lightly; it’s a theme I carried on into Familiar Debate as well.
It was also a response to the various criticisms of Tonks made post HBP. Though I don’t think we need a “Tonks’ depression was bloody well justified” rant right now.
Beneath the Sheets
I use a lot of music when writing characters and emotions and Neil Finn has been particularly influential in that respect (dude writes the best love songs). So even though Private Universe is not one of my favourite Crowded House songs, I couldn’t resist giving writing a fic to it a try.
My fics to that point had been very dialogue heavy. I hate describing things; I’m a rather lazy writer in that respect so writing this with all of six lines of dialogue was quite a challenge.
Beneath is the fic which has elicited the most criticism, mostly about my decision to have Tonks get naked. Some did not like the sexual aspect of the nudity. Personally, I would have been offended if she didn’t get her kit off. If she kept her clothes on, then Tonks would have been acting as Remus nurse. I wanted to emphasis that she cares for him because she loves him, not because she is subservient to him. By removing her clothes, Tonks gained power in the relationship.
Familiar Debate
I came up for the idea of this fic in July however it fell victim to the Pirate movie that came and ate Meddow’s brain. It got revived after I spent an hour in my brother’s presence. Family can be a wonderful thing.
I don’t generally have characters swear in fanfiction. I like to capture the spirit of the source material and not the spirit of truck stop. But I think this one called for it. I was aiming for the “fuck you” scene in The American President - that whole defeated, you may be right and I don’t want to admit it desperation.
Ghosts in the Interrogation Room
I owe a lot of Ghosts. I think it is the fic that put me out there on the map. Though to be honest, when I first posted it I thought it was awful and though others would also think it was awful, so much so that I didn’t pimp it out anywhere on LJ.
Current events do have quite a heavy influence on some of what I write and ne of the issues that has been floating around a lot lately is if we know a person has information that could save lives, is torture justified? My inner liberal says no, never. My inner pragmatist is not so sure.
Peter was not initially in the fic, it was Draco. And the torture was going to be real torture. Tonks was going to run down and rant against it. So basically, it started off life as a PSA and it was, in one word, awful. It then occurred to me that to really write characters well, sometimes you have to let your characters do something you find repugnant. Also, in initial stages there was more emphasis on the twist ending and Tonks part at the end was only a few lines long. But another one of my pet issues came up, the loss of a generation to war.
Growing
Growing can pretty much be blamed on me listening to too much Oasis, particularly Live Forever.
Maybe
I don’t really want to know
How your garden grows
‘Cause I just want to fly
That song reminded me Tonks which lead to Andromeda becoming a herbologist. Naturally, being the canon herbology geek, Neville then stepped in and plot was born.
A lot of emotions from my own life have been put in the chapters, a lot more than any other fic I’ve ever written. Current events again have a heavy influence and you can find 9/11 and the Boxing Day Tsunami in there.
Growing was originally set up for another novel fic which will probably now never be written, in which contains in it Voldemort launching an all out attack on London.
There is a theme with the chapter titles. If anyone has picked up it, they haven’t said.
There are also a few deleted subplots. Originally, at one point, Andromeda was going to be hauled in by the Ministry for questioning regarding her family leading to Tonks quitting her job. Harry and Tonks were going to get into a fight because Harry had to find out second hand that Tonks was a Slytherin. Also Tonks had half her hand blasted off in a battle and re-grew it.
I’ve been giving serious consideration to renaming Growing How Your Garden Grows lately. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea renaming a fic though.
Hostile Takeover
I have this guilt complex about Hostile Takeover. It is my most popular fic and has been niffled, reced and translated. Yet it really did take me less than two hours to writ and I posted it on the same day I got the idea. I wish that more hard work had gone into it, then I could feel better about it.
I’ve also never been comfortable with the fact that it is so capitalist. If you’ve ever heard my opinions on large corporations, profits and shareholders (which usually come out in the context of drug companies) you’d understand.
No One You Can Save
Seriously what happens when I watch Saw and then listen to The Beatles.
I commonly get asked in reviews how Tonks and Remus ended up in that room together. There is actually a reason and I’ve been meaning to put it in an R/T fic and maybe will one of these days.
As to who put them there, well it could be Death Eaters, it could be some enemy in the future, but I like the idea that it was Umbridge.
Paper Aeroplanes
Probably owe a lot to my father for this one. He loves Lancaster Bombers.
Penance More Will Do
I’m not Catholic, or even Christian these days, but I’ve always liked the idea of purgatory, some place between heaven and hell. However writing purgatory, as I found out, nearly killed my muse dead.
Obviously, there is a heavy influence of the Coleridge in Penance. There is also a side of Life of Pi and Dracula in there as well. It is unusual as I normally get inspiration from music, movies, current events etc, but Penance is the only fic I purely got ideas from poetry and books. Probably why really don’t like Penance, since the medium never changed and it can only pale in comparison to my sources of inspiration.
Potential
This is the fic that has changed life more times than any other from conception to completion. It was originally going to be called “The Man Who Sold the World” (go the Bowie) and be a fic with basically contains my Tonks knew Snape was going to kill Dumbledore theory. Can’t remember what made me change it to what it was.
It is sort of my manifesto of the Snape/Tonks relationship, he’s a skody old man with an obsession with the Black family and she’s rightly creeped out by him. That’s how I read them in canon, that’s how I write them.
The Admiral
The Admiral is one of those fics that evolved from a line of dialogue that sprung into my head - “I will hunt you down like the dog you are and hang you right here from the rafters.”
This fic also amuses me since I’ve had favourable reviews from both sides of the Norrington fangirl rift (for those outside PotC fandom, there are those that love DMC!Norrington and some that hate it so much they have refuse to have anything to do with Dead Man’s Chest).
The Illusion of Whole
Not much to say about this one other that it is my favourite of everything I’ve written this year. It contains many of the things I love, completeness, symmetry, me arsing around with space time continuum and an exploration of a theme I’ve been preoccupied with all year - how one act of hate can have so many consequences which is why I see it as a companion piece to Ghosts in the Interrogation Room.
Also like Ghosts, one of the characters changed from the original idea. Bellatrix was going to be the one who died, not Greyback. But I decided it would be more interesting to have Tonks defeat Remus’ demon rather than her own.
Illusion also happens to contain the greatest typo ever. I mean to put “sole witness to the act,” and instead wrote “soul witness to the act” and it still works.
The Ropes
The Ropes is part of my great big complicated R/T back story, the vast majority of which is still in my head, but I’ve been working on it since October last year. I had the original idea of writing four novel length fics that deal with Remus and Tonks until OotP. But I’m too lazy and I’ve decided I quite like doing it this way, with the odd one shot emerging every now and again.
Another theme which I seem to be preoccupied with is this entire issue of the difference perception, appearance and reality. It can also be seen in Illusion, Penance, the Admiral, Truth and Absence. Like probably everyone out there, I hate it when people treat me a certain way because they have made a judgment about who I am based on my appearance (oh, she must have stolen it, she’s a teenager etc) and this is just my way of ranting about it.
The Truth of the Matter
While I have said that this was possibly the result of watching too much Coupling, I think there is also a hint of House (“everybody lies”) and The Princess Bride in Truth.
You know, there is also lot of commentary on fandom in the Truth of the Matter. I didn’t place that in purposely, it just sort of happened.
In the cut subplot department: Kathy was originally to have a broken arm and Norrington had entered the pub to tell her that he had seen to it that the man who had done it was now suffering from his own broken arm. Though, having Norrington act like a gangster just didn’t seem to fit.
Unravelling
Half the fun of writing is that you get to defy the laws of physics arse around with the space-time continuum. I love flashbacks and I love non-linear storylines and I particularly love them when it gets used in the context of a love story, so I did it myself. The idea was that both time and a relationship are one piece of string that has been held in the midde and had the two sides twisted together. So I started in the middle and worked my way to the end.
It was a bitch to write though, since I had to try and make the jumps make some sort of sense. At one point I had to colour code the text based on which steam the scenes were running with. There was about four months between when I started writing it and when I posted it.
Walking Down Corridors
There were two possible ending to this fic. There was the nice one and the depressing one and it took me forever to choose the later.
An early version of this had a day in the life of Narcissa while she was in hiding at Hogwarts after having betrayed Voldemort for the safety of her husband and son. Another early draft had Narcissa and Molly living out their normal lives, but I thought that was too boring. But in all the versions there was going to be a line about Lucius damning the entire Malfoy family.
Obviously, that hasn’t been everything I’ve written in the past year, but not everything I’ve written has much of a story behind it. I think I’ll leave the floor open, if there are any questions relating to anything I’ve written, fell free to ask them. In case you were wondering where to find any of the mentioned fics, my fanfic master list is here
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