#dogtooth sw

[motownfiction]

dogtooth

As they sit across from each other at the diner, Sam watches while Steph sketches. He even thinks about it in those words. Sam watches while Steph sketches. It’s like an SW tongue twist, and he loves it. He says it about ten times before Steph slams her pencil down on her sketchbook, leaving a graphite smudge where Sam is pretty sure she doesn’t want one.

“I’m trying to work,” she says. “We have this architecture assignment due next week in AP Art, and if I don’t do well …”

“Then you’ll fail?” Sam asks.

“No. I’ll look bad in front of Miss Wozniak. That’s worse than if she just failed me.”

Sam shrugs. He’ll never understand it – that need to impress a teacher. He’s never worked in the art room, never said any words to Miss Wozniak that weren’t about Steph, so maybe she’s different from the other teachers, who will only look twice at you if you’re good at filling in bubbles. None of these teachers are smart enough to know that Sam is smart all by himself, just like they’re not smart enough to know that Steph is more than the crown jewel of the art room.

But she is pretty that way.

“Can I see what you’re drawing?” Sam asks.

“You know I don’t like to show you what I’m working on until it’s finished,” Steph says.

“Just this once?”

Steph sighs. She turns the sketchbook over and slides it to Sam across the table. Sam looks down at it – the most beautiful building he’s ever seen, almost like out of a game or a fairytale. Steph could always do that. Pin down a world and give it to you like it was nothing.

“It’s supposed to be a church,” Steph explains. “I’m not … exactly sure what era I’m going for. I’m just drafting from my mind’s eye.”

“I love it,” Sam says.

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not. Who am I? Sadie? Please. Steph, this is … this is really beautiful.”

Sam means it, too, though he’s not really sure why. There’s something about this building … something that makes him so, so sad. Maybe it’s that he’ll never walk through its doors. Maybe it’s because he knows what he would do there if it was a real place. He doesn’t know. They are playing “Sunday Will Never Be the Same,” and Sam feels like he will cry.

He points to some jaggedness on the walls.

“What’s this?” he asks.

Steph leans over and nods.

“Oh, that’s dogtooth,” she says. “Kind of an edgy style. Gothic.”

“Are you going goth on me, Steph?”

“No, but I’m always about an inch away from that option.”

Sam laughs. He lifts himself up in his seat a little bit to kiss her on the other side of the table. Sometimes, he forgets how much smaller she is compared to him. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to feel about that, either.

“This is beautiful,” Sam says again. “When it’s done, can we build it?”

“Depends,” Steph says.

“On the money?”

“Well, yeah. But on whether or not we can build it together.”

Sam swallows hard. He’s not as dumb as his teachers think he is. He knows how to spot a worn-out metaphor when one comes his way.

“OK,” he says.

And right now, Steph does not seem hurt.

(part of @nosebleedclub january challenge -- day 23!)

[hircyon]

3 17 20 for the writing meme

3 - my writing ritual is cursed because I don't have one. I don't sit down to write, I just write when inspiration strikes, so that's probably why I don't get anything done. Terrible writing hygiene.

20 - Eternal happiness with my boy, absolutely, no second thought. Sorry, I used to feel like writing was my raison d'être but I'm not actually that desperate to be published anymore. I want writing to remain my true art--and what good is an art you can't craft? Once the perfect WIP is done, it's done. It's just...done. Gone. Out there in the world. Yeah I'd take a house and breezing through immigration paperwork so my soon-to-be-husband and I can finally just live together in peace over being published any day.

17 - Oh boy, the minutiae. Well, we'll go with Dogtooth, since that's a more active WIP than Absence.

Dogtooth is, first of all, titled after the Yorgos Lanthimos film of the same name, though it's almost entirely a superficial reference. I liked the word. I kind of wanted to draw the same feeling as the raw, inexplicable violence of the film, but obviously Dogtooth the fanfic isn't going to be doing nearly as much in terms of metaphor and meaningfulness. I'm not going to pretend my violent little porn-with-plot is deep.

This whole project came about in 2012, some time after the Deception arc came out. The whole vibe of The Box and the interactions between bounty hunters made me want to combine the Star Wars universe with a gritty, starkly violent crime fantasy. I was very into Tarantino films at the time. The first few drafts were noticeably derivative. I even had a diner scene between Astrid and Moralo. (I lost all these drafts I think in 2015 when my Nook bricked and took my entire Simplenote library with it. Now I cross-device save, but I couldn't tell you why I decided to write almost exclusively on a B&N Nook except that it was cheaper than an ipad and allowed me to write on my breaks at work).

I think in the very beginning, Dogtooth took place sometime after the rise of the Empire--basically the same as it is now. Moralo breaks himself out of prison (referencing, in a silly way, the Moralo Eval's Bedtime Stories series Stephen Stanton did for Forcecast) and hires Astrid to protect him and facilitate his escape from Empire space. A simple enough plan that goes sideways, as things must, and leads to the slow degeneration of Moralo's trust in Astrid as he grows increasingly paranoid. Just two violent and morally absent people stuck in a can together in space.

But at the same time, I was developing In the Absence of Fear (aka Absence), also featuring my mary sue ass character whom everyone tolerates despite her being awful. So, at some point, I decided to add an arc to Dogtooth and split it into two parts to book end Absence and create a full arc for Astrid's character. Now I had a backstory for how Moralo and Astrid meet during the creation of The Box.

This is where I stalled for years. Because part one feels necessary to setting up the relationship Astrid and Moralo are capable of having, but had no driving force. No plot, no conflict that didn't feel contrived, no tension that wasn't forced for the sake of making things happen. And I tried to mash the round peg of that story into the square hole of the overall project for so long, because I'm stubborn and I'm increasingly only interested in finishing these fanfic projects.

Until finally this year, I decided as a last resort, I'm going to completely redo it from the ground up as a single story told partially in flashback. I'm hoping this resolves the pacing issue, if I can hold tension by paralleling the rise of their irresponsible relationship with Moralo's descent into total paranoia and Astrid's realization that things are not going to work between them anymore. I think this will also make the development of Astrid's character more obvious.

There are so many things that won't make it into the text. And I'd share but the writing is truly atrocious. I don't even like the version I attempted to publish on AO3 for a brief second there. I will say, Astrid was originally a lot more organic in her way of acting and thinking. Only recently I started taking pains to make her robotic and out of touch with organic processes. She could originally feel and actually enjoyed sex. Her relationship with pain was a lot more juvenile. She was disaffected in a way that...you could just tell a recent college grad was writing this character. Overall, just worse in every way. I think hammering my way through Dogtooth was what I needed to really push her character.

My earliest drafts have these meandering Tarantino-esque conversations. I love to let the characters talk. But to think I was actually going to publish those...

[hircyon]

So Dogtooth has always had a playlist.

I think it kind of stands on its own, even if you don’t give a shit about the story, or know what’s going on.