#its 4 am might delete in the morning to post the clean version later

[cryptidm0ths]

Have a v messy sketch from the 1h break i took from speed running 3 days of work into 1

Text reads : "things they inherited from the Godfather : money, looks, fat tits"

[sanguinarysanguinity]

rabbit & like a bat family, for the ask meme, whichever questions you feel comfortable answering

(Questions)

Like a Bat-Family

(Elementary; Martha & Kitty & Joan & Sherlock; part of Rolling Remix)

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

I received my copy of “Like Family” for remixing and groused and whined and cursed its author, because like hell did I see a way into it. The obvious thing would have been to flip the pov to Kitty, but “Like Family” might already have been a pov-flip from whatever came before it and I didn’t want to risk just flipping it back again.

I finally decided on a slumber-party-like variation of the mutual nail-painting, probably featuring Martha. Then once I had Martha and Kitty in the same mental premise, I realized they had probably built some kind of relationship during their mutual time in the brownstone, and thus that Martha should be added to the list of people cheated of a proper good-bye with her. (And not just cheated of a good-bye, but of the entire history of their relationship!) So this became a reunion/closure story for not only Joan-and-Kitty, but also Martha-and-Kitty.

I set it during New Year’s at the brownstone mostly out of cussedness. I’d already remixed a story for the exchange, which meant I knew there was a cluster of NYE stories at the beginning of the chain. I thought it’d be hilarious to re-introduce the New Year’s theme at the tail end of the chain, too, in the hopes that it would mess up some of the guessers.

2: What scene did you first put down?

A scene that no longer exists: Joan on the roof New Year’s morning, ostensibly cleaning up after the party but mostly staring at the river, and being surprised by Kitty’s entrance. The energy was never quite right, somehow, and the whole story stalled there until I switched povs and began over with Martha. However, the scene still indirectly exists in the current version of the story, and the original image of Kitty appearing from nowhere like Batman was the genesis of the Bat-Family motif.

The only part of that now-deleted scene that I was really sad to lose was the color scheme:

[Joan stood at the roof edge, looking out at] the desaturated, wintry grays of the city, contemplating the rough slate of the East River and how it reflected back the platinum sky above.

Happily, I was able to salvage the bones of that description for Nostoi:

Beyond that streak of white, there was nothing but grey all around us: sky and rain and sea-water; iron and silver and slate.

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

Joan and Sherlock argued silently with each other, a flurry of mulish mouths, jutted jaws, and raised eyebrows.

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“Alfred,” she whispered, and all three of them cracked up into giggles.

5: What part was hardest to write?

Ugh, gah, cramming in the backstory and off-screen bits. Backstory and flashbacks are always a struggle to incorporate smoothly without overexplaining or messing up the narrative flow, and this story was written so quickly, with so little opportunity for editing… Meh.

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

My first and only story from the pov of a trans character? More unusually, I didn’t have the time to ask someone who is trans to look it over – that’s usually something that I take care to do when writing a marginalized identity outside of my own experience. But once again, the turn around time was so fast… I hope I did no harm, and I own it if I did.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

I was going to bring back Joan’s accordion from the first two stories, which – when joined with Kitty’s clarinet and Sherlock’s violin – would be the foundations of a Klezmer band. (Martha would be on drums, because.) When I later saw that someone in the exchange had written a Band AU I kicked myself so hard that I hadn’t done it.

Rabbit

(TSCC; Jesse Flores; 5+1)

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

The Terminator franchise centers itself so strongly on Southern California and the Connors, I craved to know what that franchise looks like if you don’t presuppose John Connor as the center of the universe. Further, I am fascinated with the way the timelines fold back on themselves in that franchise, the way Judgement Day is forever shifting, the way futures keep reaching back to rewrite the past-to-be based on whatever has been going on in the current timeline.

A 5+1 seemed a convenient way to explore what successive futures might look like when one is half a world away from the causes, experiencing only the after-effects; it also allowed me to build an argument that John Connor may not always be the single most important person in the future. That is, that there might be futures where other people become more strategically significant.

I also had the very misguided idea that a 5+1 would be a short, simple, and easy structure, and would get me out of having to build and plot a full-blown story. Ha fucking hah.

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

There are a ton of narrative lines I love, mostly in the final section. But have this one out of the fifth section:

Jesse stared at the farmboy, her gaze flicking to where the dolphins should have been on his chest. Jesus Fucking Christ. A whole crew of nubs. They were running a deathtrap.

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“You are not a god, Derek. You made choices, I made choices, John Connor made choices. We all made choices. Hell, there’s a twelve-year-old Jesse out there somewhere, making choices. Whether to swim at the leisure centre or swim at the beach. For all you know, the war hinges on the choice she made today.”

Tied with:

“What do you want me to say, that it could have been anyone? That the only reason Skynet went after you—the only reason your family died—is because Goodnow tells a good story and Skynet fell for it?”

Because I have opinions about the Terminator franchise, and how everyone is running around making choices based on stories they were told. Skynet, the Connors, everyone from the future who gets their hands on a time machine, everyone they meet in the past: everyone has heard a story, and now they’re all making choices, and the entire future history of the world is gonna hinge on those choices. Talk about a universe that runs on fucking hearsay and gossip.

But mostly my favorite line is this:

“I’m Jesse!” she screamed at it, to make herself breathe. “I’m Jesse fucking Flores!”

Because Jesse fucking Flores. :-D

5: What part was hardest to write?

All the Australia bits. :-P

@lastwingedthing put in a good chunk of work on this story, correcting language and helping me with geographically appropriate choices for stuff. (That olive tree in the first section began life as a prickly pear, which is invasive in Australia – I wanted an invasive plant for thematic reasons – but it’s invasive in a different part of Australia.) However, the challenge with writing something that will later be Ozpicked (or Britpicked, or whatever) is that it’s not enough to eschew Americanisms in your draft, you have to put in geographically specific stuff, too, otherwise you’ll end up with a bland and non-specific story. And while a generous Ozpicker can and will help with that, you can’t expect them to do the bulk of that work for you.

For an example of what I’m talking about, consider my own The Case of the Six Marmalades against @scfrankles’ The Case of the Deceased Marmalade Thief: they’re nicely matched in terms of fandom, genre, and topic, and I consider Frankles a peer in terms of our respective skill. But notice that Frankles’ use of idiom in her dialog is much, much richer than my own (in part because she really is just that good with voices), but also in part because she’s English, and has a much larger mental catalog of appropriate idiom to select from. In contrast, I’m forever rejecting language as “too American” and then finding I have nothing interesting to replace it with. Consequently, my dialog has a linguistic blandness to it that hers doesn’t. This is the kind of thing I see a lot with American vs. British authors in British fandoms: the British authors have a vibrancy to them that American authors seldom manage to attain.

And this isn’t to run myself down, or to suggest that Six Marmalades is a failure of a story. (It’s not.) It’s simply an illustration of how it is with stories written by outsiders: even if they manage to eschew errors and stereotypes, they often end up with a generic, non-specific blandness that’s difficult to overcome. *shrug emoji* Either you never write outside your own specific cultural context, or you accept that you won’t manage the vibrancy that your story deserves. Choose your poison.

Anyway, back to Rabbit: I had to come up with Australia-specific stuff to put in, but I was starting from near zero. I watched all the Australian post-apoc films I could stomach; I played Australian talk and comedy shows in the background while I did chores; I listened to a series of Australian podcasts for English-language-learners during my commutes; I spent a fuckton of time browsing anAustralian slang dictionary (where I learned more usage via the crowdsourced definitions than in the nominal terms being defined)… Just, trying to pick up idioms and usage and rhythms and words, both to reduce the load on my very generous Ozpicker, but also trying to make sure that when she was done removing my Americanisms, my language didn’t end up blandly generic nowhere. (If nothing else, I could give her possibly-wrong Australian slang that she could correct to something more appropriate, yeah? And she did a bit of that: “yobbos” became “sad bastards,” for example.) So the language was a fair amount of up front work, even with her polishing and fine-tuning it for me.

And getting the Australian bits right was more than just language, of course; there was the usual ton of googling random shit. Who runs public swimming pools, the history and composition of the Australian submarine service, what plants are invasive, imports/exports from Perth… Again, she corrected and fine-tuned a bunch of stuff (and sometimes pointed out issues that I hadn’t thought to question), but there was still a chunk of work involved in giving her something that could be corrected and fine-tuned.

I wanted to set Rabbit in Australia, a place that is distinct from America, and that ultimately was the hardest part of writing the story.

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

At the time, it was my only fic set in Australia, my only go at action/suspense, my only 5+1, my only “heroine against the world, framedaround a strong central metaphor, ending when the showdown begins in earnest” kind of story structure. I’ve since repeated all of those things, because I wrote this a long time ago, and I’m as repetitive as fuck.

As to what makes it still unique among my stories…

Um…

It’s the only one with submarines in?

8: Did any real people or events inspire any part of it?

I grew up in a Navy town, outside a nuclear submarine base, and one of the members in my origfic writing group served on a submarine, back in the day. So all the submarine stuff is strongly influenced by my hometown, the kids whose parents were in the Navy, my own dad who worked for the Navy, my schoolmates who went into the Navy themselves, the submariner who I dated when I was faaaaar too young for him (and the shit my dad pulled to scare him off), the tours I’ve taken on out-of-service submarines, the time I’ve spent fucking around in boats while sharing the same waters as submarines, plus all the time I’ve spent editing my friend’s submarine novels based on his own service.

None of which is actually the same as actually serving on a submarine myself, of course, but there are a number of submarine details that were inspired by spending a chunk of my life submarine-adjacent.

(Navy showers! My father enforced Navy showers on us when we were kids. Although not the same way that they’re enforced in the actual Navy, because that would have been child abuse. But you know. You run across random shit in your life, and it eventually ends up in a fic.)