#lmao this is very long and probably quite boring too condolences to anyone who opens the readmore xoxo

[gothprentiss]

Hello please give commentary on the boxing au cos it’s my favourite thanks

yes! so! this one is a bit of a wander down memory lane since i don’t have any of my drafting notes, as far as i can tell, but (at characteristically great length):

i know i definitely had wanted, for a while, to write some sort of boxing au. james ellroy is one of my favorite writers and the boxing rivalry part of the black dahlia is the part i remember the best— i thought it was really incredible characterization and also really dynamic writing. probably i started writing this fic around when i was thinking about a sotl fic too— probably the three driving impulses were a) working more intentionally with lit that was really formative for me, b) realizing i’d rather reread my fave books than rewatch criminal minds again (lol), c) i think martial arts are generally a hot look on women. but also i think of ellroy’s writing as very like, stylish and sparse in a way that’s perfect for crime writing, and i wanted to try that on. i don’t think i really did, in part because his prose stylings are remarkably first-person and i’m not that kind of writer, but it was fun to try.

as i’m reading it now, i find it kind of endearingly clumsy— i think there’s something definitely off about the focalization, and i’ve always found my prose style a bit ungainly. like in the first place it’s always trapped between two poles (academic writing, and underdeveloped creative writing), but here you add a third, which is ellroy, whose prose is zippy and fast and highly colloquial, and it’s just kind of frankensteiny. also this fic is too long. i remember reading it and being like it’s too long, but i wrote this whole damn boxing scene and felt obligated to sketch out multiple rounds, and now here we are. it’s also trapped very clearly between the sort of like, thing about writing jemily (for me, at least), which is that what you have to get around with jj is her life, and what you have to get around with emily is granting her the right level of interiority. it’s typically easier for me to write jj as a way of looking at emily and dealing with her own life— it makes more sense than the reverse, because a lot of that would then have to be conducted in dialogue, which i hate to write. so that’s another thing here— on one hand, very experimental for me, on the other hand, very much squarely in a comfort zone in order to enable that experimentation.

in a lot of fics i remember pretty precisely where i started, or the multiple, i don’t know, nodes that i wrote outward from, but it’s surprisingly hard to tell with this one. here are some bits i remember starting with, though:

i wasn’t going to screenshot all of this but there’s a lot of early retreading of the gold vs silver metaphor, a riff on ellroy’s fire and ice thing—which also would have worked but struck me as less naturally apt. i spent some time on it because i thought it was fun, and i love to stack and overdetermine metaphors— probably the last 2 sentences in the second paragraph above are my favorite part of the whole fic. there’s also the obvious element of contrast in jj and emily, who are fairly polarized on levels of class, have the sort of contrastive girl roles (brunette and blonde, the two poles of 00s tv white woman personalities, yk), are differently reserved and tempermental, and obviously distinct color palettes too. i said above that i thought the fire and ice rivalry was really good characterization on ellroy’s part, and that’s because it really allowed bucky to speak about himself both as he was perceived, as he saw himself, and how he aspired to be and be perceived; it also allowed him to size himself up against lee, and many of those same matters of perception relative to lee, albeit secondhand. so what i had going with jj was, on one hand, seeing emily, seeing emily through the eyes of others, and looking at herself in those same terms. the thing the rivalry of contrasts produces is this kind of categorical thought (if x is true of emily, it must have its analogue in jj), which has some validity, but also— as we get to the end of the paragraph— doesn’t have much momentum, and is largely an aesthetic judgment. one of the things i was kind of playing with here and throughout is how the terms of the rivalry fail them, but also guide them.

the above i remember writing quite early on, in the sort of like exploratory writing stage where i was setting up contrasts. this comes later in the fic, but i’d initially had it earlier (which makes sense, very much a fic about the various things hands can do), with jj sizing them up in action settings. i.e., there was going to be a bit where jj is like, ‘actually it’s kind of wild that prentiss is into boxing given that she’s very much characterized by stillness [this still makes it into the fic but not so explicitly],’ but i got impatient with that part.

okay so THIS i remember because the line “some far-flung desert of the mind, governed by bizarro logic and surreal slips of sound and light” was written to replace a line which is in a different fic of mine, which i’d borrowed and then decided it was totally out of place here. i don’t like the replacement, actually— it reads like a sort of terribly amateurish description of dali’s persistence of memory, but i’m not gonna fix it now lol. but i did have fun with the win under her belt / medal around her neck thing. i don’t think this has much payoff for readers (maybe?), but i did think it was fun to pivot between idioms/cliches in a way that’s like, halfway materially meaningful.

i’ve had to actually reread this fic to comment on it (cursed), so here are some things i remember really leaning on while writing:

i think jj’s juvenile insect collecting (was it just butterflies?) is kind of an early season deep cut, but this is a fic that’s really, like, relishing in how technical language and practices can be analogized to all sorts of settings, and have implications there. for example, the sort of post adrenaline rush slump / parallel to dom drop i was writing for jj— part of that is the fact that she’s still thinking of them as sparring, as rivals, and as engaging in (if minimal) violence. this sort of budding mutual attraction (she’s been looking at emily, hard, but not thinking about how that looking works) makes her amateurish, on one hand (in a variety of ways, from hitting too hard to feeling guilty about participating in recreational contact sports), and kind of traps her in boxing on the other. an embrace is like a clinch (literally sometimes called a hug, very on the nose), and is a way of limiting your opponent’s offensive capacity (they can’t punch freely, can’t set up combinations, can’t build momentum), and so on, and this colors how jj thinks. i think the same is true here— like again what I’m getting at is this sudden reversal for jj, where she feels a sinister edge to her interests. so this fic is just them hooking up in a locker room, but part of jj’s journey is making peace with herself again— or more specifically, finding that peace that’s already there, that she’s just lost for a bit.

that reversal was also what i was thinking about here, and comes full circle in the question of whether jj’s feeling turned on or riled up— words which mean, on one hand, very different things, but also are nevertheless fairly synonymous. so here, as above, it’s a question of like— what is jj even able to think here, and how is she getting past this moment where she’s only seeing things in negative terms. it’s more about care and mutuality than having sex with a woman being the ultimate panacea, but you know. that also fixes things.

also, as i said above, this is kind of a fic about perception, and there’s some of that strewn around as well:

just like— looking? seeing and re-seeing. it’s occurring to me now that this fic is extremely about Interpretation and Perception, which is very annoying english major behavior, but wcyd. i also do simply love to return to things. not foreshadowing but figuration, maybe, with full and gratuitous apologies to auerbach.

this is sort of way too long and simply noting themes. i guess the other thing was this:

which is like, again, full circle gold and silver, and again about jj’s own self-awareness and perception. i think if i were to write another scene to this fic it would be jj just being like, damn i have been doing a whole lot of looking and no seeing! but i also (iirc) was thinking here about what kinds of commonalities jj sees between herself and emily, particularly in this moment where she has ground to feel quite superior (winning the fight) but instead is feeling quite vulnerable, and at the mercy of a lot of new emotional stuff going on. an audience is on one hand just a figure of speech, but on the other hand it’s also the language of the spectated match still pervading jj’s thought process, and it’s something she’s rebutting, thinking past that setting to the one she’s actually in. it’s also something she can play with, as they’re makin VERY dumb jokes about gold and silver, as my spectacular flair for incredibly weird dialogue rears its tiny furry head.

so like, yeah? i think my concern throughout this was that jj was merely a way of looking, or a perspective, which was partly intended and partly unconscious and i think i’ve made my peace with that unconscious aspect, due to it being fairly critical to what this fic is. oh and the FBI female body inspector shirt gag, which is terrible but it makes me laugh.