tocappuccinosintheclouds

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

The juxtaposition of Neal Caffrey being staunchly anti-harm while being the biggest indirect cause of harm. His life alone is an omen of death. A symbol of peace that’s actually cursed. Simultaneously a rabbit’s foot and the monkey’s paw.

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One thing I really appreciate about white collar is the balance it strikes between law enforcement being the good guys and acknowledgement of corruption in the system. We have awesome FBI agents and corrupt FBI agents. We have at least one cool cop, or ex-cop (Ellen) but admittedly mostly annoying and possibly corrupt cops. It’s a law enforcement show and ultimately justice is the goal, but sometimes there is a grey area. Neal often operates in that grey area, and it’s slippery! Sometimes he’s doing the right thing the wrong way but sometimes it slides to doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. He makes plenty of good choices and plenty of bad choices, but the middle ground is where it’s most interesting: the choices that might be good but not legal. It’s not a show that bashes law enforcement as rotten through and through and unsaveable, and yet it’s not portrayed as all pristine and perfect and lovely either. I do really like the way they did it on white collar.

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

hello, whump writer. i officially grant you permission to write unrealistic whump. yes I know there are posts everywhere telling you that you can't write it that way. yes I know some people just prefer realistic whump. yes I know you want to please everyone. however please consider: I don't care, and write what you want to write. i love you.

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

Once upon a time, the planets and the fates And all the stars aligned You and I ended up in the same room At the same time

It's. Incredibly difficult to write something like this without making it entirely too long. I've written and deleted about 4 versions of this post and they each end up being entirely too long, because there's just so much to say about how much co-authoring with @fluencca has meant to me.

There's so much to stay about me being a new fan, a new author, still learning how to capture character's mindsets in more than a sentence or two, still learning where to put weight and where to pull back, and having someone not only with degrees in literature but with time and experience writing and reading for these characters taking a chance on me and the promise that I can hold up my end of writing a big idea, especially when I have no finished multichapter stories. The amount of times in this story I write something completely different from established facts of the story, stuff that I know is in the story but just slips from my brain as I'm actively writing (the big thing happens and there's so much plot around exactly how long ago it was, but I still write it's been weeks instead of days like a dummy for example), and Flue just goes in and corrects it, fuck it's so embarrassing lol.

There's so much to say about being a writer at all, the desires to write big ideas, all these little details that mean so much to you, and the inexperience of doing so being one of the main reasons you don't even try to. The first step up the mountain is the hardest and all that. There's being a writer who can see things in your head so clearly and digging at a keyboard trying your best to get it come out, nothing ever feeling whole, nothing ever feeling right, but there's people who see what you're doing and validate it. They pick up the sentences, full scenes in your head where the words you wrote didn't do it justice, and they make a point to show to you they see the vision too. If you're lucky enough to write alongside them, they'll interpret this vision for you, and you'll feel seen and understood in a way you didn't know possible.

More personally, there's so much to say about the trauma, depression, anxiety, everything that came to this point. There's a post on my personal blog, published a few days after the ✨very first✨ fanfiction on my ao3, "I discovered who I am again," posted at 11:45 p.m. on September 16th, when 15 hours later I would be hit by a texting driver and lose myself, to a very scary degree. There's me telling my therapist, "I don't know who I am anymore, but I know how to pretend to be me, so." There was a before, where I loved procedural shows, had watched all of Bones, Criminal Minds, Monk, etc etc, on loop. These shows were a part of me and I genuinely did mourn the loss of them. I thought they were lost forever, and, okay, honestly some of them might still be, but White Collar? Oh watching White Collar was coming home.

Why do you think I try so hard for this fandom? How do you think I wrote 100k words for it in 8 months? 😂

So take all of these pieces of me and my story, and imagine the fucking joy that started back in March lol.

So I feel new in basically all the ways, new in the fandom, new as a writer, new in like Being Me and finding joy??? And Flue comes at me with a semi-innocent message that's about to spark a 6 week (as of now) forest fire, something that has given me more drive, passion, excitement, pleasure, just the whole fucking treasures of positive words than anything I've had in a long time.

I can see the dominos that have lead me to this moment, all the pushes and pull of the universe, all the hard work I've put in that lead up to this story. There's been so much hard leading up to writing something so easy with someone who recognizes me, my passion, my ideas, who not only supports but validates the writing choices I make, who takes me on the side bar going "Hey what if we intertwine this theme/reference?" and actually makes it happen when I wouldn't have known how to, who's made me cry more than once simply by leaving really nice comments of praise in the sidebar of this story lol.

Flue says in their post that they're riding shotgun in an old timey motorcycle lol, but from my perspective this has been a magic carpet ride, all fresh air, and shimmering lights, and like so much joy over whumping on Neal Caffrey lol.

What if I told you none of it was accidental And the first night that you saw me, nothing was gonna stop me? I laid the groundwork and then, just like clockwork the dominoes cascaded in a line

I totally knew what I was doing there lmao. I knew the story I was building with that reference and exactly who I was pitching it to. Did I expect to be taken along for the ride of the story, no, but I knew the framework I was helping build, the story I was trying to inspire into existence

Checkmate, I couldn't lose😜

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That thing where the character got their ribs beat the hell out of, but they're being stoic about it, and then someone frendly slaps their back or side and they just cry out in pain and curl in.

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Shipping a man in a canon het relationship with another man but I'm shaking my head the whole time so you know it's not out of misogynistic disregard for the woman character

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Fanfic trope: friends to enemies

A: Love it. Spend my time combing AO3 for it.

B: Like it. Not one of my bigger cravings, but it can scratch a certain itch if I’m in the right mood.

C: Neutral. A good author might be able to sell it, but a bad one will kill it deader than dead.

D: Not my favorite. I avoid it if I can, but it won’t necessarily put me off reading something.

F: Hate it. Will immediately make me nope out of a fic.

I don't read a lot of fanfictions with unhappy endings, the premise would have to be really compelling for me to read a relationship ending off as enemies

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

for the fanfic trope grading: amnesia

A: Love it. Spend my time combing AO3 for it.

B: Like it. Not one of my bigger cravings, but it can scratch a certain itch if I’m in the right mood.

C: Neutral. A good author might be able to sell it, but a bad one will kill it deader than dead.

D: Not my favorite. I avoid it if I can, but it won’t necessarily put me off reading something.

F: Hate it. Will immediately make me nope out of a fic.

Especially with White Collar fanfics, but more in the way that "Neal disappeared one day and no one can figure out why" then as a post-finale idea!

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

So here's the thing:

Co-writing a fic should be impossible. I ran the numbers—I don't see how many stars can possibly align:

An author whose skill you admire

Who writes similar themes as you

Who understands the characters the way you do

Whose writing style is compatible with your own

From whom you're able to take critique

And, hardest of all,

6. For whom all the above apply, about you

As though that list of requirements isn't obstacle enough, you then have to ask them, and I can only assume this is what dorky boys feel when they try to ask the coolest girl in school to the prom.

But hey! They said yes!

So here I am, co-authoring a fic that I've been thinking about for YEARS but have never been able to even outline, thanks to partnership with a brilliant writer—the incredible @tocappuccinosintheclouds—and not only is it not impossible, and not only is it one of the best time I've ever had writing a fic, it's downright awe-inspiring to (a) get a closer look at the process of a writer and storyteller who is so talented, and (b) massively, indescribably, and humbly educating.

Their eye for singular imagery (which is a phrase I wholesale plagiarized from them, because I'm shameless like that), a single moment in a story that encapsulates motif and action and motive; their way with words, with transforming bleak exposition into jaw-dropping narrative gold; their succinct and emotive prose; immaculate feel for whump; their patience 😭😭 with me, as I edit and shift and move things around, and then realize that what they'd written at first was actually the most perfect and single best way in the world and revert back to that (this has happened multiple times); and this is truly the tip of the iceberg if the incredible learning experience this has been.

I feel like a Caffrey-level conman for somehow getting them to agree to have my name next to theirs on this (truly fun, and terrible, and really very good) fic we're writing.

So... Thanks for agreeing to do this with me, August, and thanks for being so patient, and man, am I excited about this story.

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

I don't know where I'm going with this, but

Kate died in front of Neal,

Then Adler whom he had thought of (at least!) as mentor,

Then Ellen—who raised him—died,

Then James comes into the picture, reveals himself to be a murderer (twice over), and frames Peter for murder before disappearing

Sara leaves

Then Siegel is killed

Then he realizes his relationship with Rebecca was a lie

While prison hangs over him and he's constantly reminded that he's a criminal, little if anything more

And this boy cannot catch a break. He has been living from one overwhelming thing to another, with a forced smile on his face. And he codes each of these things as his fault. Even as viewers who take on his pov as the focal character, it's so easy to believe his con that he's totally fine. But he's not, I don't see how he can be. He can't control anything, not even his own movements, and he keeps on losing people.

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

Peter and Elizabeth reacting to June and Neal singing in 2x13 Countermeasures

Bonus:

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co-authoring a fic with @tocappuccinosintheclouds is basically us taking turns being this cat

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[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

Me: "Wow, this White Collar show is so much fun. What a great premise. Love the dynamic between this total square G-man and the smooth-talking conman." White Collar Canon: "We're all having fun here! Lookit the silly way they pulled off this con. Watch the G-man and the conman stretch and bend around each other. What's this? Pandora's box? Okay, we'll take a peek, but then we're on to the next." White Collar Fanfics: "Isn't every human interaction a tiny con? Is the law a just arbiter of morality? Is a good man still good if he does an evil act? Can sinners ever truly be redeemed? What is that nature of addiction? Is loyalty caused by affection or fear? Can love exist without trust?"

Me: "This is the best show ever."

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

Oh yeah this is how I love to browse the web yup I love loading a website and it initially being completely unusable

[tocappuccinosintheclouds]

“i’m a top” “im a bottom” okay????? i’m an internationally-renowned art thief????? and tonight i’m here to rob you????