My Favourite Stories
Jan. 19th, 2006 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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rageprufrock asked, my favourite five four stories that I've written:
Like Sailing and Home Runs and Not Homophobic share first and second place. Between the two of them, they absorbed the better part of two years of my brain and amount to 170,000 words. In many, many, *many* ways, they are as much an explanation/rationalisation of my views of the characters as stories. They say what I wanted to, they touch on the parts of Casey and Dan that fascinate me, that make me love them -- even when they're being jackasses, even when they're being self-defeatist, even when they show a ridiculous amount of self-importance/indulgence. These are my boys. Complicated and uncertain and forever talking *around* the issue at hand, dealing with it only in the most oblique of ways. My boys.
And those stories deal with the Big Issues as I see them. Although they're both seperate fannish interpretations, seperate fictional universes, between the two of them, they cover all the bases. They show the way that the SN crew are nutty and insane and supportive and important to both Dan and Casey. They show the way that best friends, that those you love dearly, can be wonderful, good people and still do things that hurt you -- and you can still do things that hurt them -- but in the end, you can come to terms with bad behaviour and still love them.
They deal with personal freedom, with potential, with the way that so many of our limits are self-imposed and only hideously precious to *us*, not to that other person. There's deceiving yourself and hiding from your feelings, rationalising who you are, and why you can't do this or that, but ultimately, they're both stories of self-acceptance. Of coming to terms with your own needs and desires, of recognising your own potential and taking that scary, scary step of emotionally laying yourself bare and inviting someone else in. How if you can find the bravery to do that, you can have whatever you want.
There are other SN stories of mine that I love -- Sweet Music in the Back of My Mind, Protect Me From What I Want, and Girls Night In -- but those two are the stand out favourites.
Ash, Blood and Heat (appropriately subtitled Five Ways Wes Didn't Die) is my AtS favourite. I wrote it the night of the finale -- that night when I was so blown away and amazed at the ending that I couldn't possibly sleep -- and I still love it. I love the way that Wesley was always a character that had more emotional impact when he was suffering, the way that he was the character that always mmade me whimper and wish the world was a little kinder to the Angel crew. (Don't get me wrong, I felt sympathy for teh others, too, but Wes was the one I mourned the most.) I like that this story has a similar impact for me, showing the depth of Wesley's character through his reactions to other things.
On a purely writing note, I like that I got to write action. Okay, not a lot of it, but there are actual (small) fight scenes in that story. But mostly, it makes me remember how much I love Wes.
Back To The Old Ways would be my SGA fave. I started writing it after seeing the Lost Boys (and it was based on the vague spoiler of McKay having to go through enzyme withdrawal in the next ep) and it was... rambling and uncertain and a really confusing story to write. I had no clear purpose, no real idea of what it was about. For a good while, I thought it was going to be Rodney/Ronon, but that wouldn't work for me.
Then, as I kept writing, as I got to that final section, I realised it wasn't so much Rodney/John as a tale of What Rodney Can't Have. It's self-control, it's knowing that things are bad for you, that it will lead to heartache and worse, and doing the responsible, mature thing. It's giving things up because you value other things more. It's that sweet, sweet pain of wanting and not having, of yearning and knowing that you can't (which, really, was an appeal of Sam/Josh on WW and the ultimate reason why I left that fandom... it got to a stage where it was far too depressing).
There's also... there's this vibe of connecting and not connecting, or of trying to connect with others and feeling a total lack of communication. Of the way that you can *click* with some people and sometimes, they *get* it, they *get* you, before you do. It's also the threat and danger of trying something new; the comfort of sticking to the old established patterns.
It's just... one of those stories that probably says a lot more about *me* as a personality than anything else. But I still love it because it feels emotionally true to me (even if canon totally jossed it).
Figuring out the fifth story? That's *hard*. Part of me wants to point to Five Things That Weren’t Comforting because I still think it's a clever use of very, very tiny differences and fun to write Sam Seaborn, but most of me cringes at the Exposition Intensive style of it and the way that some of the sections didn't have half as much follow-through as they should have. I've improved a lot since then. I don't actually stop and think of any of my WW stories as favourites, or the SV ones, so I don't think the fifth is one of those.
Off the top of my head, I'm not sure, so I'll leave the fifth one as a blank to be filled in by later stories.
rageprufrock asked, my favourite Like Sailing and Home Runs and Not Homophobic share first and second place. Between the two of them, they absorbed the better part of two years of my brain and amount to 170,000 words. In many, many, *many* ways, they are as much an explanation/rationalisation of my views of the characters as stories. They say what I wanted to, they touch on the parts of Casey and Dan that fascinate me, that make me love them -- even when they're being jackasses, even when they're being self-defeatist, even when they show a ridiculous amount of self-importance/indulgence. These are my boys. Complicated and uncertain and forever talking *around* the issue at hand, dealing with it only in the most oblique of ways. My boys.
And those stories deal with the Big Issues as I see them. Although they're both seperate fannish interpretations, seperate fictional universes, between the two of them, they cover all the bases. They show the way that the SN crew are nutty and insane and supportive and important to both Dan and Casey. They show the way that best friends, that those you love dearly, can be wonderful, good people and still do things that hurt you -- and you can still do things that hurt them -- but in the end, you can come to terms with bad behaviour and still love them.
They deal with personal freedom, with potential, with the way that so many of our limits are self-imposed and only hideously precious to *us*, not to that other person. There's deceiving yourself and hiding from your feelings, rationalising who you are, and why you can't do this or that, but ultimately, they're both stories of self-acceptance. Of coming to terms with your own needs and desires, of recognising your own potential and taking that scary, scary step of emotionally laying yourself bare and inviting someone else in. How if you can find the bravery to do that, you can have whatever you want.
There are other SN stories of mine that I love -- Sweet Music in the Back of My Mind, Protect Me From What I Want, and Girls Night In -- but those two are the stand out favourites.
Ash, Blood and Heat (appropriately subtitled Five Ways Wes Didn't Die) is my AtS favourite. I wrote it the night of the finale -- that night when I was so blown away and amazed at the ending that I couldn't possibly sleep -- and I still love it. I love the way that Wesley was always a character that had more emotional impact when he was suffering, the way that he was the character that always mmade me whimper and wish the world was a little kinder to the Angel crew. (Don't get me wrong, I felt sympathy for teh others, too, but Wes was the one I mourned the most.) I like that this story has a similar impact for me, showing the depth of Wesley's character through his reactions to other things.
On a purely writing note, I like that I got to write action. Okay, not a lot of it, but there are actual (small) fight scenes in that story. But mostly, it makes me remember how much I love Wes.
Back To The Old Ways would be my SGA fave. I started writing it after seeing the Lost Boys (and it was based on the vague spoiler of McKay having to go through enzyme withdrawal in the next ep) and it was... rambling and uncertain and a really confusing story to write. I had no clear purpose, no real idea of what it was about. For a good while, I thought it was going to be Rodney/Ronon, but that wouldn't work for me.
Then, as I kept writing, as I got to that final section, I realised it wasn't so much Rodney/John as a tale of What Rodney Can't Have. It's self-control, it's knowing that things are bad for you, that it will lead to heartache and worse, and doing the responsible, mature thing. It's giving things up because you value other things more. It's that sweet, sweet pain of wanting and not having, of yearning and knowing that you can't (which, really, was an appeal of Sam/Josh on WW and the ultimate reason why I left that fandom... it got to a stage where it was far too depressing).
There's also... there's this vibe of connecting and not connecting, or of trying to connect with others and feeling a total lack of communication. Of the way that you can *click* with some people and sometimes, they *get* it, they *get* you, before you do. It's also the threat and danger of trying something new; the comfort of sticking to the old established patterns.
It's just... one of those stories that probably says a lot more about *me* as a personality than anything else. But I still love it because it feels emotionally true to me (even if canon totally jossed it).
Figuring out the fifth story? That's *hard*. Part of me wants to point to Five Things That Weren’t Comforting because I still think it's a clever use of very, very tiny differences and fun to write Sam Seaborn, but most of me cringes at the Exposition Intensive style of it and the way that some of the sections didn't have half as much follow-through as they should have. I've improved a lot since then. I don't actually stop and think of any of my WW stories as favourites, or the SV ones, so I don't think the fifth is one of those.
Off the top of my head, I'm not sure, so I'll leave the fifth one as a blank to be filled in by later stories.
