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[mercyrobot]

Totally stolen from blackletter, because you know how much I love blathering about ficcing!

Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

All my stuff is on this tag and anything is fair game. C'mon, you know you want to.

Comments

[nox-candida.livejournal.com]

"What ho, all," I greeted the detachment, feeling rather like a magistrate in an unlicensed night-club, or how I imagine one might feel were he to lack the sense not to brazen on inside. "Don't mind me. I was simply hoping one of you might have such a thing as a light."

The chap that rallied round, of course, was none other than Jeeves. He produced a lighter out of nowhere and struck it to flame with some invisible sleight of hand. "Allow me, sir," he said.

On pure instinct I reached out to steady his wrist, though it needed no steadying, and I was puffing away in mere moments. "Thank you," I said, suddenly somewhat unnerved. I glanced up and our eyes met, which only served to unnerve me further. In hindsight it's all too clear what it was and why it was, but just then it was simply unnervement, if such a word exists.

That was more or less that. With no more to be said, I beat a hasty retreat and left them to it, but spent some little while on a bench a couple of corners over lighting the next off the one before and wondering if it was simply the brisk walk that had kicked the heart muscle into an odd sort of rhythm.

'But see here, Wooster,' one might say if one were so inclined, 'why would you never ask Jeeves about that?'

I wouldn't hesitate to, if, 'I say, did you light a cigarette for me while I was down from Oxford one Christmas?' happened to be the q. in q., but it so happens that it does not, thank you very much. No, the thing I'd really like to ask, if I could screw up the courage, is more in the way of, 'That shadowy figure in the doorway when I was playing the piano late Christmas night-- was that you, by any chance?'

I can't ask a thing like that, you see, no more than I can do anything but throw this page onto a nicely-stoked fire. The best possible result is that the e. in q. was so insignificant to him that he remembers nothing of it. The worst, and it's a very bad worst, is Jeeves wondering what might have moved me to ask such a thing. To a brain like his, it would be mere hopscotch from there to working out precisely what moved me.

Well, there's a better result I could hope for, but it's not a possible one, not in this life or the next. 'Yes, sir, it was I, for I loved you from the moment you touched my hand,' is never to be forthcoming. More's the pity, but there you have the lot Bertram has drawn. It's just that sometimes, when Jeeves steps into the fray with an invisibly-struck light at the ready, I say 'thank you' and our eyes meet, I imagine some happy world where that moment was the same thing to both of us.

(Okay, so it's 503 words, but I figure that's close enough to count. :D)

[thirstyrobot.livejournal.com]

Oh, Gala! ♥ This one has a special place in my heart as my first-ever non-fluffy Jooster. I have always been fascinated with their pre-canon lives and the possibility that they could have run across each other, not out of the realm of possibility because Jeeves has worked for people that Bertie is connected to. My other fascination is with Jeeves-as-servant, i.e. as a part of the below-stairs social microcosm and how that whole "other half" would see Bertie. Which maybe makes it a little weird that this is Bertie's POV since I'm so interested in that but only give it a passing glance, but it's why I set up Bertie coming upon the malingering servants the way he did.

It was important to me, too, that Bertie's first interaction with Jeeves show a bit of the special Jeevesian magic right away, and therefore we have the invisibly-struck lighter. And the instantaneous connection through gaze and the slightest touch--there's something so intimate to me about a man lighting another man's cigarette, that close moment of leaning over and careful attention.

And that moment was the same to both of them, by the by. The whole little fic grew out of an image that popped into my head of Jeeves standing in shadows watching Bertie play (it will be no surprise given how often pianos pop up in my fics that Hugh Laurie has made an irrevocable impression on my personal Bertie), and he's absolutely rapt and holding his breath without knowing it. It's always in the back of my mind to write Jeeves's side of this but it's just never quite happened.

[nox-candida.livejournal.com]

Gala is one of my faves precisely because it's a sort of what if they'd met earlier (which is one of my interests, too). lol, and you're such a tease: I would die if you wrote this from Jeeves's point of view. :D Still, this was some awesome commentary. Thank you for doing it. :)

[storyfan.livejournal.com]

You might think I'd choose Jooster, but I'm going to surprise you. I'd like to know about the last few paragraphs of your Star Trek ficlet (At Night We Go Into Our Houses and Burn). I love the imagery of the two of them sitting on the roof at night. But the freckle, the half-degree fever and the place where Bones could rest his chin are not your garden-variety images. Where did you get them? And how did you know these images would work?

[thirstyrobot.livejournal.com]

This is one of those rare things of mine that I can look at months later and still not want to change a thing. I didn't write it, really-- it just grew in this completely organic way, one of those lucky flashes that you get once in a blue moon. If I sat down to write this today, I probably couldn't do it, or if I did every word would be like pulling teeth. My head was so far up into this shiny shiny new playground at the time I wrote this that these guys would not get out of it no matter what I did, and I was in their heads too.

The fever was from Bones as a medical man, the kind of thing he would know about Jim and be unable to help but notice because of who he is. The freckle was just... I don't know, you're thinking really hard, hyper-focusing on something to stop from focusing on something else, and it just fit itself in there as something my Bones would do. The chin-on-shoulder just came from how I pictured them up there, easy intimacy underlaced with tension and longing but not the woe-is-me kind, a sense of inevitability about the whole thing because they just fit.

It's not so much I knew these things would work as it's that it just came into being that way. I really do wish I had a formula for making something like this happen, because (and you know I super-seriously believe it if I can say it) this is one of the best pieces I've ever done, maybe even the best, and if I could duplicate that on a daily basis I'd be unstoppable.

Er, if nothing else, a bit of insight into the Psychology of the Mercy. :P

[storyfan.livejournal.com]

This is just what I wanted to know. Sometimes these words and paragraphs and stories just seem to flow out of nowhere. If we could dip into the well from whence they came, whenever we liked, the writing would always be this effortless, joyful thing.

I have to agree that this is one of your best pieces. YOu've never written anything I haven't liked, but this one struck a particular chord with me. I go back and reread it every now and then, just to remind myself that golden moments are indeed possible.

[hazeltea.livejournal.com]

I was a bit slow on reading this to figure out if it was WWI or AU. http://thirstyrobot.livejournal.com/52517.html#cutid1 But it was excellent. I am just dense.

[thirstyrobot.livejournal.com]

Oh my lord, writing this fic was like amateur dentistry with nothing but a fork and some tweezers. I was in an awful funk, which was why I asked for the prompts in the first place, and then here I was with not only the "action" directive, but also a historical setting I knew almost nothing about. Cue a bunch of emergency research and absolutely squat coming out the way I wanted. Rather than military-movie-action-sequence-splodey, I got stuck on the image of a dying soldier bleeding out in Bertie's arms croaking out "It's a Long Way to Tipperary." It was successful in its own way, I think, but not exactly action, and definitely taught me that my writing muscles are just not built for big fast-paced stuff-go-boom scenes.

It really is almost AU-- I had to do some fuzzy math and just throw out some bits of the canon timeline I've worked up in my head. But it's conceivable that Bertie could have been there, and been there with Jeeves, which is why I set it towards the end of the war with Bertie basically fresh from the Eton trainee corps and Jeeves having been in a bit longer. The only way I could rationalize it having happened and still have canon exist was that Bertie sort of blocks it out. So yeah, a little suspension of disbelief is required.

[hazeltea.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I just can't imagine Bertie living through this and not being more mature than he was when the stories started, so I was thinking first WWII, then that didn't make sense, so I thought AU. It was so lovely though :)

[queen-fiend.livejournal.com]

Fic blathering is always fun! :)

What was about to be a 'steady on, Jeeves,' or similar exclamation-- for there are liberties and then there are liberties-- died on my lips, as said lips were covered by other lips. Jeeves's, to be precise. The Wooster bean is not ordinarily up to quick thinking, but as the fellow I tend to leave the quick thinking to was the one causing the need for it, it managed to come up with the goods. Jeeves had misunderstood me so utterly it was nearly laughable, but I doubted he'd want to be laughed at just now. While I'd been thinking of gliding walks and serene thoughts, of domestic harmony and everything just so, he'd concentrated on the loving hearts and sweet dearness, and had apparently been hoping for some declaration of this s. d. from me for some time.

[thirstyrobot.livejournal.com]

My idea with this one, quite simply (and fairly obviously), was to kind of turn the 'both secretly pining' cliché on its ear. Bertie being as sex-oblivious and innocent as he ever is in that kind of setup, but when the moment comes where the kiss and declaration from Jeeves would bring about the good old epiphany, it doesn't, because Jeeves has totally misread what kind of adoring Bertie's been doing.

And okay, all that's been done too. I almost, at this point where Bertie's copping onto the misunderstanding, had him do the doltish spluttering thing and cause a big old argument. The "choose your own adventure" version of this would diverge depending on whether or not Bertie has the wherewithal not to actually laugh. I think I remember that around the time I wrote this I'd just read one too many things where Bertie was just a little too clueless, so I let him have a clue.

There's two possible endings after the close of this, too-- the happy one where Bertie warms up to it quick-like and falls equally head-over-heels, and the not-so-happy one where he's guiltily going through the motions because he wants Jeeves to stay and wants Jeeves to be happy. And maybe a third (or combination of the two) where Jeeves works out what's happened and it all goes horribly wrong. Maybe in the midst of a painful rift, Bertie finally gets his epiphany, or maybe he doesn't. And maybe he does and it all works out okay, or maybe he does and it still doesn't get fixed. I prefer them to get their happily-ever-after, of course, but I like playing with things that will mean it won't come without a fight.