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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. :)