mercyrobot: (Default)
mercyrobot ([personal profile] mercyrobot) wrote2009-11-01 05:02 pm
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Special features!

Totally stolen from [livejournal.com profile] 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.

[identity profile] storyfan.livejournal.com 2009-11-01 11:12 pm (UTC)(link)
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?

[identity profile] thirstyrobot.livejournal.com 2009-11-03 12:21 am (UTC)(link)
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

[identity profile] storyfan.livejournal.com 2009-11-03 12:35 am (UTC)(link)
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.