Happy much-belated birthday to
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unanon and
psychic_serpent, and happy not-belated birthday to my LJ-less sister Michele. (
uss_hairball, can you believe she's 18??)
This Fandom Friday post is dedicated to
marksykins. Those who are here for the YA lit and RL stuff can skip.
Today, the author list for
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hp_springsmut was
revealed, so now I can tell the world that I wrote
Time and Tithe for
marksykins (Harry/Lucius/Draco, NC-17, multiple warnings). I've never written anything anonymously before, and waiting to reveal all was...kind of exciting, but not necessarily fun. Marks's reqest was very intricate, and it was a challenge to write the fic. Thanks go to
schmevil for telling me I couldn't write it in first-person and to dump the pink cashmere, to
chaos_rose for catching all the things I couldn't, and to
florahart, who reassured me that yes, Marks would like it. After I clean up a few details, I'll post it at Skyehawke.
After the fic was posted, I got to thinking about all the things I knew about the fic that the reader would never know, partly for space and partly for the reason that all the details just didn't belong in the fic. For example, I know the layout of Draco's cell. The room is rectangular, with the door and the desk on the short walls and the bed and bookcase on the long wall, and painted off-white. The bathroom attached to the cell is entirely white. The bed has a short headboard and footboard, like the bed I had my junior and senior years of college, and it's maple. The desk is maple, too, but the bookcase has a cherry finish. The eyeliner that Nebby puts on Draco is M.A.C. Fluidline in Blacktrack, and "nebby" is Pittsburgh slang for a person who is annoying and often asks too many personal questions. The room where Harry killed Snape has a flagstone floor and brick walls, and although there's minimal light in the room so Draco wouldn't really notice the color, the stones are gray. All of these small things make up the writer's challenge, that of getting the images of the room across to the reader without being too specific or boring.
And then, there was Marks's request.
Marks's request was actually the second one I got, because all of the pairings and scenarios in the first request were ones I said I specifically wouldn't do.
starrysummer is a miracle worker, I think. When I got Marks's request list, the Harry-as-Dark-Lord/Lucius/Draco idea stood out to me, probably because Draco lives in my head these days. I thought I was really, really smart and said, "I could do this as Harry/Lucius with Draco as the non-con or dubious consent part of the fic," until I read further down and saw that Marks had thought of that already. But hey, less work for the plot. It took me forever to start writing this, because I kept thinking, "How on earth am I going to fit in all of these requests?" I know I didn't have to, but it's a fic
for someone else. My job is not to write what I want to see, but what the recipient wants to see, and maybe put my own little twist on it.
Don't ask me how I came up with the idea of making Harry into the Dark Lord. That was divine intervention. Brian said to me, "
marksykins is obviously crazy and I'll drop the Dark Lord thing in your lap, but you're on your own for the rest." I countered that
marksykins is not any more or less crazy than any other fandomer, AFAIK, and is probably a very nice person to boot. He didn't believe me. But what do you expect of a muse that drinks martinis?
One thing that didn't come through so much in the final draft of the fic was the light imagery. I wanted to use tons of it when describing Dark Lord!Harry and the room Draco was in, but it never quite came through. I think what happened was that I realized, "Crap! This is supposed to be a smut fic, like, with sex in it," and I abandoned the careful imagery for nudity because I didn't have the time to write a 10,000 word fic and it would be incredibly poor form to submit a fic to a community called
hp_springsmut if it didn't actually have smut in it. And Marks definitely wouldn't like it.
So once
Time and Tithe was done I got to thinking about the things I know about the settings of my fics that others don't know and won't ever know because there isn't a need to. Like the fact that
Iscariot takes place at my grandmother's kitchen table, or that Percy holds his wand in the first groove of his index finger, back fingers wrapped around the back for support and speed. I'm not one of those writers that feels the need to describe all the colors of the curtains in a room, but I do like a few details here and there. Deciding which details are important and which aren't is, well, not really anyone's decision but my own and sometimes the beta readers'. It just makes me think about how I read the story differently than the reader, and what I can or need to do to make my story more concrete where details are concerned. I wonder sometimes about the little details; how the reader notices them and if they ever make a difference in the long run. I suppose they do if you're a writer like JKR who likes to hide major plot points in the tiny details, but I'm just me, just another wannabe who gets yelled at on the EWRA listserv for using Gmail. Don't ask. Oh, and I really don't want to go to my in-laws' this weekend.
Tags: fics
126: 
flirty
780: this shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S
dizzy
cranky
accomplished
working