The three favorite fics I’ve written, behind the cut.
3) The HYD Megafic
Hana Yori Dango; Tsukushi/Tsukasa; PG to R
“I will come to the room and knock four times if the mistress returns,” Tama informed Tsukushi as she put on the old familiar maid’s outfit. It felt strangely nostalgic… heart-pounding. Even the smell of the fabric, the feeling of it against her skin, was familiar. It made her think of days now long past, days of hard work and tension-filled nights, afraid of the stirring feelings in her soul every time he got too close to her.
And it made her think of one night in particular. The night rubies sparkled at her throat, and she could neither breathe nor move, but lay receiving… no…. opening herself to his kisses, as his thumb caressed her wrist and her forehead gently, cradling her like she was someone precious, someone he had to take care not to break. Yet his lips tasted of passion, and their touch whispered to her of possession… though who was the possessor that night she still wasn’t sure. Had it been him, who’d silenced her every cry of protest? Had it been her, who’d encited him to such a passion? Or, perhaps, in that empty room, past midnight, with the sparkling ringed planet in the sky watching over them, they had been neither possessors nor possessions, but equals even in madness, holding hands as they fell through eternity. Just perhaps, they might have been lovers.
It seems funny that this fic, which holds such a place of honor in my memories, never got itself a real name. The background to this was that I was on a mailing list for Hana Yori Dango back when the manga was still ongoing every month in Margaret magazine. I translated each issue as they came out, and after a while I started writing a fic after each translation, my version of what I hoped would happen in the next issue. Then there was a hiatus in the story, and the last issue before the hiatus had Tsukasa disappearing off to New York suddenly, and Tsukushi vowing to get on a plane and follow him. The following months I had plenty of time to write what I considered to be the perfect continuation– and the perfect ending.
Is it just coincidence that everything that happened after that moment seemed like a letdown? Because that was the beginning of everything bad that happened. (Let’s not discuss the amnesia storyline. Seriously? AMNESIA?) I could go on and on about how the manga lost its punch and started to play things out for longer than they could be sustained, but I’ve promised this is going to be about writing, not about fandom.
In terms of this fic, I storyboarded/drew a great deal of it before beginning to write. I had the major scenes blocked out in my head and in some cases on paper. Like a lot of my manga-based fics, I had a lot of the dialog in Japanese originally, as well. It feels more canon to me when the English is horribly stilted. Of course, when I translated that practice to writing about American media with Japanese characters in it, it didn’t go over well. But the “just-translated” feel of this, assisted by the plotting (which is much richer and more detailed than the story I just mentioned), makes it work.
2) Yaten’s Love Song
Sailor Moon; Yaten/Minako; PG-13
“It’s my dream,” she’d said.
I didn’t have a dream. I never had the time or space to find my dream. That was what being a Sailor Soldier was all about. How could she, a Sailor Soldier too, how could she stand there with that glowing face and tell me SHE had a dream?
“Soldiers have missions. We don’t have dreams,” I slammed her against the wall, with my words harder than with my arms, but I was the one who felt I was being crucified on concrete. She was still glowing, damn her.
I wonder when it was that I realized she was my dream?
Nothing makes you love a fic more than having it stolen. That’s all I’m going to say about the authorship controversy here. Suffice it to say that I wrote this over a year’s time, and I sweated and cried and gained and lost sanity doing so. It’s mine. End of story.
Going back to reformat this for archiving it on Tiptoe Writes Fanfic was like taking a time machine into a land when I knew nothing about writing. I want to shout every time I have a character laugh or sigh something; I feel ill at all the cliches and want to pull out half the exclamation points. But I’m archiving, not revising, and as a good proofreader I know what can and can’t be changed. Sigh! Still, if you click through, do have a laugh at how raw my prose was compared to now. I’m still over the top, but at least my edges aren’t quite as ragged anymore.
One of the really interesting things to me about translating this story over from fanfiction.net to Tiptoe Writes Fanfic was seeing how much explanation and disclaiming I did back in the day. I felt it necessary to give a huge glossary at the beginning of each part and explain that I just had to use the Japanese because the voice actors were so great and the English just didn’t work as well, blah blah blah…
Needless to say I took the big honkin’ glossary out, but I provided a small key in between segments of the fic to keep things moving. Still, I do feel some reader-guilt. Part of me wants to declare at the outset, “Don’t take my translations as a dictionary. Just because iie means ‘no’ doesn’t mean you can say We have iie bananas. The language works differently!” But in the end, it’s my readers who will act smart or dumb, not me. I can’t protect the world from willful ignorance. If I could, well, I would get into politics.
Still, it makes me wonder how I can work some authentic Japanese language into stories without inundating the reader. I want to do it so badly, but it always feels overblown or gratuitous. I need to write something where the Japanese language’s uniqueness would work with the overall sound symbolism or themes. Where it was there out of necessity as much as art. What kind of a story might that be?
1) Legacies
Heroes, Matt/Mohinder, PG-13 to R
It was unexpected visits from Elle at work and Maya at home, and he felt irked, as though a wicked blonde devil and a soulful, tanned angel were tag-teaming him, trying by turns to divert his attention. And his angel and devil quota had already been filled, both at once, in Molly, so he had no room for them.
Stranger and more worrisome still were the brief snips of conversation Matt and he would have. It was the first they’d lived together for any significant length of time, and in addition to the usual adjustments, there was also an eerie sense of familiarity. When they were not bickering, they were thinking the same thing at the same time. The strangeness with which they interacted unsettled Mohinder; he wasn’t sure whether he was bothered more by the friction or by the times of utter parallel.
There were times their eyes would meet and without a word they would know what was coming next. Matt would open his mouth and Mohinder would say “It’s my week to buy the groceries. Right.” Or Molly would have a sore throat and they would both come home with the same flavor of cough drops. Or, worst of all, they would begin to chat in the early evening and the next time they looked up it was three a.m.
What Mohinder realized after a while was that they were actually building a relationship. A partnership was forming between them. Like two sides of a bridge that meet over a rushing river below, utterly scared of falling. Once the two meet, they should be comforted, yes; but they’re still looking at a long tumble to the rapids and jagged rocks should they be unable to fit together in just the right way. It was terrifying.
And it went unsaid for a long time.
Of everything I’ve written, nothing makes me prouder than Legacies. Here I created a plot that truly made sense and truly fit the characters and world it was extending, with twists and revelations up to the very last chapter. And here I created what I felt was a realistic, intense romantic relationship in its early stages, a realistic turn into bisexuality for two men who were not expecting it, and, best yet, the building up of that relationship was integral to the plot in ways that only become clear at the very end. And in the meantime, I handled minor characters with the appropriate degrees of sensitivity and brought in people and ideas that I had foreshadowed beforehand. I’m just so damned proud of this.
This story actually began in two separate parts. One part was the theory that spawned the fic, which I wrote in the form of a conversation that remains in the final chapter. The theory itself was so intricate and carefully woven that it took a lot of time to get all the gears in place to have the plot work its way toward that final point. The other was a series of conversations between my romantic leads that were intended to portray a more realistic way for them to get together. I titled it “Tentatively,” because that’s what it was; not the flowers and rainbows of other fics I’d written but a tentative, hesitant, stopping-and-starting exploration of what had been a partnership of necessity and slowly became a friendship before turning into more. It took me a while to realize that the two pieces could be joined.
I do write a lot of dialogue before filling out the scene, because I hear the dialogue in my head. But I find that it’s more difficult to write “around” existing lines of dialogue, so I try to stay fluid and allow the words to change if they’re going to. Still, today, the best things I write are those things that pop into my head, dialogue, description, themes, imagery and all, and just go with effortless bliss from fingers to page.
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Well, this meme has been lots of fun for me to work on and think about. I think I let it get a little too fandom-y at times, but that’s OK. I was doing it for my own enjoyment. If you have read, thank you for reading.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: creativity, fan fiction, fandom meme, fanfic, fanfic meme, the creative process, writing
