valyssia

A bit of weirdness here tonight for you folks that are following along with Vanishing. Sorry about that. I had a chapter swell to unreasonable proportions. That always makes me nervous. I feel like the reason it happens is because I’ve managed to hit a bout of not-so-much verbal diarrhea. My beta and pre-reader have both assured me that that isn’t the case. They claim I’m adding ‘depth’ to the story.

Yay! Go me!

So the sitch is this: The interactions between Buffy, Willow, Xander and Giles interleaved with Kennedy and her latest drama worked well. I could’ve cut them down to one chapter of Kennedy and one chapter of Buffy and it would’ve been okay, but I liked the interleaving. The two scenarios were playing out at the same time. The thing is that working through the two scenarios led to a chapter north of ten-thousand words. That’s just too large by real world standards.

I know. I know. I’ve done that in the past. You can’t blame a girl for trying to get better, can you?

So anyway, I didn’t want to publish one piece without the other. It would’ve felt like I’d left you hanging. Telling a story in incomplete snips is just bad. But the thing is, I’m not done with part two. I have about 1200 words of the final scene written. It’s not something that leaves any of the other interactions incomplete, so I went ahead and posted all of chapter 8 except for that scene. Feel free to read it as it sits. It’ll all feel happily finished. I should be able to drop the final scene in by early in the week and you can come back and read it all by its little lonesome. It kind of belongs all by its little lonesome anyway.

I’ll make another post with a link to a second cut when the whole thing’s complete. You’ll be able to click and go right to the part you want to read.

The Taming the Muse prompt that I’ve claimed will be in that final scene. The rest of the prompts I’ve claimed are present in the published material. But because of the incompleteness, I’m holding off on making those posts. I’m also holding off on publishing this to AO3 and Near Her Always. I can’t really drop a scene into a chapter and say, “Hey! Come back! There’s another scene,” so waiting really is the better option. I had to post tonight because of TtM. Sometimes timing just sucks, but I’m faking my way through it.

Anyway, enjoy.

Oh, and footnote: the chapter title is a funny. I asked Howard what comes after Yoko and he replied, “Imagine.” It was a great little quip that made me laugh. Thing is, we’re both too geeky not to Google. The two albums that John Lennon released after he left The Beatles were called Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins and Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions. And I thought what a marvelous name for a chapter. Go figure, it overflowed and split.

I should probably explain what I’m doing. I know that some of you will have questions.

As you can see, I’ve begun to work on Vanishing again. It’s been a full year since I touched the story. That’s tough for me to believe, but it’s true. I was about a quarter of the way through when I switched focus last year. I have no idea why I dropped it, but I did and it’s still on my to-do list, so…

Anyway, when I picked it up I perceived the same flaw I saw when I last approached it. The first chapter was just lame. I read it and yawned. I tried to play with it some to work that out, but honestly, it was still boring, so I removed it. The material really isn’t necessary to make the story make sense. It was intended to be a primer that showed where the human Buffy came from. We don’t need that. This story is about an AU flopped on top of another AU. There’s gonna be exposition a plenty throughout the entire narrative, else it won’t make sense. Dishing that out in spoonfuls really is the way to go. The cupful at the beginning just sucked.

I pulled the remaining chapters instead of renaming them. It just felt like the thing to do. I’m making another edit pass and adding to what’s already there. I laced about a thousand more words into the second chapter—which is now the first chapter—before I posted it.

Because of the added material I’m also using this as my prompt piece for Taming the Muse. I trust that that’s okay. If any of the TtM mods would like to see proof of the additional word count, they need only ask. I save everything.

My plan is to work the story start to finish as a primary focus while I’m still fiddling with Bloodletting as a sideline.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

I know, I know…most of you thought that Crimes was already done. It was. The Faith-centric section of the story was told. What I posted today is the piece that ties Crimes back into the rest of A.T.S. and makes it track in context with the whole. I’ve labeled it an ‘epilogue’ because that’s what it would be in a standalone novel. I still prefer to think of it as a ‘bridge scene’ because that’s more descriptive of its function within the series.

This story represents an appreciable portion of two years of my life. I’m extremely pleased to see it done. It wasn’t easy to write. And no, it didn’t just flow onto the pages as you see it. The editing process was rather intensive. My editing process always is. Feel bad for Howard.

Speaking of…I’d like to thank him, 1shinyboat, tamoline, Spice, Chris, Dylan and Garrett for helping me to see this through.

If you see something or just want to say something, please feel free.

Enjoy!

I’m pretty sure some of you are asking that.

I’m sitting here on the couch with my laptop. Across from me on my desk there’s a monitor and keyboard. I have a desk machine too. Actually, two of them and a KVM, but who blood cares? The desktop of my poor desk machine is covered in little GUI sticky notes. You see, I haven’t had time to write. I’ve been too damn busy with the beta of Crimes and…

*sighs*

(More on that sigh later.)

It took me three days. I read the third act again, added a few thises and thates and reposted it. One of the larger thises that I added back in is the material I cropped from scene two. I just think it flows better. I appreciate that it really is too long. It’s an info dump…a long, kind of painful, tedious info dump. But then entire third act is up till the one something I’ve been headed for from the beginning happens. It’s couched well enough in angst and annoyance not to be too awful to read. (I hope.) Faith spends the entire third act catching up. After the second act, that shouldn’t be horribly surprising.

Back to my sticky notes…

So I have this fantastic idea, whatever, wherever, whenever…usually when I’m lying down trying to sleep. I hear the character’s voices in my head. That’s a nifty thing. It also might be a sign that I’m losing my mind, but whatever…I go to the one machine that’s always on and dutifully paraphrase what the voices tell me. The idea turns into a sticky note. Lots of goddamned sticky notes.

Those sticky notes will eventually become what I’ve been referring to as the ‘bridge scene.’ Technically it’s an epilogue to Crimes, but with an ongoing mythology such as I have with A.T.S. where one story has kind of jacked the ride a scene is needed to bridge the gap between what happened here and what happened before. It’ll channel you back in to the rest of the story.

It’ll also be Buffy’s first turn at the wheel in, uh…one-hundred and thirty-eight-thousand or so words.

Anyway, if you have questions or you feel that the ending was abrupt, please be patient.

Gruesome details can be tedious, so I’ll probably I’ll probably continue to approach this topic from Buffy’s perspective. However, illustrating the consideration put into forming the details does have merit, so…

( Spoilery stuff beneath the cut for Vanishing chapter six. )

Like all humans I repeatedly fall into the same traps. It makes me feel like a moron. This week’s trap is called Vanishing.

I approached the story thinking, ‘I’ll just spruce it up a little.’ Yeah, ‘a little’ isn’t something that comes easily for me. I don’t do ‘a little’ of anything. That’s why I’ve never really indulged much in alcohol. ‘A little’ would become ‘a lot’ and I would become an alcoholic, so I largely try to keep my vices clean.

Reworking stories is an arguably clean vice, though it is awfully time consuming. My plan for Vanishing is the same plan I had for Whedonist’s One Last Shot, which isn’t the same plan I had for Bloodletting. I allowed Bloodletting to become something else. It evolved as I worked on it. One Last Shot remained very true to the original story. It wasn’t my story, so I just ‘spruced it up.’ I didn’t even touch the dialog.

So, I’m attacking Vanishing, but I’m sticking to the original script. The difference is that I’ve been updating the dialog, but only to freshen it up and only when I can do so without changing the overall intent. And that’s good. It’s working.

My goal for Vanishing is to create a story that can be read and understood without reading the entire series. I honestly believe that the plot is good enough that this story deserves the attention. At one point I strongly considered using the concepts for Another Thirteen Steps, but I’m going to do this instead.

If you look at the notes, you’ll see that it began life at around forty-thousand words. At its current rate of inflation, it will probably end at roughly fifty-thousand to fifty-five-thousand words. Stylistically it won’t be as dense as the stories I’ve written for A.T.S., but it should be a pleasant little read nonetheless.

The rub is that it takes me a day to revise two-thousand words. As a result, I will be releasing the story in four-thousand word chunks. I’m going to keep the original chapter structure, so what you’ll see is multiple posts for each chapter. The story’s structure lends well to this. It has a lot of scene breaks. It changes locations frequently. Actually, it’s structured very much like a television program.

This additional work will doubtless slow my progress down on other things. I trust that you will bear with me.

I began act two of Crimes with a series of goals in mind. First and foremost, I wanted the primary focus of the material to be effect, not cause.

I had no real desire to write the actual attack and subsequent torture of Faith and Buffy. There are just so many things out there that present that sort of brutality in graphic detail. I didn’t believe that the world needed another example, so I decided I would offer a rough view of the events in retrospect.

Enough of the details would need to be presented that the reader would glean a sense of what had occurred between the acts. I decided to approach this in a non-linear fashion because it would add to the sense of confusion that would necessarily result from such an experience.

I decided that I would use a mental block to conceal the details. That idea matured into the concept of Robert Joseph Levy’s charater Alex surfacing as a result of the trauma. She became a tangible line between the immediate past and the present, a gatekeeper of sorts through which the distant past could be viewed as well. I used her to create a profile that might culminate in the character we know.

The dream begins as a result of the gatekeeper being unseated. It seemed to me that that would eventually happen. Faith would see or hear something and it would trigger a memory. That single fragment would cause the rest of the pieces to return and that would overwhelm her much like what we see happen to Buffy in The Weight of the World.

And so I wrote, and then I stepped back to look. Without describing the event that triggered the change, what I had was so much one thing and then another. The events leading up to the dream seemed separate. There were a couple of ways to repair this. I could either write the trigger scene or I could blend the two.

I decided that writing the trigger scene was bad idea. The last thing this act needed was another ‘uh-oh, bad things happened’ sequence of events. Writing that sort of scene is difficult. It’s so easy if you use that too much, to hit ‘campy.’

Furthermore, fragmenting the dream added to the sense that Faith had lost her mind. It created chaos…and chaos was actually what I wanted. Showing the breaking point would’ve lent order to the act. Doing something easy that furthers your goal is always preferable to doing something hard that doesn’t.

There were a couple of downsides to breaking up the dream. In its original build, during the section where Faith relives her fight with Angel, I had her begin to realize that she was fighting against herself. This didn’t seem appropriate once the flow of the dream was interrupted so I removed it. As a result, it left that part a little flat, which is unfortunate as that was such a pivotal moment in her history.

So, yeah…fragmenting the dream interrupted its flow. In its original form the scene is a 17,780 word hell ride. Scenes that long don’t happen often, certainly not in fan fiction.

I weighed the good against the bad and made my choice, but I’d still like you to have the opportunity, should you wish, to see it as it was.

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