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Leaping in head-first
May. 2nd, 2004 10:06 pmI've started a Spike/Xander fic. Yikes.
Whether it'll come to anything, who can say. I've started far more stories than I've ever finished, over the years. (Only one WIP actually up on the web, though - and the guilt just keeps on throbbing. One of these days I'll finish it. I swear.)
I've written a short first chapter: 1344 words. Hm, I wonder if posting word counts to my livejournal whenever I get some writing done would help motivate me? You never know... I need all the motivation I can get, and having people reading it as I go along isn't really an option. (I don't know any Buffy people well enough to inflict that on them. Plus, too much pressure.)
The premise of the story, such as it is, is this: AU season 7. Suppose the First Evil was a no-show. Suppose that without the influence of the First Evil, Spike went considerably less insane post-soul. Suppose that without the First Evil egging him on, Spike decided not to go back to Sunnydale at all; suppose that he just couldn't face Buffy with the weight and guilt of his soul upon him. Suppose he went back home to London, instead, and one September evening while drunk and maudlin he called Buffy and left a vague and weepy apology on her answering machine. Suppose Buffy, worried by the message (and having *69-ed to find out where it came from), sent Xander to London to find him.
All that's in the first chapter, so I don't think it counts as spoilers to the story.
Then... adventures ensue in London. And slash, most likely. All of that part's rather vauge in my mind right now. Either it'll coalesce eventually into some sort of reasonable plot, or the story beginning will be abandoned on my hard drive like so many others. It could go either way.
There's a lot that intimidates me about starting this story, and about writing in this fandom.
Actually, the things that intimidate me break into two main bits:
1) The fandom is so big! There are so many great writers already working with it! Can I contribute anything new? Will anyone notice me? Will anyone care?
and
2) Breaking the "write-what-you-know" rule.
Second things first: Spike's dialect. Damn. I've never written a character with a dialect significantly different from my own before. Never, in twenty-odd years of writing! (OK, when I say "twenty years" that counts the stories I wrote for my grade one teacher... but still, they were stories, and there were no dialects.) And I'm terrible at faking accents in real life. I just can't do it. I can't even fake a Scottish accent, despite sharing a home with my Scottish grandmother for the first 15 years of my life. How the hell am I going to write Spike? I can find online slang dictionaries to pepper his speech with colourful expressions, but how will I know if I'm using them right? How will I know when I'm using a word he absolutely wouldn't say?
And then I go and make it even harder on myself by setting the darn story in London instead of Sunnydale. OK, I did live in London for the summer of 1999, so I've got something more than nothing to work with... but still. It's a foreign place that I don't know a huge amount about. Whereas Sunnydale is a made-up place that I know about as much about as anyone else does. (Plus, Sunnydale is a lot more like my Canadian hometown than London is. Except for the Hellmouth stuff, of course.)
Whether it'll come to anything, who can say. I've started far more stories than I've ever finished, over the years. (Only one WIP actually up on the web, though - and the guilt just keeps on throbbing. One of these days I'll finish it. I swear.)
I've written a short first chapter: 1344 words. Hm, I wonder if posting word counts to my livejournal whenever I get some writing done would help motivate me? You never know... I need all the motivation I can get, and having people reading it as I go along isn't really an option. (I don't know any Buffy people well enough to inflict that on them. Plus, too much pressure.)
The premise of the story, such as it is, is this: AU season 7. Suppose the First Evil was a no-show. Suppose that without the influence of the First Evil, Spike went considerably less insane post-soul. Suppose that without the First Evil egging him on, Spike decided not to go back to Sunnydale at all; suppose that he just couldn't face Buffy with the weight and guilt of his soul upon him. Suppose he went back home to London, instead, and one September evening while drunk and maudlin he called Buffy and left a vague and weepy apology on her answering machine. Suppose Buffy, worried by the message (and having *69-ed to find out where it came from), sent Xander to London to find him.
All that's in the first chapter, so I don't think it counts as spoilers to the story.
Then... adventures ensue in London. And slash, most likely. All of that part's rather vauge in my mind right now. Either it'll coalesce eventually into some sort of reasonable plot, or the story beginning will be abandoned on my hard drive like so many others. It could go either way.
There's a lot that intimidates me about starting this story, and about writing in this fandom.
Actually, the things that intimidate me break into two main bits:
1) The fandom is so big! There are so many great writers already working with it! Can I contribute anything new? Will anyone notice me? Will anyone care?
and
2) Breaking the "write-what-you-know" rule.
Second things first: Spike's dialect. Damn. I've never written a character with a dialect significantly different from my own before. Never, in twenty-odd years of writing! (OK, when I say "twenty years" that counts the stories I wrote for my grade one teacher... but still, they were stories, and there were no dialects.) And I'm terrible at faking accents in real life. I just can't do it. I can't even fake a Scottish accent, despite sharing a home with my Scottish grandmother for the first 15 years of my life. How the hell am I going to write Spike? I can find online slang dictionaries to pepper his speech with colourful expressions, but how will I know if I'm using them right? How will I know when I'm using a word he absolutely wouldn't say?
And then I go and make it even harder on myself by setting the darn story in London instead of Sunnydale. OK, I did live in London for the summer of 1999, so I've got something more than nothing to work with... but still. It's a foreign place that I don't know a huge amount about. Whereas Sunnydale is a made-up place that I know about as much about as anyone else does. (Plus, Sunnydale is a lot more like my Canadian hometown than London is. Except for the Hellmouth stuff, of course.)
