The Best Chance (Part II: Ch 7-11 of 16)

[raspberryhunter]

Why am I so obsessed with this fic? Why?

...I don't know how anyone writes actual novels. When this is done, it'll be 30,000 words and will have taken over my life for five months (well, except for the couple of weeks I went and wrote SGU fic instead). And I still would never have got it into the condition it's in (which -- I'm proud of it, don't get me wrong, but it clearly could have been twice as long if I'd been willing to expand the subplots, and there are definitely places where I can see the arc could have been worked out better, and a couple of Idiot Balls despite myself) if it weren't that my recipient has been writing me a really nice feedback comment on every chapter.

Maybe it gets easier once you've done it for a while? Because OMG this is a fanfic (what I mean is, there's quite a lot of backstory-characterization-setting that is assumed, that I didn't have to DO), and only 30k, and STILL I cannot even tell you how many drafts these chapters went through, how many times I had to rewrite some of the scenes. Let's just say: a lot.

Or maybe I just have a shorter attention span than people who write novels? Because I don't think I could do this for more than five months. Anyway, I have a lot more appreciation for novel-writers now!

Title: The Best Chance (WIP; Chapters 7-11 of 16)
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: PG
Spoilers: All of Season 1
Warnings: No major warnings.
Characters: Emma, Baelfire, Henry, Regina, Mary Margaret, David Nolan, Mr. Gold
Pairings: Principal pairings are non-romantic parental-filial pairings involving all seven main characters, in the show canon combinations. In addition there are the romantic pairings Emma/Gold, Emma/August(past), Belle/Rumpelstiltskin(past), Snow/Charming.
Summary: Some families are bound by blood, some by law, and some simply by choice, but family always finds one another. Season 1 AU.

Prompt: I want to see [the characters of Emma and Gold] on a more equal and honest footing... Or an AU where August and Emma were placed in the same home as Baelfire, and they all grew up much more functionally, and came to Storybrooke prepared.

Prompt: How does Gold turn back from the sort of person who tortures Moe French to the generous sheep farmer Bae longs for? Does he even want to?

Part II: Chapters 7-12
Part I: Chapters 1-6.

Comments

[elementals_ao3]

*grabs all the text to convert for Kindle....*

*when did my life get so busy that it's taking me this long to get to your fic??*

[raspberryhunter]

Since you decided to write 7,000 (probably twice that much if we count all the words that didn't make it in the final version, maybe three times if we count the commentary) awesome words of hotness? ;) *grin*

(I'm kind of amazed, btw, that you were able to blow through that so quickly. It takes me, literally, MONTHS to write 7k!)

So be aware that this WILL spoil you for the ENTIRE first season of OUAT. And it might be better if you've seen some of it, or at least know the storyline, as a lot of what happens is sort of, umm, commentary on things I didn't like about S1 :) And it's all PG, the most explicit it gets is a kiss :) (I almost never write mature, much less explicit, although I do have this plot-what-plot bunny because Carlyle and Lana Parilla are SO cracking together, but that's another thought entirely...)

But hey, don't let me stop you -- excited for you to read!! :) (I just feel like I need to put in all these caveats...)

[elementals_ao3]

Since you decided to write 7,000 (probably twice that much if we count all the words that didn't make it in the final version, maybe three times if we count the commentary) awesome words of hotness? ;) *grin*

ROFL - oh thaaaaat! *waves hand* Yeah, no kidding! For a fic that was essentially one scene, it did kind of eat my brainz.

(I'm kind of amazed, btw, that you were able to blow through that so quickly. It takes me, literally, MONTHS to write 7k!)

Dude...I have exactly two speeds - on, and off :P Either I'm stuck for ideas/technique/structure and in a dead panic, or I'm creating. Writing, music, photography, it doesn't seem to matter :D

I'm a total weirdo when it comes to how I approach getting into a new series - TV, books, fic. I almost always start in the middle. I get a huge amount of satisfaction from trying to deduce previous events from the clues in the current scenes, and even more when I go back and finally read/watch the early stuff and see what I got wrong and what I got right. It drives my husband absolutely NUTS. He must see everything in order :P

I'm excited to read!

YK, your gift fic may need...your help LOL! HOW GENEROUS OF ME. It's like gifting someone a bicycle...with the chain, the pedals & chainrings in a box. "Your b-day present! High quality bicycle...parts!" I may solve this structure issue yet, though :P It's very fun though - light and sweet :)

[raspberryhunter]

Hee, the writing part usually goes pretty fast for me, it's working out the ideas beforehand and the kicking it into shape after that take FOREVER for me.

SO... in that case, given that you don't mind spoiling yourself... you COULD watch here "Desperate Souls" and "A Land Without Magic," if only to see the Carlyle bits ("DS" in particular is a big Carlyle one) -- you could also watch the pilot, but Carlyle appears a little less in that one ;) -- just to get a feel for the kind of thing Carlyle (and Morrison) are doing, that I'm trying to pick up on in the fic :) (Though I'd actually recommend watching ALWM first, so as to get the sense of dislocation that all the rest of us got when watching DS and Carlyle's character backstory ;) )

I wish "Skin Deep" and "The Return" were free online, bc those are AMAZING Carlyle episodes and I'd recommend you watch them too.

HEE! I would love to help you with it -- though my time is a bit limited right now, so I can't at all promise the intensity of what we did with "Beyond Perception" :)

[elementals_ao3]

I can't work out ideas *until* I'm writing. I really envy the ability to think through plotting before putting pixels to paper, cause it must save you a lot of cutting extraneous dead-end bits later!

Ooo - thanks for the spoil-reccs! "Free online" - I scoff! There's always a way, mwa ha ha ha :P I'll give those a watch.

Oh I wouldn't ask you to go to the mat again like you did for Beyond Perception any time soon! That was intense! Don't worry - this piece is much lighter weight.

[raspberryhunter]

Heh, yeah, I think it does save some (though not as many as you might think; this particular fic got something like 5k cut when my beta told me I had to axe at least one of the characters. She actually wanted me to axe a second character too, but I couldn't bring myself to do that.)

Hee! Excellent, go watch! So I know you said you don't care about spoilers, but I'd still kind of recommend you watch "Skin Deep" before "The Return," because "The Return" is such a brilliant retcon of what happened in "Skin Deep" that it loses some of its impact if you watch it in the other direction. (It's not a plot retcon, it's a character retcon, which is why I'm so insistent on this point.)

The other ones I pointed out you can pretty much watch in any order; you'll be spoiled of course if you watch out of order, but there's nothing that causes a complete shift in how you think about the character like that (except, as I said before, I recommend watching ANY episode before "Desperate Souls").

(OMG this SHOW. Apparently I can talk for hours about it, even though I have ISSUES with it. Well, okay. Partially BECAUSE I have issues with it!)

[elementals_ao3]

Your order-to-watch recc shall be my guide!

And ISSUES do seem to make one even more obsessed with a show, don't they? I wrote maaaany words about my issues with BSG and I was painfully devoted to it :P

[raspberryhunter]

Oh, and if you do watch "Skin Deep," you can read my Being Human series, in which John Crichton makes an appearance :P :) ...This was promptly completely characterization-jossed by "The Return," in fact while I was writing it (hmph) so I'd recommend reading it before watching that one :)

[elementals_ao3]

LOL - will do :P