Promised Blathering
Apr. 29th, 2010 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maychorianSo, I finally finished my big damn tornado fic...
I'm talking, of course, about The Sky Like a Bruise, finally posted after midnight last night. This story has taken me almost a year to write, which is ridiculous. But it's done now and I'm proud of it. So here's some DVD commentary, I guess.
One of the things I love about Supernatural fandom is how I can write so vividly from my own experiences. Because Sam and Dean and John and Castiel spend so much time in America, especially in the rural Midwest very much like the town I grew up in and where I still live, I can draw on a thousand memories and even where I am right this second to describe where they go and what they do. For someone who enjoys writing sensory images as much as I do, it's a great boon.
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sparky_joe won my Sweet Charity offering last year. She's from Ohio, and she asked for me, a Hoosier, to write a story about Sam and Dean caught in a Midwestern tornado. Because we both grew up in tornado country, she wanted me to capture the visceral, Midwestern panic that grips us when we hear that siren or listen to the warnings on the radio. It's a threat you live with constantly, out here in corn country, from May to September every single year. She also gave me an image of her father, standing outside the basement looking at the sky, little sparky_joe down in the shelter looking up at him. I grabbed that image and planned to write a Weechester fic. At the time I was finishing up my other opus to Midwest life, The Lights of Home, so it all seemed to dovetail nicely.
Thenpdragon76 posted her Sweet Charity fic, which was also about tornadoes and set pre-series, and I got a bit discouraged. Some emailing with sparky_joe, and I started to re-imagine the story to make it more about the aforementioned Midwestern panic. Still, I didn't start writing it. I had made the whole thing too big in my head, which is a problem I get if I think too much about what I'm writing. I do much better if I just dive into it without thinking too much.
Over the following months I finally started writing in little dribs and drabs--a description of farm country here, a bit of rawhead hunt there. I couldn't seem to get any momentum going. But I made the determination to begin working on it seriously in January because, for real, that was six months after it was due and it was about freaking time.
Another thing about me as a writer is that I'm just. not. very. good at writing action, and silly me, I started writing this thing as an action story from the very beginning. Wow, it takes me a long time to write a few paragraphs of this stuff. I can write pages and pages of someone lying in bed with a fever lickety-split, but you ask me to write someone running down the street...
Anyway. I started spending a lot of time thinking about my memories of tornadoes. I wrote more about it in this post. Every year, it seems like, we get at least one or two tornado warnings around here, meaning a tornado has been spotted touching down, and that's not even counting all the watches, all the times the clouds look like they might spit out a raging tunnel of death at any moment.
In 2004, an F4 tornado hit my parents' hometown, Roanoke, Illinois. I went to visit my grandparents out there not long after, and my grandma gave me a "tornado tour" of the damage. I saw where corn had been damaged and flattened, where buildings were missing roofs, where the manufacturing plant that had been hit dead on was still a field of rubble and ruin. We watched this video of almost forty minutes of amateur footage, from before the tornado touched down to after it lifted.
A lot of the imagery in The Sky Like a Bruise comes directly from that video. It's some pretty amazing stuff. Though, fair warning, some of my Midwestern flisties couldn't even bear to watch it, because it spoke so strongly to the fear we live with.
But then, well, I had yet another problem writing this story! Because I somewhat lackadaisically set it in Season 2, and then decided that I wanted to keep that image ofsparky_joe's father, I wrote a flashback to Dean and Sam in another tornado as youngsters with their father. And then all of a sudden I had a whole bunch of ANGST smeared all over my straightforward action/adventure, hurt/comfort story. This is the first story I'd written set specifically in Season 2, and apparently the boys needed to deal with their grief. Suddenly the story was a lot deeper and more emotional than I'd originally intended. I had to do some mental scrambling and reorganization to make it work, but I think the story is much better for it. My current interest in present-tense writing had to come into play, too. I hope that part works for folks--I couldn't seem to write it any other way.
In the end, I was almost reluctant to write the last scene. I've been living with this story in my head (and in my google docs) for a long, long time. But it was definitely time to finish it, so I finally did, yesterday, between coughing fits and snot bubbles. I couldn't seem to concentrate on Big Bang at all with this still needing to be written, and wow, I need to work on Big Bang. I gavesparky_joe the first read-through, and her praises were effusive, so my heart is warm. I accomplished what I set out to do.
There it is. This is the probably the most thinking and talking about a fanfic that I've ever done. I hope it's worth something to you, my dear readers, and I hope you enjoy the story, too.
I'm talking, of course, about The Sky Like a Bruise, finally posted after midnight last night. This story has taken me almost a year to write, which is ridiculous. But it's done now and I'm proud of it. So here's some DVD commentary, I guess.
One of the things I love about Supernatural fandom is how I can write so vividly from my own experiences. Because Sam and Dean and John and Castiel spend so much time in America, especially in the rural Midwest very much like the town I grew up in and where I still live, I can draw on a thousand memories and even where I am right this second to describe where they go and what they do. For someone who enjoys writing sensory images as much as I do, it's a great boon.
sparky_joe won my Sweet Charity offering last year. She's from Ohio, and she asked for me, a Hoosier, to write a story about Sam and Dean caught in a Midwestern tornado. Because we both grew up in tornado country, she wanted me to capture the visceral, Midwestern panic that grips us when we hear that siren or listen to the warnings on the radio. It's a threat you live with constantly, out here in corn country, from May to September every single year. She also gave me an image of her father, standing outside the basement looking at the sky, little sparky_joe down in the shelter looking up at him. I grabbed that image and planned to write a Weechester fic. At the time I was finishing up my other opus to Midwest life, The Lights of Home, so it all seemed to dovetail nicely.Then
pdragon76 posted her Sweet Charity fic, which was also about tornadoes and set pre-series, and I got a bit discouraged. Some emailing with sparky_joe, and I started to re-imagine the story to make it more about the aforementioned Midwestern panic. Still, I didn't start writing it. I had made the whole thing too big in my head, which is a problem I get if I think too much about what I'm writing. I do much better if I just dive into it without thinking too much.Over the following months I finally started writing in little dribs and drabs--a description of farm country here, a bit of rawhead hunt there. I couldn't seem to get any momentum going. But I made the determination to begin working on it seriously in January because, for real, that was six months after it was due and it was about freaking time.
Another thing about me as a writer is that I'm just. not. very. good at writing action, and silly me, I started writing this thing as an action story from the very beginning. Wow, it takes me a long time to write a few paragraphs of this stuff. I can write pages and pages of someone lying in bed with a fever lickety-split, but you ask me to write someone running down the street...
Anyway. I started spending a lot of time thinking about my memories of tornadoes. I wrote more about it in this post. Every year, it seems like, we get at least one or two tornado warnings around here, meaning a tornado has been spotted touching down, and that's not even counting all the watches, all the times the clouds look like they might spit out a raging tunnel of death at any moment.
In 2004, an F4 tornado hit my parents' hometown, Roanoke, Illinois. I went to visit my grandparents out there not long after, and my grandma gave me a "tornado tour" of the damage. I saw where corn had been damaged and flattened, where buildings were missing roofs, where the manufacturing plant that had been hit dead on was still a field of rubble and ruin. We watched this video of almost forty minutes of amateur footage, from before the tornado touched down to after it lifted.
A lot of the imagery in The Sky Like a Bruise comes directly from that video. It's some pretty amazing stuff. Though, fair warning, some of my Midwestern flisties couldn't even bear to watch it, because it spoke so strongly to the fear we live with.
But then, well, I had yet another problem writing this story! Because I somewhat lackadaisically set it in Season 2, and then decided that I wanted to keep that image of
sparky_joe's father, I wrote a flashback to Dean and Sam in another tornado as youngsters with their father. And then all of a sudden I had a whole bunch of ANGST smeared all over my straightforward action/adventure, hurt/comfort story. This is the first story I'd written set specifically in Season 2, and apparently the boys needed to deal with their grief. Suddenly the story was a lot deeper and more emotional than I'd originally intended. I had to do some mental scrambling and reorganization to make it work, but I think the story is much better for it. My current interest in present-tense writing had to come into play, too. I hope that part works for folks--I couldn't seem to write it any other way.In the end, I was almost reluctant to write the last scene. I've been living with this story in my head (and in my google docs) for a long, long time. But it was definitely time to finish it, so I finally did, yesterday, between coughing fits and snot bubbles. I couldn't seem to concentrate on Big Bang at all with this still needing to be written, and wow, I need to work on Big Bang. I gave
sparky_joe the first read-through, and her praises were effusive, so my heart is warm. I accomplished what I set out to do.There it is. This is the probably the most thinking and talking about a fanfic that I've ever done. I hope it's worth something to you, my dear readers, and I hope you enjoy the story, too.
