[Fic] From the Earth to the Stars

[crisis_control]

New Vorkosigan piece up at this link (AO3).



I haven't felt this crummy about posting a new fic in a while. I've been hammering at it through a series of weekends (granted, those have been some very crazy weekends. Last night I even managed to double book myself for a wedding dinner and a family member's birthday dinner. I managed to make both in the end, but let's just say that I am so glad that I don't have to face another wedding for a while. I'm ridiculously tired.

It's a piece about life and death. And the style I used for it was straight-forward narration, and after I was done I thought I really should have used an abstract style more similar to In this Valley of Dying Stars.

And it started being a piece about Aral alone, and I'm still not sure whether I should have just left it at that, but then I had this brilliant idea of working Miles in [1], and contrasting Aral and Miles, which gave me all kinds of problems, because I couldn't get the dialogue between the two of them to work. I hate ripping chunks out, but I had to do that about three, four times before I managed to put it together, and that always leaves me with a vaguely sick feeling in my stomach and a feeling like the fic isn't complete.

[1] Not least because after White Knights I'm a little tired of fics that basically time skip through the poignant events in a character's life, which is what this would have ended up as. Yuri. The Academy. Some indeterminate period in Aral's junior-officership (earning his captaincy). Some epic theme about killing people. His first wife. Komarr. Some epic theme about not killing people. Escobar. Cordelia. New directions. Resolution. *Falls on sword.*

Then I had some idea for Cordelia's dialogue, except that I got swallowed by work (predictably) and forgot what I wanted to do with it, and I have this unsettled feeling that it doesn't sound as good as it did originally in my head (but then again, these things never do).


I think it works, in the end. I think that maybe if I take a step back and squint at it, it probably stands well enough on its own (I wouldn't have posted it otherwise). But I feel like I massacred the prompt and then didn't deliver the goods (there was supposed to be some brilliant thesis in there about how growing into power isn't about growing into power per se, but responsibility, and how Aral may have risen into power, but it was only much later that he grew into it. And how you never really stop growing. Or something to that effect.)

I think I'd feel a lot better about it if I wasn't feeling quite so under the weather either. *reaches blearily for coffee*

Comments

[philomytha]

I think the fic you wrote may not be the fic you were planning to write, but that's not the same as writing a bad fic. To my eye, that was a fic about judgement and justice and mercy and things getting better one generation at a time. I think the flashback worked well, too, and I don't know whether a more abstract style would have been better or not. I find I tend to prefer the more straightforward style, but you are definitely someone who can pull off abstract.

But I know exactly what you mean about posting a fic when you're vaguely disappointed with it, and how unpleasant that feels. I was going to post something for Winterfair the other day, but it was still giving me not-good-enough feelings, and when I sent it to beta instead she confirmed all the problems I saw in it with a few more thrown in for good measure. :-( Still, I don't think you've anything to be ashamed of with this one, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Also, Simon should creep into everyone's fics, imo!

[crisis_control]

Thank you for this :) At the end of the day I think writing something that people enjoy is probably the most fulfilling part about writing.

The flashback was my favourite part about it - it was pretty much the scene that I wrote the fic for :) I hear you on preferring straightforward; abstract can be prettier (and even easier to write sometimes, depending), but unless it's done really well, it can be hard to read.

I do think authors tend to be their own harshest critics, and after too many blows at work recently where I've had a sinking feeling about something and written it off only to realise that things are as bad as I thought they were, it's a huge relief to be proven wrong in this case!

I'm definitely looking forward to your Winterfair fic, and I'm sure you'll be able to thrash out all the little kinks (I'm sure they're little too, I've never read anything of yours that I didn't love).

And now that I've managed one fic without (much) Simon, my next one is totally going to be centered around him. Oh dear.

[philomytha]

Somehow, I can't find it in me to object to a fic totally centred around Simon... ;-)

Some stories really demand a more abstract style, I think - thinking of your Into the Void here, which really couldn't be told any other way - and then it works amazingly well. But it rarely comes naturally to me.

And thank you for the kind words. My fic's gradually crawling its way out of the hole...

[tel]

I also enjoyed this a lot :)

[crisis_control]

Thank you! That's really great to hear :)

I had a bit of a question about Winterfair - given that I've already received a very lovely fill for my first prompt, can I still post a second prompt?

[tel]

Sure, go ahead! Someone might even write it :)