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AO3 Link. Simon/Alys.
I love Simon. I love Alys. I think I'm in love with the quietly competent support characters who don't steal the limelight, but without whom the main characters wouldn't be able to get anything done. And I love getting into their heads. Who guards the guards, and who supports the supporting characters?
Oh oh, and I love ice cold Simon Illyan staging a coup for Aral.
Anyway.
The idea for this fic grabbed me the instant I read its inspiration, Beginner's Lessons, by the very talented Philomytha, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head ever since. Sadly, I also wasn't able to get the words out for it for a very long time; I wrote a bit too much at the end of last year and my figurative pen ran dry for a few months. It took me a few months to get the fic started at all, and then it was supposed to be a quick and dirty scribble fic, something semi-brainless and fluffy and intended as a pick-me-up for Philomytha who was having a bad day. I managed about 4000 words before I ran out of time and had to sleep, and no matter how I looked at it, it just wasn't right.
The second part took me a while to write, and I've poked at it a lot, tweaking here and there, trying to fix the not-rightness. I can't quite put a finger on it; I think it was the tone - the fic itself is a bit schizo (probably because I'm a bit schizo lately), swinging between fluff and light humour, all the while with a darker undertone lurking underneath, and yet it needed to all get caught in a happy upswing of hope. Without being epic. Because Simon and Alys don't do epic. They do quietly competent, without drama. Drama is for Miles.
I think letting it sit for so long has been good for it; I went over it today and wrote the last section, and did a whole bunch more tweaks that fixed it up to a standard I wanted. The draft had a bit too much of an action-fic feel to it, I think; I smoothed out some of the choppy transitions by using a more narrative lead in, and that seemed to work. The ending... isn't exactly fluff, isn't exactly epic, is transformative and yet not metamorphosis. To be honest, I don't know quite what to make of it - when I write fics like these there's usually a whole lot more rising action and people getting killed, and the protagonists going through hell before they come to end of their journey... but this to me is more real - life lessons are more often learnt in quiet ways, in little things, in the slow dawning of realisation rather than a massive, blinding flash of light.
I think I'm happy with it. And not just happy in the this-is-the-first-thing-I've-managed-to-write-in-6-months-I-don't-care-how-it-turns-out way.
I still want to write an incredibly dark AU for this series, though. Like a fic about Simon following Aral into the dark in a world where's no Cordelia.
I love Simon. I love Alys. I think I'm in love with the quietly competent support characters who don't steal the limelight, but without whom the main characters wouldn't be able to get anything done. And I love getting into their heads. Who guards the guards, and who supports the supporting characters?
Oh oh, and I love ice cold Simon Illyan staging a coup for Aral.
Anyway.
The idea for this fic grabbed me the instant I read its inspiration, Beginner's Lessons, by the very talented Philomytha, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head ever since. Sadly, I also wasn't able to get the words out for it for a very long time; I wrote a bit too much at the end of last year and my figurative pen ran dry for a few months. It took me a few months to get the fic started at all, and then it was supposed to be a quick and dirty scribble fic, something semi-brainless and fluffy and intended as a pick-me-up for Philomytha who was having a bad day. I managed about 4000 words before I ran out of time and had to sleep, and no matter how I looked at it, it just wasn't right.
The second part took me a while to write, and I've poked at it a lot, tweaking here and there, trying to fix the not-rightness. I can't quite put a finger on it; I think it was the tone - the fic itself is a bit schizo (probably because I'm a bit schizo lately), swinging between fluff and light humour, all the while with a darker undertone lurking underneath, and yet it needed to all get caught in a happy upswing of hope. Without being epic. Because Simon and Alys don't do epic. They do quietly competent, without drama. Drama is for Miles.
I think letting it sit for so long has been good for it; I went over it today and wrote the last section, and did a whole bunch more tweaks that fixed it up to a standard I wanted. The draft had a bit too much of an action-fic feel to it, I think; I smoothed out some of the choppy transitions by using a more narrative lead in, and that seemed to work. The ending... isn't exactly fluff, isn't exactly epic, is transformative and yet not metamorphosis. To be honest, I don't know quite what to make of it - when I write fics like these there's usually a whole lot more rising action and people getting killed, and the protagonists going through hell before they come to end of their journey... but this to me is more real - life lessons are more often learnt in quiet ways, in little things, in the slow dawning of realisation rather than a massive, blinding flash of light.
I think I'm happy with it. And not just happy in the this-is-the-first-thing-I've-managed-to-write-in-6-months-I-don't-care-how-it-turns-out way.
I still want to write an incredibly dark AU for this series, though. Like a fic about Simon following Aral into the dark in a world where's no Cordelia.
