In honor of Gaia... fic departing the fandom.

[icarus]

As you all must have heard by now, gaiaanarchy is posting her last unfinished SGA fics and leaving the fandom. Usually when I read dramatic departures, well, I remember my friend Red who left an old forum of mine. Annually. But Gaia I believe because her motivating forces are pretty strong (a 29,000 word story and only one review? Ouch). And she's also putting her WIPs out on the front lawn as a sort of SGA yard sale -- without the tags that read "50 cents or best offer."

I'm not departing the fandom but I do have a WIP to put out on the front lawn. Or rather, part of a WIP. But it is complete. In a way. At least... you have the ending. It's been in front of you the whole time, like that Easter Egg that's in the most obvious place that no one ever finds.

A year ago I wrote a story called Last Port Of Call. It was only the first part of a (roughly) 24-part long fic. There was a storm of controversy at the time with a lot of interesting feedback that would probably make my year if I were doing a thesis in Psychology and Gender Relations. I had enough material for a guaranteed A, I'm sure of it.

I never told anyone (well, okay, I told auburnnothenna) but at the same time I posted it (and by same time, I mean the same day), I also posted my story outline for the rest of the story.

Yep. That's right. I gave away the rest of the story. Without telling anyone that's what I did.

You see, when I told people that I knew that they'd like Last Port Of Call as a whole once it was complete -- I really knew. Because the same people who hated the first part loved the story outline. Yes, I do know, because you reviewed it and you told me you loved it. (ETA: It took a tremendous amount of discipline on my part to not point this out to you guys at the time, to put the story first before winning an argument. But I'm writer first and foremost and I'm not going to spoil my own reveal, no matter how tempting.)

The story outline was About 10 Days Before The Wraith Attack.

I even used a little of the same dialogue. I thought for sure that would give it away.

Part of why I posted the outline was that I was afraid the story was so big, and so difficult, that I would never finish it, and I wanted everyone to know the end. At the same time, I didn't admit it because I still wanted to give Last Port Of Call the good ol' college try. After I posted them I thought, "Okay. I'm going to have a little fun with this." I planned to post Last Port Of Call as a WIP and see who figured it out. (There was one person who did just from what I posted, noting with tongue-in-cheek that it was the same premise with even the same dialog. Ding-ding-ding, you win a prize, you smart cookie.)

It was going to be cool because About 10 Days Before The Wraith Attack was John's perspective with 20/20 hindsight, his gloss of events, while Last Port Of Call was the LP of what really happened. Both were going to be written from a very tight John viewpoint. It started to turn into an interesting exploration of memory and how we re-write it in hindsight.

But after the storm, I found that the story had changed in my mind. There was a fierce demand to write Rodney's point of view and I felt a need to defend the story rather than writing it as I intended. I wrote a second chapter... and it came out from Rodney's point of view, which really wasn't the story but rather an answer to the unhappy women who criticized it. It had changed and... wasn't that exploration of memory any more. It shrank and became just what people wanted. It made people happy. Gave those who needed to see Rodney's perspective what they wanted. But I'd lost the structural integrity of the story.

So here you go. Here's the ending of Last Port Of Call.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

As one of your loyal readers I have to pipe up and say yes, I noticed the similarity in the stories at the time you posted them. Yes, I noticed the same dialogue. I commented on Last Port of Call because I thought it was a fantastic story; I did not comment on About Ten Days Before The Wraith Attack because it felt like a summary rather than a story to me: all telling, no showing.

I assumed, at the time, that you were doing a pair of stories with different takes on the same theme, in much the same way that Zoe Rayne wrote Icing on the Cake (http://zoe.vaportraces.com/fic/icing.html) and Strange Attractors (http://zoe.vaportraces.com/fic/attractors.html). Many authors write multiple stories on the same idea, working out different variations on a theme. Given the prevalence for this type of writing, which has even gained it's own subgenre of "Five Things" stories, there was no reason to assume that the stories were any more connected than that. In fact, the author notes state that they were two separate stories inspired by the same line.

The implication that your readers were hypocritical or unperceptive for liking one story and disliking another when they were "clearly" the same story is a little annoying. I'm a firm believer that what the reader should react to is what is actually in the story, not the author's intent—especially not the author's unstated intent. It's a bit of a stretch to expect everyone to have made the connection and let that interpretation, external to the story, influence their opinion.

Even if the link had been explicit, I'm not sure it would have changed my opinion of Last Port of Call. As you said, things happen when you're writing that change the story from the outline you expected it to follow. Ideas are easy, execution is hard, so I don't usually put much stock by outlines. You can tell me I'll love the ending, but I want to see it before I make up my mind.

In other words, had you finished Last Port of Call as originally planned, people may still have had a problem with it because of how it was executed. As you say, About Ten Days Before the Wraith Attack glosses over the negative. So when you shine a spotlight on the negative, of course people react differently.

It's like "When Harry Met Sally"—my mother has always hated the film. I finally found out that it was because she'd turned the thing off right after Harry and Sally slept together and it destroyed their friendship. Even telling her that the ending was happy didn't change her mind—what she'd seen was a story with a terribly unhappy ending. You could say from a structural standpoint that Last Port of Call is similar—it's a romance that stopped before the happy resolution was reached and so, taken as a stand alone, was heartbreaking.

I enjoyed it a lot as a standalone and was willing to give it a lot of leeway because it was a WIP and I expected it to follow a romantic storyline…similar to About Ten Days, in fact. But you may have gone in a different direction entirely, so I was reserving judgment on the whole thing until I saw which way it went.

I'm reminded of one writer in my writing group who when we tell him that his story has serious flaws or makes no sense he tells that we just don't "get it" and it's "cool." That's pretty much what you're saying here: we don't get it, Last Port of Call was really a happy story. What I say to that is Last Port of Call speaks for itself, and it says great things. Coming back a year later and telling all of us that we missed the point is, to me, irrelevant to my interpretation of that story.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

The implication that your readers were hypocritical or unperceptive for liking one story and disliking another when they were "clearly" the same story is a little annoying.

Huh? What? No.

I deliberately misled you guys in the summaries. I didn't want you to figure it out... until maybe it became so obvious that you might. That's why I didn't bring it up in the fight. But I was impressed with people who figured it out anyway.

*reads the rest of your comment*

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Actually, for me, dubious consent is a bulletproof kink, so I would never have been disturbed or unhappy with Last Port of Call.

People don't have to like it. I've never cared if people liked it. I'd rather people did, sure, but that was never the issue.

When I read a story that I don't like (like deathfic, augh) -- I don't attack the author. As far as I'm concerned it's a free country (internet) where people don't have to always write what I like. If I don't enjoy it, I pop open a story I do enjoy.

I'm reminded of one writer in my writing group who when we tell him that his story has serious flaws or makes no sense he tells that we just don't "get it" and it's "cool."

So your friend, do people attack him?

Does he get seven emails from the same person over a four-day period about how wrong it was for him to write this story in the first place?

Does your group each have a blog and start taking veiled public stands about his story in order to pillory it and make sure no one else writes anything like it?

Does your group, when he's at the grocery store talking about something completely different a week later, bring it up and berate him in public for it?

After he brings his story to your group, does the anger go on daily for about three weeks (including the person who keeps contacting him over and over)?

Do you guys gang up on people who like the story in the group to convince them not to recommend it?

Do people start bringing up examples about politically incorrect his story is, and how they themselves have gone through a similar terrible trauma and it has traumatized them terribly to see the characters do this?

Do people bring it up four months later in a completely unrelated situation?

If that's not what happened to him then your example falls short.

Icarus

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm a little confused by this response—I was not addressing the flaming in my comment, but rather your post about the story itself. Perhaps the two cannot be discussed separately.

In your post you seem to be pulling a Scooby Doo ending: "Haha! About Ten Days was the outline all along! If only you meddlin' kids had figured it out!" But as the two stories were posted as unrelated stories, the one is irrelevant in a discussion of the other. Responses to the one don't disprove responses to the other, which is what you seem to be saying when you imply that you could have won the argument just by pointing out the connection. I, like many readers, took you at your word and reacted to them as separate stories. You're kind of saying "Gotcha!" to your readers, which is why I used the example I did: if an author tells me I'm just not seeing what they intended the story to be, I tend to say, well, then the story isn't what they intended it to be.

That being said, I couldn't begin to tell you why people reacted so badly and I'm sorry fandom's done wrong by you. I've always liked Last Port of Call. Still do.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

No, no, the "zoinks!" Scooby-Doo ending is not what I meant at all, but I can see how you got there.

This post could have been a posting of an incomplete section of Last Port Of Call as an abandoned WIP, which is what Gaia is doing now. (I might have more though I don't think so.)

But in this case the ending was right there, so it's not so much as abandoned as it's never fleshed out. So you have the story. Not what I was planning to write in its entirety, but at least you know how it ends, which in its way is a little better than an incomplete WIP.

I did something similar for a reader of a Percy fic of mine. She wrote a really detailed review and I had to explain that I wasn't finishing the story. What I did though was send her the story outline so at least she knew how it ended.

That being said, I couldn't begin to tell you why people reacted so badly and I'm sorry fandom's done wrong by you. I've always liked Last Port of Call. Still do.

The most common reason cited in people's reviews was "I was date raped" and "this reminds me of that experience."

Which, frankly, I was sexually abused as a child and I don't read things that disturb me. Occasionally I do encounter things that hit buttons for me -- which is where, as an adult, I hit the Back button. I feel it's my responsibility to police what I read, not the responsibility of the author.

Beyond those personal responses, it snowballed, and people just enjoyed dishing out the abuse.

Icarus