locating my talent

Some of these thoughts are new; most are lifted from the writing diary I keep as I work on each story or pairing. Questions? Comments? Complaints are on the ninth floor, everybody else send thoughts via e-mail.

FUNNY GIRL
1.6.02--1.8.02

Yeah, this was a birthday present for LE, because we keep talking about Miranda, who, to be fair, is something of a mutual Mary Sue, as if she is just waiting for us to find her again. And here's a funny thing. Cause no matter what people thought, I didn't write Chance to have a happy ending. Just happier, just for then. Here they're still happy, so go figure. Blame it on the pretty dancing boys. I do.

AMERICAN GIRL
6.20.01--10.23.01

This is another thing that I've been poking at for some time. I said I wouldn't write a sequel to Chance, but when Donna started talking it seemed to fit in that universe, so here we go, not that you get much more of that Josh and Sam in the long run.

And here's the thing about Donna, about this Donna, this American girl. I started this piece, I swear, as a satire, a skewering of that kind of girl who thinks it's fun to flirt with women but never thinks twice about what that means for those of us who make a life of it. Or the kind of girl who runs around holding hands with her best friend at Lilith Fair and hasn't ever really considered how they'd get their ass kicked in another time and place. That was my Donna, I thought, feeling clever and superior. But then a funny thing happened: Miranda showed up, Donna didn't know where she fit in Josh's life but she typed real well and about five pages in, I began to believe that she meant well. I don't doubt that Miranda would have a different view of everything, but it stopped being anything resembling a satire long before I finally finished it. And anyone who's ever been an assistant to someone they really cared about knows it's sometimes hard to remember that you don't, in fact, run their lives. Even when you think you could do it better. So this is for all the great bosses I've had who let me try anyway.

Additional thanks go to T1, who first took me to Luna Grill and liked how women talk with their hands, and who may very well have seen Bonnie in a lesbian bar in Rehobeth.

N.B., 12.22.01: Ask and ye shall receive, if you're as lucky as I am. Best gift I've gotten all year. LE brought Miranda, and it didn't take a Rosetta Stone but she gets her say in the end.

NOWHERE
7.22.01--10.05.01

When I started this piece, the world still made sense. Sorkin wrote what he had to of this madness. This is my take on feeling useless, and I wanted it to hurt a fraction of how I felt that day, because maybe that would make this all make more sense. That's all I have left to say at this moment.

CHANCE TO MAKE IT REAL
2.28.01--5.8.01

I have actual reams of notes on this story. This is by far the longest cohesive piece of creative writing I'd ever attempted (the Illusion series is about twice the page count overall, but it was conceived piece-meal, so I'm not really counting it), and I honestly didn't know I had it in me. I started making notes for it immediately -- literally -- after the first airing of "Somebody's Going to Emergency..." That became As Years Unfurl, a shorter piece that I've now de-archived wherever possible because the writing of Chance basically rendered it irrelevant. Almost nothing except a vague framing device and one idea -- that it was Josh who first said the longitude and latitude line -- remain. Which is a good thing. :) What I didn't want to do was a post-SGTE ep, a Josh-and-Toby-get-Sam-drunk-and-put-him-to-bed story. Which has been well done. But I didn't want to do it. I wanted to keep all of the action of the story up to the end of that ep.

My gut feelings about Sam in this episode drove all the rest. His overreaction to Donna's flattery seemed to me to be the key to that whole nuanced scene -- it was the kind of backlash we have when we see in our parents the traits we most abhor in ourselves, and vice versa. Whatever else his father may have been, he was clearly, to me, a man who needed some inflated sense of self to survive. And the only reason Sam would have reacted so violently was if he was afraid of the same tendency in himself. Why was fidelity such a touchy issue? And what about that most powerful of past lives, denial? A man who grows up in a house that ignores nearly 30 years of affair does not come away without the skills for deception, both of others and himself.

The other element was the sense of history we saw in "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen." I believe in the Grand Gesture -- Jerry Maguire running through the airport -- even when it comes in small packages -- Lloyd Dobler with a boombox. But Josh's Grand Gesture was so obviously referencing The Graduate (the rainy dash, the pay phone, the stare through the glass window of the conference room -- all that was missing was a New York City taxi that ran out of gas) that it was impossible not to take the leap that Sorkin had dodged. I wanted to know why Sam believed Josh when he said it was the real thing. I wanted to know why Josh either didn't believe Sam was engaged or didn't seem to care (or was trying hard not to care). I wanted to know how they'd met. I wanted to know if, as they raced down the halls of Gage Whitney and into the maelstrom of a downpour and the future, they had looks on their faces like Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross as the bus pulls away. Because the thing about the Grand Gesture is that it's just not all that simple. What happens the morning after? Or, even, the hour after?

This idea of Josh and Sam constantly swinging in and out of each other's orbits, not just because the sex was difficult to negotiate (because that far, far easier) but because they had no idea how to survive the morning after, just would not quit. It was about compromise. It was about fathers and father figures. It was about learning that big love isn't always enough to make it work.

I swear, I didn't want to write a happy ending for this story. I'm still not convinced I did, or that there's necessarily reason to believe this time they got it more real, more right than the others.

An acknowledgement: Sab and Jae went so far above and beyond the call of duty on this piece as editors. They each read many, many drafts, suffered through massive reorganizations, and endured my anxiety attacks toward the end as I prepared to unleash two-plus months' intensive work into the public realm.

I honestly didn't think I'd ever finish this story, and when I sat down to write it I began with a new file, blank slate, and it turned out I wrote three sentences almost word for word what I'd laid down months before. The first time 'round Casey was more passive in the whole pier pick-up. By the time LE and I strolled down Hudson after dinner in mid-December and the rest of the plot appeared, he was a little more pissed off about the whole thing, and this is what we got.

I hadn't necessarily intended to make Falling, Flying, Tumbling into a series. But it's looking like one anyway. So call this part III, or part IIa or whatever (just don't call it a WIP, because we know how I feel about those). But there's at least some DannyPOV brewing between where this leaves off and New Year's Eve at Isaac's, and even though I know how it ends I'm finding myself surprised by what comes between.

I do know one thing. This is my love song to New York. Because Danny made Casey love New York, and even though I took out my frustrations in Danny's voice, he made me love it too. Whether we go back to Dallas or L.A., that's where all of this is heading.

This has felt like a departure for me. I left out the whole middle part, just kept to pre- and post-Sports Night as a show and a series. These started out as separate ideas but didn't stay that way for long. But then again, I didn't have much to do with anything the characters decided would happen over the course of these stories. They were also far more concise than I'd anticipated, and more insistent. And happier.

This is perhaps the most auto-biographical piece of fanfic I've written, if only because I'm leaving NYC myself soon. All of Danny's encounters are true (not counting the one with Casey, of course), and believe me when I say they're not the half of it. But the fact that this isn't my story should be clear as soon as Danny curses the godforsaken desert.

N.B., 9.17.01: Please see my mea culpa to this city of mine. There's too much in this story of places I can almost not bear to remember -- I'm a downtown girl, I guess, so we've got St. Vincent's and Battery Park City and the 1/9 and subways. And the next thing I'd half finished had Casey picking up boys on the Chelsea Piers, but the view from there right now is still hazy with smoke, so I don't know when I'll finish. In the meantime. This is my city. These are my boys. And I watched old SN tapes all through the worst hours when I couldn't sleep and closed my eyes for all the establishing shots.

Everything I know about love and how to tell a story I learned from Cameron Crowe's Say Anything..., but this my first explicit tribute. What I really wanted, after reading the transcript to "Shane" but still not having seen the episode, was to write some hit-and-run Danny!Angst, something about him throwing up all the time, because that was such an extraordinary thing to toss in the middle of a breakdown, even for a guy. But I couldn't think of a way to do that that wasn't just trite and hurt-comfort cliche. So I made it CaseyPOV, which took care of that problem but introduced about a zillion of its own. Namely, Casey is clueless! He's a big blockhead (love him, but it's true) who's used to having Danny take care of him.

Still, I kind of wandered around on what to do with the piece, how to capture my favorite moments of "Thespis" and "April is the Cruelest Month" in the same piece. And then my boys, my beautiful boys of the 76ers, came so damn close to kicking the Lakers' ass that I honestly believed they'd be able to win by sheer fact of wanting it more. Allen Iverson was sitting on my shoulder while I wrote this, Iverson and his bruised ribs and his cocky grin as Sixers fans chanted "Silver Spoon! Silver Spoon!" at Kobe. I was so caught up in the whole thing, so elated and despondent and angry at the drama of it all, completely swept off my feet when I wasn't looking. (Thanks to everyone, most notably my father, who offered suggestions of underdogs through history, sports and otherwise.)

While I'm thanking people, also the plot device that is Charlie. Twice while I was completely stuck, I found a new start in the form of Casey's all-but-unseen child. The other weird, mean thing I did here was put the sex scene at the top. That's partly because it was the first to fully materialize mentally, partly just to be snarky, and partly because once I snarkily suggested the idea nothing else worked as well.

A note on timing: This is the most I've strayed from locating a story in or alternate to canon. "Late second season" is kind of simplifying the matter. In my head, I conflated the events from "Celebrities" on down to about "Bells and a Siren," where all of the major plot points of those episodes occurred, possibly in a different order, definitely with some sex in the middle. I tried very hard to adhere to canon THEME, and threw most of the rest out the window. Probably the key moment in the middle is in "The Local Weather," when Dan tells Abby, "If you're good enough to come in second place, you're good enough to be disappointed in it," which made me quite sure that Danny thinks he's the underdog. If pressed, I'd put this somewhere just after "April is the Cruelest Month" and say that when Casey said they had work to do he had no idea what he was getting himself into.

Strange note bene: I realized that almost ALL of my earlier stories have, at some point, the word "underdog" in them. Common theme. Kind of used up now.

Suffice it to say that I'd never even seen a Sports Night episode until Sabine collected sixteen shippy episodes to win me over. This story was spurred by the hoopla around OUT editor Brendon Lemon writing a piece for the magazine about his "ballplayer boyfriend," which had hatched some wicked funny and rapid guessing games about the identity of said boyfriend. Specifically, there was a post on the Outsports message board, where everyone was naming names left and right, about how one of the leading contenders (I think it was the Orioles' Brady Anderson) had supposedly once upon a time had a fling with some sports reporter who was on the team bus for a road trip. We jotted down the following: "Almost Famous meets Bull Durham. Ripped from the headlines."

And then we took a little road trip of our own, or Sab took one and I joined in around Kansas City -- where, incidentally, we had set the flashback before ever realizing we'd have a chance to do location scouting. I'm definitely a writer-on-the-go, but this piece possibly set new records for the sheer number of settings in which we wrote, together and individually. Thank god for notebooks and iBooks. I count, at the least, seven states, five or six bars, three restaurants, two ballparks, a lake, a college campus, a Jetta and a whole truckload of chickens. Chickens died for this story, just so you know.

This story also has the distinction of receiving the LEAST feedback ever for anything I'd ever written, and, I think, also for Sab. Make of that what you will. Does it suck that hard, people? It's by far the most fun I've had writing fanfic, so what the hell. A note on the title: It's all Sab. Or, rather, it's all little pitchers having big ears and the guy sitting in front of us at the Royals game who told his daughter that. I'm making a shout-out here to my own father, who explained batting order and made up realistic stats without ever quite understanding why I kept asking.