Valentine Fanfic flashbacks: Inside Track and You Can’t Resist It

Hey, everybody – Happy Valentine’s Day! Did you get a chance to try the Ferris Wheel Google Doodle? What was your favorite animal love match? I kinda dug the hippo and the bird myself – at least they look like they’re having fun on the sled. 😉

I’m a bit of a Valentine’s scrooge, but trying to look for the bright side of the holiday today reminded me of a few sweet and Roswell stories that I’ve written in years past involving the season, so I’m going to ramble a bit about them, and give links to fanfiction.net in case you want to read more.

Polishing prose takes time…

Well, I’ve been working hard at my remaining goals, including polishing one of my old Roswell fanfics, ‘Husk Funeral’, to get it posted up on the fanfiction.net website. Actually, I published the first chapter this evening, and I’m working on chapter 6 of 9 for the ‘polishing’ draft. But even though I’m fairly pleased with this story overall, my target to shoot for isn’t incredibly high, and I’ve already been a few times over these chapters to proofread and tweak them, I still find that really getting into it takes up so much time. I can work away at editing for an hour in the evening and find out that I’ve managed to finish two scenes perhaps – if I’m lucky.

Maybe my expectations for how quickly I should be able to do this kind of editing are just way out of whack, I dunno. I may not reach this goal, but I’m going to do the best I can, and I’m really pretty pleased with the progress I’m making, and this chance to return to my fanfic roots.

On a slightly off-topic note, I discovered that fanfiction.net now allows book cover images – but they have to be taller than they are wide, by a factor of 3:2, so that all the banners I made for Roswell Fanatics, (which are generally just a bit wider than tall, something like 10:11,) are no good. Sigh.

Fan Fiction Crossovers

One of my goals for 2011 was to finish all three of the fanfiction crossovers that were Works In Progress on January 1st. It’s looking like I might actually accomplish that goal! I’ve got one that’s still incomplete, but the plot is clearly winding up, (and leaving open the possibility of a sequel.)

To me, writing a crossover can be the ultimate fanfic high – not just playing with somebody else’s characters and telling your own story with them, but trying to find a way to make two different fandoms work together for more than twice the fun, and finding the common ground between them.

The first crossover I finished this year was ‘A Roswellian Alien in Metropolis’, and it was already nearly finished in December – 3 chapters out of four. This was a sequel to a Roswell/Smallville crossover that I wrote because of a challenge. The first story in the series, ‘Arrow through my soul’, involved Maria DeLuca going to Metropolis for a record deal and falling in love with Oliver Queen/Green Arrow.

By the time I finished that one, I’d already thought that there could be a sequel involving Michael going to Metropolis as well, and then I got the idea of Chloe trying to train Michael to become part of the Justice League. That gave me my opening scene, but it was actually when Chloe sent Lana Lang to keep tabs on Michael that the story really hit high gear. Somehow Michael and Lana have chemistry on the page. Who knew?

And that’s part of the fun of crossovers, of course, seeing how the different characters will relate to each other. Roswell and Smallville have very similar canons and mythologies, of course – both teen soaps originally from the WB network, featuring extraterrestrial teenagers hiding their abilities. It wasn’t hard to picture the two sets of characters, some in New Mexico and the others in Kansas, unaware of what was going on in the next state over.

Both of these stories have followed the pattern of a protagonist character from Roswell (in first person narration,) entering the world of Smallville and meeting many of that show’s characters, and facing a challenge from a Smallville antagonist. I’m still considering a third story in the series, which would play with that convention a little, and have Clark come to Roswell and meet with Max, Liz, Michael and some of the others.

Fanfic flashback: Please Stand Up

I’ve been thinking about this story quite a bit yesterday. Partly just because I really like it anyway, it’s a fun little adventure, and writing it was possibly my most amazing Nanowrimo experience ever – I chose this project for National Novel Writing Month 2006, and by November the 30th, I had finished it, at a little over 100,000 words – yes, that’s right, it was a double-length Nano. The words just seemed to be flowing out of whatever I was typing on that month, my friends.

It also has a great little fight scene at the end, but mostly what I want to talk about today was the road trip structure. I wanted to do something a little bit more organized than my usual pantsing when I decided to do this story in Nanowrimo, and the idea of the road trip seemed to fit a lot of the other stuff I knew would be going on.

Fanfic Flashback: Divergence

This was an idea for a fan fiction story that I had been mulling over for a long time before I finally started to set it down on New Year’s eve, 2004, with the encouragement of a great friend in the Roswell fandom community, TrueLovePooh. In fact, it was actually one of those stories that had two ideas thrown together to see what became of them.

The first idea was ‘what if Alex’s death was faked by aliens?’ The way that Colin Hanks’ character, Alex Whitman, was killed off the show has always been a downward turning point in my mind – I understand some of the reasons that Ronald Moore did it, he was trying to help free Colin up for more movie work, and had the story about a high school friend of his dying in a car accident to work with – but Colin wouldn’t have wanted to do movies if they’d been able to write better plots for Alex. But anyway…

Fanfiction flashback: Not Written Yet

Okay, since a lot of readers seem to have liked my posts about fanarts and vidding, and my walks down memory lane about Roswell and Buffy, I’ve decided to start a series of posts about my fanfiction writing, and some of what I like most about the favorite fanfics I’ve written or what they’ve taught me. To start with, I’d like to tell you a bit about a Roswell story called “Not Written Yet“, which I wrote between January and April of 2005. By the way, I’m going to be spoiling the fanfic later on, so if you’d like to read it fresh, you should click on the link now.

One of the things I love most about writing fanfiction in the Roswell universe is how much fun it can be to fix the writer’s mistakes. Not Written Yet is a fix for an episode of the show called “End of the World”, which was broadcast during November sweeps in season two of the show. It’s really a turning point in the plot and character arcs for the entire season, really – and a time travel story to boot. The premise is, that a thirty-something version of Max Evans (Jason Behr,) comes back in time to tell Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby,) that in the life he lived, the two of them finally sorted out their relationship issues, lived a happy life for many years without any more angst – until eventually the fact that they were together meant the apocalypse and all of their friends dying. Future Liz helps to find a way to use an alien artifact to send her Max back through a rift in space-time to fix what went wrong, though she doesn’t have any regrets.

Future Max goes on to tell Present Liz that the events of the next few days are going to be critical to the precarious love triangle between herself, Max, and Tess Harding. In Future Max’s timeline, he asked Liz to go to a concert with him, Liz said no, Max kept asking, somehow they ended up having sex, Tess found out, and she left town in a huff. Future Max figures that’s where everything went wrong, because Tess has strong alien abilities and if she’d stayed with the rest of the gang, they’d be able to guard themselves against danger better.

So – Liz and Future Max try several things to keep these events from playing out, and eventually Liz gets her ex-boyfriend Kyle in on the scheming, though he doesn’t know about the time-traveller part. When Max comes to Liz’s balcony at the date and time Future Max predicted that they’d ‘cement their relationship,’ he finds Kyle already with Liz in bed, and jumps to the obvious, but not entirely accurate conclusion about what’s happened. Max is heartbroken, runs into Tess in the park, talks and bonds with her a bit, and Future Max whiffs out of existence, saying that his work has done and the last fifteen years of his life will never happen now.