Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	btvs, writing

Post-Mortem for A Heavy Darkness Falling

summer_of_giles is over. *sad* I got spoiled with so much Giles on my flist every day! I need to go back through now, make sure I feedbacked everything I read, and nominate a few things for the Bodice Ripper Awards.

And now, the post-mortem for A Heavy Darkness Falling. antennapedia does these and they're always fun to read and seem helpful from a craft standpoint, so here we go.

Okay, let's start with Things I Think I Did Well:

1. Giles and Ethan's relationship. I had not thought about this at all really before I started. I don't even read much Giles/Ethan to be totally honest, which possibly helped in keeping it strictly platonic (with, of course, the canonical overtones of them once having had something). They started out just snarking at each other, but then the whole thing about trust grew out of it and then Ethan's issues surrounding the incident with Randall. If I'd sat down and really thought about it, I probably could have figured out that all of that needed to come up, but it's better, I think, when the story hands it to you.

2. Shockingly enough, the action sequences. I was pretty intimidated by them, but when I reread everything on Sunday/Monday to do last minute polishes before posting, I liked them. I probably should have watched some S7 to get the Bringer fights just right, but by the time I got to that part of the fic I honestly didn't feel I had the time to spare.

3. Plot structure. I really feel like this story was a huge step forward for me in terms of understanding plot structure. I compare it and Death Penguins and there's just no denying that A Heavy Darkness Falling is much, much better. Hopefully I can use what I learned during the writing process - Always Make It Harder - to improve the end of Death Penguins, which I would like to post (or begin posting) sometime in the next month.

4. The writing itself. I'm really, really happy with most of the writing for this fic on the level of description and tone and dialogue. I think writing long-hand had something to do with it, but most of Chapter 7 was written on the computer and I'm pretty happy with it too.

And now, Things I Could Have Done Better:

1. The romance/Willow. Originally it was supposed to be all UST until the very end, but the characters surprised me and "it" happened in Chapter 3. This was fine, and made for some nice angst in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, but something about the arc of it feels just a little bit off to me. It felt much more off to me until I wrote Chapter 7, actually; it drove me crazy to have Willow sitting at home, even if nothing else made sense, until I realized that it would drive her crazy too - really crazy, not just the little bit crazy I had in there originally. And then kivrin said something to me about how Giles and Willow needed a complication, something to make things harder on them, and I realized more or less what needed to happen. So Chapter 7 helps a lot, I think, but there's still something that doesn't feel quite right to me.

2. The magic. It's too Harry Potter-esque. I should have rewatched Grave probably, to get a handle on how Giles and Willow fought using magic, but honestly, as antennapedia pointed out to me, Joss's rules on how magic is used in combat situations have never been very clear (which is probably why it ends up very Potter-like, because say what you will about the giant gaping holes in that canon, at least Rowling's rules about magic are consistent). Most of the time I find the inconsistencies in the Buffy 'verse to be helpful (like the totally vague S7 explanation of how the First was let in, which allowed me to be equally vague), but this one really wasn't. It bothers me a bit.

Overall, I feel really good about this story. I said yesterday that I think it's the best thing I've ever written and I stand by that. I've written a few stories in the last six months or so that I like very much (The Way On, for instance), but this one made me stretch myself in ways that the other stories didn't. I've been intimidated by plot and action for a long time (probably has something to do with Death Penguins, actually), and it was time to get myself out of that rut.

Next up: Death Penguins, mostly, with Chalion and Temeraire 'verse fics to fiddle with. And possibly something post-Deathly Hallows. Plus the next tag-fic, of course, though that might have to wait until after DP has been posted. I can only work on one Vorkosi-verse thing at a time, I think.