Epiphany: Behind the Fanfic. By the Way and Returning

[thebratqueen]

Okay, if nothing else this is for wesleysgirl who loves hearing about how people write. For those who are interested in what came before, you can read the behind the scenes of Everybody Fell and Liberty Rules. Or you could

First up, here's links to By the Way and Returning for those who might want to reread before plunging in here.

So - By the Way.

Uh-huh. Yep. Good ol - hey there's a spider on your arm!

What, you're still here? Crap.

Okay, here's the thing - I don't actually like BtW that much. In fact I think that's part of the reason why it took me so long to do another one of these behind the fanfic things - doing one meant I'd have to reread BtW again. I finally had to bribe myself by grouping it together with Returning.

But never let it be said I don't talk about my mistakes as much as my good stuff.

BtW was actually the second Epiphany story I wrote, and GOD is it an obvious sophmore effort. Amongst its, IMO, many faults are weak canon references, large amounts of plot convienence playhouse, a story which is obviously fanficcy, an author who bit off more than she could chew and stuff I so would handle differently if I had another chance.

Seriously, I'm amazed that anybody read BtW and continued with the series. Can I just take a minute here to thank those of you that did? Thank you. I hope the rest of the stuff I wrote more than makes up for BtW's craptacular nature.

Let's discuss what went on.

Having written EF and having noticed that the plot bunnies for A/W had not left my head, I decided to try another story. The only problem (in hindsight) was that I really didn't have the thesis for the series down yet - was it a relationship series? A MotW series? Some of each?

Add on top of that I made the classic fanfic error of doing something just because I could - ie sending the boys to England. Now I'm not saying that sending the boys to England per se is a bad idea, I'm saying that doing something just because I could is a bad idea. You shouldn't write something just because you can, you should write something because you have a good reason for it and it makes sense for your story.

I didn't really have a story - again this goes back to me not having a thesis for the series yet - so I retrofitted one. Watchers! Family references! Sending Wes and Angel to places in London that I know like the back of my hand! Boy do I wish I'd thought about this more before I wrote it!

Again - fun, certainly, but this was me writing a story to meet those ideas, not these ideas naturally fitting themselves into the story.

Things that I like about BtW are the hints of domesticity that are starting to show up in the A/W relationship (Angel automatically handing Wes his salad, for instance), me starting to get a grip on a day to day Wes (as opposed to the specific "pissed off and needs to be appeased" one in EF), some of the bantering and a few of the details here and there. I think also you start to see the seeds of what the series was to become - Angel and Wes and how they related to one another given the fact that they were in such a strange and essentially problematic relationship.

Things I don't like are how detail oriented I got about some things. I wrote a lot of stuff in here because it was true and not because it worked in the narrative. This is a side effect of the fact that I actually took a trip to London before I wrote this (coincidence - I don't actually have that kind of budget to research fanfic ;) ) so of course I was brimming with details about the British Museum, the London Dungeon, etc. I think a lot of those could have been written out since this isn't a series that really lends itself to that kind of extraneous detail.

OTOH I can at least guarantee that Angel could survive the trip over. My flights there and back showed me it's possible to keep out of sunlight both on the plane and when you land if you time things right. Plus if you go at the right time it's overcast enough that Angel could walk around without too much trouble. This is why I made sure to mention what time of year they went. This is also why Wes gets into the specifics in Returning - I wanted to make sure that people knew it was possible.

You can also see that I'm not 100% sure of where I want to take the canon as far as vampire lore goes. Okay, I know what I've seen on the show, but how do I want to extrapolate the fact that Angel doesn't eat much? Or what items can hurt a vampire? Again these are decisions I might have rethought in 20/20 hindsight.

You also get me doing a bit of a MotW here - Cordy gets a vision, the Council shows up as bad guys, etc. Boy did I get over that urge as the series went on.

[skimskimskim] What else? I hope it's apparent now that the vision Cordy had wasn't about the orb as much as it was about getting Wes and Angel to England so that they could have the encounters that they did. That is to say, that the Powers wanted them to run into the Council and later Buffy, in much the same way that on the show they sent a vision to try to keep Angel on the other side of town and away from Darla and Dru.

Also fwiw the blowjob scene at the end wasn't Wes's first attempt at giving Angel a blowjob, as you know from later stories.

And... that's it! I can post no more on this or I'm going to curl up in a pile of embarassed shame. Moving on now!

Returning!

The seeds for Returning were planted when stakebait told me that she and buffybot were writing Buffy and Spike fanfic. Boy, wouldn't it be a kick and a half, I suggested, for us to do a story where we had my Angel and Wes meet up with their Buffy and Spike?

Now the thing of it was that at the time stakebait and I didn't know how buffybot would feel about it, plus there was the difficulty of trying to juggle 3 schedules, so Mer and I decided to write the story on our own with a disclaimer that while it was based on Strange Bedfellows, it wasn't actually part of it.

Until we wrote it.

By the time we were done Mer was so jazzed about the outcome that she wanted to make it an official part of her series. So she went back to buffybot, begged prettily, agreed to some minor changes in characterization and boom! There you go.

I'll get to all that in a bit though.

First up, I love Returning. I think it's one of the best stories in the series. And it makes me very happy when people read it b/c I know the unusual nature of it (like the huge "previously" section) would have been more than enough to send people screaming for the hills. Hell, I don't even know that I'd read a story that had that many disclaimers to it so again thanks.

This is probably the first story that gets to the heart of what Epiphany was going to become. The entire point of the story is the A/W relationship and how it affects them and those they know so - bingo. A/W have to tell the Scoobies.

The idea of doing it in London came from the fact that completely independantly of one another Mer, buffybot and I had sent our characters to England. I told Mer this was the ideal place to have the meeting - it would cover why the characters were in the same place at once. When Across the Pond was posted and I saw that Xander, Anya and Dawn had gone to the London Dungeon I said we had to have the first encounter there - too much of a coincidence and too funny besides.

This was also the start of the retrofitted writing. I had already posted Easter Interlude - which took place after the London trip. After already begging my readers to forgive the out of order posting of Liberty Rules, how could I do it to them again?

Aha! Inspiration! I would write the story after but in flashback - a flashback inspired by Buffy's final action in the tale.

With those ideas set, Mer and I started to write. The first parts of the story were done at my apt, which at the time did not have any furniture beyond my bed and my desks, so this was done with Mer typing away while I either sat on the desk or paced in a severe caffiene high. We wrote the story as dialogue with stage directions, which meant that after the fact I had to go through and do narration translation, a task which nearly kept the story from being posted because the thing was freaking huge. tenebraeli had a near-miss with being a co-author as I nearly asked her to do it.

Sometime at the beginning Mer also had an inspiration which made me ask her to marry me, specifically how Xander would find out.

More backstory: I loved Xander being the first to find out because I didn't want to rush the emotional payoff of the story, which was Buffy and Angel. So I really wanted one of the Scoobies to be the first to know. The London Dungeon coincidence provided the ideal circumstance for that - Xander et al bump into Angel and Wes while they're there and somehow they find out.

Now everything about the LD that you see in the story is true - Mer and I joked that we should say that the story was sponsored by that place, for all that we wrote about it. The souveinir pictures of getting your head chopped off, the cafe that sells pizza, the whack-a-mole and the bathrooms decorated with insane clown pictures and fishtanks.

I can't remember when in all of this I decided that at some point Angel would get upset about Dawn, leave for a private moment, Wes would follow and they'd end up smooching, but whenever I did Mer topped the idea by saying that Xander would come in while A/W were smooching in the bathroom and see Wes's reflection.

I was on the floor I was laughing so hard. Bingo - a scene was born.

(This was also, btw, the scene Mer and I felt very smug about when it was echoed by something on the show - Xander's expression when he sees Spike being ridden by the Buffybot was exactly what we pictured his expression as when he discovers Wes and Angel. Top it off with Xander on the show saying he'd knock himself unconscious and our Xander making that attempt with the Whack-a-Mole and verily we did Numfar's Dance of Smuggery)

The Dawn stuff went through some revisions. I decided that the spell around her would affect Wes and Angel, hence their retrofitted memories of how they related to her. Dawn calling Wes El Dweebo was a no-brainer. I don't remember all of the revisions that the A/W conversation went through, but I think the only thing that really changed was what got Angel brooding more than how he expressed himself.

For the record, as most of you know, my LJ "Box?" icon comes from this story, and buffybot still cracks up at the mental image of Wes earnestly saying "We flew United?"

Let's see - I think the next big thing on the block is Angel's reaction in the hotel, which sets the stage for the fact that Epiphany Angel is definitely darker on average than his show counterpart. You can see him being very much the vamp with the Watcher who comes by, and then he goes out and grabs a pack of smokes, which he uses casually throughout the series - no continuity error, that. I know on the show it means evil.

The Watcher scene was also inspired by Olwen, who suggested it when I told her I was struggling to think of something to connect the LD scene with what came after. Angel being possessive about Wes to a Watcher had just the right tone to it.

Also, for the record, the hotel I stayed in on my trip had the staircase of doom with no elevators. ;)

We then get to bringing the boys to Oxford, which is as good a time as any to talk about retrofitting the story so it would work with Strange Bedfellows.

Here's the thing - when Mer and buffybot wrote their series, they, like me, didn't start out with the intention of doing crossovers. Also, like me, they didn't realize it was going to be a series so they threw everything and the kitchen sink into the first tale - including Angel.

Who was now my Angel.

Oops.

This was now a problem, because Angel according to them had already gone to Sunnydale, found out about Buffy and Spike, and reacted to it. But my Angel hadn't, and moreover how many people reading a slash series would really slog through a het one just to find out the backstory?

So - one fuzzy tiger, coming up.

The first big change was the LD scene. Many of the "You've got Spike watching Dawn" comments and questions about the safety of the chip were changed from Angel lines to Wes ones, thus providing a plausible fuzzy tiger - the reader could read that scene from Epiphany and feel satisfied b/c Wes was covering all of the exposition basis on Angel's behalf (and presumably Angel himself would have brought up all those questions if Wes didn't) and the people coming in from SB could read that scene and be fine with it because obviously Wes would be the one to ask since Angel already knew.

The next big one was Oxford. First off we had to fit the discussion from Hell into the timeline of both stories. Mer and I had to sit down with pen and paper to plot the days out and figure out when things could occur - esp because we had to leave things so that it made sense that other scenes weren't affected by them. Case in point - in BtW after the LD we see Angel being broody and cranky, well that makes sense both for the vision and for the fact that he just ran into Xander et al. But for Buffy to see Angel and not have that be a factor in other scenes meant that we had to put Angel's meeting as late into Buffy's London time as possible.

Fortunately Angel could plausibly take a day to brood, then go up to Oxford and brood some more, esp if he came across Buffy and Spike sparring as they did in Across the Pond. But again we had a narrative problem - it was Angel's POV. How to write him so that his anger could be onstaged without contradicting the premise that he'd been to Sunnydale before (and again without making those who had only read Epiphany scratch their heads in bewilderment).

Hence a line like:

He'd known it. Xander had told him about this. Spike was in England. With Buffy. Angel had no right to be surprised. No right, given what he was about to tell Buffy, to even be angry about it.

Again meet the fuzzy tiger. It covers enough of the bases to get the job done without being a glaring contradiction of anything from either side.

I'll admit that for all the work that needed to be done to retrofit the story, I was glad to do it because it took care of that fanfic cliche of both Buffy and Angel telling each other at the same time that they're sleeping with somebody else. Yes, Angel still gets his licks in (no pun intended) on Spike's behalf, but its without having to go through that rote shock that so many other people have done to death.

POV was a fun thing for the discussion from Hell scenes. Bouncing back and forth worked for the contrast of Angel telling Buffy and Wes telling Giles, but once the actual conversation started we needed to pick somebody who could see it all and register that Spike was taking his agressions out on the wall - hence why the camera flips over to Spike and stays there for the duration. Which actually works because he's detached enough (love for Buffy aside) that he can report on the Angel and Buffy psychodrama. Wes, Angel or Buffy wouldn't have been able to.

With Spike we can also see that there's Spike/Angel(us) subtext in this series as well as on the show. That theme would come up again in later crossovers. ;)

The conversation from Hell was also the writing session from Hell as Mer and I got into it at - hum. Must have easily been after midnight on Saturday and got no sleep because we wanted to write it out and see how it ended. This then resulted in me being very tired when I went to my folks' house for Easter dinner. We literally wrote that sucker up until the very last minute. Spike's bit about "once upon a time" was hastily typed out while Mer packed, I changed clothes and we got read to drop Mer off at the train station.

Again the conversation sets up the rest of the series - Wes is convinced he's not good enough but stays in the relationship anyway, Angel's struggling with his dark side and Spike, as always, hits the nail of the problem right on the head. Angel's struggle with his dark side would stay an underlying theme of the series until arc 3, when he and Wes finally confront it. Mer is fond of telling me that it's a shame SB Spike doesn't know about that now because boy would he be enjoying a well-earned round of "I told you so".

After that we get the various aftermaths - Angel and Wes don't break up, Buffy's in a place where she's not even sure how to react yet. Mer and I wrote these parts separately, except for the conversation in the kitchen which we double-teamed weeks after the fact when she had the free time to come visit me again. I think it was around here that Mer also asked buffybot if it could be canon for their series too, which it was even though it was never posted on most of the websites that archived SB (NC17 slash not being what you'd call overly welcomed on het-only sites ;) ). So it's possible that there are those who read SB who've never even come across Returning, but in-jokes do abound in the later SB stories. Spike makes Buffy laugh with the "once upon a time there was a nancy boy vampire.." line, for example.

Spike also speaks for me and Mer in the kitchen scene when he goes "oh for fuck's sake not again". Basically we knew the conversation from Hell was, well, the conversation from Hell but a bit of repetition was necessary to cover everything that needed to be covered. Willow, Xander and Tara couldn't be in on the garden scene for timeline reasons and practical ones (the garden scene already had as many people as it could plausibly take) but we needed to onstage the aftermath of Xander not telling Buffy Angel was in town and Willow - who in SB had tried cursing Spike - attempting to figure out if Angel could have sex and keep the soul because of something she'd done.

For the record - I know why Angel and Wes can be together and not break the curse. Whether that ever gets found out by Angel and Wes themselves remains to be seen ;)

Finally we get the Epilogue. Mer and I debated on what Buffy would send for a while. We knew it would be something, but what took some figuring. Mer originally suggested the cross and ring that Angel gave her but I nixed that as being way more symbolic than we intended. I voted for a weapon, which would indicate Buffy's feeling that Angel was Wes's problem now and might even imply a vague kinda sorta fellow-feeling with that responsibility. A stake, however redundant to Wes's own weapons supplies, was just the right item to get the meaning across.

And... there we are. Not sure if I'm forgetting something. Feel free to ask, I guess. But otherwise I hope you enjoyed. =)