So I've got up to A Little Matter of Life and Death in my gradual transferring of works across to AO3.
This was my one and only Angel/Jack fic and it won me two awards and I've always been really proud of it. And re-reading it again today, after quite a few years, was absolutely fascinating. It doesn't really, any more, feel like I wrote it. I really enjoyed it, and it's hot and the ending is very satisfying, and there's nothing actually wrong with it, but it doesn't feel like me any more.
Perhaps because it's one of the very first fics I started, way back in the summer of 2007 when I'd got sucked into the Torchwood fandom and wanted desperately to write Jack but had no idea who to pair him with. In the end Giles won and Connection got finished first, and this fic languished until![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
travels_in_time held a finish-a-thon in March 2008, at which point I picked this one up again and finished it.
Which means that the majority of the writing was done before I had a very strong hold on Jack, and to be fair I've never had a very strong Angel muse (he's a bit like the Doctor, way too complicated!), and so while I think the characterisation is fine and it works, it is nowhere near as deep or nuanced as it would be if I'd written it today. Jack here feels very, very much like DW S1 Jack, despite him being able to share some angst with Angel about living too long and not connecting with other people etc. He's still very light and flippant and jokey. Obviously some of that was probably intentional (I can't remember!), since this is set back in the 50s, a long time pre-TW S1, but I do think if I'd written it now I would have put a few hints at a lot more depth in Jack.
Also, nowadays I tend to write an extremely tight third person POV, with a lot of "he"s for the POV character and only really using names for the other characters, if that makes sense? This is very definitely a hangover from role-playing, and especially from playing threads against other characters with the same name, as it's much easier to differentiate between them if your Jack is "he" and the other Jack is "Jack"! The POV in this fic is much, much looser, almost verging on omni, even though it very definitely switches between the two characters for different sections. I think that's actually one of the biggest things that makes it feel 'not mine' any more.
Let me just add that I'm not disappointed by any of this - either in the fic, which I still think is good, or by it not feeling like mine any more, because that means I've grown as a writer. I'm just absolutely fascinated by it!
This was my one and only Angel/Jack fic and it won me two awards and I've always been really proud of it. And re-reading it again today, after quite a few years, was absolutely fascinating. It doesn't really, any more, feel like I wrote it. I really enjoyed it, and it's hot and the ending is very satisfying, and there's nothing actually wrong with it, but it doesn't feel like me any more.
Perhaps because it's one of the very first fics I started, way back in the summer of 2007 when I'd got sucked into the Torchwood fandom and wanted desperately to write Jack but had no idea who to pair him with. In the end Giles won and Connection got finished first, and this fic languished until
travels_in_time held a finish-a-thon in March 2008, at which point I picked this one up again and finished it.Which means that the majority of the writing was done before I had a very strong hold on Jack, and to be fair I've never had a very strong Angel muse (he's a bit like the Doctor, way too complicated!), and so while I think the characterisation is fine and it works, it is nowhere near as deep or nuanced as it would be if I'd written it today. Jack here feels very, very much like DW S1 Jack, despite him being able to share some angst with Angel about living too long and not connecting with other people etc. He's still very light and flippant and jokey. Obviously some of that was probably intentional (I can't remember!), since this is set back in the 50s, a long time pre-TW S1, but I do think if I'd written it now I would have put a few hints at a lot more depth in Jack.
Also, nowadays I tend to write an extremely tight third person POV, with a lot of "he"s for the POV character and only really using names for the other characters, if that makes sense? This is very definitely a hangover from role-playing, and especially from playing threads against other characters with the same name, as it's much easier to differentiate between them if your Jack is "he" and the other Jack is "Jack"! The POV in this fic is much, much looser, almost verging on omni, even though it very definitely switches between the two characters for different sections. I think that's actually one of the biggest things that makes it feel 'not mine' any more.
Let me just add that I'm not disappointed by any of this - either in the fic, which I still think is good, or by it not feeling like mine any more, because that means I've grown as a writer. I'm just absolutely fascinated by it!
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