ahaha

[aria]

I just spent most of today (...technically yesterday now) reading Hawks and Hands for the first time (!). I am aware that linking directly to it probably makes me evil; I'm also aware that the front page explicitly tells me that management is not responsible for lost sleep or productivity, but damn it, Dira, I just lost a whole day of writing my AU to reading yours with my hands clutched at my face.

On the other hand, it is making me feel much less guilty and weird about the F/K/V maybe coming out to something alarmingly like 90K. Perspective is such a wonderful thing.

Comments

[dira]

Ahahahaa \o/

I mean. Um. Yay perspective? I actually went on to spend three years writing a story that made me think of Hawks and Hands as the manageable one. :)

[aria]

Dira, I know you do not love due South much anymore and also probably get told this ad nauseam, but Hawks and Hands was FUCKING AWESOME, in that evil evil way where I spent basically twelve hours straight reading it. And it was many things but among those it was pretty much the best remix of the pilot ever. It also occurs to me that you remixed mostly the non-wacky stuff, which makes sense given the absurdity complaint you made. (I kind of love that on the absurdity scale, a ghost dog is less wacky than a dead father. Yeesh.)

BUT IN CONCLUSION I ask with some trepidation: how long did Hawks and Hands take you? I mean, I fully expect to have the first draft of my stupid long fic finished by the end of August, but that does not mean I am right. (And what is the story that took three years and made you find Hawks and Hands managable? Ahaha.)

[dira]

Thank you! I never mind hearing about it--as may be evident given that I finally wrote their coda last month, these guys are kind of my brain's exception to being done with Due South. And ghosts are practically not wacky at all!

And, hmm, let me just cast my mind back to early 2004... *g*

I wrote maybe a scene or two in October 2003, then wandered off into other things, picked up writing for serious in March 2004, and finished the draft in January 2005, a feat that included writing the last 50,000 words in 23 days. I was getting betaed scene-by-scene as I went so that there wasn't a lot of final beta required by the time I finished the draft. I... did not do very much, for those ten months, besides go to work and write and obsess about writing.

(And then, in September of 2005, I started writing Missing Persons, which a) is a fuck of a lot more grim than H&H, and b) I was in grad school and then I was in grad school while also working full time and c) I started falling out of Numb3rs fandom and into a wide array of others when I was about halfway through, which is how the three years thing happened. Also, d) it killed and ate betas at an alarming rate. I think I'd had eight or nine people on it by the time I got it ready to go. I serial-posted it in June-July of 2008.)

[carrieann]

Hawks and Hands is awesome. How have you not read it before today?? ... now you're making me want to reread it. Dang you, Aria.

[aria]

I think it was a combination of [a] everyone and their dog (or literary wolf) had read it already, and although I try not to be a snob and not do What Everyone Else Does, because dS fandom generally has quite good taste, I still have this ingrained childhood habit of being totally snobbish, and [b] longfic is looooong, oh my dear lord. But then I met Dira at WisCon, and since she was awesome and I'd liked her shorter stuff, I decided [a] was clearly ridiculous; then I just had to wait until such time as I had an entire free day, because I also have this horrible habit of reading fic all in a go no matter how long it is.

OH GOD DON'T REREAD IT UNLESS YOU HAVE THE TIME! But if you do, by all means absolutely reread it. :D