#but I'm oddly pleased with how that turned out even/because of the head-hopping POV

[epersonae]

For the ask game: no. 5 for "for the benefit of all the broken hearts"

5: What part was hardest to write?

Chapter 13, almost certainly: the Ed and Mary stuff. Because I had made this artistic choice to stick very closely with the unnamed wife's point of view, the reader was never going to see what happened with them behind closed door. And I hand-waved that for a LONG time, but I realized that I did need to know the details, the whole question of how do you get from them arguing backstage to being found in the green room or whatever. I think I was stuck in revision and it felt like something important was missing, and so I took a break and just wrote out what ended up being the first chapter of end up several worlds away. I needed to understand the physical blocking, the potential dialogue that the characters might refer back to later, and their mental states.

And then before I even got to that level of editing, after the first draft I had to go back and lay a bunch of additional groundwork to make that encounter feel not just plausible but sort of inevitable. It was much more abrupt in the first draft, and needed all of this foreshadowing in the conversations between Ed and the wife and Mary and the wife, lots of little things. (In the same way that chapter 9 did, the middle Berlin chapter; something something Chekov's dildo.) I had some very intense conversations about it with all my betas but especially Tor about taking something that made sense in kind of an abstract way and making it concrete and visible in the text. It was incredibly hard work and I remain very proud of how it came together

[give me a fic title and a number]