#not necessarily planning to write direct follow-up for this though lmao; right now i'm anticipating running on sitcom rules

[brittlebutch]

'Changeling,' she thinks about texting, wishing against all reason that it was here for her now. 'I went on a walk and got hit by a car. I came all this way, and did not even get to look through the stupid card packs. How is that fair?'

words: 12,865

[omgkatsudonplease]

Hello :) I've been following your fic BtDS for long time now and I love the complex story and the entire premise of this story. I'm really curious how you two got around such complex world building including the little details and so much more. Have you already discussed this topic on world building before where I can read? I'd would love to know what inspired you both for this story and the background research you did for this? If you don't mind me asking? I admire your storytelling technique:)

Oh man, thank you so much; I’m super glad you like our fic! @atomicsapphic and I actually started thinking about this fic while I was on a cruise this past Christmas (you know, surrounded by water). I can’t say much about her train of thought regarding this fic since I actually do most of the writing (but she and I talk about every plot development and she also reads and okays all the chapters before we post -- oh! and she’s also responsible for some of the poems and the really lovely stream of consciousness in chapter 8), so most of it is just me spewing feelings and stuff all over the place. I’m actually a compulsive world-builder; ask any of my friends and they’ll tell you right off the bat that I do this shit for like everything creative, ever. I’ve been world-building and writing since I was 11, so in terms of storytelling technique it’s just how I’ve been rolling for a long time. I’ve actually taken some time each year since high school to write a really long fic (or, last year, the Quest for Erebor liveblogs on tumblr at @quiterespectablyyours) so writing giant wordcounts is also something I’m fairly used to, haha. 

Anyway, I’ll talk about my process under the cut.

I actually did know quite a bit about selkies before I started! I read a couple selkie AUs for other fandoms (there’s a good series for Gravity Falls and there’s a really lovely heartbreaking one for Gimli/Legolas in LotR) and I knew I wanted to do something set in a seaside town for a really long time, not to mention a long slow-burn multimedia fic (I just didn’t anticipate it being this). I’ve grown up in a city that’s a ten-minute drive from the beach, and I’ve gone to a lot of little seaside towns in my life, so I’ve had some experience on that front, though I do admit in constructing Torvill Cove I took a lot of liberties with the town; there isn’t one specific town in the Highlands that is the “real” Torvill Cove (though its location is roughly where Maillaig is). In a way it’s kinda idealised and playing more with my childhood nostalgia of Thomas Kinkade paintings and Anne of Green Gables novels, so there’s something North American about the town sometimes, but I tried to put in some more Scottish details where I could find them (the Hogamany stuff, a lot of the Celtic mythological detail, the Torvill family crest, the process of renting a cottage, etc). At one point we’d actually set the fic in the south of England instead because I’m a sucker for chalk cliffs, but then we decided that Scotland was just a more accurate setting in terms of the folklore and the mood of the piece. 

But the process of actually building the town itself was relatively simple; Leah and I talked about what jobs we wanted each of the characters to have, and that in turn informed us as to what the town had. We did change things up a lot in between our initial plans and the final story, mostly because once we factored in the fact that they’re mostly school-age people and we didn’t want to age people up, we had to give them all schools/colleges to attend in addition to their jobs. So not all of it was planned from the get-go -- things and details cropped up as I was writing and I just rolled with a lot of them. I’d actually written out like around 3 or 4 chapters before we started publishing them, so we had a large portion of time in which the fic was sitting around unpublished and I could just go in and change details as I pleased (it’s not so easy to do that now haha; I’ve had to go back and edit things like the winery’s product -- grape wines aren’t doing so hot in Scotland but berry wines are apparently a thing -- and the town’s population -- which I’ve adjusted like at least four times lol). I’ve also drawn some pretty crude maps of the town’s general layout, as well as floorplans for Viktor’s cottage and the lighthouse. I don’t have much for Yu-Topia, though -- I just sorta imagine Hotel del Coronado meets the Spirited Away bathhouse and go from there lmao

Honestly the biggest thing during the writing process was mostly the direction in which we wanted to take the story. Leah had actually imagined something a lot darker; she had envisioned something more like Gone Girl where Viktor deliberately takes the skin, but I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with something like that because this fic is actually tapping into some personal issues I dealt with this time last year (you could say it’s my own personal Stay Close to Me except I don’t want the hypothetical Yuuri in this situation to stay close to me? weird) and I personally felt like I wanted to do a story about people who love each other and, despite both of them being excellent writers and communicators of emotions in fiction, can’t seem to properly communicate with one another about their own feelings without hurting the other. So Leah and I had a talk about the vastly different wavelengths we were on and... well, since I’m writing the bulk of the story, my vision prevailed lol. I mean, I wanted there to be a little vein of darkness, but I didn’t want too much? I wanted there to be some obsession, obviously, but not to a very dangerous, borderline-abusive level. I didn’t want to portray this couple as having an abusive relationship (even if writing something Gone Girl-esque would be fuckin amazing -- just not for this fic lol); I wanted something that was a bit unhealthy, a bit codependent, but nothing that the two of them couldn’t eventually work out. That’s not strictly worldbuilding per se but it did greatly inform the tone of the words that I picked for Viktor’s endless thirst and pining so, yeah.

The multimedia aspect of the fic was actually purely accidental, since I realised I was going to get into nitty-gritty details but I also wanted bridges between each scene so it wasn’t jarring. So I rewrote a great portion of the first chapter, added in a visitor’s guide, and... it worked? And we rolled from there. Having that additional layer actually lets Leah keep working with me on this since she’s so busy with other things, so it worked out pretty well in the end. 

I’m glad you asked this question, as it sorta let me get my thoughts in order as I write chapters 11 and 12 -- which, for plot related purposes as you’ll find next Sunday, are from Yuuri’s POV -- so thank you so much for this! If you have more questions, my ask box is open. 

(also, if you’re feeling generous, please, consider buying me a cuppa?)