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paintedrecs · 5 years ago

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‘It didn’t snow in their part of California; it never had, and likely never would. But that didn’t stop him from asking, or longing, once he was too old to believe his parents could make anything happen. Maybe it wasn’t the natural state of the world, for a town that wasn’t far enough north, or high enough in the mountains, to gather that magical dusting he daydreamed about every winter. The thing was, though. Most of the world didn’t know werewolves existed outside of fairy tales and horror films. People relied on what they knew, and what they’d been taught, without opening their eyes to other possibilities.’

Honestly I just want the origin for this story. What led to it, what parts did you know first, etc. it’s one of my favorites and I love it.

Submissions are actually kinda weird (I’ve never used them before), so I don’t know if there’s a better way to post this, but! We’ll try it this way.

For this meme.

Excerpt from the opening of tide pulls from the moon (Sterek, 45k, canon divergent, future fic)

I’m very fond of this fic, which people tend to refer to as “warm” and “healing.” Two things I wanted to achieve with it, so that’s always awesome to hear. I’m really glad that you like it!

Funny story..........this was one of my failed attempts to write a 3k fic for the Sterek Zine. I tried like....three times, I think, and they all ballooned too much, because writing within a strict word limit is really difficult for me. (One of the reasons it’s probably the only zine I’ll ever be a part of.) So I sat down and just cranked out the rest of this fic instead, which ended up being one of my favorites for a long time.

It’s been long enough now (five years since I posted it!!!) that I honestly don’t really remember the initial inspiration or plan. I do know I was sitting in one of my favorite local coffee shops, drinking a latte. I was thinking about winter (a thing I don’t get in California) and about Derek and his family. I think I was planning for it to be a very short thing about his family - the image of his grandmother came right away - that would lead into a scene with Stiles in the snow, maybe building a snowman. Something soft and sweet about new beginnings.

Then I started writing, and I got into a little bit of the family feels, as one does with the Hales, and then this scene happened:

The holidays made Derek happy, every year, even if the weather never did shift over into the picture-perfect landscape all the movies and songs lingered over lovingly.

He even secretly loved being born on Christmas Day - "the best gift I've ever received," his mom would say. "Me too," Laura would add, since her reward for a ruined Christmas spent in the hospital had been a silky black puppy with big eyes and bigger paws. She'd spent years trying to shift into her full wolf form so they could tumble together in the Preserve, two woodland creatures at play.

She hadn't managed it - not then. Not until years later, long after the Alpha powers had coursed through her body and left her shaking and sobbing, grey-white flakes of ash drifting softly in the air and settling onto their bowed shoulders, coating their smoldering house and scorched yard into a mockery of the winter wonderland Derek had always dreamed about.

It'd been snowing in New York the day he felt her die.

And suddenly I knew this wasn’t going to be a short fic. It had to be canon compliant (or at least, compliant with the parts of canon I’m willing to acknowledge), and somewhere in the future, with Derek leaving Beacon Hills for a place where he could find things he’d never get if he stayed. Snow, maybe. Distance from both the good and horrific memories of his past. Maybe some kind of healing, if he could ever manage that.

(More under the cut.)

Derek leaving Beacon Hills isn’t a new concept - I’ve been reading Sterek fics for years, so I’d seen plenty of this concept before - but I hadn’t ever read one where he went to England. And I just...I don’t know. I took him to a place where I’d been during a sort of transitional point in my life, where I’ve felt some of the deepest contentment.

I realized after writing and editing and fact-checking and posting my fic that I’d made a mistake and Cornwall actually does not get snow either, at least not to the thickly soft level I’d described at the end, so just...ignore that part. It’s a fantasy world. In this world, Cornwall gets more than a little dusting of snow in the winters, okay. (I’d visited for several weeks during the summer, had been in England during the winter but not in that part of it, and had foolishly relied on googling images, where I’d seen evidence of snow. I mercilessly research all my fics now, largely because of this error, hahaha)

Anyway, the point is that Cornwall is this little jewel of a place that’s small and quiet and beautiful and slow-paced enough that I could see Derek really finding his footing and learning how to be himself in a world that had been so incredibly damaging for so much of his life.

Most of the settings are real places I’ve been to. Derek’s house, with the deck overlooking the tidal river, is a house my best friend’s godmother owns, and which I wish I could someday retire to. The three of us drank tea out there and journaled in the mornings and watched the river pull back, leaving boats stranded - but only until the tide came rushing back in to free them.

We walked through a bluebell-thick wood to a pub with cozy wooden booths and plates of crunchy-boned fish. We went to the Eden Project, to Land’s End, to a modern art gallery. I was, during this particular trip, pretty deeply in love with my friend, who was not in love with me, and whom I never told.

I think all of that just added.......emotional depth when I pulled out those memories and shaped them into a story that didn’t match any of my actual experiences, but drew from a backdrop of physical settings I’d embedded in my soul.

This was a beautiful place that I still think of very fondly. I wanted Derek to be able to live in a place like that - to have his pack, Stiles, his new family, join him there and see what kind of peace and happiness he’d found.

tide pulls has always been a pretty personal story to me, and I think that’s why it always makes me so happy when readers come out of it saying they feel a sense of healing and contentment, too.

#sterek #eternalsterek #meme #fic talk #about my fics #pdxtrent #submission

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