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This post is for anyone in the middle of writing a fic (or many fics!) and it's so we have a chance both to share illustrative snippets and to bitch about how recalcitrant our fics are being.
I only have the one fic going, so you're going to get a sneak preview of the end of Chapters Nine, which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eor is proofreading for me right now, and beginning of Chapter Ten (of Swept Away!, for anyone new to reading my journal there's more explainations about what this is at that link, and all the previous chapters) and I would love feedback on this, because I have Phipps doing a personality flip-flop and Tom being remarkably unaware and I wonder if I'm doing romance wrong.
(As background for people who haven't been reading - they were swept down the river on a raft which also has a trade wagon on it after a fight with bandits during which Phipps had caught a glancing bullet to the shoulder. Also, Phipps has been nothing but a pain in the ass the entire story so far and Tom unintentionally finds himself standing in the capacity of servant to him.)
(As background for this chapter, Phipps gets even more pissy, runs off in the woods, and they have a short fight.)
Eventually, in order to hold him, they both ended up stretched full length on the wet leaf mold of the forest floor. It still took several moments of vain struggling before Phipps came to the realization that he was not going to toss Tom's much greater bulk off. When he gave up he said nothing, he simply stopped and went limp. The rain discreetly hid whether there were tears running down his face, but somehow Tom guessed that they were there.
"I'm sorry, but you really must calm yourself. It'll be all right"
"It's not going to be all right. Nothing's all right. We're going to die."
"We could, yes." No point in lying, Phipps knew much better than that and would not think better of him for it. "We almost certainly will if we lose our heads. We need to stay calm and work together."
"Work together? I'm useless! I'm worse than useless, I'm dead weight. You might do all right if it weren't for me!"
"Oh come now. Are you calm? Here, sit up."
(Suddenly Phipps is all compliance, spends a lot of time blushing, and offers useful suggestions. Some other stuff happens, then they go back to the raft...)
This confused Tom a little, but it was certainly preferable to Phipps in his surly mood. "Let's see if we can get you dried off, sir."
"You must find a way to dry yourself, too, and surely you can stop calling me 'sir'!"
"How shall I call you? Master Ethan?"
"Horrors. No." He paused, looking down. "You could call me Phipps, I guess, as my schoolmates do. Or. Or Ethan. I think I'd like that."
"You're sure?" Tom knew that the upper classes guarded the use of their given names by some arcane rules he was unsure of (sometimes it was required, but only when following a title), and that only close friends and family were allowed to use the unadorned name. It was different for the lower classes, of course, as everyone above them claimed the right to use their first or last name as they saw fit.
"Yes." Phipps met his eyes, though his face was again tinged with a blush. "Yes. You did say we were together in this, and well... I would like it."
Tom felt he had been offered something important, it was in the way Phipps's whole body seemed to strain toward Tom, like a cat that wanted petting. "All right. We had better get out of these clothes-"
"Certainly!"
"-but let me find some dry cloth for us to wrap up in."
"Oh yes. Of course."
Can Phipps put up that much of a fight when he has this wound in his shoulder/upper arm/wherever the hell I said it was? It was pretty shallow and happened a day or two ago, now.
But, my major questions:
Should Tom be aware of physical or emotional reactions in himself when he's holding Phipps down, if this is to be a proper romance? I wasn't sure it fit, where he's pretty focused on survival at the moment, but I'm not a teenage boy. Tom is naive and clueless (about the sort of things Phipps is quite experienced in from having been at boarding school), but at the same time he's very in tune with body language - maybe he should at least touch Phipps's shoulder (the not-hurt one) in that last part, there?
My worry all along (and those of you who've been reading for a while know this) has been that I'm scared to death of the characters getting sexually involved, and yet I feel I can't avoid it at some point - they are, after all, hormonal teenage boys - it's not going to be a problem for them. And yet I can't exactly explain why I'm scared to death of them getting sexual. Maybe it's just my embarrassment about writing it. Well, and the worry that someone, somewhere, sometime, will accuse me of child pr0n. They're sixteen, which I think is perfectly acceptable, and if I want to I can always say that their planet has a longer year so they're really 19. It would be stupid, but I could, because it's science-fiction. :)
Now the sun is driving it's spikes into my eyes, time to abandon the computer for a while. At least this prompted me to type up the beginning of Chapter Ten which I had on paper. :)
I only have the one fic going, so you're going to get a sneak preview of the end of Chapters Nine, which
eor is proofreading for me right now, and beginning of Chapter Ten (of Swept Away!, for anyone new to reading my journal there's more explainations about what this is at that link, and all the previous chapters) and I would love feedback on this, because I have Phipps doing a personality flip-flop and Tom being remarkably unaware and I wonder if I'm doing romance wrong.(As background for people who haven't been reading - they were swept down the river on a raft which also has a trade wagon on it after a fight with bandits during which Phipps had caught a glancing bullet to the shoulder. Also, Phipps has been nothing but a pain in the ass the entire story so far and Tom unintentionally finds himself standing in the capacity of servant to him.)
(As background for this chapter, Phipps gets even more pissy, runs off in the woods, and they have a short fight.)
Eventually, in order to hold him, they both ended up stretched full length on the wet leaf mold of the forest floor. It still took several moments of vain struggling before Phipps came to the realization that he was not going to toss Tom's much greater bulk off. When he gave up he said nothing, he simply stopped and went limp. The rain discreetly hid whether there were tears running down his face, but somehow Tom guessed that they were there.
"I'm sorry, but you really must calm yourself. It'll be all right"
"It's not going to be all right. Nothing's all right. We're going to die."
"We could, yes." No point in lying, Phipps knew much better than that and would not think better of him for it. "We almost certainly will if we lose our heads. We need to stay calm and work together."
"Work together? I'm useless! I'm worse than useless, I'm dead weight. You might do all right if it weren't for me!"
"Oh come now. Are you calm? Here, sit up."
(Suddenly Phipps is all compliance, spends a lot of time blushing, and offers useful suggestions. Some other stuff happens, then they go back to the raft...)
This confused Tom a little, but it was certainly preferable to Phipps in his surly mood. "Let's see if we can get you dried off, sir."
"You must find a way to dry yourself, too, and surely you can stop calling me 'sir'!"
"How shall I call you? Master Ethan?"
"Horrors. No." He paused, looking down. "You could call me Phipps, I guess, as my schoolmates do. Or. Or Ethan. I think I'd like that."
"You're sure?" Tom knew that the upper classes guarded the use of their given names by some arcane rules he was unsure of (sometimes it was required, but only when following a title), and that only close friends and family were allowed to use the unadorned name. It was different for the lower classes, of course, as everyone above them claimed the right to use their first or last name as they saw fit.
"Yes." Phipps met his eyes, though his face was again tinged with a blush. "Yes. You did say we were together in this, and well... I would like it."
Tom felt he had been offered something important, it was in the way Phipps's whole body seemed to strain toward Tom, like a cat that wanted petting. "All right. We had better get out of these clothes-"
"Certainly!"
"-but let me find some dry cloth for us to wrap up in."
"Oh yes. Of course."
Can Phipps put up that much of a fight when he has this wound in his shoulder/upper arm/wherever the hell I said it was? It was pretty shallow and happened a day or two ago, now.
But, my major questions:
Should Tom be aware of physical or emotional reactions in himself when he's holding Phipps down, if this is to be a proper romance? I wasn't sure it fit, where he's pretty focused on survival at the moment, but I'm not a teenage boy. Tom is naive and clueless (about the sort of things Phipps is quite experienced in from having been at boarding school), but at the same time he's very in tune with body language - maybe he should at least touch Phipps's shoulder (the not-hurt one) in that last part, there?
My worry all along (and those of you who've been reading for a while know this) has been that I'm scared to death of the characters getting sexually involved, and yet I feel I can't avoid it at some point - they are, after all, hormonal teenage boys - it's not going to be a problem for them. And yet I can't exactly explain why I'm scared to death of them getting sexual. Maybe it's just my embarrassment about writing it. Well, and the worry that someone, somewhere, sometime, will accuse me of child pr0n. They're sixteen, which I think is perfectly acceptable, and if I want to I can always say that their planet has a longer year so they're really 19. It would be stupid, but I could, because it's science-fiction. :)
Now the sun is driving it's spikes into my eyes, time to abandon the computer for a while. At least this prompted me to type up the beginning of Chapter Ten which I had on paper. :)
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