Can't imagine what is must have been like for Sheila Atim though. You get cast as a major character in a popular series, except you only appear in half an episode and your lines consist entirely of breathy superslow single words and all you have to do is lie statue still on a slab, easiest and most boring job in the world—

—apart from the minutes-long run-on nonsensical monologue you're supposed to deliver in one go in a terrifying increasingly furious monotone without barely any space to breathe.

Wednesday WIP

Productivity, yay!

This week I have holidays at home while the kid is at camp, and even the weekend before that I'd been writing, so things are moving forwards!

For the moment I'm fully focused on TToD. I haven't forgotten about all the prompts, and I feel a bit bad about ignoring them, but I do have to pick, and having large swathes of uninterrupted time is a rarity I can't afford to spend on things that need it it.

So, I've made my way through chapter 6 and 7, once again taking the raw material I've got there and trying to weave it all together, and have started work on chapter 8.

The current method of getting all the scenes in the right order is group them by day/time period—ie if the boys are currently hiding in Italy, there's a couple of scenes that happen in day 1 when they settle in, then the next scenes are grouped together in a little folder called "day 5" and I know it needs to start with a time skip paragraph etc. It works pretty well, makes it a lot more manageable than just trying to arrange them all separately.

I've finished off for the moment with chapter 6, added some things and streamlined the plot. It's the one I was struggling with a bit, so any progress there is nice. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but it is good to have enough raw material to actually work with at a later point. There's a build-up there that I wanted to get right, and I think I'm finally approaching something workable.

And then I moved to chapter 7.

Oh boy. Chapter 7. There's an odd sort of tenderness coming through in the writing there, that isn't really present in any of the other Jim-pov chapters. I'm not even sure it works, characterisation-wise. A couple of Jim's most defining traits are his cynicism, the dominance/controlling aspect, and the sort of… hard, mocking cheerfulness? None of those are present here, he's almost soft at moments, strangely. I might be straying too far here, but I won't be able to see that until I do a larger-scale reread. In terms of the emotional arc of the whole story it's definitely a pivotal one, with a lot of new backstory coming up, the impact of the previous chapters finally hitting, and quite a few tiebacks to fif and tvd. It's Jim with most of the defenses knocked off, both of them vulnerable and trying to navigate each other and their trauma, with very mixed success. It's a bit of a heartbreaking chapter, to be honest, and I'm very curious to see how this'll land, given that there's so many of things implied, unsaid.

It's also, despite everything, a bit of a breather chapter before things really start taking off. I started on chapter 8 today and there's one really ugly scene in there, that I still need to make my way towards. It is a Ride to go from the uneasy tenderness in chapter 7 to the violence of chapter 8, and navigating that transition believably while also taking the pov switch in account is... tricky. Still, I've managed to get the scenes in line, and now I'm going to need to let it sink in a bit and Ponder to see where it still needs adding. And resist the urge to immediately jump to chapter 9

Some other random thoughts:

Obligatory fragment (from chapter 7):

I should have seen this coming, shouldn't I? Otoh now I can really appreciate what a bastard question it is, it's like making me choose between my children (luckily I only have the one real child).

Anyway:

For moments, there's actually two very minor ones I like a lot. The first one is the one in Scandal, where he gets Irene's text. You've got this whole episode full of new villains, complicated plot, in a way that you sort of forget about everything that happened with Moriarty at the start. When you get to this point, it basically feels like the puzzle is solved, the plot is done--except then you realise that there's still thirty minutes to go, and suddenly there's threatening music playing? And Irene is acting shifty and you get that slow pan up and—wham, it's your boy Moriarty in his cunty sunglasses! And I do have to give props to the show there, because that's a clever little way of showing just where Moriarty's threat value is. It's not that he's holding a gun to your head, it's that he's behind the crime, pulling the strings, even when you didn't see his presence at all. The Spider, indeed.

The other one is an even smaller blink-and-you-miss-it: the finger snap in TGG. I make a lot out of the fact that Moriarty is casually, effortlessly dominant/controlling when I write, and that little moment is sort of an illustration of that. Doesn't look back, doesn't even interrupt his conversation, just makes the smallest signal and doesn't even check because he's that sure he'll be listened to. And of course, in my happy little headcanon world putting Sebastian at the other side of that is just a kinky bonus :)

Moving on to lines:

I'm also gonna cheat and pick a couple, because, you know. They're all winners.

But special shoutout to no one ever gets to me. and no one ever will. There's the whole thing about Andrew Scott playing a Moriarty who is, underneath all the outrageousness and sadism and whimsy, deeply lonely, and sometimes it shines through. He sounds almost sad here about how no one will ever beat him, which tracks with the rooftop speech.

Other one that has been banging around my head: [I never liked riddles] Learn to. There is a theme here and it is Moriarty being a domineering bastard. The whole conversation is honestly fun powerplay, but that one line is so coldly serious that it quite stands out to me.

And finally, the dream sequence in Bride's Lie back and lose because it's so vicious. A bit like with the first quote, that thing where most of what Moriarty does is performance, and then sometimes something genuine breaks through; and this time it's fury. I mean, the whole fight is a joy, love how feral and dirty he fights, but this one particular line did stand out to me. I do love it when he goes apeshit <3

Oh no.

Gonna need a little Wound Man to keep track of all of Sebastian's various injuries and scars at this point.