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crack_van2004-01-31 10:45 am
justacat.livejournal.com) wrote in crack_van2004-01-31 10:45 am
Ten Things to Get Used To, by Speranza (NC-17)
Fandom: DUE SOUTH
Pairing: Ray Kowalski/Benton Fraser
Author's Website: http://trickster.org/speranza/
Author on LJ:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cesperanza
Why this must be read:
I promised another Speranza Day ... and it's come down to the wire, as I've struggled to settle on just one more Speranza fic out of all those I'd love to tell you about - but I've done it, and here it is!
Ten Things to Get Used To is structured quite differently from the other two Speranza stories I've rec'ed (The Bodyguard and Juggling Act). Rather than a single linear story, with a plot and a "resolution" of sorts, it's a series of vignettes. I notice looking back over my recs that I have a definite attraction to this kind of fic - at least when it's done well. There are a number of authors who use the "vignette" format very effectively, and I've rec'ed a few of them. Resonant's Sixteenth of June (as well as Adorned, which was rec'ed last month), Brighid's Slice, and Ardent's First all fall into this category. Speranza does it occasionally - and unsurprisingly, since this is Speranza we're talking about, when she does it, it works.
The thing is, when a vignette fic is done well it seems so easy and effortless, flows so naturally, hiding the amount of work and skill that goes into making it work. Just throwing random scenes together gets you nothing but a kind of incoherent mish-mash - in order to work the vignettes need to be somewhat complete in themselves, but also must connect, even if the interconnections aren't always apparent, so that together they form a single "picture."
I think of it as kind of like triangulating - trying to zero in on something by coming at it from a variety of different angles, rather than linearly. Or maybe a better metaphor is Wheel of Fortune - each vignette is a letter, and when you're done you have a bunch of blank spaces interspersed with a bunch of letters - and if you chose your letters well, you don't need the additional letters to see the entire word; you can fill in the blank spaces from the letters you do have. If you've chosen too many vowels, or too many rare and unused consonants, you won't be able to see the whole word - you'll just see a bunch of apparently unrelated letters.
Ten Things to Get Used To (to beat the metaphor mercilessly for a moment) has a perfect balance of vowels and consonants, so that your mind can almost automatically fill in the blank spaces - afterwards it's hard to remember which letters she gave you and which you filled in for yourself. The vignettes alternate first-person POV between Ray and Fraser, who are already a couple when the story begins, and each describes something that the narrator has had to get used to since they moved up to the Great White North together after Call of the Wild and moved into - wait for it! - yes, a Canadian shack, fifty miles outside a tiny town of 300.
The vignettes deal superficially with various day-to-day-type things - how long it takes to get a pizza, how hard it is for Fraser to get used to the idea of having another person around, how surprised Ray is that Fraser isn't like other Canadians, how Ray's penchant for befriending people and accepting invitations has altered Fraser's life. But no matter what they're about on the surface, each vignette is really a view of their relationship from a particular angle (invoking the triangulation metaphor again). Like this line from the scene in which Ray muses about how long it takes to get pizza:
Suffice it to say that each vignette is totally riveting - some are humorous, some achingly sad, all deeply moving and full of brilliant, sensual details that paint an almost technicolor picture in your mind. On its own each is a perfect little gem - but it's together that they really shine. The scenes build off each other seamlessly, so when you're finished, you have in your head a world so vivid, so complete, that you feel like there must have been more words than there actually were, that it must have been longer. Taken together the vignettes create a remarkable picture of them, up there in the wilderness, in what is for me the ideal of a slash relationship - the two of them basically self-sufficient and self-contained, ultimately needing only each other, sustained by heat and passion and partnership, in a glittering North that feels almost ... magical. It's the promise of Call of the Wild, of a mythical place of peace and privacy where the two of them can be together undisturbed, fulfilled, beautifully.
Ten Things makes my heart ache, makes me smile and shiver and tear up at times. The characterizations are as dead true as in anything Speranza's written, the writing is simply gorgeous. It's another example of Speranza at her very best - there simply aren't sufficient words to thank her for the unparalleled pleasure her stories bring, but here's to trying.
Ten Things to Get Used To
Pairing: Ray Kowalski/Benton Fraser
Author's Website: http://trickster.org/speranza/
Author on LJ:
cesperanzaWhy this must be read:
I promised another Speranza Day ... and it's come down to the wire, as I've struggled to settle on just one more Speranza fic out of all those I'd love to tell you about - but I've done it, and here it is!
Ten Things to Get Used To is structured quite differently from the other two Speranza stories I've rec'ed (The Bodyguard and Juggling Act). Rather than a single linear story, with a plot and a "resolution" of sorts, it's a series of vignettes. I notice looking back over my recs that I have a definite attraction to this kind of fic - at least when it's done well. There are a number of authors who use the "vignette" format very effectively, and I've rec'ed a few of them. Resonant's Sixteenth of June (as well as Adorned, which was rec'ed last month), Brighid's Slice, and Ardent's First all fall into this category. Speranza does it occasionally - and unsurprisingly, since this is Speranza we're talking about, when she does it, it works.
The thing is, when a vignette fic is done well it seems so easy and effortless, flows so naturally, hiding the amount of work and skill that goes into making it work. Just throwing random scenes together gets you nothing but a kind of incoherent mish-mash - in order to work the vignettes need to be somewhat complete in themselves, but also must connect, even if the interconnections aren't always apparent, so that together they form a single "picture."
I think of it as kind of like triangulating - trying to zero in on something by coming at it from a variety of different angles, rather than linearly. Or maybe a better metaphor is Wheel of Fortune - each vignette is a letter, and when you're done you have a bunch of blank spaces interspersed with a bunch of letters - and if you chose your letters well, you don't need the additional letters to see the entire word; you can fill in the blank spaces from the letters you do have. If you've chosen too many vowels, or too many rare and unused consonants, you won't be able to see the whole word - you'll just see a bunch of apparently unrelated letters.
Ten Things to Get Used To (to beat the metaphor mercilessly for a moment) has a perfect balance of vowels and consonants, so that your mind can almost automatically fill in the blank spaces - afterwards it's hard to remember which letters she gave you and which you filled in for yourself. The vignettes alternate first-person POV between Ray and Fraser, who are already a couple when the story begins, and each describes something that the narrator has had to get used to since they moved up to the Great White North together after Call of the Wild and moved into - wait for it! - yes, a Canadian shack, fifty miles outside a tiny town of 300.
The vignettes deal superficially with various day-to-day-type things - how long it takes to get a pizza, how hard it is for Fraser to get used to the idea of having another person around, how surprised Ray is that Fraser isn't like other Canadians, how Ray's penchant for befriending people and accepting invitations has altered Fraser's life. But no matter what they're about on the surface, each vignette is really a view of their relationship from a particular angle (invoking the triangulation metaphor again). Like this line from the scene in which Ray muses about how long it takes to get pizza:
Thing is, though, you begin not to mind the fact that it takes at least an hour to get basically anywhere, because the trip is--you and Fraser and the road ahead of you and the hugest sky you ever saw and fuck-all else.Or this, one of the most memorable lines in the story for me, from the vignette in which Ray describes how he's begun to understand Fraser's lackadaisical attitude about money:
I am poor up here, but I am rich up here; my gun is my credit card, my knife is my checkbook, and my sweat is crude oil, baby, my own personal gusher. We are rich, Fraser and me. We are rich and we are free.I'm dying to quote more, but quote too much in a vignette-type fic and you've basically disclosed an entire vignette, so I'll leave you to discover the rest on your own.
Suffice it to say that each vignette is totally riveting - some are humorous, some achingly sad, all deeply moving and full of brilliant, sensual details that paint an almost technicolor picture in your mind. On its own each is a perfect little gem - but it's together that they really shine. The scenes build off each other seamlessly, so when you're finished, you have in your head a world so vivid, so complete, that you feel like there must have been more words than there actually were, that it must have been longer. Taken together the vignettes create a remarkable picture of them, up there in the wilderness, in what is for me the ideal of a slash relationship - the two of them basically self-sufficient and self-contained, ultimately needing only each other, sustained by heat and passion and partnership, in a glittering North that feels almost ... magical. It's the promise of Call of the Wild, of a mythical place of peace and privacy where the two of them can be together undisturbed, fulfilled, beautifully.
Ten Things makes my heart ache, makes me smile and shiver and tear up at times. The characterizations are as dead true as in anything Speranza's written, the writing is simply gorgeous. It's another example of Speranza at her very best - there simply aren't sufficient words to thank her for the unparalleled pleasure her stories bring, but here's to trying.
Ten Things to Get Used To
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Re:
You just can't go wrong with anything Ces writes, can yoU?