Right, so I promised myself that I'd do a little postscript to TWR to talk about some things and get some thoughts down.

1) The genesis for this idea was, of course, Chapter 75 of "Nobody Dies", where Lilith runs around Nerv, tanging folks left and right. In the Spacebattles thread, someone mentioned what it might look like if people didn't get un-Tanged. So sometime right after Halloween 2010, if memory serves, I wrote up this -

It was just another day in the Tokyo-3 graveyard, just outside the city. One of the legacies of the vast casualties of Second Impact, it spread like a stain across a huge area. Various persons silently made their way through the forest of memorials, not seeing anyone else, each lost in their own thoughts. One man, slightly older, stood in front of his destination.
Shinji Ikari stared at the simple black post, with the small bouquet of flowers at its bottom, as he had the same day for the last 20 years.

Asuka Langley Sohryu, 2001-2017

He had wanted to die, at first. Many had felt the same way. They had beaten Lilith, though it had taken a fierce battle. But after the smoke had cleared the horror began - they couldn't get the souls back. With Lilith destroyed, they were all gone - the Ree, Asuka, the many personnel who had been dissolved damn near completely unaware of what was happening - all were lost. For a time, people didn't know how to react. Yui and Gendo worked day and night for months trying to find a way to find the lost souls, and even reenlisted Fuyutsuki to help. But with every test, a failure, and with every failure, hope ebbed away.

It was Pieter who contacted one of the priests in Tokyo-3, asking for the funeral. He would never admit it, but it would be the hardest thing he would ever do in his life. Uriel would forever blame himself, thinking that if he had fought differently, they might have been able to save Asuka. The admittance that his sister would never come back, that she really had been stolen by the "giant marshmallow bitch", did not come easy.

But it was Shinji who seemed to be hurt the most. He grew quiet. Misato saw parallels to herself after Second Impact, and tried her best to keep him from closing up completely. Hikari wept on his shoulder at the funeral, with Kensuke and Touji subdued.

But life went on. Kei and Kaworu returned to Tokyo-3, and Nerv continued, if greatly diminished in spirit. The last few Cherubim were hunted down, and the Angels, losing both means to Instrumentality, were either destroyed or made allies.

But that was the past. Shinji stared down through his glasses at the marker when he heard the sound of footsteps stop behind him. He turned around, and sees a face he had not witnessed for over 18 years. He narrowed his eyes - she's older, but is it? "Mana?" he said.

The woman in front of him wore a dark grey uniform, her cap with three stars over two bars. Her hair, cropped to her shoulders, is a bright brown. She smiled at his question. "Yeah, it's me. Long time no see, huh?"

He frowned. "Let me guess, someone told you to come here, and tell me everything's alright, well FUCK THAT, and FUCK EVERYTHI-" He stopped himself, realizing what he's doing. Mana looked at him with eyes widened. She hadn't expected *that* to be the first thing out of his mouth.

Shinji looked down at the dirt. Mana takes a deep breath. "We should talk," she says.

"Yeah."

As you can probably tell, a lot different from what it all ended up as - Mana is the stable one, with Shinji unable to move on from the past. Funny how it got completely switched around in the full story. I think it's a lot better as it is.

2) Music
Every chapter has a song that I linked to in conjunction with posting the chapters in the ND thread. They are (Song, Artist, Album, with attendant link):
Ch 1 - Papillon, Nervous Doll Dancing, Aphelion (http:/ akeenerheart. tumblr. com/post/3891811195/papillon-by-nervous-doll-dancing-off-of-2009s )
Ch 2 - Moscow is in the Telephone, Rachel's, Systems/Layers (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=E5UnA7RIJ08 )
Ch 3 - I was Only 19, Redgum (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=Urtiyp-G6jY )
Ch 4 - If I Only..., Do Make Say Think, Do Make Say Think (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=4uFwM9Bnp_I)
Ch 5 - The Adolescent, Gregor Samsa, Rest (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=U_i2UmRY5pA )
Ch 6 - 13 Angels Standing Guard 'Round the Side of Your Bed, A Silver Mt Zion, He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Still Sometimes Grace the Corners of Our Rooms (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=hQZfGa5t4e8 )
Ch 7 - Lissie's Heart Murmur, Warpaint, The Fool (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=uEHd3j1jPeY )
Ch 8 - Videotape, Radiohead, In Rainbows (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=Qvv-LpTBWVk )
Ch 9 - Untitled, Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=Ejoxw_xrTJc )
Ch 10 - Pyramid Song, Radiohead, Amnesiac (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=zbKQPqs-cqc )
Ch 11 - True Love Will Find You In the End, A Whisper in the Noise, Dry Land (http:/ www. youtube. com/watch?v=Wil0bEpnUd8 )
Yeah, I am never titling chapters off of the songs they use ever again. Just... that was a dumb idea. But by the time I realized that it was too late, and I just had to plow through.

3) Other Thoughts
The Good:
I love the beginning of Ch. 3, where Lilith blows up. I really think I captured some of the panic with the dissolution of the text.
I think the ending of Ch. 8, where Mana & Shinji just spend an evening together, is one of the best scenes of them I wrote. Some of Mana's inner contradictions are well on display in how she acts there.
I think the first moment where things clicked is when Mana tells Uri that she didn't miss anyone from Nerv. That statement came out of the blue to me, and I thought, "Damn, that's perfect."

The Bad:
I should have written an outline. That's pretty much the root of a lot of the problems I faced, especially as I got past Ch. 6. I only (finally) wrote an outline when I hit Ch. 9, and realized that I had a number of points that I wanted to hit, and it would be much easier if I put them on paper to figure out their relationship.
I had a vague idea from the beginning of where I wanted to go, but if I had done something like that from the beginning, I think it would have been much tighter. I could have played up Mana's ambivalency about returning to Japan, foreshadow her issues with Shinji, added a scene or two with Beck to establish their relationship, all that good stuff. Looking back over the first chapters, I was pretty confused about where I wanted to take things. In the intro chapters there are a lot of unnecessary points - especially the stupid ring. Originally that was supposed to be Mana's old wedding ring, and she was a widow who kept the ring on. But after the first chapter got written I decided that wasn't a good idea, so that didn't go anywhere.
Chapters are an average length of 4500 words or so. A little on the short side, but I wasn't too sure how to lengthen them while still adding in meaningful material.

The Other:
This was an interesting experiment. Having the gap of 20 years between the points of action was a great excuse to jump around time and juxtapose scenes with similar themes.
A lot of what I read through writing this bled through. From Faulkner's Light in August to The Magus by John Fowles (which is the source of the final epigram), they all helped in their own way.
In case you don't speak Latin, the final epigram can be translated thusly - May (s)he who has never loved love now, and may (s)he who has loved love again - appropriate for our duo.

Things I would do differently 5 months on:
I'd have made references to Mana's rocky thoughts concerning Japan/Nerv/Shinji in the first chapter. Mention the 'labyrinth', as it's such a great image.

Anyway! thanks for reading! Dziekuje! Danke vielmals! Gracias! Gratias tibi !