Le bronchitis. AGAIN. Le sigh. The sooner I figure out how to write Jimiverse stories for a living, the better...
Chapter Seventeen
It was a dark and stormy night.
Sam stared at the single line on the screen, and sought inspiration of the Bulwer-Lytton kind.
It was a dark and stormy night, terrifying and scary.
He was no stranger to being set writing assignments: essays, critiques, analyses, and fiction, he'd spent his education years writing them to requirement.
It was a dark and stormy night, like totally terrifying and scary.
The problem was, he'd spent all that time trying his very best to write well. Before he'd even started, he'd had a natural talent for correct and expressive use of American English, and had honed the skill – he'd been on track to become a lawyer, for fuck's sake, in which case it wasn't just necessary to be able to use English well, you had to be able to wield it by turns with the accuracy of a laser scalpel or the force of a sledgehammer, when you weren't bending it over the nearest lawsuit and making it squeal like a pig. Hell, in his final year of college, he'd won an award for the most articulate, most creative and most entertaining filibuster in his class.
It was a dark and stormy night, like totally terrifying and scary, with bats flying around.
Sam Winchester had been required to do some things for the Hunt that had battered his brain, beaten his body and broken his heart, confronted his very sense of self and his understanding of the world around him and made him question everything he'd ever believed, every conviction he'd ever held, every emotion he'd ever felt. But he was a Winchester, and with his brother at his side, they always found a way, somehow, somewhere, though it was likely to kill them both, they found a way.
It was a dark and stormy night, like totally terrifying and scary, with bats flying around and stuff.
But he feared that he had, finally, run up against a challenge that would defeat him.
He tried to recall the advice that he had heard a number of teachers give to classes when a chorus of groans arose over a writing assignment. "If you have to, start by writing crap," more than one professor had said frankly, "Just start writing, stream of consciousness stuff, ideas, words, whatever comes to mind. Just get something down on the page. It doesn't matter if you start with crap. You'd be amazed at how many journal articles start as crap. You start with crap, then you can edit it, you can rewrite it, you can polish it, you can improve it – you can't do any of that with a blank page. So if you're having trouble working out what to write, or just getting started, try writing crap."
The trouble was, Sam Winchester had never written crap: he would consider the matter, marshal his ideas about the topic or the assignment, he would do research, make notes, possibly scribble down an outline, assemble his thoughts, and then write. The editing of swirling, incoherent crap to logical or lyrical language went on largely automatically, inside his head, before he picked up a pen or opened the word processor. No matter how many teachers and professors had told him that producing drafts and iterations were a perfectly acceptable and constructive process for writing, he couldn't bear the thought of letting anything out of his head until it was, in his opinion, fit for public consumption.
It was a dark and stormy night, like totally terrifying and scary, with bats flying around and stuff, the sort of night where ordinary people think that really spooky things might happen not realising that really spooky things happen all the time and they don't just wait for a dark and stormy night to be like really spooky and like kill people.
Sam Winchester was trying to write a bad fan fiction, and it was shredding his very being from the inside.
He paused and sat back, tweaking at his bra in annoyance, to consider the elements of bad fanfics, then looked up in irritation at where Dean was typing furiously, fastidiously lacquered nails clicking on the keyboard of the other laptop.
"Inspiration has struck, huh?" he noted wryly.
"I'm just doin' what you said," Dean replied, "I'm just writin' the opposite of what I did before…" the computer made a brief tinny sound meant to represent a cheer from a crowd at a sports even, and he paused in his typing."
"What the hell was that?" asked Sam.
"Just an alert," Dean replied, "I got another review."
"You're not supposed to be getting reviews!" snapped Sam.
"Well, tell ImpalaDude's readers that," sniffed Dean. "I can't help it if these people like what I wrote."
"Just don't do it again," humphed Sam.
Dean looked up, and arched perfectly shaped eyebrows. "Not drowning in inspiration there, Sammy?"
"It's… it's just… look, it's just really hard for me, okay?" Sam tried to keep the whining tone out of his voice. "I'm trying to write crap, and it goes against the grain."
"Pride is one of the Seven Deadlies, Sam," cautioned Dean.
"You're the one who's always saying that false modesty sucks," Sam shot back. "Think of it this way: if we were on a job, and we were Hunting some fugly that was only attracted to guys who were lousy in bed, and you had to go out and pick up women and disappoint them between the sheets, how would you feel about that?"
"It just wouldn't happen," Dean waved a slender hand dismissively, "I'd follow some other guy."
"Well, what if you couldn't?" pressed Sam.
Dean gave him an understanding smile. "Sammy, there will always be a plentiful supply of guys ready able and willing to disappoint women between the sheets."
"Yeah, but if it was absolutely necessary for you to lure it out," Sam went on, "If it was too dangerous to let somebody else do it and you personally had to track this bitch down and then leaver her unfulfilled and homicidally angry…"
"It wouldn't happen," said Dean firmly, "The Living Sex God is incapable of anything except a masterly performance."
"But what if you had to?" insisted Sam.
For a moment, Dean looked lost for words. "I really don't think I could do that at all convincingly," he eventually pronounced, with a small shudder. "God, what a totally hideous thought."
"Well, this whole writing a bad story? For me, it's just like that." He scrubbed a hand over his face. "And it is too dangerous to use somebody else as bait." He stared at the depressingly unfilled document.
"You did research though," Dean pointed out, "Can't you just, you know, use what you found?"
"It's not that simple," sighed Sam, opening the list he'd constructed. "A bad story may be bad because of one or more elements – if I don't get the balance right, it'll end up not bad enough to be considered bad, but if I overdo it, it'll look completely contrived, deliberately bad." He peered at his list. "For a start, English expression that's florid, cringe-inducing or just carelessly bad gets you halfway there. Then, you need a complete lack of any sort of plotline, just a wandering narrative for you to indulge your own verbosity, and possibly fantasies."
"Fantasies, huh?" grinned Dean, "Careful you don't end up in one o' them slash workshops."
"No, not like that," Sam was grasping for a way to explain, "Genre has nothing to do with it. Hell, I even found a Bobby and Crowley story that was pretty well-written."
Dean's face blanched. "You mean, as in, you know, Bobby, and, and, Crowley, and, and…"
"Actually, it wasn't as bad as you think," Sam grinned ruefully. "It was a description of a man-date to Rome, with a quick trip back in time to check out the ancient city and watch Caesar being assassinated, which finished with them drinking Scotch at Bobby's place and complaining to each other about the idiots in their lives. As slash fan fantasies go, it was pretty damned tame." He sighed, and stared at the screen once more.
It was a dark and stormy night, like totally terrifying and scary, with bats flying around and stuff. I could just tell that it was the sort of night where weird stuff would happen because I've been like into that stuff since forever and I'm a huge fan of Supernatural.
"I'm starting to think that The Haunted Tea-Cosy Of Polecat Bottoms was easier than this," he complained, tweaking a bra strap once more. "At least there wasn't foundation garmentry making things more uncomfortable than necessary."
"Well, you could always knit a tea cosy," shrugged Dean, tapping away at his own keyboard, "Or at least make a start on the teddy tits you're supposed to be knittin' for RJ."
"Dean, I am NOT knitting your kid a pair of toy boobs!"
"Wow, this whole female thing is gettin' to you - you feelin' hormonal? Want me to go get you some Midol?"
"Hormonal, no, but homicidal, possibly..."
"Huh, some aunt you turned out to be, the boobless wonder, in so many ways."
"Look, you're so keen on it, I'll teach you how to knit, and you can make him a pair of damned stuffed tits!"
"Don't be ridiculous," sniffed Dean disdainfully, "What if I chip my nails or something?"
"Oh, God, why me?" Sam practically wailed unto an uncaring universe.
He struggled on with his fanfic, making occasional little noises of distress until RJ woke up from his nap and began to echo them.
"Look what you've done," said Dean accusingly, picking up his son, "Your grizzling has upset RJ."
"Titi," humphed RJ, grabbing for the objects he clearly believed would make him feel better.
"Hey, how about we go out for a walk and leave Auntie Samantha to her writer's block?" suggested Dean brightly. RJ immediately smiled, and clapped his hands. "I'd say that's a yes."
"You're supposed to be workin' on your next fanfic!" protested Sam.
"It's done," Dean replied smugly, "And I need to get out. Sittin' in front of a computer inside, typin' away, it aint natural."
Sam growled an instruction to bring back coffee as his infuriatingly grinning brother left. He took a small satisfaction in the yelp elicited when RJ made a particularly enthusiastic grab for 'Dee's' most prominent assets.
"I'll do better without that jerk around anyway," he muttered to the dogs. "For fuck's sake, how hard can it be?"
His eye fell on the magic mirror compact, and with a grim determination, he opened it.
"Mirror mirror, in my mitt, is my writing really shit?"
There isn't much there yet to judge,
But so far, it's appalling sludge.
"Okay," Sam told hiself, closing the mirror, "Come on, Winchester, get your act together. If you have to, just write crap…" He took a deep breath, and turned back to the laptop.
It was a dark and stormy night, like totally terrifying and scary, with bats flying around and stuff. I could just tell that it was the sort of night where weird stuff would happen because I've been like into that stuff since forever and I'm a huge fan of Supernatural. So I called my friend Simone and told her to come over. "You have to come over to my place" I said "Oh okay why" she said "Because somethings going to happen tonite" "What sort of somethig" she wanted to know. "Im not sure, but I can feel it, Its going to happen tonight" "Oh hey is this like that time you kind of like knew what was going to happen to you're math teacher like the day before it happened" Kind of" I said "I think you need come over for this.
So she did. As soon as she got to my place (my parents werent home) I opened the door and the TV turned itself on! "What the hell?" said Simone "Did you do that?" No I swear" I said "It just did that" so we went over to the TV and lo and behold it started playing Supernatural! And Dean turned to the screen and said "Oh shit" and then there was this lightenig strike and it hit my house and there was like a fireball and we got sucked right into the TV…
Poor Sam - he's going to be completely traumatized by this in a way no other Hunter could be. Although some of you may be familiar with the discombobulation of opening a link, and finding something of a similar calibre lying in wait.
Actually, bats flying around isn't scary for me - for a number of years now there's been a single lonely little bat flying around over my place, all by himself - but now he has a friend! Yep, there's two of 'em, flying around together. I even saw 'em pause briefly in a tree across the road. It's kind of cute to think that they might have found each other and paired up.
Unless they start a colony and start spreading noise, guano and exotic viruses, that won't be cute and I'll get out the Nerf gun to encourage them to move on.
Feed Alfie-Con the recalcitrant plot bunny reviews, because Reviews Are The Entertainly Excruciatingly Bad FanFics On The Site Of Life! Then go and sanitise your keyboard so you don't catch anything from me.