"There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story." ~ Frank Herbert. These are the author's notes for Where Angels Tread, for those who might be interested.

Logistics

I conceived the idea for this story a full two years ago (!) in April of 2014. After two months researching and carefully outlining the project, I started writing it in June 2014. The first chapter was posted to AO3 in August 2014, and posted to a few months because of initial difficulties with that platform. The final chapter has been posted April 2016, and the whole thing is 253,811 words long, in 38 chapters ~ which is much, much, much longer than I thought it would be!

My goals were 1) to write a little bit every day, to the best of my ability, until 2) it was done. I hit both marks, which pleases me to no end. As each chapter was finished, I let it sit for at least a day, then edited it many, many times until I couldn't see any way to make it better.

I had lined up a friend at the beginning to beta and brit-pick for me, but she had to bow out before I even got the first chapter done. Since I was new in the Sherlock fandom in 2014, I didn't know anyone else to ask –– so I decided to go it alone and just be extra meticulous about editing and proofing. This didn't help the chapters to get published any faster, but it did force me into a crash-course in British idiom and custom, which was interesting in itself. I hope I got most things mostly right; I'm open to receiving constructive criticism and making revisions if I didn't.

Background

Where Angels Tread first bubbled up in my brain as a fix-it story, a response to Mycroft's seeming out-of-character moment near the end of His Last Vow when he tells Sherlock, "Losing you would break my heart." Even though I understood at the time (and the show-runners have indeed spelled out) that Mycroft was drugged by "something in the punch" when he said it, my reaction was still "WTF!? Mycroft would never say something like that right up front! What happened to him?"

I also became obsessed with wondering what on earth a midlife crisis would look like for Mycroft. The years just after they turn 40 are murky waters for most people, when elements of the psyche that have been long-suppressed demand recognition and release. A character like Mycroft, who would have started out somewhat odd, might become progressively odder as they aged, until some resolution is negotiated.

These two streams merged into the idea for Angels, that after Sherlock is seriously wounded Mycroft finds himself gripped by an emotional crisis that we see being worked out and resolved through an original pov character. I also had some headcanon about Mycroft that I wanted to explore, which I preferred to do in fic rather than meta.

Now, I have a confession: I only started writing fiction of any sort in 2013, with three very short stories in the LOTR fandom (they can be found here, if anyone cares to have a look) and one aborted WIP –– so Angels is actually my first real piece of writing.

I did a careful outline before starting, with classic three-act structure and character arcs and all the bells and whistles that all the books recommend . . . and I got bogged down about three chapters in. Classic writer's block. Couldn't write to save my soul, even though I was working from a thorough outline and plot diagram and everything. . . It lasted for weeks! What broke the block was an hour of free-writing, nonstop; I trashed my outline, tossed out my (color-coded!) plot diagram, and just kept asking myself at each turn, "What happens next?" I let Angelica tell her story. If you've ever been rafting, it was like paddling against the current vs. guiding the boat as it careens down the rapids!

At the end of that hour, I realised that I'm not a writer who works well with too much structure. Who would've guessed? Except that I should have known, because I'm generally pretty allergic to being told what to do.

From that point on, whenever I sat down to write, I had only a hazy idea what was coming next. It was exciting, because every writing session was a new discovery, but also scary as hell, because by that time –– wonder of wonders! –– I had a number of people actually reading the thing.

I never expected very many readers. I mean, I had hopes that a few people might, but I didn't think there would be many; face it, I couldn't have designed a more auto-nope story if I had been actually trying: First-person POV, original character, heterosexual pairing, "minor" character focus, some dark and difficult material, ultra-long, and no Johnlock (I'm not anti, just not interested). I was incredibly pleased to find so many reading and enjoying the story despite all that.

So I just kept asking myself, What happens next? And kept answering, and somehow ended up at the final scene that I had been imagining all along. It's almost like my subconscious knows what its doing or something. Weird.

Story Structure

From the first I meant for Angels to be a single POV piece, utilizing a self-insert second-person OC to explore my ideas about the Sherlock characters. Since I honestly believe that it's implied in Sherlock that Mycroft is gay, my first try at my OC was male, leading me up against a severe limitation in my current ability as a writer: For the life of me, I can't write good slash, at least right now.

I studied, I read, I worked at it, but the sex scenes were frankly boring, and since sex was going to be a significant part of the story, I had a problem.

So I decided that Mycroft could just as well be bisexual (or hetero, or asexual; who knows?) and thus Angelica was born, and it worked. Almost. The prose was still too wooden, until on a whim I re-wrote the chapter from second person to first person. Then, it sang.

I didn't envision or plan this story as a romance, and I have taken pains to let potential readers know upfront so they wouldn't be disappointed ~ but now that it's finished, I stand back and wonder if maybe I wrote a romance after all. If the definition of romance as a genre is, "A story focusing on relationship and romantic love, and having an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending," (as per Romance Writers of America) then I suppose whether or not Angels fits that hinges on how you define romantic love. To be honest, I'm still not sure myself, and I wrote the thing! In the end, however it works for you, the reader, is what matters; you may take the story any way you like with no argument from me.

Starting off each chapter with a quote or fragment of poetry was an accident. There was supposed to be only one, the Rumi quote that the first chapter starts off with, but then I found the perfect one for the next chapter, and the next . . . so I went with it. I have quite a stock of quotes, as I've been collecting them for years, and if my stockpile failed me there was always .

In general, I claim no conscious responsibility for the story structure as it stands; if you have issues with it, you'll have to talk to my id :)

Research

Oh, my lord, how did people write things before there was Google and Google Maps? I've travelled a fair bit, and lived for a few years in the Antipodes, but like many Sherlock fic writers I've never even been to England. Google Maps to the rescue! Every location in Angels is a real place, or based on one, and researched as well as I could.

My primary resources for writing about sex work and sex workers were two excellent scholarly books, Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant, and Sex at the Margins by Laura Maria Agustin; I also had a look at Brooke Magnanti's Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl to get a specifically London perspective. I lurked around sex-work Tumblr quite a bit to get an idea of what sex workers were concerned about, incidentally soaking up some of their sub-culture to help inform the character of Angelica. One blogger I learned a great deal from is clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead; she has some very good resource pages on her tumblr.

If you've read this far, thank you! Thank you for your interest, and (assuming you have, or will) thank you for reading Angels. And, if you are one of the readers who made a point of posting comments to encourage me along through the WIP, a double-huge thank you with a cherry on top!

Love,

Stella Mira