Commentary on An Open Book
Dec. 18th, 2024 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neremanthAn Open Book was the second fic I posted, but not the second fic I had an idea for nor the second I started writing (though it was the second I finished a first draft for).
Keeping on writing
When I posted A Bluff to Remember, I wasn’t sure whether I would ever write any more fics or whether that would be it. I was pleased with how it turned out, but I’d written it because I’d been strongly grabbed by an idea, and I didn’t know if that would happen again. I was also aware that that one had been comparatively easy to write on account of being a retelling of canon from another POV: most of the dialogue and character actions were already mapped out for me. I didn’t know whether or not I could manage when I didn’t have that scaffolding.
However, within a week or so I did have another idea for a fic occur to me. It concerned two characters who as far as I remember don’t interact in canon, but who I thought have interestingly contrasting attitudes with regards to a particular concept and would be interesting to see have a conversation about that topic, and who could perhaps even be good for each other if they formed a friendship or relationship, since they each go too far in opposite directions. I was travelling, visiting friends and family, so I didn’t have a chance to start writing it straight away, but I kept turning it over in my head, and planned to write a draft when I got back. It was quite daunting, though, and I wasn’t sure I could pull off what I had in mind, so I kept putting it off, and eventually ended up writing the draft quite a few months later, after I’d written several other fics. I’m not all that happy with it, and will likely either edit extensively or even make a fresh draft at some point. (I might actually bring in a third character, who might solve some of the issues with it.)
Then halfway through May I randomly got the urge to read fics about people going into heat, even though that’s not usually my kink, so I browsed the tag on AO3 (fandom blind). Most of the ones I found were Alpha/Beta/Omega AUs, which I had encountered before, and which also isn’t really my thing (though I don’t mind it). After reading several, I found myself imagining an Alpha/Beta/Omega porn scenario more tailored to my kinks, with a dollop of world-building to go along with it. (It was with original characters, not based in any fandom.) I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I got it written down, so I started writing it. It came out much more body horror than porn (I’ve noticed since that when I try to write porn I usually end up with something that, while definitely having sexual content, would be better described as some other genre), but I was reasonably pleased with it. I wrote about 7K words, from the point of view of an Alpha; I also had planned the point of view of an Omega and the point of view of a Beta, and then I also had an idea for a sequel involving a different Alpha, Beta, and Omega, but I still haven’t written any of that. I probably will finish it some time and post to AO3 as an original work.
The day after I wrote that, I was texting Onward_and_Upward, and told her about how I’d come to a part in Trials and Tribulations where we get an explanation for how people sometimes seem to be able to read Phoenix’s mind. (We’d played together from the beginning up to partway through Reunion, and Turnabout when I visited her, and had wondered what was going on there.) I commented that there was “considerable crackfic potential in the mismatch between that and his keeping his burning passion for Edgeworth a secret until he eventually thinks it’s the right time to confess”, and went on to briefly describe a scenario where Phoenix is thinking romantic and sexual things about Edgeworth while they’re facing each other in court and then afterwards Edgeworth quotes Phoenix’s “thoughts back to him verbatim while raising an ironic eyebrow, and follow[s] that up with something like a disdainful ‘Really, Wright?’, enjoying drawing out making him squirm, before saying ‘I suppose you’re just lucky I feel the same way’”.
Then I thought I might as well take a bash at writing that.
It probably helped my confidence that I’d just managed to produce a decentish 7K words of an original idea, but the fact that it was crack was also important. I still wasn’t at all sure I would be able to write anyone in character, and crack allows more leeway for things to get a little OOC in the interests of Rule of Funny. Having had a couple of the lines of dialogue come to me already also helped, since I was worried about being able to produce natural sounding dialogue too: I wasn’t staring at a completely blank page in that regard.
I was happy enough with the result to send it to Onward_and_Upward, and she enjoyed it. I’d like to take a moment to say how much I appreciate her. She hasn’t read absolutely everything I’ve written, because some of it isn’t to her taste, but she’s read a lot of it, and she’s been so supportive and encouraging (and at times enabling). She’s also given me some helpful feedback on some of my fics, although she mostly isn’t betaing for me, and has often seen something of interest in what I’ve written that I hadn’t thought about myself. I don’t know whether I’d have had the confidence to post anything after that first fic without her support (maybe, but it definitely helped). Having her read most of my fics soon after I draft them also means it’s not that difficult to wait patiently until whatever date I’ve decided I want to post them, and hearing what she thought about them means that, while comments and kudos are still nice whenever I do eventually post, I’m not too bothered if I don’t get them. I’m extremely lucky to have her.
How I write
For my first fic, I wrote a draft in my phone’s notes app, copied and pasted to a text file, then worked in a text editor on my laptop as I edited and expanded it. (I did use a word processor right at the end, to try and spellcheck for US English, and to insert things like em dashes; I can’t remember whether I added italics there too or in the AO3 editor.) For the Alpha/Beta/Omega fic, I wrote straight into a text file on my laptop. Starting with An Open Book, I’ve been writing everything in LaTeX, again in a text editor (usually Kate). LaTeX is a markup language, a bit like HTML, but you have to compile the document to get a PDF. I had to learn LaTeX for my final year project at university, and then got proficient at it when I chose to use it for assignments in my subsequent degrees and in my job. I really don’t like word processors, because you have to take your fingers off the keyboard and fiddle around with the mouse for a lot of the formatting, and because it’s often a pain trying to get them to do what you want. With LaTeX I can just type everything, both the content and the formatting, and I feel like I have more control. (There are various other advantages, which I won’t get into here.)
It’s maybe not the most obvious choice for creative writing (it was designed for technical and scientific writing, which is where it really shines), and I probably wouldn’t have had too hard a time using LibreOffice Writer (most of the formatting I’d want to do is making things italic, which you can do in most word processors with <CTRL> + i). But it’s what I’m most used to doing any kind of writing in, so it felt familiar, and it meant I could produce a nice PDF which was ideal for sharing with Onward_and_Upward. (Not that you can’t export to PDF from LibreOffice Writer.) I also knew when the time came to post it would be fairly easy to change the formatting to HTML: I could just read through the text and whenever I encountered something like “How \emph{do} people keep doing that?” I could easily spot the part that needed to be italic and change the LaTeX to HTML tags manually (or use AO3’s rich text editor to add them). I have now automated the LaTeX to HTML conversion process, but I didn’t have that in place when I posted An Open Book.
Obviously even easier from the point of view of posting to AO3 would be writing in HTML rather than LaTeX to begin with. That would similarly allow me to format through typing. However, I couldn’t so easily get a PDF out that way, and in any case I’m not as familiar with HTML so I would have to break off more often to find out how to do certain things.
I wrote a LaTeX package that does things like adjust the font size to be good for reading on a phone screen (since I figured that’s probably how Onward_and_Upward would read it), so now I can just load that at the start of all my fics and the stuff I need every time is taken care of.
I do still write occasional bits in the notes app on my phone, if I come up with something while it’s not convenient to sit down at my laptop, and then usually just transcribe them into the file I write the fic in on my computer, since they’re rarely long enough for it to be worth copying and pasting to the text editor app, saving as a .txt file, turning my phone off, opening it up, taking out the SD card, putting it into the card reader, putting that in the computer, copying the file, and putting the SD card back in the phone.
With LaTeX, when you compile the file you obviously get a PDF file, so there’s the PDF and the text file you were typing in, but you also get a couple of other files created at the same time (including a log file for troubleshooting). So having my various fics all in the same directory would get quite messy, and I give each its own directory. (For some of them I also have several text files, because you can have LaTeX put the contents of separate files all into one PDF, and it’s often more convenient for example to put each POV in its own file when I have a fic with multiple POVs, and that’s another reason a directory for each fic makes sense.) The PDF is by default named based on the filename of the text file (and so are the other files created), so if I were to change the name of the text file and then compile again, I’d get a new PDF with a name based on the text file’s new name, but the PDF I compiled before changing the name would still be there too (and the same with the other files created). Similarly, if I were to use any old name for the text file but then change the PDF’s name to the fic’s title before sending to Onward_and_Upward, that would be fine if I really was all done with it, but if it turned out I wanted to make any further edits, I’d get a PDF with the original name when I compiled again and need to rename it again (after deleting the first PDF I renamed, so I could use its name again). (It always turns out I want to make further edits.)
Therefore, if I were to use some kind of placeholder for the filename until I’d thought of the title for the fic (like I did with my first fic, naming the draft TaT1headcanon.txt), when I did come up with the title I’d need to rename the text file, the PDF, the log file etc, and the directory they’re all in. I could certainly do that, but it’s a bit of a pain. So I usually like to come up with a title for my fics before I start drafting them. An Open Book was pretty easy to title, fortunately.
Points of interest
I posted this on another date I find nice, because it was one of the few fics I had ready to go at that point (besides needing to play through Recipe for Turnabout up to where Gumshoe explains Phoenix has an expressive face, to make sure I accurately described that in the summary; and I managed to find time to do that), and I already felt like my writing had improved a bit since I wrote it, so it made sense to post it as one of my first works rather than hang onto it for months or years and post it after some of my better pieces and have people think my writing had deteriorated.
I of course gave it a final edit before posting, but I didn’t make huge changes, just rephrased some things.
This was the first fic I posted written in second person. I was aware some people aren’t keen on that, and wrote A Bluff to Remember in third person because I wanted to maximise the number of people who’d read it, but I was less bothered about people seeing this one, so I decided to just go with what I was most comfortable writing and if that meant fewer readers, so be it. I was prepared for it not to get many hits, and quite surprised that it actually did better in that respect than A Bluff to Remember. Indeed, by the time it had been up for two days it had surpassed A Bluff to Remember’s hits, and in less than three weeks it had double A Bluff to Remember’s. I think a large number of the hits might actually be people having this fic (and presumably others) open in an autorefreshing browser tab for a long time before getting round to reading it (since it seemed to get around 5 hits every day for an extended period, and I’d expect more fluctuation if those were all new people finding it), but of course it being for the most popular ship in the fandom also explains why it’s been more viewed than A Bluff to Remember. It may still be that I would have got more readers if I’d written in third person, but this at least showed me that writing in second person wasn’t going to be the kiss of death for my work.
I’m still wondering whether “You look round anxiously for help” would be better than “You look round nervously for help”. I think the former sounds more like concern for Edgeworth while the latter sounds more like Phoenix being worried for his own safety. I might change it at some point.
I had it be while Edgeworth was asking the witness her name and occupation that Phoenix thought “God, Edgeworth is so fucking beautiful” because I didn’t want to suggest the thoughts about Edgeworth were getting in the way of him doing his job (though as the scene continues Phoenix turns out to have had so many thoughts it’s hard to see how they couldn’t have done), and that seemed like something he could probably get away with not paying full attention to; and because that’s something that’s obviously going to happen in every trial so I didn’t have to come up with anything more specific related to this particular case. (I made the witness female because men shouldn’t be the default human beings.)
I know that the mention of “unnecessary feelings” in canon refers to Edgeworth’s “uncertainty and doubt” related to his profession, not to having a crush on Phoenix. I intended it to be taken the same way here: Phoenix isn’t holding back because Edgeworth is referring to romantic feelings as unnecessary, but because if he thinks the feelings of uncertainty and doubt about his profession are unnecessary, that might say something more generally about his willingness to allow himself to feel things, and suggest he’s not in the right place for romance. I did worry though that readers would think I had taken the “unnecessary feelings” to be referring to feelings about Phoenix.
I’m slightly reminded of my first fic by Phoenix’s attempts to think of a way to pretend his thoughts about Edgeworth were platonic: it’s my second fic and here I am again writing him coming up with a wild bluff on the spot.
I was a little hesitant to refer to “girls” rather than “women” here, because use of that term is part of a societal infantilisation of women. But “women” just wouldn’t sound right (it makes him sound like a stuffy old man), and after all Phoenix is not necessarily going to be up on feminist points like this. Hopefully the use of “guys” rather than “men” later in the sentence makes it better.
I wanted Edgeworth to do something that called Phoenix’s attention to his lips, and this is all I could think of, but I’m actually not entirely convinced getting a drop of water on your lower lip when drinking from a glass is something that’s very likely to happen, nor that you would take the lip into your mouth for a moment to deal with it rather than licking or wiping it off.
Phoenix is using the AO3 rating system here, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because there’s no indication in canon that he’s aware of fanfic and I didn’t specifically intend him to be in this fic. I originally wrote it without really thinking about it, and then spotted it in editing and thought about changing it to the US film rating system, but I’m not really sure whether this would be G or PG (or PG-13?) and in any case to me it doesn’t sound quite right somehow. I’ve left it as it is and I guess it’s justified by this being a crack fic, but I might eventually decide to change it. (Using the AO3 system does at least have the advantage that all readers should understand what the ratings mean, whereas with an international audience not everyone may be familiar with US film ratings.)
I just wanted Edgeworth to quote a lot of Phoenix’s thoughts, throwing in a “Really, Wright?” at one point and concluding with the threat to report him to the Bar Association. Phoenix saying anything would have derailed that. So I had to explain why he kept quiet, and while the first instance of him thinking of what to say but not quite getting his words together before Edgeworth speaks again seems reasonable, I’m not too sure how well it works to have that happen again (particularly as this time it’s just mentioned that he’s thinking of a response rather than taking a look at what he’s considering saying).
It was a little scary writing smutty stuff for the first time, even though it was fantasies rather than an actual sex scene. It probably helped that at the time I was writing I knew I wouldn’t be posting it for a while.
It’s obviously implausible that Edgeworth would be able to remember all of this word for word without having taken notes, so I decided to lampshade that to show I was aware of it. It’s justified by this being a crack piece.
Someone commented that Phoenix hadn’t actually done anything Edgeworth could report him to the Bar Association for, since this was all in his head, not said out loud, and I’m glad they did because that was actually something I’d thought about myself, and it gave me a chance to respond. I think it’s very possible that in the Ace Attorney universe you actually could get in trouble with the Bar Association for having naughty thoughts about opposing counsel (this is a world where a nine year old child could be convicted of murder if they threw a gun and it accidentally went off, so clearly they have different standards about what it takes to be guilty of various things). And even in our world, while I’m definitely no expert on Bar Associations, I would think if someone was being obvious enough about the sexual thoughts they were having that someone else could tell what those thoughts were, that could still constitute sexual harrassment? Even if the Bar Association couldn’t actually do anything to Phoenix for this, I can imagine he might not realise that in the moment and still be worried.
I wasn’t sure what the best wording for the last line of the main chapter was. I also considered “I suppose you’re just lucky I feel the same way”, “I suppose it’s just lucky for you that I happen to feel the same way”, “It’s just lucky for you I happen to feel the same way”, and “I suppose it’s just lucky I feel the same way.”. What I went for is similar but not identical to what I wrote in the text to Onward_and_Upward, and I think it’s better than the alternatives.
This is the only thing I’ve posted so far with more than one chapter, and the second chapter is ridiculously tiny. But I think the last line of the main chapter is more effective if it is visually an ending, so I wanted to put the Epilogue in a new chapter. (Obviously anyone viewing the entire work in one go will still see the Epilogue following immediately, but at least it’ll still clearly be the last line of a section so will to some extent have the same impact.)
The Epilogue wasn’t in the draft I sent Onward_and_Upward (and I didn’t think it was worth sending her a new version just for that after she’d already read what I’d sent her, so come to think of it I don’t believe she’s read that part). I think I had the idea for it shortly after writing the draft, and I did mention it to her and asked her what she thought about adding it. She wasn’t in favour because she thought it took away from the original ending, which I agree it would if it just continued straight on from that, but I’m hoping putting the Epilogue in a separate chapter will minimise that.
I had to make the kiss not be the way Phoenix imagined, because it would be kind of weird for them both to just do exactly what Phoenix had fantasised about — it would make the kiss feel staged rather than sincere.
I had the basic outline of the Epilogue before I started writing — Edgeworth mentions Phoenix got a lot of things wrong but one thing right, then quotes some things Phoenix thought about him as a person as examples of Phoenix being incorrect, then Phoenix asks what he got right, and Edgeworth whispers in his ear that he does indeed give amazing blow jobs. The slight expansion with a little banter came easily enough as I was writing it, but thinking of the supposedly incorrect things for Edgeworth to quote was a real challenge, and for a long time I left it with a note to myself to fill it in later. I needed things that Edgeworth would think were inaccurate, but I didn’t want them to actually be inaccurate or at least not definitively so, because I didn’t want to imply Phoenix has got a lot of wrong ideas about Edgeworth (that would suggest he might love Edgeworth for who he thinks he is rather than who he really is, which isn’t somewhere I wanted to go with this fic). And I also didn’t want them to be things that were negative enough that the reader wonders why Phoenix wants to get together with Edgeworth if that’s what he thinks about him, but at the same time I didn’t want them to be overly positive, or at least not all of them, because I didn’t want Edgeworth to be trying to say “you think I’m much better than I am” here. So I was looking for mildly negative things which Edgeworth didn’t believe to be true about himself but which Phoenix and the reader would be inclined to think of him. (The “Edgeworth needs a hug” is a little nod to all the fics tagged with that.)
The fic ends after Edgeworth telling Phoenix what he got right about him, because again that was most effective if it was the last line. But I imagine they went back to one of their places (probably Edgeworth’s) after this and had sex. Whether the crack premise ends there and it’s just normal sex, or whether Edgeworth continues to read Phoenix’s mind in the bedroom, I don’t know. The latter has kinky as well as comedic potential, but the former is perhaps more likely, considering that there’s no evidence in the fic that Edgeworth continues to be reading Phoenix’s mind during the conversation we see them have. Maybe he does, though, and just doesn’t feel the need to bring it up. (I did consider having him take exception to Phoenix characterising him as a walking Dictionary of Quotations, which would have indicated that he was still reading his mind, but that felt like too much.)
Keeping on writing
When I posted A Bluff to Remember, I wasn’t sure whether I would ever write any more fics or whether that would be it. I was pleased with how it turned out, but I’d written it because I’d been strongly grabbed by an idea, and I didn’t know if that would happen again. I was also aware that that one had been comparatively easy to write on account of being a retelling of canon from another POV: most of the dialogue and character actions were already mapped out for me. I didn’t know whether or not I could manage when I didn’t have that scaffolding.
However, within a week or so I did have another idea for a fic occur to me. It concerned two characters who as far as I remember don’t interact in canon, but who I thought have interestingly contrasting attitudes with regards to a particular concept and would be interesting to see have a conversation about that topic, and who could perhaps even be good for each other if they formed a friendship or relationship, since they each go too far in opposite directions. I was travelling, visiting friends and family, so I didn’t have a chance to start writing it straight away, but I kept turning it over in my head, and planned to write a draft when I got back. It was quite daunting, though, and I wasn’t sure I could pull off what I had in mind, so I kept putting it off, and eventually ended up writing the draft quite a few months later, after I’d written several other fics. I’m not all that happy with it, and will likely either edit extensively or even make a fresh draft at some point. (I might actually bring in a third character, who might solve some of the issues with it.)
Then halfway through May I randomly got the urge to read fics about people going into heat, even though that’s not usually my kink, so I browsed the tag on AO3 (fandom blind). Most of the ones I found were Alpha/Beta/Omega AUs, which I had encountered before, and which also isn’t really my thing (though I don’t mind it). After reading several, I found myself imagining an Alpha/Beta/Omega porn scenario more tailored to my kinks, with a dollop of world-building to go along with it. (It was with original characters, not based in any fandom.) I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I got it written down, so I started writing it. It came out much more body horror than porn (I’ve noticed since that when I try to write porn I usually end up with something that, while definitely having sexual content, would be better described as some other genre), but I was reasonably pleased with it. I wrote about 7K words, from the point of view of an Alpha; I also had planned the point of view of an Omega and the point of view of a Beta, and then I also had an idea for a sequel involving a different Alpha, Beta, and Omega, but I still haven’t written any of that. I probably will finish it some time and post to AO3 as an original work.
The day after I wrote that, I was texting Onward_and_Upward, and told her about how I’d come to a part in Trials and Tribulations where we get an explanation for how people sometimes seem to be able to read Phoenix’s mind. (We’d played together from the beginning up to partway through Reunion, and Turnabout when I visited her, and had wondered what was going on there.) I commented that there was “considerable crackfic potential in the mismatch between that and his keeping his burning passion for Edgeworth a secret until he eventually thinks it’s the right time to confess”, and went on to briefly describe a scenario where Phoenix is thinking romantic and sexual things about Edgeworth while they’re facing each other in court and then afterwards Edgeworth quotes Phoenix’s “thoughts back to him verbatim while raising an ironic eyebrow, and follow[s] that up with something like a disdainful ‘Really, Wright?’, enjoying drawing out making him squirm, before saying ‘I suppose you’re just lucky I feel the same way’”.
Then I thought I might as well take a bash at writing that.
It probably helped my confidence that I’d just managed to produce a decentish 7K words of an original idea, but the fact that it was crack was also important. I still wasn’t at all sure I would be able to write anyone in character, and crack allows more leeway for things to get a little OOC in the interests of Rule of Funny. Having had a couple of the lines of dialogue come to me already also helped, since I was worried about being able to produce natural sounding dialogue too: I wasn’t staring at a completely blank page in that regard.
I was happy enough with the result to send it to Onward_and_Upward, and she enjoyed it. I’d like to take a moment to say how much I appreciate her. She hasn’t read absolutely everything I’ve written, because some of it isn’t to her taste, but she’s read a lot of it, and she’s been so supportive and encouraging (and at times enabling). She’s also given me some helpful feedback on some of my fics, although she mostly isn’t betaing for me, and has often seen something of interest in what I’ve written that I hadn’t thought about myself. I don’t know whether I’d have had the confidence to post anything after that first fic without her support (maybe, but it definitely helped). Having her read most of my fics soon after I draft them also means it’s not that difficult to wait patiently until whatever date I’ve decided I want to post them, and hearing what she thought about them means that, while comments and kudos are still nice whenever I do eventually post, I’m not too bothered if I don’t get them. I’m extremely lucky to have her.
How I write
For my first fic, I wrote a draft in my phone’s notes app, copied and pasted to a text file, then worked in a text editor on my laptop as I edited and expanded it. (I did use a word processor right at the end, to try and spellcheck for US English, and to insert things like em dashes; I can’t remember whether I added italics there too or in the AO3 editor.) For the Alpha/Beta/Omega fic, I wrote straight into a text file on my laptop. Starting with An Open Book, I’ve been writing everything in LaTeX, again in a text editor (usually Kate). LaTeX is a markup language, a bit like HTML, but you have to compile the document to get a PDF. I had to learn LaTeX for my final year project at university, and then got proficient at it when I chose to use it for assignments in my subsequent degrees and in my job. I really don’t like word processors, because you have to take your fingers off the keyboard and fiddle around with the mouse for a lot of the formatting, and because it’s often a pain trying to get them to do what you want. With LaTeX I can just type everything, both the content and the formatting, and I feel like I have more control. (There are various other advantages, which I won’t get into here.)
It’s maybe not the most obvious choice for creative writing (it was designed for technical and scientific writing, which is where it really shines), and I probably wouldn’t have had too hard a time using LibreOffice Writer (most of the formatting I’d want to do is making things italic, which you can do in most word processors with <CTRL> + i). But it’s what I’m most used to doing any kind of writing in, so it felt familiar, and it meant I could produce a nice PDF which was ideal for sharing with Onward_and_Upward. (Not that you can’t export to PDF from LibreOffice Writer.) I also knew when the time came to post it would be fairly easy to change the formatting to HTML: I could just read through the text and whenever I encountered something like “How \emph{do} people keep doing that?” I could easily spot the part that needed to be italic and change the LaTeX to HTML tags manually (or use AO3’s rich text editor to add them). I have now automated the LaTeX to HTML conversion process, but I didn’t have that in place when I posted An Open Book.
Obviously even easier from the point of view of posting to AO3 would be writing in HTML rather than LaTeX to begin with. That would similarly allow me to format through typing. However, I couldn’t so easily get a PDF out that way, and in any case I’m not as familiar with HTML so I would have to break off more often to find out how to do certain things.
I wrote a LaTeX package that does things like adjust the font size to be good for reading on a phone screen (since I figured that’s probably how Onward_and_Upward would read it), so now I can just load that at the start of all my fics and the stuff I need every time is taken care of.
I do still write occasional bits in the notes app on my phone, if I come up with something while it’s not convenient to sit down at my laptop, and then usually just transcribe them into the file I write the fic in on my computer, since they’re rarely long enough for it to be worth copying and pasting to the text editor app, saving as a .txt file, turning my phone off, opening it up, taking out the SD card, putting it into the card reader, putting that in the computer, copying the file, and putting the SD card back in the phone.
With LaTeX, when you compile the file you obviously get a PDF file, so there’s the PDF and the text file you were typing in, but you also get a couple of other files created at the same time (including a log file for troubleshooting). So having my various fics all in the same directory would get quite messy, and I give each its own directory. (For some of them I also have several text files, because you can have LaTeX put the contents of separate files all into one PDF, and it’s often more convenient for example to put each POV in its own file when I have a fic with multiple POVs, and that’s another reason a directory for each fic makes sense.) The PDF is by default named based on the filename of the text file (and so are the other files created), so if I were to change the name of the text file and then compile again, I’d get a new PDF with a name based on the text file’s new name, but the PDF I compiled before changing the name would still be there too (and the same with the other files created). Similarly, if I were to use any old name for the text file but then change the PDF’s name to the fic’s title before sending to Onward_and_Upward, that would be fine if I really was all done with it, but if it turned out I wanted to make any further edits, I’d get a PDF with the original name when I compiled again and need to rename it again (after deleting the first PDF I renamed, so I could use its name again). (It always turns out I want to make further edits.)
Therefore, if I were to use some kind of placeholder for the filename until I’d thought of the title for the fic (like I did with my first fic, naming the draft TaT1headcanon.txt), when I did come up with the title I’d need to rename the text file, the PDF, the log file etc, and the directory they’re all in. I could certainly do that, but it’s a bit of a pain. So I usually like to come up with a title for my fics before I start drafting them. An Open Book was pretty easy to title, fortunately.
Points of interest
I posted this on another date I find nice, because it was one of the few fics I had ready to go at that point (besides needing to play through Recipe for Turnabout up to where Gumshoe explains Phoenix has an expressive face, to make sure I accurately described that in the summary; and I managed to find time to do that), and I already felt like my writing had improved a bit since I wrote it, so it made sense to post it as one of my first works rather than hang onto it for months or years and post it after some of my better pieces and have people think my writing had deteriorated.
I of course gave it a final edit before posting, but I didn’t make huge changes, just rephrased some things.
This was the first fic I posted written in second person. I was aware some people aren’t keen on that, and wrote A Bluff to Remember in third person because I wanted to maximise the number of people who’d read it, but I was less bothered about people seeing this one, so I decided to just go with what I was most comfortable writing and if that meant fewer readers, so be it. I was prepared for it not to get many hits, and quite surprised that it actually did better in that respect than A Bluff to Remember. Indeed, by the time it had been up for two days it had surpassed A Bluff to Remember’s hits, and in less than three weeks it had double A Bluff to Remember’s. I think a large number of the hits might actually be people having this fic (and presumably others) open in an autorefreshing browser tab for a long time before getting round to reading it (since it seemed to get around 5 hits every day for an extended period, and I’d expect more fluctuation if those were all new people finding it), but of course it being for the most popular ship in the fandom also explains why it’s been more viewed than A Bluff to Remember. It may still be that I would have got more readers if I’d written in third person, but this at least showed me that writing in second person wasn’t going to be the kiss of death for my work.
I’m still wondering whether “You look round anxiously for help” would be better than “You look round nervously for help”. I think the former sounds more like concern for Edgeworth while the latter sounds more like Phoenix being worried for his own safety. I might change it at some point.
I had it be while Edgeworth was asking the witness her name and occupation that Phoenix thought “God, Edgeworth is so fucking beautiful” because I didn’t want to suggest the thoughts about Edgeworth were getting in the way of him doing his job (though as the scene continues Phoenix turns out to have had so many thoughts it’s hard to see how they couldn’t have done), and that seemed like something he could probably get away with not paying full attention to; and because that’s something that’s obviously going to happen in every trial so I didn’t have to come up with anything more specific related to this particular case. (I made the witness female because men shouldn’t be the default human beings.)
I know that the mention of “unnecessary feelings” in canon refers to Edgeworth’s “uncertainty and doubt” related to his profession, not to having a crush on Phoenix. I intended it to be taken the same way here: Phoenix isn’t holding back because Edgeworth is referring to romantic feelings as unnecessary, but because if he thinks the feelings of uncertainty and doubt about his profession are unnecessary, that might say something more generally about his willingness to allow himself to feel things, and suggest he’s not in the right place for romance. I did worry though that readers would think I had taken the “unnecessary feelings” to be referring to feelings about Phoenix.
I’m slightly reminded of my first fic by Phoenix’s attempts to think of a way to pretend his thoughts about Edgeworth were platonic: it’s my second fic and here I am again writing him coming up with a wild bluff on the spot.
I was a little hesitant to refer to “girls” rather than “women” here, because use of that term is part of a societal infantilisation of women. But “women” just wouldn’t sound right (it makes him sound like a stuffy old man), and after all Phoenix is not necessarily going to be up on feminist points like this. Hopefully the use of “guys” rather than “men” later in the sentence makes it better.
I wanted Edgeworth to do something that called Phoenix’s attention to his lips, and this is all I could think of, but I’m actually not entirely convinced getting a drop of water on your lower lip when drinking from a glass is something that’s very likely to happen, nor that you would take the lip into your mouth for a moment to deal with it rather than licking or wiping it off.
Phoenix is using the AO3 rating system here, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because there’s no indication in canon that he’s aware of fanfic and I didn’t specifically intend him to be in this fic. I originally wrote it without really thinking about it, and then spotted it in editing and thought about changing it to the US film rating system, but I’m not really sure whether this would be G or PG (or PG-13?) and in any case to me it doesn’t sound quite right somehow. I’ve left it as it is and I guess it’s justified by this being a crack fic, but I might eventually decide to change it. (Using the AO3 system does at least have the advantage that all readers should understand what the ratings mean, whereas with an international audience not everyone may be familiar with US film ratings.)
I just wanted Edgeworth to quote a lot of Phoenix’s thoughts, throwing in a “Really, Wright?” at one point and concluding with the threat to report him to the Bar Association. Phoenix saying anything would have derailed that. So I had to explain why he kept quiet, and while the first instance of him thinking of what to say but not quite getting his words together before Edgeworth speaks again seems reasonable, I’m not too sure how well it works to have that happen again (particularly as this time it’s just mentioned that he’s thinking of a response rather than taking a look at what he’s considering saying).
It was a little scary writing smutty stuff for the first time, even though it was fantasies rather than an actual sex scene. It probably helped that at the time I was writing I knew I wouldn’t be posting it for a while.
It’s obviously implausible that Edgeworth would be able to remember all of this word for word without having taken notes, so I decided to lampshade that to show I was aware of it. It’s justified by this being a crack piece.
Someone commented that Phoenix hadn’t actually done anything Edgeworth could report him to the Bar Association for, since this was all in his head, not said out loud, and I’m glad they did because that was actually something I’d thought about myself, and it gave me a chance to respond. I think it’s very possible that in the Ace Attorney universe you actually could get in trouble with the Bar Association for having naughty thoughts about opposing counsel (this is a world where a nine year old child could be convicted of murder if they threw a gun and it accidentally went off, so clearly they have different standards about what it takes to be guilty of various things). And even in our world, while I’m definitely no expert on Bar Associations, I would think if someone was being obvious enough about the sexual thoughts they were having that someone else could tell what those thoughts were, that could still constitute sexual harrassment? Even if the Bar Association couldn’t actually do anything to Phoenix for this, I can imagine he might not realise that in the moment and still be worried.
I wasn’t sure what the best wording for the last line of the main chapter was. I also considered “I suppose you’re just lucky I feel the same way”, “I suppose it’s just lucky for you that I happen to feel the same way”, “It’s just lucky for you I happen to feel the same way”, and “I suppose it’s just lucky I feel the same way.”. What I went for is similar but not identical to what I wrote in the text to Onward_and_Upward, and I think it’s better than the alternatives.
This is the only thing I’ve posted so far with more than one chapter, and the second chapter is ridiculously tiny. But I think the last line of the main chapter is more effective if it is visually an ending, so I wanted to put the Epilogue in a new chapter. (Obviously anyone viewing the entire work in one go will still see the Epilogue following immediately, but at least it’ll still clearly be the last line of a section so will to some extent have the same impact.)
The Epilogue wasn’t in the draft I sent Onward_and_Upward (and I didn’t think it was worth sending her a new version just for that after she’d already read what I’d sent her, so come to think of it I don’t believe she’s read that part). I think I had the idea for it shortly after writing the draft, and I did mention it to her and asked her what she thought about adding it. She wasn’t in favour because she thought it took away from the original ending, which I agree it would if it just continued straight on from that, but I’m hoping putting the Epilogue in a separate chapter will minimise that.
I had to make the kiss not be the way Phoenix imagined, because it would be kind of weird for them both to just do exactly what Phoenix had fantasised about — it would make the kiss feel staged rather than sincere.
I had the basic outline of the Epilogue before I started writing — Edgeworth mentions Phoenix got a lot of things wrong but one thing right, then quotes some things Phoenix thought about him as a person as examples of Phoenix being incorrect, then Phoenix asks what he got right, and Edgeworth whispers in his ear that he does indeed give amazing blow jobs. The slight expansion with a little banter came easily enough as I was writing it, but thinking of the supposedly incorrect things for Edgeworth to quote was a real challenge, and for a long time I left it with a note to myself to fill it in later. I needed things that Edgeworth would think were inaccurate, but I didn’t want them to actually be inaccurate or at least not definitively so, because I didn’t want to imply Phoenix has got a lot of wrong ideas about Edgeworth (that would suggest he might love Edgeworth for who he thinks he is rather than who he really is, which isn’t somewhere I wanted to go with this fic). And I also didn’t want them to be things that were negative enough that the reader wonders why Phoenix wants to get together with Edgeworth if that’s what he thinks about him, but at the same time I didn’t want them to be overly positive, or at least not all of them, because I didn’t want Edgeworth to be trying to say “you think I’m much better than I am” here. So I was looking for mildly negative things which Edgeworth didn’t believe to be true about himself but which Phoenix and the reader would be inclined to think of him. (The “Edgeworth needs a hug” is a little nod to all the fics tagged with that.)
The fic ends after Edgeworth telling Phoenix what he got right about him, because again that was most effective if it was the last line. But I imagine they went back to one of their places (probably Edgeworth’s) after this and had sex. Whether the crack premise ends there and it’s just normal sex, or whether Edgeworth continues to read Phoenix’s mind in the bedroom, I don’t know. The latter has kinky as well as comedic potential, but the former is perhaps more likely, considering that there’s no evidence in the fic that Edgeworth continues to be reading Phoenix’s mind during the conversation we see them have. Maybe he does, though, and just doesn’t feel the need to bring it up. (I did consider having him take exception to Phoenix characterising him as a walking Dictionary of Quotations, which would have indicated that he was still reading his mind, but that felt like too much.)
