By Your Powers Combined |

By Laura Fischer
March 21, 2014

Kevin Dooley via Compfight
Absolutely nothing like our meetings.

We’re coming up on our one-year anniversary here at Children of the Wells. It’s amazing to look back and see how far we’ve come–and to look forward and see how far we have yet to go. Our plans are many, varied, and not exactly concrete, so look forward to lots of interesting twists and turns in the stories to come.

But there’s something to be said for taking reflection at a milestone, too. To celebrate our (mostly) successful passage through a year of writing and posting, we’ve decided to publish a short-story anthology. The idea is to have one short story connected to each of the published novellas. They could be missing scenes, scenes from different perspectives than the ones offered in the published novellas, or stories based around new characters only loosely connected to already-published events. I’ve read the story for The Doctor’s Assistant, by our story editor, Natasha Hayden, and it is excellent in every way. I can’t wait for you all to get to read it.

I volunteered to write a story connected to The Rules Change. I was deeply impressed by that novella–the plot, characters, and style are very different from everything Nick, Nathan, and I had written, and yet the story built on the foundation provided in a very powerful and meaningful way. John is an indispensable addition to our team and I’m deeply grateful for his contribution to the world of Children of the Wells. None of us could have written quite what he did, in quite the way he did it.

It’s been fascinating to watch the way the different strengths of each writer are displayed in our work on this shared saga. Nick Hayden has a gift for fascinating characters with deep, complex emotional lives. Nathan Marchand’s pages burst with action and adventure. John Bahler’s work drags you in and pulls you along as in a tide, laying out new paths and new possibilities that you can only gape at in astonishment.

After all my angsting over following Nick’s work with my poor sequel, now I had set myself another challenge with this assignment. Again, I found myself agonizing over the proper way to do it, humbly aware that I was probably never going to be able to match John’s powerful, vigorous style. I thought of and discarded handfuls of ideas on my way to the final prize.

Once again, I’ve fallen back on my experience with fanfiction. Instead of diving into the heart of the story and pulling at the strings of the plot–something I’ve never been good at–I’ve decided to indulge, once again, a style of writing that fanfiction excels at. I’m playing at the edges.

My story, it turns out, is going to be a combination of two time-honored fanfiction tropes: the character study and the “five times” fic.

A character study tends to focus on one single character, is usually short, and contains little dialogue. It attempts to probe a character in a way unexplored in the main work the fanfiction based on, whether because it’s a minor character that doesn’t enjoy much development or because the medium does not allow for long, intense introspection. I’ve chosen to write about Kyrie, Jaysynn’s friend, who has only one scene from her perspective in the main body of Children of the Wells, even though she has such a great influence on Jaysynn at important plot points in both The Fall of the House of Kyzer and The Rules Change.

A “five times” fic, as the name implies, is a collection of vignettes or short stories all based on a theme that happens five times. Two of such that I’ve written before, for the Supernatural fandom, were “Five Things Most Kids Do That Sam and Dean Never Did” and “Five Times Sam Got into the Strawberries.”

The story I’m writing for this upcoming anthology is titled “Five Nights Kyrie Waited.”

And that, I hope, is teaser enough. Please keep coming back, keep reading, keep enjoying Children of the Wells. And keep your stick on the ice.