Canis Majoris

My dear MNFF readers,

 

     A few weeks ago I sat down to write the ending of Canis Majoris.  Not because I had finished the story.  On the contrary, I’m nowhere near finished with it.  And the ending I was writing will go through several edits before you ever see it.  I simply sat down to write it as an incentive to keep writing the story.  An Okay, I’m eventually going to get to this point kind of thing.  But as I began typing, something horrible occurred: I wrote the real ending of the story.  What is so horrible about this, you might ask.  What is so horrible is that the real ending to the story and the ending I was planning are two very different things.  The ending I was planning centered on Lily and James; The ending I wrote centered on Sirius and Jocelyn.  And it was then that I had a terrible revelation: My story wasn’t a Lily/James fic!  Probably, many of you figured this out long before I did (actually, I know my dear reader Hallia did… as well as the ever honest Liz_n_Elly).  But please understand: I really meant for it to be a Lily/James story.  I didn’t put it in the Lily/James section so I could get more readers by marketing it as something it wasn’t.  I always intended it to be Lily/James.  My dear reader xoTom told me, “Your plot is very well thought out (or appears to be so)”.  And yes, my plot is thought out.  But you see, the Sirius/Jocelyn part of it (which was very well planned) was only meant to be an interesting subplot, while the Lily/James part (also well planned) was meant to be the main focus.  But, as you authors will understand, many times your story will take you places you never expected to go.  The more I wrote, the more the focus of the story shifted, until Sirius and Jocelyn became the main focus and Lily and James were reduced to a very important subplot.  So you see, the plot never changed, just the focus did.

     Truthfully, as I wrote more and more of it, I began to find the Lily/James aspect, well, frankly, boring.  You see, for me, writing (or even reading, when it comes to it) Lily/James is boring because there is this terrible element of inevitability.  It’s like when you first see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.  There’s been this huge buildup in the first two episodes of all Anakin’s anger and resentment and annoying self-pity, and you know that this third one is supposed to take you on this roller coaster of emotions to the point where, as Darth Sidius begs for mercy, you’re gripping the edge of your seat mentally begging Anakin to make the right choice and turn to the good side.  But the reality is that you’re simply bored.  Not just because the script is terrible and acting stiff (and you can disagree with me all you want in the comments, but trust me, I know bad acting when I see it, and in Revenge I saw it), but because you already know what Anakin’s decision is going to be and that, were you to watch all the Star Wars movies without stopping, he is destined to be killed in about seven hours screen time by the life-sucking action of throwing the Emperor off a balcony to keep him from torturing his son Luke to death.  And so there is this horrible element of inevitability that keeps you from working up the energy to even mentally scream, “Don’t do it, Anakin!”

     That’s what Lily/James is like to me.  There’s supposed to be all this buildup, and all this emotional struggle, but it’s boring because you already know that they get together and have a son who is destined to save the wizarding world and who is, let’s face it, the reason we’re reading/writing this story in the first place.  But with Sirius/Jocelyn it’s different.  I don’t know why.  After all, there’s inevitability there too.  There’s the inevitability that they won’t get together.  But somehow, it’s not the same.

     Now here’s the part where I tell you why I made you come here and read this in the first place.  Due to the revelation that the focus had shifted, the current location of Canis Majoris on MNFF will be moved from Lily/James to the Other Pairing section on September 24, 2005.  I really hope this doesn’t inconvenience anyone.  If you can’t find it use the search part of MNFF, or come back here for links.  Thanks everyone, and sorry about the inadvertent false advertising for the fic.

 

~ Trinsy

 

P.S. If you leave me a comment here and you’ve reviewed on my fic at any time, please tell me your MNFF penname.  I know who you all are, love you all to death, and like to know when one of you comments here.  Thanks!

 

Deep Thought of the Day: Maybe in order to understand mankind we have to look at that word itself.  Mankind.  Basically, it’s made up of two separate words, “mank” and “ind”.  What do these words mean?  It’s a mystery and that’s why so is mankind. ~ Jack Handy