I'm tired of looking at it! I want it gone! I want it out! I'm tired of tussling with it, of trying to figure out why everything sounds good except for the last line, which should be simultaneously snappy and well-roundedly conclusive but just WOULD NOT BEHAVE and so instead is just something lame and sorta-placeholding. I AM DONE WITH IT. I'm moving on. I have other...tiny snippets of fic I want to work with more.
http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 10"> name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 10">A/k/a, the RS Fic Vault has been opened and a story that burst into Word in May 2007 is now officially complete and ready for posting.It doubled in length after season 14, in which Sarah briefly became a Stupid Teenage Statistic and I needed to explain how she got there.I feel like that part of the story is less authentic, since I clearly have no experience with such things, but…the story didn’t feel quite right when I tried to cut it back down, either, since there’s a very important passage lifted ver batim from my original episode review that really gives it its punch.
Anyway! Here. Now it is posted. Title: Someone Else's Dream Rating: PG-13, for subject matter mostly Word Count: 2250 Summary: Set after season 13, missing scene for how Sarah copes - or doesn't - with her grandparents taking custody.
Oh yeah, the title! It was quite exciting, giving it a title, since it had gone at least 25 months without even a vague idea of one. I went through my entire music library, seeking first a lyric from "Hallelujah", then all the songs in my library that related to "Home" in some way, or traveling, and all kinds of things...and finally Mono's "Life in Mono" popped into my head: The stranger sang a theme / from someone else's dream
It works on two levels - the first one being that a summer with horses, as the story suggests, would be a dream for some people (just not for her). The second is the idea that when she plays the part of the bad girl -- that's not her; it's like she's in a dream, but a dream even she wouldn't produce. I actually had this cool idea of tying the ending line into that; my brainstorm was "The faster she goes, the closer she gets to her real life, breaking free of the cobwebbed spiral, memories of the last months slipping and shedding like the remnant’s of someone else’s dream."
but then it didn't really, you know, conclude the story. It almost does, but no, once you look carefully, it would still need another sentence to really tie things up. Which is a shame, because there are some cool things in that admittedly too convoluted sentence, but I was really determined to end on a single line.
