Story 199: "Dance Card" by Sab (Sabine)

[wendelah1]

After reading "Five Things That Never Happened to Dana Scully" last week, it seems appropriate that this week's offering is also about a "road not taken." Since three members separately expressed some interest in reading it, and because Sabine is an accomplished and entertaining writer, "Dance Card" is now on our dance card.

SUMMARY: The road not taken.
NOTE: This is a true story, sorta. I mean, it happened to me, not Scully, but I figured I'd plug her in to the game and see how she played it out. So that's where it stops being a true story, but those little snowy highways and dogwoods and mistakes do exist, ten, fifteen years later. Oh, and in answer to your question, yes, I did write another story with another guy Scully meets named Paul. It's a good all-purpose name; whatcha gonna do? Album and book publication dates verified with Borders.com, Amazon.com, and Cdnow.com, so they should all be correct. German translations c/o Altavista's Babelfish; let me know if they got it wrong. All "chalking" quotes copyright J. Wilson Kello, with whom I spent four years of college chalking. He is not Paul.

That will all make sense after you read the story, I promise. "Dance Card" has two sequels: "What Happened After That" and "Moonshine," which could be subtitled "What Happened After What Happened After That." The links are all to Gossamer under "Sabine" if the links get broken; the first and third are also at Fugues Fiction Archive. Discussion on any and all of the three is welcome. Sab is iamsab here and Sab at AO3, but alas, these stories have never been re-posted to either location.

Leave feedback, leave suggestions, and come back for discussion, which is still ongoing for the last two fics we read, by the way. You guys are awesome.

Read "Dance Card".

Read "What Happened After That".

Read "Moonshine".

Comments

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

Yes, I feel the same. I have trouble deciding if I would classify this as a "good" story. The writing is very good, no doubt about that, but at the end of the day I found myself skipping pages somewhere around the middle, because I wasn't that interested in something that disguises itself under the label "X-Files fanfiction" but really isn't.

I'm searching so hard throughout the text for something resembling Scully.

This.

This is the story of a woman reminiscing her college years before going to the wedding of the guy she had a crush on. There is little in here that is "Scully specific". A few comments on quantum physics and the odd "I'm fine" can't really hide this fact.

I can't really understand the impulse for a good writer to write a reasonably interesting personal memoir, change the names, and post it on the internet as X-Files fanfiction, I have to admit.

Well, this is what "Mary Sueing*" is all about isn't it? Disguising yourself and your autobiographical tales under the veil of the characters? And the only way an author can pull this off without being too obvious, is if the characters share several of their personality traits with the author himself/herself.

I write Scully because she's so different from me and I'm intrigued by what makes her tick, but there are authors who write her because they feel a sense of kinship with her, authors who think of themselves as "Scullys".

I know, I know, you're gonna tell me we all put a little of ourselves and our experiences in the characters when we write, but what we have here is in a whole different ballpark.

*Mary Sueing - a Fish definition: when an author injects himself/herself in a fanfic,either as an OC or as one of the main character.

I did like the paragraph where Scully is reflecting on Paul and his wife's future ("Somewhere there were plane tickets to Aruba or Sydney or Florence; somewhere there was rice, and a car with tin cans behind it.").

I agree, this was an excellent paragraph, I loved it. And I liked the ending as well, where Scully reflects that there is no such thing as the road not taken and that she is exactly where she's supposed to be.

I haven't read the others. I'm not sure I'm interested enough in this universe to want to, unless someone convinces me otherwise.

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

Ugh, livejournal, quit eating my comments.

Yeah, I think we can draw a distinction between using personal experience/some personal traits (1) in a story and essentially plopping yourself down in the middle of a story and calling yourself "Scully".

(1) And I even think using something of yourself is essential to make a good story--otherwise the characters would be feelingless cardboard cutouts.

I was thinking the ending was very reminiscent of "all things", but when I checked Gossamer, Dance Card was published the year before.