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]

I think this is a Masses VS Select Few issue.

Back in the days the majority of fics were tepid pedestrian affairs at best but we had a good pool of great writers who enjoyed "colouring outside the lines" and who were well received because of the quality of their writing. Sadly most of these people moved on to new pastures and as the fandom shrunk, the bulk of medicore fics just became more noticeable.

Then of course there is the Haven phenomenon. Don't get me started on that.

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

What's the Haven phenomenon? Is it to do with everyone reading/reccing the same stories?

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

Haven's fanfic folder has had a long standing rep for reccing mediocre stories. Don't get me wrong in spite of all its flaws and board divas I love Haven for the wonderful source of information that it is, but I keep seeing things recced in the fic folder that make me go "SERIOUSLY???" There is a hanful of "board favourite" authors whose names get mentionned almost every time someone asks for something, and...well, these people do nothing for me.

If I were a newbie, and would sample some of the recs there, I would probably think the X-F fandom is mostly crap. But YMMV.

[wendelah1]

Haven's fanfic folder has had a long standing rep for reccing mediocre stories.

The rep is deserved. There are some people there with terrible taste.

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

IKR? And unfortunately they happen to be the vocal ones on this particular board, which is a crying shame because Haven gets a huge amount of traffic. Whenever I get a big spike of readership in my web stats it's always because some story of mine was recced on Haven.