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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2dTaCMy:
I assume you mean for Never Wrote A Letter, since you were just commenting on another post about it. If not, do correct me! LOL.
There weren’t… exactly alternate versions? but the whole thing is that before I published chapter 1 of Home Out In The Wind, I made myself sit down and write The Whole Thing, including the very ending of this story.
And oh boy. It was. Well. It wasn’t done, is the thing. I was like, It’s done! Look at me! I’m amazing! It’s done!
And it wasn’t done. So there was some hilarious shit.
#1 Kes was introduced mm right about now. I literally introduced him to Finn as they were on their way to the standoff with Kylo Ren. He had not previously been in the story except for a scene with Leia– a brief scene. As it was happening, that was the first moment when I really knew that I’d done good by not using my usual M.O. of publishing each chapter as soon as I finished it.
(I mean, that’s sort of an exaggeration; I usually write like 40k of unconnected scenes, pick a spot, and incorporate them, and make a story, and then start posting, but this was different because my first draft was like 150k and technically in order.)
#2 there is a scene that literally reads “Luke/Leia/Kylo etc scene”
WTF that’s not a scene, self.
#3 The entire climactic scene of the fight with Kylo was from Finn’s POV and I am super super bummed to have lost that because while it didn’t work at all, it was a good scene, if sort of… breezy? Anyway. I had no idea who Kylo was or what his motivation was, but fuck, I think I had a better handle on Finn. This story has taken too long and I’ve let myself get distracted by Kes.
You want deleted snippets? Buddy, I got whole deleted scenes. I got like 15k here that didn’t make the cut. I am super bummed to have lost the bit where Kylo can’t freeze Finn’s blaster bolt entirely, I fucking loved that image, but I couldn’t make it work in the new scene. I’ll have to do it later somewhere!!
Anyway, here’s Finn being super badass, only in a scene that doesn’t hang together with any of my subplots and is super rough and unbeta’d and repeats words and such:
The big Shozer from the inn met them at the door. “Hurry,” he said, anxious, and Finn had to stop and shake his head to clear it after the door shut.
“We know,” Kes said. He looked around. “Do we have all the exits?”
“We do,” the Shozer said.
Finn grimaced, pressing the heel of his hand against the middle of his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose; the Dark Force user was making a godawful mess of the entire place, expanding dramatically outward. “We gotta hurry,” he said.
Kes pulled his blaster out, and it made a high-pitched whine as he flipped it to the ready position. “You don’t actually have to tell me that,” he said.
By the time they fetched up against the doors to the conference room, Finn could tell that Kylo knew he was there. “This is probably a suicide attack,” Finn said quietly to the people leaning against the walls beside him. Kes was closest, but the big Shozer was just behind him, and there were four other Utilians, three women and a man, all human and wildly varying ages. “I don’t know when our reinforcements will be able to arrive. They have a Dark Force user, a knight, and he knows I’m here, and he knows me, and he’s waiting for me to come through that door. I can feel him, I know for certain he’s there and he’s expecting us.”
“I don’t care,” Kes said. “The rest of you, I won’t judge if you don’t follow us, but I don’t care.”
Finn looked at him, and there was something in the set of his jaw that he viscerally understood. He met Kes’s eyes, and nodded sharply, and in tandem they kicked the door open.
Kylo Ren was standing in the middle of the room, arms extended. Everyone else was frozen, motionless, and Poe was sprawled on the floor in front of him, and the walls behind him were made of something transparent, a dozen people sitting or standing around watching, and that was all of the tableau Finn had time for. Kes immediately fired twice with his blaster, and Kylo gestured, freezing both shots. But Finn had already targeted the Stormtroopers behind him, felling three with three shots, and his fourth shot refused to freeze when Kylo grabbed it out of the air. It crept, shimmering, toward him, and the knight stared at it in visible startlement.
“You,” he said to Finn, and tossed Kes’s blaster shots back at him. Kes had apparently been expecting it, because he ducked and ran forward. But he wasn’t trying to get to Kylo. He skidded across the floor and slammed into Poe’s limp body, and picked him up.
“Me,” Finn said to Kylo, watching Kes from the corner of his eye. He had sort of– okay, he hadn’t expected that Kes had literally just come here to die holding Poe, but he guessed he was going to have to work with that. The Utilians were in the doorway behind him, though he hadn’t expected them to actually follow. Finn snapped off another blaster shot toward the remaining First Order members, aiming in particular for an officer whose stripes proclaimed him a general, but Kylo’s energy stopped it.
The First Order soldiers had all drawn blasters and a few had fired back, but those bolts all stopped too. Kylo was stopping all of the blaster fire, except the one bolt of Finn’s that was still creeping toward him. He was watching it. “That’s why you broke your conditioning,” Kylo said. “You’re Force-sensitive after all. I had wondered.”
Kes hauled Poe up into a sitting position, even though the younger man was utterly unresponsive, and held Poe’s head against his shoulder, rocking very slightly. He wasn’t crying or shouting, he was just holding him, and he still had his blaster in his hand, and he was watching Kylo Ren. Maybe he wasn’t out of this entirely.
“I broke my conditioning because it was wrong,” Finn said. Everyone had stopped firing, since none of it was landing on anything. There was an oppressive pressure on him, like the weight of everyone’s eyes, but he knew it was Kylo. He was completely outmatched, here, but all he really had to do was distract Kylo for a little bit longer. That’s all this was.
“So did I,” Kylo said. He turned his head slightly, and Finn could feel him refocusing his attention. “Kes Dameron,” he said.
“Will you kill me too?” Kes asked. “Or will you leave me to bury my son, and make me do it myself later?”
“Intriguing notion,” Kylo said, “but he isn’t dead. You have no imagination.”
On cue, Poe made a strangled little noise, and Kes looked pained and let Poe’s head tip back away from his shoulder. Finn was waiting, waiting for Kylo’s attention to slip, but it was still holding firm. Meanwhile all Finn could do was keep that blaster bolt creeping toward him slowly. Kylo had deflected it slightly, but Finn knew he could curve it back at the last moment if Kylo’s attention wavered.
“Papa,” Poe said, soft and bewildered.
“Mijito,” Kes breathed, face creased in pain. “Lo siento, mijito.”
“Me duele, Papa,” Poe murmured plaintively.
“Lo siento,” Kes answered him. “Lo siento.”
“Didn’t you break your conditioning for love?” Kylo asked, refocusing on Finn.
“I broke my conditioning,” Finn said, focusing on not letting his voice reflect the strain he was feeling, “because it’s not right to treat people as disposable things.”
“Nearly the only thing left in this one’s mind was his sentimental attachments,” Kylo said, and Finn kept his gaze on the knight’s implacable mask, not letting himself stare at the blaster bolt, thinking surely the knight was focused on too many things, on everyone else’s bolts too, and keeping everyone frozen, and wouldn’t be able to keep it all up indefinitely. All Finn had to do was curve that blaster bolt’s trajectory. “He has a very sentimental attachment to you. Too bad you were as unfaithful to him as to your former masters.”
It occurred to Finn that Kylo was looking for an opening, which took some of the sting out of the observation. “I don’t think it’s the same,” Finn said.
“I think wiping his memory and dumping him here as an unwitting distraction with no defenses is a more profound betrayal than simply seeing other people sometimes,” Kylo said. “He had no expectation that anyone would save him. His last thoughts as himself were of how alone he was in the world.”
“Who is he now?” Finn asked, and he felt it then, felt the finger Kylo was trying to slip in under his defenses, to pry him up and take him over. He slammed his mental plating back down.
“He is a distraction,” Kylo said, and released all of the blaster bolts at once. Finn yanked, trying to curve that bolt, but it took too much concentration and Kylo slid under his armor deftly. Finn screamed, and someone else fired a blaster, and suddenly Kylo’s darkness yanked away, and the knight bellowed in anger.
Kes had shot him, and was struggling to his feet, with Poe over his shoulder. The knight staggered back, bringing his lightsaber up, the same horrid ragged red blade that Finn remembered so vividly from that snowy forest.
The frozen bolts had all cascaded into the newly-released frozen crowd, and there was a chorus of screaming, showers of sparks as some of the bolts hit the transparent wall, and general chaos. Finn clamped down his mental defenses and fired his blaster again. Kylo deflected it with his saber. He wasn’t fatally injured, but he was slowed-down. “Go,” Finn said to Kes, “go, go,” and Kylo was laughing, a horrible sound, “just get him out!”
Some of the people in formal dress who had been among the First Order officers were now struggling against them. Some of the First Order people were dead. Someone who looked like the holopic Finn had seen of the planet’s New Republican Senator was lying open-eyed in a pool of blood. The Util Resistance fighters who had come in with him were scattered behind various bits of furniture, mostly shooting at Kylo but not having any luck.
Finn hadn’t had much practice deflecting blaster bolts, though he knew he could. He didn’t have the focus, not with Kylo still trying to get into his mind, so he ducked and rolled behind a decorative but sturdy end table, upending it and using it as a shield. There were several First Order officers still alive, and as he watched, one of the exquisitely-dressed noblewomen leapt onto the back of a colonel, yanking his head brutally backward and then using him as a human shield against the surviving Stormtrooper belatedly trying to protect him. Finn snapped off a shot at the Stormtrooper, who fell, and the noblewoman discarded the colonel’s corpse and ducked behind another end table.
Finn supposed everyone in this room was doomed, but he could see, behind him, that the Shozer had covered Kes’s retreat. No one here, including himself, was going to be able to kill Kylo Ren, however. He had no illusions. Kylo was advancing on him now, on Finn specifically, and Finn fired at him again and again, and grabbed the bolts of other blasters out of the air and curved them to throw them at Kylo too, and nothing could get through and he was going to get cornered, and that was just a damn shame because he had nothing but this blaster and it wasn’t going to get through, and he knew now that Kylo could maintain enough concentration to keep from getting shot and to invade Finn’s mind pretty handily.
Well, fuck.
“Kill me if you want,” he said, ready for a last stand, “but you still didn’t get this planet!”
“I am aware,” Kylo intoned dramatically, “that you have a cruiser in orbit, but you cannot think I fear it.” The prying blackness hooked at the edge of Finn’s mind, prying implacably, and it got through enough that Finn suddenly could feel the terrible creeping horror of it. Kylo was feeding him Poe’s despair, he realized with some resignation: this was the moment Kylo had bragged about, when Poe had understood that nobody was coming for him and this was it, for him to face alone.
Maybe the worst thing was how relieved Poe felt. And that was the prey hypnotized by the snake, in part, when your fear froze you, and your terror left you so wrung-out that you could only be relieved it was ending. It was trying to suck Finn down, and he wasn’t sure how long he could keep fighting it off.
In that moment, Rey crashed in through the window with her light-saber blazing blue, and Finn laughed in savage joy and threw half a dozen blaster bolts at Kylo.
See it was breezy as fuck and maybe I hadn’t actually considered any of the logistics, and note that Bolt didn’t exist yet and Pava wasn’t in this, and I hadn’t figure out what to do with Luke Skywalker either, but. You know.
It was a hell of a scene. And it made Finn the hero of the story. And I am in goddamn mourning to have lost that. But I had to add in Bolt, and then I had to leave room for Rey, and I just couldn’t make this be as quick as this.
I should’ve done better by Finn, though. I let him down.
Shit, y’know, maybe this was a better scene than the one I actually wrote? This is the problem I’ve always had with novels; I can’t revise things without just massively rerouting, and it’s tremendous wasted effort. I wish I had better discipline, or– something. I don’t know. I don’t know! There’s no right answer.
FOR THE RECORD, the Iberican is untranslated because Finn doesn’t speak it, but Poe says exactly the same things as he does in the published scene, which is translated because it’s Kes’s POV and he speaks the language.
asks: questions here | AO3 here
I assume you mean for Never Wrote A Letter, since you were just commenting on another post about it. If not, do correct me! LOL.
There weren’t… exactly alternate versions? but the whole thing is that before I published chapter 1 of Home Out In The Wind, I made myself sit down and write The Whole Thing, including the very ending of this story.
And oh boy. It was. Well. It wasn’t done, is the thing. I was like, It’s done! Look at me! I’m amazing! It’s done!
And it wasn’t done. So there was some hilarious shit.
#1 Kes was introduced mm right about now. I literally introduced him to Finn as they were on their way to the standoff with Kylo Ren. He had not previously been in the story except for a scene with Leia– a brief scene. As it was happening, that was the first moment when I really knew that I’d done good by not using my usual M.O. of publishing each chapter as soon as I finished it.
(I mean, that’s sort of an exaggeration; I usually write like 40k of unconnected scenes, pick a spot, and incorporate them, and make a story, and then start posting, but this was different because my first draft was like 150k and technically in order.)
#2 there is a scene that literally reads “Luke/Leia/Kylo etc scene”
WTF that’s not a scene, self.
#3 The entire climactic scene of the fight with Kylo was from Finn’s POV and I am super super bummed to have lost that because while it didn’t work at all, it was a good scene, if sort of… breezy? Anyway. I had no idea who Kylo was or what his motivation was, but fuck, I think I had a better handle on Finn. This story has taken too long and I’ve let myself get distracted by Kes.
You want deleted snippets? Buddy, I got whole deleted scenes. I got like 15k here that didn’t make the cut. I am super bummed to have lost the bit where Kylo can’t freeze Finn’s blaster bolt entirely, I fucking loved that image, but I couldn’t make it work in the new scene. I’ll have to do it later somewhere!!
Anyway, here’s Finn being super badass, only in a scene that doesn’t hang together with any of my subplots and is super rough and unbeta’d and repeats words and such:
The big Shozer from the inn met them at the door. “Hurry,” he said, anxious, and Finn had to stop and shake his head to clear it after the door shut.
“We know,” Kes said. He looked around. “Do we have all the exits?”
“We do,” the Shozer said.
Finn grimaced, pressing the heel of his hand against the middle of his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose; the Dark Force user was making a godawful mess of the entire place, expanding dramatically outward. “We gotta hurry,” he said.
Kes pulled his blaster out, and it made a high-pitched whine as he flipped it to the ready position. “You don’t actually have to tell me that,” he said.
By the time they fetched up against the doors to the conference room, Finn could tell that Kylo knew he was there. “This is probably a suicide attack,” Finn said quietly to the people leaning against the walls beside him. Kes was closest, but the big Shozer was just behind him, and there were four other Utilians, three women and a man, all human and wildly varying ages. “I don’t know when our reinforcements will be able to arrive. They have a Dark Force user, a knight, and he knows I’m here, and he knows me, and he’s waiting for me to come through that door. I can feel him, I know for certain he’s there and he’s expecting us.”
“I don’t care,” Kes said. “The rest of you, I won’t judge if you don’t follow us, but I don’t care.”
Finn looked at him, and there was something in the set of his jaw that he viscerally understood. He met Kes’s eyes, and nodded sharply, and in tandem they kicked the door open.
Kylo Ren was standing in the middle of the room, arms extended. Everyone else was frozen, motionless, and Poe was sprawled on the floor in front of him, and the walls behind him were made of something transparent, a dozen people sitting or standing around watching, and that was all of the tableau Finn had time for. Kes immediately fired twice with his blaster, and Kylo gestured, freezing both shots. But Finn had already targeted the Stormtroopers behind him, felling three with three shots, and his fourth shot refused to freeze when Kylo grabbed it out of the air. It crept, shimmering, toward him, and the knight stared at it in visible startlement.
“You,” he said to Finn, and tossed Kes’s blaster shots back at him. Kes had apparently been expecting it, because he ducked and ran forward. But he wasn’t trying to get to Kylo. He skidded across the floor and slammed into Poe’s limp body, and picked him up.
“Me,” Finn said to Kylo, watching Kes from the corner of his eye. He had sort of– okay, he hadn’t expected that Kes had literally just come here to die holding Poe, but he guessed he was going to have to work with that. The Utilians were in the doorway behind him, though he hadn’t expected them to actually follow. Finn snapped off another blaster shot toward the remaining First Order members, aiming in particular for an officer whose stripes proclaimed him a general, but Kylo’s energy stopped it.
The First Order soldiers had all drawn blasters and a few had fired back, but those bolts all stopped too. Kylo was stopping all of the blaster fire, except the one bolt of Finn’s that was still creeping toward him. He was watching it. “That’s why you broke your conditioning,” Kylo said. “You’re Force-sensitive after all. I had wondered.”
Kes hauled Poe up into a sitting position, even though the younger man was utterly unresponsive, and held Poe’s head against his shoulder, rocking very slightly. He wasn’t crying or shouting, he was just holding him, and he still had his blaster in his hand, and he was watching Kylo Ren. Maybe he wasn’t out of this entirely.
“I broke my conditioning because it was wrong,” Finn said. Everyone had stopped firing, since none of it was landing on anything. There was an oppressive pressure on him, like the weight of everyone’s eyes, but he knew it was Kylo. He was completely outmatched, here, but all he really had to do was distract Kylo for a little bit longer. That’s all this was.
“So did I,” Kylo said. He turned his head slightly, and Finn could feel him refocusing his attention. “Kes Dameron,” he said.
“Will you kill me too?” Kes asked. “Or will you leave me to bury my son, and make me do it myself later?”
“Intriguing notion,” Kylo said, “but he isn’t dead. You have no imagination.”
On cue, Poe made a strangled little noise, and Kes looked pained and let Poe’s head tip back away from his shoulder. Finn was waiting, waiting for Kylo’s attention to slip, but it was still holding firm. Meanwhile all Finn could do was keep that blaster bolt creeping toward him slowly. Kylo had deflected it slightly, but Finn knew he could curve it back at the last moment if Kylo’s attention wavered.
“Papa,” Poe said, soft and bewildered.
“Mijito,” Kes breathed, face creased in pain. “Lo siento, mijito.”
“Me duele, Papa,” Poe murmured plaintively.
“Lo siento,” Kes answered him. “Lo siento.”
“Didn’t you break your conditioning for love?” Kylo asked, refocusing on Finn.
“I broke my conditioning,” Finn said, focusing on not letting his voice reflect the strain he was feeling, “because it’s not right to treat people as disposable things.”
“Nearly the only thing left in this one’s mind was his sentimental attachments,” Kylo said, and Finn kept his gaze on the knight’s implacable mask, not letting himself stare at the blaster bolt, thinking surely the knight was focused on too many things, on everyone else’s bolts too, and keeping everyone frozen, and wouldn’t be able to keep it all up indefinitely. All Finn had to do was curve that blaster bolt’s trajectory. “He has a very sentimental attachment to you. Too bad you were as unfaithful to him as to your former masters.”
It occurred to Finn that Kylo was looking for an opening, which took some of the sting out of the observation. “I don’t think it’s the same,” Finn said.
“I think wiping his memory and dumping him here as an unwitting distraction with no defenses is a more profound betrayal than simply seeing other people sometimes,” Kylo said. “He had no expectation that anyone would save him. His last thoughts as himself were of how alone he was in the world.”
“Who is he now?” Finn asked, and he felt it then, felt the finger Kylo was trying to slip in under his defenses, to pry him up and take him over. He slammed his mental plating back down.
“He is a distraction,” Kylo said, and released all of the blaster bolts at once. Finn yanked, trying to curve that bolt, but it took too much concentration and Kylo slid under his armor deftly. Finn screamed, and someone else fired a blaster, and suddenly Kylo’s darkness yanked away, and the knight bellowed in anger.
Kes had shot him, and was struggling to his feet, with Poe over his shoulder. The knight staggered back, bringing his lightsaber up, the same horrid ragged red blade that Finn remembered so vividly from that snowy forest.
The frozen bolts had all cascaded into the newly-released frozen crowd, and there was a chorus of screaming, showers of sparks as some of the bolts hit the transparent wall, and general chaos. Finn clamped down his mental defenses and fired his blaster again. Kylo deflected it with his saber. He wasn’t fatally injured, but he was slowed-down. “Go,” Finn said to Kes, “go, go,” and Kylo was laughing, a horrible sound, “just get him out!”
Some of the people in formal dress who had been among the First Order officers were now struggling against them. Some of the First Order people were dead. Someone who looked like the holopic Finn had seen of the planet’s New Republican Senator was lying open-eyed in a pool of blood. The Util Resistance fighters who had come in with him were scattered behind various bits of furniture, mostly shooting at Kylo but not having any luck.
Finn hadn’t had much practice deflecting blaster bolts, though he knew he could. He didn’t have the focus, not with Kylo still trying to get into his mind, so he ducked and rolled behind a decorative but sturdy end table, upending it and using it as a shield. There were several First Order officers still alive, and as he watched, one of the exquisitely-dressed noblewomen leapt onto the back of a colonel, yanking his head brutally backward and then using him as a human shield against the surviving Stormtrooper belatedly trying to protect him. Finn snapped off a shot at the Stormtrooper, who fell, and the noblewoman discarded the colonel’s corpse and ducked behind another end table.
Finn supposed everyone in this room was doomed, but he could see, behind him, that the Shozer had covered Kes’s retreat. No one here, including himself, was going to be able to kill Kylo Ren, however. He had no illusions. Kylo was advancing on him now, on Finn specifically, and Finn fired at him again and again, and grabbed the bolts of other blasters out of the air and curved them to throw them at Kylo too, and nothing could get through and he was going to get cornered, and that was just a damn shame because he had nothing but this blaster and it wasn’t going to get through, and he knew now that Kylo could maintain enough concentration to keep from getting shot and to invade Finn’s mind pretty handily.
Well, fuck.
“Kill me if you want,” he said, ready for a last stand, “but you still didn’t get this planet!”
“I am aware,” Kylo intoned dramatically, “that you have a cruiser in orbit, but you cannot think I fear it.” The prying blackness hooked at the edge of Finn’s mind, prying implacably, and it got through enough that Finn suddenly could feel the terrible creeping horror of it. Kylo was feeding him Poe’s despair, he realized with some resignation: this was the moment Kylo had bragged about, when Poe had understood that nobody was coming for him and this was it, for him to face alone.
Maybe the worst thing was how relieved Poe felt. And that was the prey hypnotized by the snake, in part, when your fear froze you, and your terror left you so wrung-out that you could only be relieved it was ending. It was trying to suck Finn down, and he wasn’t sure how long he could keep fighting it off.
In that moment, Rey crashed in through the window with her light-saber blazing blue, and Finn laughed in savage joy and threw half a dozen blaster bolts at Kylo.
See it was breezy as fuck and maybe I hadn’t actually considered any of the logistics, and note that Bolt didn’t exist yet and Pava wasn’t in this, and I hadn’t figure out what to do with Luke Skywalker either, but. You know.
It was a hell of a scene. And it made Finn the hero of the story. And I am in goddamn mourning to have lost that. But I had to add in Bolt, and then I had to leave room for Rey, and I just couldn’t make this be as quick as this.
I should’ve done better by Finn, though. I let him down.
Shit, y’know, maybe this was a better scene than the one I actually wrote? This is the problem I’ve always had with novels; I can’t revise things without just massively rerouting, and it’s tremendous wasted effort. I wish I had better discipline, or– something. I don’t know. I don’t know! There’s no right answer.
FOR THE RECORD, the Iberican is untranslated because Finn doesn’t speak it, but Poe says exactly the same things as he does in the published scene, which is translated because it’s Kes’s POV and he speaks the language.
asks: questions here | AO3 here
