#fatesverse

See To Sleep, Perchance to Scream or any single pun ever inserted into any one of my stories.

1) In looks, Digital Dave is based off of a friend of mine who is a very big dude with fire-engine red hair and a beard.  He's not overweight by any means, but I imagine he drinks way more Red Bull/energy drinks than he should.

2) His daughters mean a lot to him, but his job keeps him at the office a lot more than he likes, which is why he is trying to get out of the CIA.  By the way, his daughters are named after Firefly characters, but his wife hasn't put it together. She just really liked the names, too. They're the light of his life, and all of the programmers get a kick when they visit because the older one is already starting to disassemble old CPU units and fix phones for them.

3) His fear of Sarah Walker is very real. He respects her, but there's a clear divide between the field agents and the computer guys for a reason. Thankfully, he'll get over that as Sarah will be the godmother of his third child, who will be, ah, a surprise.

4) Digital Dave is actually inspired a lot by my friend Aardie, who came up with most of his tech-related dialogue in later chapters. He's a very left-brained person, while I am not. I have to work hard not to project my right-brained ideas onto him.

1) She's a very burdened character. Going through medical school when you had a calling can't be easy, so I wrote her as a little less buoyant than my regular Ellie. One of the burdens is keeping the secret from Chuck (man, how great would it have been to see CANON CHUCK FEEL GUILT FOR LYING TO ELLIE FOR ALL OF SEASON FOUR?!)

2) She's stronger than most and therefore probably has to think about her strength all the time. I imagine this makes her careful.

3) She likes tea. Awesome being British inspired this habit.

4) In my head, she struggled with the hippocratic oath because even though the vampires weren't living creatures, they were still animated. It took her a long time to be okay with slaying them, especially after her first experience with a vampire was a very, very messy one

5) Sarah knows because Carina's a vampire slayer, too.

Uhhhh, anon, that’s not actually a safe assumption to make. I’ll come out and say this, I am proud of it, which sometimes makes me uncomfortable. I spent over two years working on Fates and it pulled things from me emotionally and mentally that I never thought I could do. It taught me a lot, and it makes me happy to hear that people like it. I mean, there was backlash against it, some inevitable because it was popular and it’s within human nature to decry something because it’s popular, some just because not every story is going to hit everybody the same way. Sometimes that backlash was hard to deal with and I convinced myself that I should be ashamed because it could have been more, it could have gone on to tell the Orion arc, or I could have done better at the Jill arc. This was usually the point where my beta reader stepped in to kick my ass, perhaps rightfully so.

(Apparently this reply is turning into a case of me saying, ‘MY NEUROSES, LET ME SHOW YOU THEM’)

So while I am proud of Fates—sometimes—it’s not the story I’m proudest of. The main reason behind that is actually because I’m not proudest of any story, all told. I can’t do overall rankings like that. Each story is different, no matter that there are similar themes and tropes throughout all of my work. If I had more specific parameters, maybe I could compare my stories like that, but for me, it always comes down to specifics.

For example, since you’re asking for concrete examples here, I’m going to step into the potential firing range and say that I’m proudest of the third chapter of Fortune Favors Fools (Terminator fight aside, but that’s for a different reason). I liked writing a Sarah and Bryce who were at odds but weren’t actively trying to rip each other to pieces to create needless tension the way so many fanfiction stories fall back on. I’m proud of writing a Violet Bartowski who felt so realistic to some people that they left me reviews telling me about the times their children did the same things to them in one story, but then in another Violet story, I’m proud that Ellie and Sarah have a realistic discussion about dating somebody with a kid. And of course, I’m proud of the time Sarah Walker tried to blow up the 405 because I got Casey to slur drunkenly about zoo animals.