#jatj

Fic Back Friday

It's Midsummer Eve, the day I write about in the third chapter of my 5-chapter hockey rpf fic Jussi at Jussi's (in the brightness of my night).

I wrote the fic originally in 2017 and revised it with additions in May 2018. It's the longest work of my seb/teuvo series boy from the north country, the main fic of that series if you like.

In the 3rd chapter Teuvo has arrived to Sebastian's Midsummer party at Jussi Jokinen's summer cottage on a resort area by the sea on the Nortwest coast of Finland.

"There was at least as much a party atmosphere in the house, with chatter and yelling over the gradually rising volume of the Finnish rap and dance pop blasting from the speakers, TV blaring muted highlights of the NHL streaming. Sebastian downed black candy shots with the guys, and one of his old friends appeared to be a professional cook and grilled them an enormous platter of delicious spicy chicken that was demolished as quickly as it was put on the table."

--

"It’s another relief that the slow bike ride in the cold wind sobers Sebastian up noticeably. That way most of the kids that come to talk to them - some to exchange a shy word or two, others for selfies, hugs and autographs - are more drunk than Sepe and he manages to put his polite professional-athlete-nice-role-model game face on at the phone cameras pointed at him."

--

Finnish Midsummer explained  by British-born writer Joel Willans,

“I’ve heard of unaware foreigners waking up on Midsummer’s Eve in Finland and panicking when they discover their city utterly devoid of people. Has a mass alien abduction taken place while they were peacefully slumbering, they wonder?”

“Juhannus is a fantastically fun concept. There’s nothing like hanging out in the forest with your best buddies or family when the midnight sun’s shimmering on the lake and the bonfire’s blazing. It makes you feel a special type of wonder at the world.”

I really like doing the revision to Jussi at Jussi’s! It’s a nice no-pressure job because the fic is already out there.

I don’t know if it’s typical, but it certainly looks like it’s only getting longer. I’ve written some new dialogue and inner monologue to chapter 1 and it’s almost done, I only need to test one idea first.

The changes will most likely affect chapters 1, 2 and 5. I’ll shift the Christmas eve flashback entirely to chapter 2 and maybe add a few sentences. Chapter 5 will probably just be about checking for continuity, if the changes in the first chapters make it necessary to tweak something in the end chapter.

The overall plot will not change.

I think it’s arguable whether rpf fic is ever canon-verse. But as far as it can be, the fic I kept working on today is. It keeps quite strictly to real-life timeline and the story is in many points tied to real-life occurrences, news, people and connections.

I got the edit ready. The word count of the 5-chapter fic has grown from 27,7K to 29,5K. I’m now going to let it rest for a moment before I start to update the ao3 version; that process has been started, though. I have downloaded the existing version so I can refer to it if I later want to.

Today was mostly about editing and making minor corrections. The additions to the first 2 chapters required only a little tweaking in the end.

Anyway, from my point of view this WIP week has already served its purpose: one WIP less!