#philly-ossapher

11. What do you like best about this fic?

Hmm, that’s a difficult question!! There’s a couple of things I could think of!

1) The fic premise was one of the earliest Lams ideas I came up with, back when one of the main engines for imagining scenes in my head was ‘how could a possible bio series based on John Laurens go?’ (I got really into it? And got very specific about some things? Like I always imagined it as two seasons of 10-12 episodes each. Not sure why.) Hold Your Grandmother’s Bible was also inspired that way. But because of that, my original vision of it in my head was very, well, visual. Which became an issue when I started writing and suddenly realised that I really wanted the opening ‘shot’ to be really atmospheric, but couldn’t figure out how to communicate that through writing. The thing lingered there in my drafts for months just as a couple of paragraphs because I just felt really dissatisfied with the feeling of it. In the end, I decided for Ham’s birthday I’d finally just try and make it work, and... well, I’m pretty happy with it! Still doesn’t evoke EXACTLY what I was imagining in my head, but ‘the whole scene is lit with a warm, orange glow’ just... doesn’t translate into words very well lmao.

2) Most of the getting together fics I’ve read for historical Lams have pretty much begun with Hamilton making a sexual advance. That’s super plausible and I enjoy those fic a lot, but I wanted to kind of try something else for a change with this one! ‘Cause for me, one of the most interesting and emotionally satisfying things to read about is, essentially, intimacy and vulnerability. So, I really wanted to communicate that in this one, Alex is already pretty head over heels - and John is not far off, though he’s much less aware of it. And even more so, John doesn’t really understand Alex’s feelings either - something that’ll become more obvious over the next couple of sequels, heh. So not only did I have to communicate this about Alex, I had to do it through the eyes of John, who isn’t getting the message. (Also, the bit where John watches Alex and he’s looking at him with such an expression of love that Alex is really taken aback... yeah, not the easiest thing to write from John’s perspective, lol.) I love writing layered stuff like that so it was really fun and I enjoyed being able to write this other side of Alex!

3) When I first envisioned the fic, there really wasn’t any examination of Alex and John’s relationship up until this point. I fact, as it was imagined as a visual thing as I said above, there was v little internal thinking going on. (Which, heh, I’ve always admired the skill of some authors to communicate so much about their characters’ mindsets without ever outright telling us what they’re thinking, so I’ve tried many times recently to emulate that minimalist writing style, especially since I have a tendency to over-explain in, um, pretty much all situations... but clearly, it hasn’t always worked out. :P) That could’ve been a good fic. But because it took so long for me to write those parts, by that time, I had a lot more ideas about their relationship and how they would view it given the standards of the time. I still have a looot more to learn about all of that so I can’t say for sure that it’s accurate, but I think it’s probably better embedded into those contemporary norms, and certainly made for a more thoughtful and interesting fic IMO. So in that sense it’s kind of a good thing that I kept putting it off out of frustration, haha!