#pinknote

We deserve feedback for our work. But no one owes us feedback for our work.

Now apply this principle to life in general.

We deserve good things. But no one owes us good things.

Important rules of writing I've since discovered:

1. Let the piece sit for a few days after completion.

2. Then go back and cut out every word that doesn't say anything important or goes into too much description. Pare it down like the words cost money. The real value of writing is in the ability to let the reader infer the obvious.

3. Speak every line of dialogue out loud to see if it sounds in character and replace every marginally high falutin word with the most colloquial phrase, unless the character speaks otherwise.

I love Olivarry and Coldflash. But my problem with reading those fics are that I miss Iris like a limb if she's not also part of Barry.

I felt the same way before I ever shipped Westallen, and I didn't even ship them for the longest time. Nor was I particularly interested in Iris as a character until sometime mid-way S3.

(It was when she burst into frightened tears in 3x9. Something in me immediately went PROTECC and it hasn't turned off since.)

I think it was more the sheer intensity of Barry's love for her that fascinated me. Not that a man fixating on a woman and obsessively pinning all his happiness on her is new or healthy phenomenon, but it was also deeper than that, character-wise. His love for her is so tied up in his self-definition, and the myriad ways their childhood bond helped mould their adult selves.

(And the fact that no matter how this love can change in nature, he will never be immune to appreciating her beauty and sexuality as a woman, which is so important to me as a slash fan and WoC. Seeing women be desexualized unless they're active romantic interests makes me want to scream. You can find people attractive af without wanting to bang them! It doesnt make you any less close! Not all close m/f relationships have to be sibling-like! Aargh!)

Regardless of how it came about, I need Iris to have that importance in Barry's life no matter who (else?) he's in love with. Which is why I started writing slash myself. It's a relief to me to know that she's there in every story I write, like a personal touchstone if nothing else. There you are my darling, you aren't forgotten.

Coldflash vs Olivarry polyam AU - Barry's love for Iris and the pain of her rejection is the springboard of the series. His struggle to reconcile with her over the years drives his character trajectory as much his love for Len and Oliver does. And there is so much she sees and evolves and goes through herself that the stupid boy cannot see until the very end, caught up in his own pain as he is.

The Assistant Verse - Barry and Iris are queerplatonic partners in a poly sexual relationship. Iris is the one who dolls up her boy in lipstick and booty shorts and sends him into Len's path in Paint It Red. Many years later, in Every Kind of Love, she descends wrathfully on Oliver from half a world away for doing her darling wrong, bringing her own broken heart for Barry to nurse.

This is one of the most wholesome Westallen relationships I have ever written, even though I'm pretty sure it will generate the least interest.

For The Good of the Realm - in the first draft Iris was Barry's first love and heartbreak pulled apart by politics, but in the second revision they're again queerplatonic partners and childhood best friends who call each other "soulmates". They had hoped to be married to each other and be kept safe from political matches. But then Barry becomes betrothed to High King Oliver and must be sent to Starling Court as the reluctant new Prince Consort, while Iris sets out on her mission to emancipate the tribes of the Middle Kingdom. They gift each other two halves of a magical "heartstone", a conduit of emotional resonance that connects two people across leagues of distance. In the fear, alienation and intrigue of the Starling Court, its Iris's love and safety that Barry holds onto, even while he falls in love with his husband.

Call Me By Your Name - Barry and Iris go to Greece in the summer before college, each hoping it will lead to a resolution to the magnetic push and pull they've been feeling for years. But when Barry meets and falls in love with Oliver and realizes he's gay, he is devastated at both breaking Iris's heart and not being in love with her. Because he really wants to be; she's always been his home and the future he's envisioned - to lose that terrifies him. It's a story about Barry and Oliver's sexual and romantic awakening, but also about how Barry and Iris manage to break down their own expectations of what it means to love one another forever and build something much truer and real.

A Stitch in Time is solidly Queenwestallen now. I was going to have Iris evolve into an undefined queerplatonic partner for Barry and Oliver but that ship is long gone.

For Love Or Money - Barry and Iris were childhood sweethearts and married young, Barry's tech startup and her career both took off. By their mid-twenties they should be the couple that has it all.

Except for Iris finally realizing she's ace and sex-repulsed. This is a terrible shock to both of them and not a small blow to Barry's self-esteem because she's the only woman he's ever been with. But they decide they're too in love to divorce and Iris tentatively suggests that Barry takes the opportunity to explore his interest in men, leading him to engage Oliver's services as an escort. Iris has to discover for herself what it means to be an asexual woman but Barry falling in love with Oliver is an issue they both have to deal with as a couple. Meanwhile Oliver has to reconcile the fact that not only is he falling for a client but one who is very much in love with his wife.

Mercury Rising - my Earth-13 Coldflash mob boss AU and oh is Iris ever there! This is my most delicious iteration of her - not as Barry's support but as his combatant, his antagonist and the eternal thorn in his side. Her unwitting role in Barry's betrayal that drives him to criminality, her bull-headed faith in the goodness of his character even in the face of his escalating violence, calling him to account every step of the way till he does the one thing she cannot forgive. The resulting single-minded determination to take her former best friend down without compromising her own moral code even as the undeniable magnetism between the two of them wreak havoc with their lives, and final realization that even after everything she can never give up on Barry Allen. Hate is truly just love with its back turned and what makes them tear each other to pieces even as it brings out their noblest and most human instincts.

Queen of Starling - On Earth 42, Beatrice Allen is adopted by Harrison Wells when her parents are murdered and taken away to Starling City - but even distance can't make her less in love with the best friend she left behind.

Here's the kicker of this story - Iris dies. Her death bisects Beatrice's story in two - the halycon days of her girlhood and the shattered trauma of the next fifteen years where she has to collect the pieces of herself out of her lover's grave to rebuild herself into the mother her children need, the superhero the world needs and to let herself love again.

The Awakening - Curse specialist Iris West and alchemist/ lore master Barry Allen are part of the Men of Letters team that go into a old cursed and haunted mansion to retrieve the Book Of The Dead, last known to have been in the hands of disgraced former Man of Letters and necromancer Eobard Thawne. The team is led by their chapter's chairman Harrison Wells, but the expedition is funded by eccentric millionaire and hunter Oliver Queen.

The blue-collar hunters and elitist Men of Letters don't trust Oliver, being seen as a mere hobbyist or thrill-seeker in the absence of any real tragedy or family legacy to put him on his path. But Iris distrusts him because she's the only one who can see his clear attraction to her best friend and childhood sweetheart Barry. Iris has spent her life as Barry's protector, himself being something of a pariah in the community due to his rumoured supernatural parentage and open empathy for the spirits and monsters they hunt. It's Iris that sees the way the house draws in both Barry and Oliver and the patterns of the hauntings that occur around them, she's the one who is as terrified for Barry's safety as Oliver as the house sucks them deeper into the tragedy of its past and she's the one that finally deduces how the malevolence of the house works and what it wants.

From Dusk Till Dawn - I think this is the story that has Iris in it the least. Eobard kidnaps Barry at age fifteen and subjects him to an experiment that backfires badly, leaving him dead and Barry with only a fraction of powers he was destined to have and no connection to the Speed Force. ARGUS immediately finds him and forces him to manufacture a rift with the Wests so they can claim him without suspicion, mould him into one of their operatives and train him to hunt the other metahumans Eobard created.

This is an Olivarry story where Barry rediscovers hope and love through his secret protection of Oliver. But its the memory of Iris's love and the happiness of their childhood that keeps him tethered to his humanity through the next eight years, it is her that he goes to the night before what he believes will be his final sacrifice ("You have always been the best part of me. Keep that part of me inside your heart and I can never die. Keep me and don't let me go, Iris"), it is her, after everything, that leads him home, and it is her that seeks out Oliver and asks him to help Barry heal.

This is not including my Coldwestallen fics The Scarlet Rose (Snow Queen/ Beauty and the Beast fusion) and The Adventures of Snart The Cat (Bastet turns Len into a cat and charges him with protecting Barry and Iris's unborn child).

So yes, I absolutely started writing slash because I missed Iris West. It's not just her though. None of the ladies are relegated to ship support. In the Polyam AU Lisa Snart specifically rips into Barry for ignoring her emotional needs as a friend while on the outs with Len, Oliver's fixation with Barry in Stitch in Time and resulting neglect of his friendship with Laurel has serious repercussions, Caitlin couldn't give less of a damn about Barry's romantic exploits in her incarnations as Killer Frost. Even in For The Good of the Realm where he's her foster brother and charge, Caitlin is more wrapped up in manoeuvring him away from court intrigue, legitimizing her own presence at his side and being a ball of identity issues. And I absolutely love my dark!Felicity AUs where she is outright antagonistic and disapproving of Barry's love interests and sometimes of Barry himself. In the Olivarry stories where she is supportive and sympathetic, Felicity and Oliver themselves still acknowledge their own romantic potential. Which means Barry and Oliver falling in love creates tension between the three of them, and the men have to learn how not to hurt her or take her support for granted while they figure themselves out.

It's subtle ways, from my own sense of inadequacy when I see new worlds and characters and clever plots while I re-tread the same ones over and over, to the way even people who are supportive of my writing try to push me toward creating original content.

"You have so much potential. Why are you wasting it writing only fanfic?"

The fact of the matter is that I just. Like fanfic. I find rebuilding and reforming characters and situations within already-given parameters more fun than building them from ground up. I like having a ready template from which I can make permutations of the same thing. Maybe it's my inherent obsessive, fixating nature. When I love something, a song, a book, a tv show, I repeat it over and over for years until I've wrung every bit of imagination I can from it. There is a safety and joy in familiar, repeating patterns.

My obsession lives in the fine line between love and hate - I must love the potentiality of something while hating its execution enough to want to take it into my own hands. Anything that fulfils me in most every way has my gushing love and enthusiasm but does not snag that raw itch to catch hold of it and wrest it into other shapes and faces. When someone asks me if I love the source material of the things I transform I'm always hesitant to answer. It's a love-hate relationship really, one fuelling the other.

This is possibly not the healthiest place for the font of creativity to burst forth, but it's just how it's been since I was a small child daydreaming about being Tintin's girlfriend. There has to be a lack that calls to me, a void for me to insert myself. A snaggle-tooth I'm never done prodding.

Which is why original work is rather confounding to me. I can't consciously create a wanting in something I create for myself. It would feel silly, like deliberately laying a roof with a missing tile so it can irritate me everytime I see it. I know exactly how to fill that tile, I don't need to build another house around it.

Two clips in, it has yet failed to depress me and make me lose faith in humanity. I really should stop prodding it like a loose tooth to see when the pain will come.

Otoh, its so weird to me in shared universe shenanigans that their friends don't visit each other when in a jam. It's probably in the rulebook somewhere that when you crash a man's wedding you turn up to visit him when he's in prison. There could have been throwaway lines in both shows ("How's Barry doing?", "Oliver and Felicity dropped by yesterday" "Digg says Lyla's offering to pull some strings" or "does Oliver need help fending off this FBI investigation?") just to affirm that this is a shared universe, where people are actually friends with each other outside of magic and aliens and alt earth Nazis. The way they do in comic books.

This time even the timelines don't match up. But the CW has never been good with that sort of thing and I'm still trying to pretend Arrow doesn't exist anymore. So.

The other thing that grates on me is Nora's age. The way the girl acts she cannot be more than a kid of twenty-one tops. Even the aged-up Bart Allen who was the Flash for a spell in the comics had a corresponding maturity. Yet she's supposed to be from 2049 and born somewhere around 2019 - 2020 (Is Iris getting pregnant next season???) Part of her appeal is that she's very young, new to the hero biz, looking up to her older and wiser father who may be young but not a peer and certainly not younger than her. Literally the only reason they made her come from 2049 is because Barry Allen was dead in the comics from 1985 to 2009 (so actually 24 years) and they wanted to pay homage to that.

I always rearrange facts in my head when the show gets nonsensical. Things I decide happened off-screen: Barry comforting and being there for Iris when her Mom was dying, spending time with Cisco and Caitlin when they were going through all the crap they have, Team Arrow visiting Barry in prison and checking up on his family, Barry visiting Oliver in prison and checking up on his family. And now Nora from 2040 managing to get the 2049 newspaper from the Waverider/ Gideon/ The Legionnaires (she did mention Lightning Lad) and then, realizing its no use waiting for her father to come back, deciding to go back in time to save him.

That's not even counting the scenes I actively refuse to acknowledge/ rewrite entirely in my head. Oliver sleeping with Laurel after telling Tommy to go after her, Laurel prosecuting Moira, 80% of Arrow S3, Laurel dying, Barry deciding to let Eobard kill his mother like she wasnt a real person outside of his own life, Savitar being Barry, "I don't know what I'd do if this was all that was left of the man I love", "you lied to me too when you said you didn't have feelings for me" (I think I rooted for Eobard for the rest of the season after that one) "why didn't you ask for my father's permission", "its okay Dad I know you were just trying to protect me" (which Flashpoint actually did rewrite thank God), their treatment of Harry after he lost his knowledge, the whole wedding crashing dear Lord how traumatized am I by these shows.