Heartbeat: Meta Archive
Aug. 6th, 2022 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoHeartbeat [AO3]
Tom/Harry, Orion/Harry, 24k words, Explicit
Archived from tumblr, each reflection originally written at the time of posting the chapter. No log from ch. 1; log for ch. 3 lost to tumblr post editor.
This story was revised from an original (incomplete) version, posted and taken down in Feb 2022.
Changelog for Ch. 2:
This chapter marks my first substantial change from the original version, in a reordering of the scenes. Initially, Harry meets Tom at Borgin and Burkes at the end of the chapter, after more description of a week of time passing, including the sex scene with Orion that now closes the chapter. It was meant to start the slow burn of Harry breaking into Tom’s orbit.
I didn’t like the slow pace in my first go around. Harry spent too much time on his own, and in fixing that, I had to start early. Reduce the scope (of Harry’s life outside of Orion and Tom), cut some scenes. Simple enough!
The reordering was a more interesting choice for me. Harry was already asking Orion for a favor at the end of this sex scene in its original version, so I had an opportunity, but I needed an excuse for Tom to be relevant if I was going to have Harry invoke his name here. They hadn’t met yet, not until the end of the chapter. Flipping the order would solve the “how Harry met Tom” problem, but it also complicated that week-long timeline and Harry building up the confidence to go into B&B. But the slowness of the original was also an issue, and, well, I thought I might be able to make it work.
I’m a fan of dwelling in moments. The introduction to Sylvie’s café, here, is an example of that: setting a scene, learning a bit about daily life in this world, seeing the normality of it. That sort of thing works, and I’m keeping those parts. I’m not a fan of drawing out the introduction of characters that are key figures in a story, and I’d set up Tom poorly in the original. Harry was thinking about him, yes, but Harry was dithering. Orion and Tom wouldn’t dither—their shared history means they know how to interact with one another, and with Harry pushing them together, they will act.
So: flip the scenes, have Harry invoke Tom’s name early, and let Orion and Tom do their thing off-screen so that Tom can spend more time on it. And boy will he be on it in the next chapter.
Changelog for Ch. 4:
As we get further into this, I can’t decide whether I’m more surprised by how much I keep from the original or by how much I write new. I’m not sure what that means.
The opening scene with Orion and the dream sequence are from the original, with bits slightly changed for consistency and to reflect the changing order of other plot events. The reunion with Tom at the shop is new; the bit about Harry’s life is a thorough mix. But of course, new vs. old is hardly the entire story anymore, as even the “old” content has been so radically moved around, the order changed as I repurpose set pieces towards different ends. I think the sex with Orion hits diffrent, now that Harry’s having it after he’s had sex with Tom. Anyway.
I think about this story in terms of the moments where Tom and Orion are in the same place. Our longest point of separation was the build-up towards the threesome in the last chapter, as Harry maneuvers around them both and unwittingly incites them to come together. This is a break–they need one, following such a climax (lol), and the story needs time for Harry to feel like he’s got his bearings about him, that he has influence and control over this. Like dropping a rubber ball, though, each bounce (gap between meetings) gets a little smaller. The space separating Tom and Orion is collapsing, thanks to Harry’s meddling.
And that, truly, is the heart of the change in this portion of the story. In the first go, I thought I was better off drawing out their meeting, giving Harry more time with one or the other rather than putting all three on screen, and that was wrong. Harry’s the vector, and the instigator for this particular conflict, but he’s ultimately serving as a lens into a single point along a larger continuum.
Changelog for Ch. 5:
Nearly all of this chapter is new, and it’s the first to fit that description. A few parts of the party, mostly the entrance and pleasantly-chatty bits, existed; the rest is June/July 2022 vintage. So though the idea to have a public confrontation (with the risk of an audience) has been around, the execution of it, the nature of the fight, hasn’t.
I believe the original version was going to be less overt. More in line with how Harry felt at the start, seeing Tom’s behavior as centered on Harry, but as I’ve said a few times: 2.0 is about cutting out the meandering dreck and getting to the point. Harry can be delusional, but Tom and Orion don’t carry those same delusions. They’re not really modifying their behavior much to keep up Harry’s misconceptions; why would they? They don’t… care. Harry’s the ball they bounce back and forth, not a person in his own right. So I cut the idea of forcing them to be subtle and instead let them be so familiar with one another that they don’t need full sentences or proper nouns to have a fight. They’ve had the same fight a dozen times. The patterns are known. They do it without thought or shame, and Harry, in observance, has rightly no clue what’s happening except that something obviously is.
Also, it lets Harry have a chance to feel neglected and lash out. He’s quite passive before this moment, secure in attention being on him. It’s not, anymore, and he gets petty and jealous, which is very funny to me.
I promised that in this version, I would write a lot of sex scenes. One per chapter, actually; I’m proud of that. Part of what I wanted was not just more hot sex, but something that would gain meaning as we peel back the layers of the pre-existing Tom-Orion relationship. Someone in the comments remarked upon this, and I’ll reinforce, that this is a good point to go back and reread the threesome from chapter 3.
Well, I mean—maybe you’re reading this story having read my other takes on Tom/Orion and already know what to look for. I do like that pairing. But if not, this is one big milestone, where Harry is forced to face the idea that he isn’t the primary thing connecting those two men to one another.
There’s only one more chapter to go. I’m looking forward to it, and the ways it will further complicate these three characters’ tangle of connections. That one is entirely new text, but contains the other scene that motivated this fic’s existence (the first being the threesome).
Wrap-Up for Ch. 6:
How do we define an unhappy ending?
I think it’s a more difficult question than how we define a happy ending, which tend to all be happy in the same fundamental way. Forgive me for leaning on Anna Karenina; Tolstoy knew what he was saying. The multiplicity of unhappiness makes it hard to pin down, but if I constrain my domain space, I might be able to hazard a guess.
An unhappy ending for a Tom/Harry shipfic is one in which Harry is not the object of Tom’s interest or obsession.
I admit, I’m being a bit facetious. But that’s it, isn’t it? That’s a reasonable-enough statement to capture the feeling of how this ship works. (And others. It fits a mold.) The definition leaves room for darker or lighter stories, in accordance with reader taste; it doesn’t prescribe the boundaries of sexual content or violence or romance, among other controversial topics. Our main character’s centrality is tied to happiness or lack thereof.
So, it’s no secret that I write for love of Tom, not Harry. It should also not be a shock to hear me say that I find my interest in this particular ship rather limited to premises where Tom’s interest in Harry, insofar as it exists, is self-serving and conditional. Allow me to clarify: while I set out to write an “unhappy ending,” as I’ve defined above, I don’t consider it objectively so. Harry is the POV character, but he’s not the only character in this story. There are two other people whose perspectives, motivations, wants, needs are as heavily weighted, even though we don’t get to see those in direct speech or narration. And I admit that I’ve been tricky by deliberately hiding what’s going on in their minds, revealing it progressively so that you, reading it, might experience some of Harry’s betrayal. It’s tagged “unreliable narrator”—Harry’s unreliability is his optimism and narrowmindedness. He can’t conceive of Tom and Orion having some more complicated relationship than what he’s seen.
But! To unhappiness: is this an unhappy ending for Tom? For Orion?
It’s quite clearly not unhappy for Tom. He chooses to murder Harry, who he sees as posing a threat (or at least an annoyance) to him. Harry dies. He achieves his goals quite neatly. As a bonus, Orion agrees to continue to pay him for sex, under the terms Tom previously specified—those aren’t ever given in the fic, but as Tom says, they remain agreeable. Satisfactory ending.
Orion loses something in killing Harry. He’s sad to do it, and he liked having sex with Harry, who suited his tastes. So, he’s not happy. However, he doesn’t love Harry; Harry isn’t more meaningful to Orion than as his current sugar baby. Faced with Tom’s gift of disembowelment, Orion chooses to go for a clean kill, rather than attempting to get Harry to a hospital. Orion still wants to have sex with Tom, enough to pay for it, despite Tom leaving Harry in Orion’s fuck flat like a cat leaves a mouse at one’s doorstep. It’s really mild disappointment at worst, here.
I won’t call it an unhappy ending. Harry’s outcome is not the only one that matters.
—
Broadly, my current feeling on Heartbeat is that I’m glad it’s done. I wanted to write a “Harry dies at the end” Tomarry back in January; I only managed to make it stick after a failed run and some heavy revision. Though the foreshadowing, the callbacks, the thematic motifs, etc. were all as intentional as they are in any of the fics I write, I took less joy in writing and connecting together the parts of this narrative than I usually do. It is difficult to write a story that goes contrary to a ship tag’s norms. I thought I might have an easier go of it this time, since I knew what I was getting into and could anticipate the blowback, but it’s mostly just gone worse. Not socially! Aside from some heat on this final chapter, I feel much less demotivated by the reader reaction than I did when I last fought big-ship conventions. (Er, last time in a chaptered work. My prior two Tomarries don’t count; they were one-shots with very small audiences.)
Rather, despite being truly excited about the story—I promised myself I would never write Tom/Harry unless I was truly excited about the story—the journey to put it on the page was a slog. Most of my writing is not sloggish. Most of my writing, though inevitably containing a few scenes which require discipline, is the sort of thing that fills my mind between writing sessions. This was… the words came quickly and easily when I sat in front of my document, but I didn’t want to think about the project as it was ongoing. I did not enjoy the editing and rereading. I cannot tell if my prose is any good, or if I landed any of the themes and emotions I was trying to achieve.
Partly, I think that’s writing a ship I don’t ship for 23k words. That’s a lot of words for a NOTP. Partly, I think it’s that Harry’s POV was not fun in this; I had to let go of trying to achieve a “Harry voice” because my honest evaluation of Harry’s character and the voice that would best represent it is “it’s boring.” These are two things that normally drive the joy of writing, for me, and I hope I’ve learned to avoid future projects where the POV and the ship are both unappealing.
At one point, I considered writing this as a first-person narrative. I dropped the idea because the Tomarry ship tag is so utterly devoid of alternate POVs, and I was afraid to dump 20k+ words into something no one would read. Then, in my second go around, I didn’t want to rewrite so much text from a different POV. I think third person worked fine, mind. I just want to acknowledge that another choice might have made me happier, as second person POV did when I wrote Personal Assistant this month.
So I’m glad that it’s done. I have excised the idea from my brain, and I can rest happy knowing that I got the green checkmark of completion for this, even if it took another attempt. Hell, if I deleted the story now, I would still feel more accomplished as a result of having climbed that mountain. (And I do think about deleting this one. No promises either way.) I don’t see myself touching Tom/Harry again anytime soon—Assistant was a fluke, and I cannot guard against flukes, but I think I would like to return to my true interest in rarepairs and some of my old favorite pairings.
Tom/Harry, Orion/Harry, 24k words, Explicit
Archived from tumblr, each reflection originally written at the time of posting the chapter. No log from ch. 1; log for ch. 3 lost to tumblr post editor.
This story was revised from an original (incomplete) version, posted and taken down in Feb 2022.
Changelog for Ch. 2:
This chapter marks my first substantial change from the original version, in a reordering of the scenes. Initially, Harry meets Tom at Borgin and Burkes at the end of the chapter, after more description of a week of time passing, including the sex scene with Orion that now closes the chapter. It was meant to start the slow burn of Harry breaking into Tom’s orbit.
I didn’t like the slow pace in my first go around. Harry spent too much time on his own, and in fixing that, I had to start early. Reduce the scope (of Harry’s life outside of Orion and Tom), cut some scenes. Simple enough!
The reordering was a more interesting choice for me. Harry was already asking Orion for a favor at the end of this sex scene in its original version, so I had an opportunity, but I needed an excuse for Tom to be relevant if I was going to have Harry invoke his name here. They hadn’t met yet, not until the end of the chapter. Flipping the order would solve the “how Harry met Tom” problem, but it also complicated that week-long timeline and Harry building up the confidence to go into B&B. But the slowness of the original was also an issue, and, well, I thought I might be able to make it work.
I’m a fan of dwelling in moments. The introduction to Sylvie’s café, here, is an example of that: setting a scene, learning a bit about daily life in this world, seeing the normality of it. That sort of thing works, and I’m keeping those parts. I’m not a fan of drawing out the introduction of characters that are key figures in a story, and I’d set up Tom poorly in the original. Harry was thinking about him, yes, but Harry was dithering. Orion and Tom wouldn’t dither—their shared history means they know how to interact with one another, and with Harry pushing them together, they will act.
So: flip the scenes, have Harry invoke Tom’s name early, and let Orion and Tom do their thing off-screen so that Tom can spend more time on it. And boy will he be on it in the next chapter.
Changelog for Ch. 4:
As we get further into this, I can’t decide whether I’m more surprised by how much I keep from the original or by how much I write new. I’m not sure what that means.
The opening scene with Orion and the dream sequence are from the original, with bits slightly changed for consistency and to reflect the changing order of other plot events. The reunion with Tom at the shop is new; the bit about Harry’s life is a thorough mix. But of course, new vs. old is hardly the entire story anymore, as even the “old” content has been so radically moved around, the order changed as I repurpose set pieces towards different ends. I think the sex with Orion hits diffrent, now that Harry’s having it after he’s had sex with Tom. Anyway.
I think about this story in terms of the moments where Tom and Orion are in the same place. Our longest point of separation was the build-up towards the threesome in the last chapter, as Harry maneuvers around them both and unwittingly incites them to come together. This is a break–they need one, following such a climax (lol), and the story needs time for Harry to feel like he’s got his bearings about him, that he has influence and control over this. Like dropping a rubber ball, though, each bounce (gap between meetings) gets a little smaller. The space separating Tom and Orion is collapsing, thanks to Harry’s meddling.
And that, truly, is the heart of the change in this portion of the story. In the first go, I thought I was better off drawing out their meeting, giving Harry more time with one or the other rather than putting all three on screen, and that was wrong. Harry’s the vector, and the instigator for this particular conflict, but he’s ultimately serving as a lens into a single point along a larger continuum.
Changelog for Ch. 5:
Nearly all of this chapter is new, and it’s the first to fit that description. A few parts of the party, mostly the entrance and pleasantly-chatty bits, existed; the rest is June/July 2022 vintage. So though the idea to have a public confrontation (with the risk of an audience) has been around, the execution of it, the nature of the fight, hasn’t.
I believe the original version was going to be less overt. More in line with how Harry felt at the start, seeing Tom’s behavior as centered on Harry, but as I’ve said a few times: 2.0 is about cutting out the meandering dreck and getting to the point. Harry can be delusional, but Tom and Orion don’t carry those same delusions. They’re not really modifying their behavior much to keep up Harry’s misconceptions; why would they? They don’t… care. Harry’s the ball they bounce back and forth, not a person in his own right. So I cut the idea of forcing them to be subtle and instead let them be so familiar with one another that they don’t need full sentences or proper nouns to have a fight. They’ve had the same fight a dozen times. The patterns are known. They do it without thought or shame, and Harry, in observance, has rightly no clue what’s happening except that something obviously is.
Also, it lets Harry have a chance to feel neglected and lash out. He’s quite passive before this moment, secure in attention being on him. It’s not, anymore, and he gets petty and jealous, which is very funny to me.
I promised that in this version, I would write a lot of sex scenes. One per chapter, actually; I’m proud of that. Part of what I wanted was not just more hot sex, but something that would gain meaning as we peel back the layers of the pre-existing Tom-Orion relationship. Someone in the comments remarked upon this, and I’ll reinforce, that this is a good point to go back and reread the threesome from chapter 3.
Well, I mean—maybe you’re reading this story having read my other takes on Tom/Orion and already know what to look for. I do like that pairing. But if not, this is one big milestone, where Harry is forced to face the idea that he isn’t the primary thing connecting those two men to one another.
There’s only one more chapter to go. I’m looking forward to it, and the ways it will further complicate these three characters’ tangle of connections. That one is entirely new text, but contains the other scene that motivated this fic’s existence (the first being the threesome).
Wrap-Up for Ch. 6:
How do we define an unhappy ending?
I think it’s a more difficult question than how we define a happy ending, which tend to all be happy in the same fundamental way. Forgive me for leaning on Anna Karenina; Tolstoy knew what he was saying. The multiplicity of unhappiness makes it hard to pin down, but if I constrain my domain space, I might be able to hazard a guess.
An unhappy ending for a Tom/Harry shipfic is one in which Harry is not the object of Tom’s interest or obsession.
I admit, I’m being a bit facetious. But that’s it, isn’t it? That’s a reasonable-enough statement to capture the feeling of how this ship works. (And others. It fits a mold.) The definition leaves room for darker or lighter stories, in accordance with reader taste; it doesn’t prescribe the boundaries of sexual content or violence or romance, among other controversial topics. Our main character’s centrality is tied to happiness or lack thereof.
So, it’s no secret that I write for love of Tom, not Harry. It should also not be a shock to hear me say that I find my interest in this particular ship rather limited to premises where Tom’s interest in Harry, insofar as it exists, is self-serving and conditional. Allow me to clarify: while I set out to write an “unhappy ending,” as I’ve defined above, I don’t consider it objectively so. Harry is the POV character, but he’s not the only character in this story. There are two other people whose perspectives, motivations, wants, needs are as heavily weighted, even though we don’t get to see those in direct speech or narration. And I admit that I’ve been tricky by deliberately hiding what’s going on in their minds, revealing it progressively so that you, reading it, might experience some of Harry’s betrayal. It’s tagged “unreliable narrator”—Harry’s unreliability is his optimism and narrowmindedness. He can’t conceive of Tom and Orion having some more complicated relationship than what he’s seen.
But! To unhappiness: is this an unhappy ending for Tom? For Orion?
It’s quite clearly not unhappy for Tom. He chooses to murder Harry, who he sees as posing a threat (or at least an annoyance) to him. Harry dies. He achieves his goals quite neatly. As a bonus, Orion agrees to continue to pay him for sex, under the terms Tom previously specified—those aren’t ever given in the fic, but as Tom says, they remain agreeable. Satisfactory ending.
Orion loses something in killing Harry. He’s sad to do it, and he liked having sex with Harry, who suited his tastes. So, he’s not happy. However, he doesn’t love Harry; Harry isn’t more meaningful to Orion than as his current sugar baby. Faced with Tom’s gift of disembowelment, Orion chooses to go for a clean kill, rather than attempting to get Harry to a hospital. Orion still wants to have sex with Tom, enough to pay for it, despite Tom leaving Harry in Orion’s fuck flat like a cat leaves a mouse at one’s doorstep. It’s really mild disappointment at worst, here.
I won’t call it an unhappy ending. Harry’s outcome is not the only one that matters.
—
Broadly, my current feeling on Heartbeat is that I’m glad it’s done. I wanted to write a “Harry dies at the end” Tomarry back in January; I only managed to make it stick after a failed run and some heavy revision. Though the foreshadowing, the callbacks, the thematic motifs, etc. were all as intentional as they are in any of the fics I write, I took less joy in writing and connecting together the parts of this narrative than I usually do. It is difficult to write a story that goes contrary to a ship tag’s norms. I thought I might have an easier go of it this time, since I knew what I was getting into and could anticipate the blowback, but it’s mostly just gone worse. Not socially! Aside from some heat on this final chapter, I feel much less demotivated by the reader reaction than I did when I last fought big-ship conventions. (Er, last time in a chaptered work. My prior two Tomarries don’t count; they were one-shots with very small audiences.)
Rather, despite being truly excited about the story—I promised myself I would never write Tom/Harry unless I was truly excited about the story—the journey to put it on the page was a slog. Most of my writing is not sloggish. Most of my writing, though inevitably containing a few scenes which require discipline, is the sort of thing that fills my mind between writing sessions. This was… the words came quickly and easily when I sat in front of my document, but I didn’t want to think about the project as it was ongoing. I did not enjoy the editing and rereading. I cannot tell if my prose is any good, or if I landed any of the themes and emotions I was trying to achieve.
Partly, I think that’s writing a ship I don’t ship for 23k words. That’s a lot of words for a NOTP. Partly, I think it’s that Harry’s POV was not fun in this; I had to let go of trying to achieve a “Harry voice” because my honest evaluation of Harry’s character and the voice that would best represent it is “it’s boring.” These are two things that normally drive the joy of writing, for me, and I hope I’ve learned to avoid future projects where the POV and the ship are both unappealing.
At one point, I considered writing this as a first-person narrative. I dropped the idea because the Tomarry ship tag is so utterly devoid of alternate POVs, and I was afraid to dump 20k+ words into something no one would read. Then, in my second go around, I didn’t want to rewrite so much text from a different POV. I think third person worked fine, mind. I just want to acknowledge that another choice might have made me happier, as second person POV did when I wrote Personal Assistant this month.
So I’m glad that it’s done. I have excised the idea from my brain, and I can rest happy knowing that I got the green checkmark of completion for this, even if it took another attempt. Hell, if I deleted the story now, I would still feel more accomplished as a result of having climbed that mountain. (And I do think about deleting this one. No promises either way.) I don’t see myself touching Tom/Harry again anytime soon—Assistant was a fluke, and I cannot guard against flukes, but I think I would like to return to my true interest in rarepairs and some of my old favorite pairings.
