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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
cosmictuesdays

andtheyfightcrime asked:

Chapter 10 in Set off like Geese for the director’s cut commentary

wrap her up in a package of light got its title from “Anna Begins” by Counting Crows, which isn’t their best song about depression - that honor goes to “She Don’t Want Nobody Near” - but has a lot to say, very well, about unmanageable situations you can only work on living through. The original lyrics are “package of lies”, not light, which is more apt but a lot less poetic.

It originally came earlier in the story, just after chapter eight. It was meant to get directly inside Buffy’s head and show her daily life right after the major revelation of the depths of her depression were revealed in the narrative, but one of my beta readers said the overall narrative flow didn’t work with the chapters progressing in the way that they did. As such, it got shuffled around to come a little bit later. It still serves its purpose, and in retrospect, I don’t know what waiting to get inside Buffy’s head does to the impact of finally getting there.

Some of the moments and sequences come from my lived-in experience and some come from what I’ve read and heard in firsthand accounts. I did shelf-reading as a library assistant in high school and I know people who deal with those same kinds of intrusive thoughts. The thing about Drusilla’s inner ears reacting to lowered atmospheric pressure is something that happens to me - though for a different set of reasons than what she lived through there - and I don’t know anyone who’s gone through a bad time to not have looked at a plate of food they’ve made and think, Life will be all right for as long as it takes me to eat this.

(I’ve since made that snack a few times. It’s not the most lavish thing in the world, but with good bananas, it’s really tasty.)

I didn’t want Buffy’s depression to be overwrought, histrionic, or melodramatic. Depression is debilitating and god-awful, and it’s also a very boring thing to live through. Buffy’s current coping mechanisms are a lot healthier than her old ones, and I wanted to show those old ones as both more dangerous and very banal, because banal was the most feeling she could muster at the time. I also didn’t want to present her sexual history with any shame or disapproval. It wasn’t healthy, but she herself doesn’t think badly of it, and I didn’t want anyone reading to think badly of her for doing it, either. So: presenting it with plain language and no narrative punishment.

One thing I really liked about this chapter was giving Buffy that conversation with Drusilla about not feeling upset about being sick. It’s a tricky thing when one has a mental illness or disability - because being upset about the symptoms is very different than being upset about being sick. Which Drusilla isn’t. Buffy’s never had it framed that way before, and it was a huge boon to Spike to have someone already used to thinking about it that way when he got his diagnosis.

Anything else about it you wanted to know?

cosmictuesdays

tinsnip asked:

⭐

I mostly want to say that the segment on the couch in chapter one of aim me up at the sky gave me a lot of trouble until I remembered: there’s no need to be coy. The characters I was writing, at that point in time, had no reason or inclination to dance around any subject. They’d all get right down to business, and Dawn is in one of the very few places she knows it’s okay with bringing up otherwise-taboo subjects. So of course everyone’s going to be as honest as possible with each other.

It made for a fun night when I realized that. It broke a jam I’d been having and helped get me into the rest of the story’s proper rhythm.