switchbladeeyes

From

snowflake_challenge: Talk about a current fannish project (fic, art, vid, crochet, funko pop village) (that you are creating or enjoying)

I have several Forever Knight fan fiction projects that I tinker with here and there, but one specifically that I've put a lot of work into, and yet finishing it has eluded me. I keep torching my drafts to the ground because they just haven't been quite right.

It's the elusive Daniel fic that I can't let go. Daniel, the child-turned-vampire from season 1's "Father Figure” haunted me.

Three of my five FK stories answer questions or reconcile issues that the series left unresolved. I like writing fan fiction of this ilk. Since FK left a lot unresolved, there's a lot of room for us fic writers to fill in the gaps. "What happened to Daniel?" is a huge one for me.

First, what happened to him in the sense of, after the last flashback in "Father Figure," what became of him? The show left that question hanging in the air when Natalie asked Nick near the end of the episode, and he didn't answer. Daniel is never seen nor talked about ever again.

Second, what happened to him in the sense of, why exactly did LaCroix turn him into a vampire? There's what LaCroix said to Nick, and then there's whatever actually went down, which Nick was not present for. A big issue for me here is trying to reconcile this episode with the more developed characterizations of both LaCroix and Janette later in the series. The child vampire as an "interesting experiment" angle doesn't square with me for either of them. That LaCroix would say that to Nick, I absolutely believe, because he loves pushing Nick's buttons. But actually doing it, and Janette going along with it, would be quite something else. In my head, there was more to that story.

So that's the raison d'être for me wanting to write the story. The actual writing of it... oy.

To give you a sense of how this has been going, I wrote nearly the entire story in a case fic context, decided "this isn't working," and started over. (I'm sure I'll be able to recycle the murder investigation into another story, though, so it's not a total loss.)

I then redrafted it with many changes, including a totally different police investigation, and it still just wasn't right. So I torched that one, went back to the drawing board, and outlined a different story. I started writing that one, and NOPE. Still not working.

Back to square one. I outlined yet another version and started writing. And that one has been sticking. I think I finally have figured out the direction this needs to go. (Of course, I thought that two drafts ago so we'll see.) Still a case fic with a murder investigation running parallel to the vampire story. Lots of Schanke on the case fic side. Also brings in another past character.

So I'll keep plugging away, and maybe someday I'll actually finish it, and y'all will know what I think happened to Daniel.

Thanks for coming to my personal fan fiction TED talk :-D