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Running on Empty "making of" featurette
Well, Running on Empty came out on top of the poll ... and it happens to also be a story that I think I can say more than a few sentences about, so here it is:
Running on Empty: Behind the Scenes Featurette (illustrated!)
Running on Empty: Link to story
It seems a little odd to say this now, with so many other stories under my belt, but back when I wrote this in June of '06, I thought this would be my definitive story in this fandom -- my big hurrah, the epic story in which I said everything I wanted to say before I moved on to other fandoms.
The thing was, I'd already written two relatively long stories for SGA (Plumber's Helper and That Which is Broken) and I just don't normally stay in a fandom long enough to do more than one or two of those. As I worked on Running on Empty, it really felt like that story. I loved the writing process of this story more than any I've written since; it just flowed, every word. I could visualize everything as I wrote: the lonely empty mountainsides, the dark woods, the abandoned village in the rain, the river with its banks of scattered rocks. More than any of my other SGA stories, too, this one is drawn from places I've actually been (but more on that shortly). As the story went on, I realized that one of my aims in this story was to push Sheppard and McKay, but especially McKay, right to the edge of their endurance and beyond. That scene at the end where Rodney breaks down crying by the crashed dart -- I was about 1/3 or so done writing the rest of it when that scene came to me. Up to that point, I'd pretty much just been larking about, writing the individual chapters with McKay and Sheppard fighting the Wraith, but not really having any idea where it was going. That was where it clicked for me: "this is what I'm heading towards," thought I, and the whole rest of the story became a process of getting Rodney to that ragged emotional edge. When I finished writing this story, I really believed, at that point, that I'd done everything with these characters, as individuals and in their relationship with each other, that I could possibly do. I was done.
.... for a couple of days, before I started working on The Killing Frost and realized that what I actually needed was an ensemble story for a change of pace because I'd just spent about a month and a half working on a very emotionally-intense Sheppard and McKay story.
Sigh.
Anyway, moving along to the story itself -- I've sometimes said that I begin my stories, at least my successful stories, with a really vivid image or mood. It's not absolutely necessary, but the stories that I'm most likely to stick with and complete usually have something like that at their heart. The foundation of this story is the memory of a walk I took on Alaska's Kodiak Island in fall 2004. I'd been sent there for work (the newspaper where I work, in Fairbanks, also owns the Kodiak paper) and took an afternoon to go hiking with a co-worker in Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park just outside town. Southern Alaska is littered with the remains of World War II fortifications -- Alaska being the only part of the continental U.S. that experienced actual land combat in WWII -- and that's what Abercrombie Park is, a former WWII staging area. We wandered through huge trees with cold October sunlight shafting through them, investigating concrete bunkers draped with moss and slowly crumbling in the damp sea air. The gorgeous abandonment of the place made a huge impression on me; this probably isn't the only story where I'll use it, but that was definitely the starting point. The abandoned concrete bunker where Rodney wakes up in Chapter Two is absolutely one of those 60-year-old Kodiak bunkers, and the whole autumn-in-the-mountains feeling of the story is rooted in the crisp sharpness of a sunny October day on Kodiak Island.
You can see how much that initial inspiration changed as I developed the story, because the mountains in Running on Empty are nowhere near the sea, the bunkers play very little role in the story, and overall the vegetation is sort of a cross between the Southcentral Alaskan semi-alpine forests of my childhood and the pine forests that I encountered occasionally in the Lower 48 during the four years that I lived there -- it doesn't resemble Kodiak's moss-draped giant pines and arid hills very much at all. Still, as I wrote the story I deliberately tried to recapture the basic feeling, even if not every detail, of that walk in the evergreen forests by the sea.
The opening scene where Sheppard wakes up in the field is actually taken almost whole-cloth from a story I started writing several years ago. The protagonist wakes up in a field with no idea how he got there and no memory ... and, well, things developed in a different direction from there, eventually petering out into a cloud of confusion and apathy, as so many of my original stories do. The story had been defunct for some time; however, I did like the opening scene and didn't want to lose it, so I pulled out big swathes of description for the first couple of pages. (Hey, it's not plagiarism if you steal from yourself, is it? You don't want to know how many of my old stories I've ruthlessly culled for parts, the same way that villagers since time immemorial have pulled apart ruined temples to long-forgotten gods and built their houses out of the ancient stones.)
I believe I wrote the whole story in about a month, which is phenomenally fast even for me; like I said before, it just came. With some of my stories, the plots undergo a lot of alterations as I write and I end up cutting out big chunks, but that didn't happen here, because the plot was so nicely linear. This isn't a complicated story and it didn't even require much research. The only hard parts were figuring out how I wanted the boys to meet up and how to get them off the planet, but mainly it was just a straightforward point-a-to-point-z adventure story, with the obligatory complications along the way. I actually wrote quite a bit of the story at work, which I can't always get away with, but it worked out well in this case because work was sort of slow, and the story itself broke down nicely into bite-sized chunks; I could write an individual scene without really needing to refresh my memory on the scenes before and after.
As mentioned before, I drew heavily on my Alaskan childhood in writing this. The woods were sort of a hodgepodge of different woods I've wandered around in. The brushy ravines were very much drawn from brush-choked ravines in the mountains of my childhood; the scenes of Sheppard blundering around in the creek in the dark were drawn from some of my own hiking experience, stumbling around after dark in unfamiliar hill country and trying not to fall into those little half-hidden streams. My sister and brother and I did, indeed, build little dams in mountain creeks from rocks and sticks, although we weren't trying to use them to trap and kill an alien space vampire. And the river where Rodney wakes up is visually based on the Tazlina River near Glennallen, where my husband grew up -- a glacier-fed river with impressive cliffs and boulder-strewn rocky beaches. (I made Rodney climb a cliff that was much more intimidating than anything the real Tazlina has to offer, though.)
As a kid, I was tremendously fond of boys' adventure books -- Jim Kjelgaard, Black Stallion, Treasure Island and its derivatives, Julie of the Wolves; all those books about a boy (usually) and his dog, horse, plane, boat, sidekick, etc., pitting himself against the wilderness and, as the plot requires, robbers/pirates/murderers/etc. in the wilderness as well. I ate them up, and I think this story was in some ways my homage to the adventure stories I grew up on.
I was really amazed when I started this story that this idea -- characters as Runners -- hadn't been used in the fandom yet, as far as I'd seen. In the year and a half since then, I've seen a couple of other stories that do use the Wraith-tracker idea (usually on Sheppard), but I'm honestly surprised it isn't more widespread. There's such awesome action/adventure/angst potential! Regardless of which characters you prefer in that sort of role, fandom ought to be all over it.
Images: Header banner is built from one of my photographs of Abercrombie Park plus two Season 2 publicity stills of Sheppard and McKay -- the story is supposed to take place in the general Season 2 era. The two top photos are of WWII bunkers in Abercrombie Park, possibly different angles on the same one; the bottom two are my husband's photos of the Tazlina River about a mile or so from the house where he grew up, outside the town of Glennallen, AK.
Running on Empty: Behind the Scenes Featurette (illustrated!)
Running on Empty: Link to story
It seems a little odd to say this now, with so many other stories under my belt, but back when I wrote this in June of '06, I thought this would be my definitive story in this fandom -- my big hurrah, the epic story in which I said everything I wanted to say before I moved on to other fandoms.
The thing was, I'd already written two relatively long stories for SGA (Plumber's Helper and That Which is Broken) and I just don't normally stay in a fandom long enough to do more than one or two of those. As I worked on Running on Empty, it really felt like that story. I loved the writing process of this story more than any I've written since; it just flowed, every word. I could visualize everything as I wrote: the lonely empty mountainsides, the dark woods, the abandoned village in the rain, the river with its banks of scattered rocks. More than any of my other SGA stories, too, this one is drawn from places I've actually been (but more on that shortly). As the story went on, I realized that one of my aims in this story was to push Sheppard and McKay, but especially McKay, right to the edge of their endurance and beyond. That scene at the end where Rodney breaks down crying by the crashed dart -- I was about 1/3 or so done writing the rest of it when that scene came to me. Up to that point, I'd pretty much just been larking about, writing the individual chapters with McKay and Sheppard fighting the Wraith, but not really having any idea where it was going. That was where it clicked for me: "this is what I'm heading towards," thought I, and the whole rest of the story became a process of getting Rodney to that ragged emotional edge. When I finished writing this story, I really believed, at that point, that I'd done everything with these characters, as individuals and in their relationship with each other, that I could possibly do. I was done.
.... for a couple of days, before I started working on The Killing Frost and realized that what I actually needed was an ensemble story for a change of pace because I'd just spent about a month and a half working on a very emotionally-intense Sheppard and McKay story.
Sigh.
Anyway, moving along to the story itself -- I've sometimes said that I begin my stories, at least my successful stories, with a really vivid image or mood. It's not absolutely necessary, but the stories that I'm most likely to stick with and complete usually have something like that at their heart. The foundation of this story is the memory of a walk I took on Alaska's Kodiak Island in fall 2004. I'd been sent there for work (the newspaper where I work, in Fairbanks, also owns the Kodiak paper) and took an afternoon to go hiking with a co-worker in Fort Abercrombie State Historical Park just outside town. Southern Alaska is littered with the remains of World War II fortifications -- Alaska being the only part of the continental U.S. that experienced actual land combat in WWII -- and that's what Abercrombie Park is, a former WWII staging area. We wandered through huge trees with cold October sunlight shafting through them, investigating concrete bunkers draped with moss and slowly crumbling in the damp sea air. The gorgeous abandonment of the place made a huge impression on me; this probably isn't the only story where I'll use it, but that was definitely the starting point. The abandoned concrete bunker where Rodney wakes up in Chapter Two is absolutely one of those 60-year-old Kodiak bunkers, and the whole autumn-in-the-mountains feeling of the story is rooted in the crisp sharpness of a sunny October day on Kodiak Island.
You can see how much that initial inspiration changed as I developed the story, because the mountains in Running on Empty are nowhere near the sea, the bunkers play very little role in the story, and overall the vegetation is sort of a cross between the Southcentral Alaskan semi-alpine forests of my childhood and the pine forests that I encountered occasionally in the Lower 48 during the four years that I lived there -- it doesn't resemble Kodiak's moss-draped giant pines and arid hills very much at all. Still, as I wrote the story I deliberately tried to recapture the basic feeling, even if not every detail, of that walk in the evergreen forests by the sea.The opening scene where Sheppard wakes up in the field is actually taken almost whole-cloth from a story I started writing several years ago. The protagonist wakes up in a field with no idea how he got there and no memory ... and, well, things developed in a different direction from there, eventually petering out into a cloud of confusion and apathy, as so many of my original stories do. The story had been defunct for some time; however, I did like the opening scene and didn't want to lose it, so I pulled out big swathes of description for the first couple of pages. (Hey, it's not plagiarism if you steal from yourself, is it? You don't want to know how many of my old stories I've ruthlessly culled for parts, the same way that villagers since time immemorial have pulled apart ruined temples to long-forgotten gods and built their houses out of the ancient stones.)
I believe I wrote the whole story in about a month, which is phenomenally fast even for me; like I said before, it just came. With some of my stories, the plots undergo a lot of alterations as I write and I end up cutting out big chunks, but that didn't happen here, because the plot was so nicely linear. This isn't a complicated story and it didn't even require much research. The only hard parts were figuring out how I wanted the boys to meet up and how to get them off the planet, but mainly it was just a straightforward point-a-to-point-z adventure story, with the obligatory complications along the way. I actually wrote quite a bit of the story at work, which I can't always get away with, but it worked out well in this case because work was sort of slow, and the story itself broke down nicely into bite-sized chunks; I could write an individual scene without really needing to refresh my memory on the scenes before and after.
As mentioned before, I drew heavily on my Alaskan childhood in writing this. The woods were sort of a hodgepodge of different woods I've wandered around in. The brushy ravines were very much drawn from brush-choked ravines in the mountains of my childhood; the scenes of Sheppard blundering around in the creek in the dark were drawn from some of my own hiking experience, stumbling around after dark in unfamiliar hill country and trying not to fall into those little half-hidden streams. My sister and brother and I did, indeed, build little dams in mountain creeks from rocks and sticks, although we weren't trying to use them to trap and kill an alien space vampire. And the river where Rodney wakes up is visually based on the Tazlina River near Glennallen, where my husband grew up -- a glacier-fed river with impressive cliffs and boulder-strewn rocky beaches. (I made Rodney climb a cliff that was much more intimidating than anything the real Tazlina has to offer, though.)
As a kid, I was tremendously fond of boys' adventure books -- Jim Kjelgaard, Black Stallion, Treasure Island and its derivatives, Julie of the Wolves; all those books about a boy (usually) and his dog, horse, plane, boat, sidekick, etc., pitting himself against the wilderness and, as the plot requires, robbers/pirates/murderers/etc. in the wilderness as well. I ate them up, and I think this story was in some ways my homage to the adventure stories I grew up on.
I was really amazed when I started this story that this idea -- characters as Runners -- hadn't been used in the fandom yet, as far as I'd seen. In the year and a half since then, I've seen a couple of other stories that do use the Wraith-tracker idea (usually on Sheppard), but I'm honestly surprised it isn't more widespread. There's such awesome action/adventure/angst potential! Regardless of which characters you prefer in that sort of role, fandom ought to be all over it.
Images: Header banner is built from one of my photographs of Abercrombie Park plus two Season 2 publicity stills of Sheppard and McKay -- the story is supposed to take place in the general Season 2 era. The two top photos are of WWII bunkers in Abercrombie Park, possibly different angles on the same one; the bottom two are my husband's photos of the Tazlina River about a mile or so from the house where he grew up, outside the town of Glennallen, AK.
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I don't know why there aren't more Runner stories either! I think I've read three other than this one. (Sheppard, Sheppard and Ronon, Ronon and Zelenka.)
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Ronon and Zelenka as Runners? What a fascinating idea -- I don't suppose you remember where you saw the story?
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And thanks!
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It's a great adventure fic with lots of angst and whump, and great kids! It's interesting to see the thoguht processes behind it, and the places (great photos, love the banner) - and I had to laugh at the:
because you just don't know when those pesky little plot bunnies are going to strike, do you?!! LOL! I, for one, am *so very* glad that you're still writing wonderful stories in this fandom, and will mourn the day that you leave it, if you ever do.
And now I'm off to write your newest fic - a lovely Christmas present to us all - thanks!
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(also, man, I've been wanting to visit Alaska for YEARS. Those pictures are really pushing me over the edge.)
This was really cool seeing what real life things inspired you for the story and what your thought process was while writing it.
I still remember reading that story. I think "Running on Empty" was among the first five Stargate stories I ever read and I kept telling myself "okay, just finish this section and then you have to do the dishes/go for a run/etc" and every section I couldn't stop - I had to know what was coming next. It was so well paced and I could picture the action and the places and the world felt so real and I just loved every minute of it. I loved the way it bounced back between Sheppard and McKay and how we had to figure out what was going on along with the characters and the quotes from the field manual and all of it so very much.
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This is still my favorite of all the long stories I've done. I know it sounds egotistical to say this, but I just think it's a very well-constructed story, despite not having put much actual thought into its construction! It's very focused, which sounds a little strange for a story that long, but I think it worked much better from a plot standpoint than my stories often do. Some of my stories, I can't even look at, but I still occasionally go back and re-read parts of this one.
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I like seeing people proud of their stories and I think it's very much a story to be proud of because, yeah, it did feel very well-constructed in reading it.
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I think, of the various fanfic I've written, this is probably one of the most personal in a sense of working in things that have meaning to *me*.
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That story took forever to get through!
Sitting through it all, getting up to get various things done (dishes, laundry, etc), and trying-TRYING!!!-to finish it before someone else interupted me again...it took forever.
BUT IT WAS WORTH IT!
You're entire fic was just fantastic, and I enjoyed each and every minute of it.
Thanks for giving us something to read that will (more than likely) be stuck in our memories forever! :D
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