Arctic Light

Back in the dawn of time (i.e. 2008), naye and I teamed up for SGA Big Bang and co-wrote 85K of magic/urban-fantasy AU, with telepathic whales and winged Ronon and John as an elf.

It's on AO3 if you want to read it: A Clear and Different Light.

naye was talking about it just recently at her journal (posts here and here) and this led to talking about the version of it that almost happened. Originally we had planned to cross over this 'verse with the canon 'verse, but when we hit that point in the plot (about 50K in) we started writing it, got about 7K into the crossover part, and realized that (for a number of reasons) it wasn't going to work; this was not the story that we wanted to tell, and the plot had to go a different way instead.

schneefink asked if she could see the alt-version, which we never actually posted anywhere, so rather than posting in naye's comments, I'm posting it here. This goes AU from the existing AU in Chapter 8, in which Rodney and Jeannie are constructing a gate to try to find Rodney's missing teammates. Originally it was going to have a very different outcome.

( 7K of 2008-era alternate universe SGA under the cut )

Tao of Whales - SGA, McKay/Sheppard + team, PG13, 17K wds; basically Tao of Rodney in the "whaleverse". This takes place a few months after A Clear and Different Light. If you haven't read ACaDL, you should probably do that first or this will be kind of WTF.

This was written for bellewhan's gift in the Handmade Meme that was going around last winter. It's posted over at the whaleverse comm.

*is ashamed of self*

naye and I have created an LJ community for posting art and short stories related to our Big Bang story: whaleverse! We're just beginning to post things over there, and it is totally open to anyone who wants to contribute something. We don't mind other people playing in our sandbox at all - and you have to see this absolutely gorgeous picture that bellewhan painted of baby Meredith and the whales; I just have no words for how lovely it is!

More happy!

With all the many stories over at sgabigbang, the mods are offering each writer an opportunity to put up promotional material for her story. They had a list of different options - we can have people write DVD commentaries or reviews for us, or we can solicit questions and do a little Q&A, sort of a mini-interview with us!

naye and I both loved the idea of a Q&A. Here is your opportunity to ask questions about A Clear and Different Light - questions about the writing/collaborating process, what gave us the idea for this or that, clarification on anything that seemed unclear, more info on anything in the world-building - basically, any question that you have, anything you wondered about while reading the story ... please ask!

We will be writing up the answers together and posting them at sgabigbang in a few weeks.

So! Questions?

Title: A Clear and Different Light
Authors: naye and friendshipper
Word Count: 88,000
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard (with lots of team)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Rodney McKay, raised by a pod of telepathic whales. John Sheppard, mage with fae blood. Teyla Emmagan, rune-scientist. Ronon Dex, winged soldier. On the waystation of Atlantis, they're about to become embroiled in an age-old war against a brutal enemy.
Beautifully illustrated by bellewhan and cynicatlantis!

Main sgabigbang website is here and the AU subsection is here. The site is gorgeous this year!

We have a feedback post in sgabigbangfb. Please don't feedback the story here; please leave feedback at our feedback post so that both authors will be able to see and respond to it!

Edit: Some of the bugs are still being worked out of the website, and it appears that our section breaks, i.e. the *hr* tags, don't appear in most of the skins on the site. On my browser (Firefox, Mac) the only skin that displays the section breaks is "Quite Content". So it's recommended that you use that skin to view the story for the least confusing reading experience. *g* This appears to have been fixed! Let me know if you experience any additional formatting problems when you read it, and I'll ... uh. Stare at the screen and weep, because there's not a whole lot else I can do. XD But, no, seriously, if you have trouble viewing the story for whatever reason, leave a comment and I'll see what the mods can do to fix it.

Edit2: naye has a small preview of the story at her journal, if you'd like a taste!

naye and I have discovered that our sgabigbang story is not gen after all. It appears to be slash. I swear we did not do this. And yet, our 60,000 words of gen seems to have turned, entirely without our knowledge, into 60,000 words of pre-slash. I seem to recall having a discussion with someone not too long ago in which I claimed that this never, ever happens to me. Story that starts out gen and develops a pairing later on? Ha! Never happens!

Oops.

What's really funny is that we both came to the same realization more or less at once ... we'd been trying our damnedest to keep it gen and getting more and more frustrated with the story, and finally gave up on the whole gen thing, and suddenly it's all working again! Yay!

The chat kinda went south after that:

( Chat transcript )