Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love reel_merlin.

I suicidally signed up for two reel_merlin fics in July: Imagine Me & You, and Laws of Attraction. (RM, like many others of its kind, is a comm where people write Merlin AU fic based on movie plots. You sign up for a movie and, in this case, get a two-month deadline.) Due to circumstances quite beyond my control, I found myself being signed up for co-writing a fic with firstlightofeos; after much debate, we settled for Closer. Runi also had a fic of her own to write—Mean Girls. I of course didn't actually start writing much of my fics until, like, two weeks before the deadline (which was September 1st; later, it was extended to September 8th).

In the meantime, Runi and I discussed the Closer fic at length. And by that I mean TO A TRULY RIDICULOUS EXTENT. Seriously. 'Overthinking' doesn't begin to cover it. We watched the movie—I think I watched it, like, three times in the past month—and read (and annotated) the play, and discussed each character thoroughly—their motivations, their personalities, the play/movie's recurring motifs and timeline quirks, the locations, shit, everything. We drafted an outline, picked a structure and what would happen in each scene. I started spouting Closer quotes in all kinds of everyday conversation; I swear, even my brain started monologuing in Closer quotes.

Er. We ended up not writing the Closer fic, and chose to focus on our individual fics.

Laws of Attraction somehow became an amorphous monster that took over my life in the past few days. The movie itself is a fluffy romcom about two divorce lawyers who hate each other, have sex, continue hating each other, get drunk, get married, stop hating each other, and continue married. Straightforward, right? Apparently not. For some reason, my brain decided to indulge the following ideas:

1. Giving Merlin only one magic power. Since the character he's based on in the movie is addicted to the Weather Channel, Merlin got stuck with weather manipulation. Simple and straightforward—we've all seen X-Men, after all.

2. Adapting Merlin episode plots in addition to using its characters, possibly transforming plots to destroy Camelot into divorce cases. Easy.

3. Being reasonably faithful to American law, which would probably require a little bit of research, but not that much—I'm in Law School, for God's sake; surely researching a tiny bit of US law couldn't be that difficult.

4. Having added a couple of subtle quotes/references to some of my favourite movies/TV shows in the first few pages, I thought it might be fun to have a few more throughout the fic. Fun! Yay.

This of course horribly and very much inevitably mutated into:

1. Asking friends, acquaintances, and random strangers on the street, "What would you do if you had the superpower to change the weather?"

2. Having to write all episodes into the fic, because I'm just that obsessive. Inexplicably, some villains just didn't work as divorcing spouses. My poor friends had to suffer disgruntled, nonsensical ramblings like, "I'm going to make Tristan an actual zombie. Can I make Tristan a zombie? With falling zombie parts? Please?"

3. Going INSANE trying to figure out New York divorce law and procedure. I still remember some of the case law I had to look up, and I can probably quote bits of the state's Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers by heart. In the end, I said 'fuck it' and succumbed to inaccuracy.

4. Oh, God. The quotes. I don't even know how that happened. It just—did. The fic became a collage of random references to everything, ever. I went crazy, guys, I really did; since I'm not going to include this in the actual fic out of...shame or whatever, here is the full list of movies, TV shows and other sources that I referred to, quoted, paraphrased or lampshaded: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Devil's Advocate, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pride and Prejudice, Serenity, Star Wars, Kill Bill 1, X-Men, Captain Britain, Doctor Who, Captain Planet, Firefly, The Day After Tomorrow, The Daily Show, Erin Brockovich, Scrubs, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Brothers and Sisters, Star Trek XI, How I Met Your Mother, The Lion King, Chicago, Sin City, A Few Good Men, Anatomy of a Murder, Primal Fear, Body Heat, Mean Girls, Intolerable Cruelty, Closer, Notting Hill, Alias, Bad Education, Battlestar Galactica, Six Feet Under, True Blood, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Milk, Heroes, Watchmen, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pushing Daisies, Ocean's Eleven, Harry Potter, Pulp Fiction, Friends, My Fair Lady, Rocky Horror Picture Show, A Clockwork Orange, Kill Bill 2, V for Vendetta, and The Princess Bride. I may have forgotten a few. *facepalm*

I finished Laws of Attraction on September 3rd, at about 2 AM. Around midnight, firstlightofeos got a panicked text reading, "SHIT, I FORGOT 113," which, bless her heart, she replied with a hearty "-Niiiice-!" And then, since for some reason 'Mr. Questeen Beest' didn't sound like a believable plaintiff name, she helped me fix it. Because she's awesome that way. ♥

And now I'm writing Imagine Me and You. I have no idea whether I'll finish on time—I have four days, which is not much, but it's somewhat doable—but I'll do my damnedest!

So like, if I start spouting flower meanings out of the blue, please don't mind me, really. *grins* These fics have quite clearly eaten my brain.