Choices (Sentinel story by Charlotte Frost)

Fanfiction
Title:	Choices
Author(s):	Charlotte Frost
Date(s):	1-03-03
Length:	87k 33pgs
Genre(s):	gen
Fandom(s):	The Sentinel
Relationship(s):
External Links:	online here
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Choices is a Sentinel story by Charlotte Frost.

Summary: "A short-term visitor leaves Jim and Blair with serious issues to contemplate."

Author's Comments

They say you should write what you know, and in my teenage years when I knew I wanted to be a writer, I figured suicide was going to be my pet theme, as that was a subject I had much more first-hand experience with than the average person. Turns out, “buddy” relationships and fanfic gave me a much more positive subject to write about.

Still, the pull is always there, in every fandom I’ve written for, to do a suicide story. I didn’t want the angst of Jim or Blair contemplating commit suicide, so I decided on a secondary character. Because of the rather dark tone, I wasn’t surprise that this story received almost no direct feedback.

The story did, however, receive some rather unflattering comments on a list. (Or rather, I did as its author.) It was criticized for being mislabeled as gen. (There is one kinda, sorta mention as a possible kinda, sorta relationship between Jim and Blair in the distance future. To me, that wasn’t enough to even call it “pre-slash”, for a story that takes place over a two-week time period.) The Cascade Library refused it for being “too slash” (and, per my complaints that sentinels-are-known stories with pseudo-orgasmic “bonding” scenes are allowed, the archivists changed their policy on the latter), but later a zine editor refused the story as written (she wanted me to re-write it) for being “too gen”. (This whole labeling saga greatly increased my already extreme disagreement with TS fandom’s obsession with labeling. To me, writing a story to fit a label is ass-backwards. Instead, the label should fit the story – yet, there’s no way preset labels are going to describe all stories adequately, let alone accurately.)

In that same label discussion (which I didn’t participate in, because I wasn’t signed into the list), the story was also criticized for being unrealistic in its treatment of suicide. Hey, if someone has more experience with suicides and attempted suicides in their immediate family than I do, they have my sympathy.