Heart and Home

Sentinel Fanfiction
Title:	Heart and Home
Author(s):	Charlotte Frost
Date(s):	3/09/04
Length:	220k, 96pgs
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	The Sentinel
External Links:	online here
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Heart and Home is a Jim/Blair story by Charlotte Frost.

It is a sequel to Truths That Wake.

Summary: "Jim and Blair's lives are going great, so why is everything so complicated?"

Author's Comments

I don’t remember much about how this story came about; only that I’d been thinking for a long time about doing a domestic-life sequel to “Truths That Wake”. The problem with that type of story is finding something dramatic to keep the reader’s interest. By the time I had introduced Janet, the secretary, I still didn’t know what was going to happen. But I think the sexual harassment angle ended up being a good one. The story’s credibility got a tremendous boost with help from a beta who had worked in the legal field.

I did have a major dilemma in this story, in that I felt it wouldn’t be complete unless the reader heard Janet’s side of things. But no matter how I tried to think of a way for her to tell her side, I kept running up against the fact that her revealing her true feelings would be a violation of her ultra-rigid character. So, I reluctantly decided that Jim and Blair’s suppositions in the elevator, after seeing the attorney the last time, was going to have to be accepted by the reader as “fact”.

I was relieved that this story seemed to work well with sex scenes only being mentioned in passing. I thought that, as a “slice of life” piece, it came out pretty well. It also allowed me to interject some of my own beliefs that events in life are as all-encompassing or life-changing or angsty as we choose to make them.

A couple of weeks after I posted this story, I got a call from a new client who needed a bookkeeper. I went out to meet with him and found out that, while he was a pastor who performed weddings, his main source of income was as a professional speaker throughout the country. He had a secretary to do the clerical work. Her name was Janet. (She was actually a very nice person.)