Ten Things To Get Used To
| Fraser/Kowalski Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Ten Things to Get Used To |
| Author(s): | Speranza |
| Date(s): | 2003-03-25 |
| Length: | 6928 words |
| Genre: | slash |
| Fandom: | due South |
| External Links: | at Speranza's website at AO3 |
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Ten Things to Get Used To is a Fraser/RayK story by Speranza.
It was podficced by Zabira in 2007.
Reactions and Reviews
I promised another Speranza Day ... and it's come down to the wire, as I've struggled to settle on just one more Speranza fic out of all those I'd love to tell you about - but I've done it, and here it is!Ten Things to Get Used To is structured quite differently from the other two Speranza stories I've rec'ed (The Bodyguard and Juggling Act). Rather than a single linear story, with a plot and a "resolution" of sorts, it's a series of vignettes. I notice looking back over my recs that I have a definite attraction to this kind of fic - at least when it's done well. There are a number of authors who use the "vignette" format very effectively, and I've rec'ed a few of them. Resonant's Sixteenth of June (as well as Adorned, which was rec'ed last month), Brighid's Slice, and Ardent's First all fall into this category. Speranza does it occasionally - and unsurprisingly, since this is Speranza we're talking about, when she does it, it works.
The thing is, when a vignette fic is done well it seems so easy and effortless, flows so naturally, hiding the amount of work and skill that goes into making it work. Just throwing random scenes together gets you nothing but a kind of incoherent mish-mash - in order to work the vignettes need to be somewhat complete in themselves, but also must connect, even if the interconnections aren't always apparent, so that together they form a single "picture."
I think of it as kind of like triangulating - trying to zero in on something by coming at it from a variety of different angles, rather than linearly. Or maybe a better metaphor is Wheel of Fortune - each vignette is a letter, and when you're done you have a bunch of blank spaces interspersed with a bunch of letters - and if you chose your letters well, you don't need the additional letters to see the entire word; you can fill in the blank spaces from the letters you do have. If you've chosen too many vowels, or too many rare and unused consonants, you won't be able to see the whole word - you'll just see a bunch of apparently unrelated letters.
Ten Things to Get Used To (to beat the metaphor mercilessly for a moment) has a perfect balance of vowels and consonants, so that your mind can almost automatically fill in the blank spaces - afterwards it's hard to remember which letters she gave you and which you filled in for yourself. The vignettes alternate first-person POV between Ray and Fraser, who are already a couple when the story begins, and each describes something that the narrator has had to get used to since they moved up to the Great White North together after Call of the Wild and moved into - wait for it! - yes, a Canadian shack, fifty miles outside a tiny town of 300.
The vignettes deal superficially with various day-to-day-type things - how long it takes to get a pizza, how hard it is for Fraser to get used to the idea of having another person around, how surprised Ray is that Fraser isn't like other Canadians, how Ray's penchant for befriending people and accepting invitations has altered Fraser's life. But no matter what they're about on the surface, each vignette is really a view of their relationship from a particular angle (invoking the triangulation metaphor again). [1]