here comes the flood.

[dira]

So, possibly you will have noticed that I kept talking about this big big Numb3rs story I was writing, and then I said I was finished, and then I didn't say anything at all for a couple of months.

That is about to change.

Starting Monday, I'll be posting the story (which has a name but I'm still not saying what it is because I am oddly but deeply superstitious on this point) in twenty-seven parts over the course of about five weeks. The story as a whole is about 250,000 words, and the chapters (a structure I am trying out for the first time and don't quite have the hang of yet) range from 4,400 to 16,600 words.

The story is written in its entirety; I'm serializing mainly so that I can format and proofread one chapter at a time without trying to do it all in one go and getting really sloppy. And also because I enjoy torturing you, yes, of course. It's been three years for me, you can cope with it for five weeks--or, if not, then I apologize in advance for the twenty-seven interim posts, and the complete story should be up on or about July 15. I hope you'll give it a whirl then, but don't blame me if you lose an entire day to it.

Please be assured that if I am run over by a bus before then, iuliamentis has a complete copy as well as instructions to finish posting for me.


Tentative posting schedule, subject to the vagaries of Real Life, is as follows:

Part 1
Chapter 1 - Monday, 06.09.08
Chapter 2 - Wednesday, 06.11.08
Chapter 3 - Friday, 06.13.08

Part 2
Chapter 4 - Monday, 06.16.08
Chapter 5 - Tuesday, 06.17.08
Chapter 6 - Wednesday, 06.18.08
Chapter 7 - Thursday, 06.19.08
Chapter 8 - Friday, 06.20.08
Chapter 9 - Saturday, 06.21.08

Part 3
Chapter 10 - Monday, 06.23.08
Chapter 11 - Tuesday, 06.24.08
Chapter 12 - Wednesday, 06.25.08
Chapter 13 - Thursday, 06.26.08
Chapter 14 - Friday, 06.27.08
Chapter 15 - Saturday, 06.28.08

Part 4
Chapter 16 - Monday, 06.30.08
Chapter 17 - Wednesday, 07.02.08
Chapter 18 - Friday, 07.04.08

Part 5
Chapter 19 - Monday, 07.07.08
Chapter 20 - Tuesday, 07.08.08
Chapter 21 - Wednesday, 07.09.08
Chapter 22 - Thursday, 07.10.08
Chapter 23 - Friday, 07.11.08
Chapter 24 - Saturday, 07.12.08
Chapter 25 - Sunday, 07.13.08

Part 6
Chapter 26 - Monday, 07.14.08
Chapter 27 - Tuesday, 07.15.08



And now - because I keep forgetting other people don't know anything much about this story, and because I have been mentally composing descriptions and explanations almost since I started writing the story - a few things.

A little over three years before I finished writing my story, on March 23, 2005, I posted about the first and most utterly amazing Numb3rs story I read: viggorlijah's Parallel Connections over Symmetric Spaces. I had yet to see an episode of the show, but this story grabbed me by the shirtfront and dragged me through an incredibly intense emotional experience, and when I was able to think anything afterward, I was thinking "I want to do that. I want to write a story like that, except more and bigger."

Well, I certainly wrote more. *g*

Within that month, I dove headfirst into Numb3rs, and in IMs to iuliamentis and qe2 and lynnmonster, I began to sketch out the story I finally finished two months ago. All of them asked questions and made encouraging noises which shaped the story and convinced me that it was worth telling, but I was on the verge of relocating for graduate school and had the sense to put it off a few months. But on the night of the premiere of the second season of Numb3rs, talking to merryish, I returned to that sketched-out idea, that big gripping story I wanted to tell, and on September 25 I started writing it, and didn't stop for two and a half years.

So what is it, exactly... It's big. It's angsty, verging on dark. It's Don/Charlie. It's possibly the most NC-17 thing I've ever written, not only for graphic sex and incest, but torture and violence and many and various problems of sexual consent which do not - in my humbly authorial opinion - amount to rape. It has led me, in the last two years, to start to regard my Due South hockey AU as uncomplicated, happy, and manageably-sized.

It's a post-Season 1 AU, because I started plotting it before that season ended and could not bear to give up Terry when I finally got around to starting to write. Along the way, I fell in love with the replacements (remember when Megan and Colby were replacements?) and resolved to include them somehow, and then realized that shoehorning them into this universe was an exercise in frustration and redundancy. You may find echoes of them in a couple of the OCs, but I'm afraid that's all.

It's... did I say big? and kind of grim? In the course of many (many, many, many) discussions of the story with my longsuffering darling strangecobwebs, we concluded that I ought to serialize for readers' safety, and remind them to be caught up on their meds, and to take time between chapters to go outside, pet kittens, and so on.

It's been what's in my head, to varying degrees, for more than three years. And it's really, really, amazingly, finally, almost ready. Here it comes.