My heart bleeded, girl

Okay, my spn_cinema story is making me crazy. So I'm about to ramble about it at length, mostly in an effort to figure out what the hell I'm doing.



At first I thought, hey, this'll be fun. Jared and Jensen take one weekend a year out of their lives to meet up and have sex and fall in love and have a relationship that's as real as the relationships they have the rest of the year. What a sweet love story!

How could there be a problem with that?

I was thinking about doing it for Big Bang, but started to worry about the infidelity aspects of it. That doesn't bother me, but I know a lot of people for whom it's an issue. I didn't want to write a BB that on one would read. (Ironic, yes?)

And then I got another idea for BB (yikes, John/Mary and John and his boys) and decided to forget the whole ST,NY idea. Then along came spn_cinema and \o/ I decided to give it a try.

So, first of all, the movie. It's from 1978. Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. I have no idea why I love it so much, but I do. I've seen it a gazillion times.

But how to adapt it for J2? Do I make them gay? Married to women and in denial? In the closet? Bi? I didn't want it to be a light-hearted Brokeback Mountain. I didn't want to deal with cheating and a sexuality crisis at the same time. I think I blew my "angsty coming out story" wad on Green Scales Fell Like Rain and I'm not sure I have another one in me.

So do I make them gay? With boyfriends? Starting out single, so the first couple of years they're not really cheating?

How closely do I follow the movie? One of the things the movie did was have Doris and George each tell a good story about their spouses and a bad story, and then they didn't talk about them the rest of the weekend. It's how they came to know and also love each other's families. Should I do that, too, with boyfriends? Do they have kids? Dogs? Cats?

The other thing I love about the movie is the time frame. It covers roughly 25 years, starting in 1951 and ending in 1977. I wanted to make it more modern, partly because I didn't want the gay thing to be quite the issue it would have been back then. So, I decided to start it in 1985 and end it in 2010.

Also, if they're not already married with kids, what ages should they be? I want to explore the moving into middle age thing, but that starts them out in their mid-thirties already. Do I want to do that?

The other thing is, things were more interesting in the 50s and 60s. At least, they changed more dramatically. The difference between 1960 and 1965 is huge and dramatic. I couldn't begin to tell you the difference between 1990 and 1995. Or 1995 and 2000. Not really. It's all a blur of sameness to me. And a part of the appeal of the movie is how George and Doris react to the changing times. George's son was killed in Viet Nam, and Doris's marriage was affected by the women's lib movement and it was just more interesting than "OMG, will ALL THE PLANES crash on January 1, 2000???"

So I'm, like, stuck. Or, not stuck, but I have to rely on personal growth and changes in the characters, instead of depending on things like dramatic social and cultural changes or issues of sexuality.

I guess I could make it about sexuality and coming out and all that angsty stuff, but that doesn't follow the spirit of the movie, which is, after all, a rom com, even if it is an ode to infidelity.

And I could set it in the 60s and 70s, I guess, but I don't want them to spend the whole time being afraid of being discovered, or not able to have civil unions, at the very least, with their boyfriends, if they want to.

I DON'T KNOW. Is the problem. And I have 8 days to finish a first draft. I've got around 2000 words and it's fine, but how do I make it about more than 5 or 6 booty calls, especially when I haven't been able to write good porn in what feels like ages?

Well, I hope that was helpful. We'll see.