"Promises and Promissory Notes" (HL) by me

[brightknightie]

hlh_shortcuts de-anonymized over the weekend. Many correctly guessed me in the guessing game, which is fine; except for temporarily witholding full endnotes and not commenting on quite all the stories before reveals, I didn't at all try to hide! I hope that my easily identifiable writing habits are benign. (If not, hey, take me aside and gently help me improve them, please. Seriously.)

"Promises and Promissory Notes"
G, gen, ~6K words
Duncan & Amanda; with OCs, Joe, and MethosPassing through Gilded Age San Francisco, Duncan runs into Amanda and tries very hard to avoid getting sucked into her latest shady scheme.

I've added the full endnotes. I'd like to thank dlyt and chelseagirl for brainstorming with me! And celli for encouraging me! And very much havocthecat for beta-reading, most specifically for identifying rough spots in my Amanda depiction and the balance of loose/tied plot threads!

While this story is all Duncan's perspective, it's also the first time I've written Amanda at length. I've often struggled to understand her character and Duncan's relationship with her; I've usually just passed her on the way to other subjects. This year, though, when I rewatched "The Lady and the Tiger," I felt, for the first time, like I understood Duncan's reply to Tessa's question about why he puts up with Amanda when she's done such harm to him, and, from Tessa's view, actively betrayed him -- that Amanda brought laughter into Duncan's life at times when joy was hard to come by. (I've always thought I understood Tessa's question; this was the first time I really felt Duncan's answer.) I carried that into rewatching several other Amanda episodes, and got much more out of them through that lens.

My recipient, Adabsolutely, mentioned liking road stories, mysteries, future stories, and sitting around the bar telling tall tales; also, preferring stories that are like the show, and stories featuring the "main characters," defined as Duncan, Joe, Methos, and Amanda.

I read a bunch of articles on road trips and road-story tropes, watched a documentary, and listened to some podcasts. I learned a lot about road trips -- the very first ever road trip was quite a thing! Mrs. Bertha Benz thought her husband was failing to market his invention, so she solved that problem, and when the device failed along the way, fixed it herself, even tying parts together with her petticoat -- and also about road stories -- apparently, there are many subgenres, depending whether the story focuses on what happens along the way, or at the destination, or at the origin, how long the trip is, etc., but that the purest form is considered a focus on the obstacles along the way. (I encountered a memorable description of an Australian horror movie about a small town that murders people on road trips who pass through in order to scavenge their cars...) But I came up with no ideas.

I tried to come up with something set in the future, but while I managed a little world-building for ~200 years from now -- climate change, population, technology, culture -- I didn't find a story there. Duncan would run into Methos how? And do what? And it matters why?

So I ended up falling back into something I'm usually comfortable with: history. With Duncan and Amanda in mind from rewatching "The Lady and the Tiger," I took a pinch of a mystery from a real-life historical incident, and then looked up historical criminals for the period of that incident, and bumped into a real-life historical scam that I felt was an excellent fit for Amanda. I wrapped these in a trip: by rail and water, not road, though. When I first started writing, Amanda was just the biggest obstacle in Duncan's way on this trip, trying to follow what I'd gathered was the essence of a road story. As I kept writing, their relationship became the point of the story. As the very last step, then, I could wrap the historical part in a present-day frame -- 1999 was the year The Raven ended, btw; that's why this Amanda is feeling down, because of how things fell out with Nick -- to, hopefully, both make the story more like an episode of the show and cement that relationship through time.

If I'd had more time, of course it would have been much better to write the whole mystery for real, and not just bounce off it -- "Look! A mystery!" -- in the rush to Duncan's ship. I originally intended to do that, because my recipient explicitly likes mysteries (not history). But I didn't have any more time, not a bit, not even as much as I took. And maybe that's okay, in the end, because the story does say as much as I have to say about Duncan and Amanda at that period, I think. I could have added more shenanigans, but not more insight, I suspect.

Anyway.

Thank you for reading all of this post! And thanks to everyone who has been so very kind about this story! ♥ I'll try again to be better next time, and get closer to my recipient's requests.