Title: Laws of Attraction
Author: christycorr
Film prompt: Laws of Attraction
Pairings: Arthur/Merlin, Gwen/Lancelot (background Arthur/Helen, Gwen/Afanc, Sophia/Edwin, Anhora/Dragon—but it's not as bizarre as it sounds, I swear.)
Rating: R
Word count: ~23,800 (all parts)
Summary: "Merlin Emrys had strong convictions on the subjects of love and marriage—namely, that they should be avoided at all costs."
Warnings: m/m sex, slight mangling of American civil procedure, excessive geekery, overindulgent quoting of basically every movie ever.
Story notes: Here. Beta-ed by firstlightofeos, who endured far more of my have-I-your-approvals than she should have, really; thank you also to lu, who knows more of these quotes than anyone else, and to keshi_t and oxymoron, who read this first. ♥

(This was cross-posted to Dreamwidth, if you prefer reading there.)

( Laws of Attraction, 1/3 )

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love reel_merlin.

I suicidally signed up for two reel_merlin fics in July: Imagine Me & You, and Laws of Attraction. (RM, like many others of its kind, is a comm where people write Merlin AU fic based on movie plots. You sign up for a movie and, in this case, get a two-month deadline.) Due to circumstances quite beyond my control, I found myself being signed up for co-writing a fic with firstlightofeos; after much debate, we settled for Closer. Runi also had a fic of her own to write—Mean Girls. I of course didn't actually start writing much of my fics until, like, two weeks before the deadline (which was September 1st; later, it was extended to September 8th).

In the meantime, Runi and I discussed the Closer fic at length. And by that I mean TO A TRULY RIDICULOUS EXTENT. Seriously. 'Overthinking' doesn't begin to cover it. We watched the movie—I think I watched it, like, three times in the past month—and read (and annotated) the play, and discussed each character thoroughly—their motivations, their personalities, the play/movie's recurring motifs and timeline quirks, the locations, shit, everything. We drafted an outline, picked a structure and what would happen in each scene. I started spouting Closer quotes in all kinds of everyday conversation; I swear, even my brain started monologuing in Closer quotes.

Er. We ended up not writing the Closer fic, and chose to focus on our individual fics.

( My creative process, let me show you it. )

And now I'm writing Imagine Me and You. I have no idea whether I'll finish on time—I have four days, which is not much, but it's somewhat doable—but I'll do my damnedest!

So like, if I start spouting flower meanings out of the blue, please don't mind me, really. *grins* These fics have quite clearly eaten my brain.