What inspired you to write the story where Remus is left alone up in space? Is there a particular reason you chose that setting? Do you have any headcanons for that AU that didn’t make it into the final story?
ah, time, as a symptom!
so i think the idea had been knocking around for a while. i was thinking a lot about space stations as a setting... i started to get into sci-fi as a genre in 2015-16 and something about space stations really appeals to me. they’re a great mix of alien and human, and they’re these big industrial structures in space, which is this terrifying/wonderful numinous thing. they also allow for a lot of solitude, and i like writing about people who are alone - especially when i’m writing remus.
they’re like. i don’t know. industrial settings for sci-fi stories which don’t have to be about the science. i knew i wanted to write about remus/sirius and thought i would try and use a sci-fi setting to get across character work.
a couple of direct inspirations were the podcast wolf 359 and alistair mcdowall’s play x. in my head, the station is very similar to the research base in x. i didn’t love x and i didn’t want to bother with the stuff about earth in the play, but i loved the set. and the sense of physical space. there was also a certain amount of the horror comic southern cross in there.
i was probably also thinking of a short story by sofia samatar about somebody who chooses to stay in space, in a non-glamorous job, isolated with only a cat for company. Request for an Extension on the Clarity.
i was very dissatisfied with the end result of the fic and considered orphaning it. it’s not so much that i had headcanons that didn’t make it in, as i didn’t give myself enough time to write the setting or remus’s state of mind properly... if i’d had more time (i wrote it very quickly) i would have turned in a much longer story. as it is, i feel like it’s little more than bare bones.
i wanted to spend more time working out how the travel there worked, as well as the travel between earth and the space station. it’s hard to make it reasonable for remus to remain there and to make it possible for both sirius and someone else on his trail to turn up at the station on their own... and i didn’t pull it off.
if i was writing it now i’d also write more of their lives on the station, and maybe also write scenes of remus as the station’s caretaker alongside other visiting teams.
the problem really is that i knew all the plot points i wanted to write but didn’t have time or space to earn them. stuff happens because it has to happen for the story to work - not because the story makes it clear that they should happen.
i’d also like to have written more about mundane life on the station. my favourite bits in like, the martian are when he’s eating, and growing potatoes. i wanted to write about the small pieces of life that stay the same even in an alien, industrial, enclosed space, in space - and i’m not sure i did that enough.
the bit i was happiest with was the betrayal scene, with peter, james, sirius and lily. i think i could have made it more explicit and i did have the scene fully blocked out in my head, i think. but i think what i wrote does get it across well enough.