Wow, blast from the past, daaaamn. Let’s see.
☼: how i came up with the idea
I am pretty sure it came out of the fact that I was watching the 2012 London Olympics pretty obsessively. Fates had finished, I had spent a couple of months dealing with the burnout from that, and this story just grabbed me and wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote it down. I spent a lot of time talking to sabra-n about ideas because she’s really great at enabling me—er, I mean, helping me with fic research and coming up with brilliant ideas. Anna being Chuck’s coach? Totally all her. I’m 95% sure Sarah’s sport came first, and Chuck’s much later.
☾: how i thought people would respond to the fic
I wasn’t sure. I mean, I had a pretty great following in the Chuck fandom, but that whole MsRomanceWriter debacle kind of cleared out a lot of them and I was pretty much on my way out of the fandom at the time. I had a feeling some people were going to love it.
☽: how people *actually* responded
Definitely a lot of love for that fic. I remember people were surprised when they kissed in the third chapter since it took 40 chapters in Fates (and 5 in Walker’s Eleven, but people didn’t know I was Moonlight Pilot at the time). I had a reputation for not putting Chuck and Sarah very early in the fic, which was probably well-earned, but eh. I don’t rush relationships in multichapter fics just because people want their ids scratched.
∞: something i wish i’d done differently
Can’t think of anything. I’m sure at some point there probably was, but I’ll be real with you: this fic was me blowing off steam. Fates had become this gigantic monster with lots of people weighing in and no matter how I ended it, people were going to be very vocally disappointed. I still have people who like to remind me to this day that they had issues with it—THREE YEARS AFTER IT GOT COMPLETED. So this fic? This fic is me writing 100000% what I like to write. There’s not much I’d change in that light.
