Discover Top Posts Tagged with #toyem

DVD Commentary: Two of Your Earth Minutes

I saw one of these on my dashboard, and I was like, oh, I meant to do that! And I needed something to stop myself from using the last hours of these precious days off to do work instead of something fun.

Thanks to @shamelessdvdcommentary for the great questions!

Which fanfic is your DVD commentary about?

Two of Your Earth Minutes

Give us some stats - (when you wrote it, word count, how long it took to finish, is it a one-shot/multi-chapter, etc)

12,394 words. It was written in July and August 2015. I was originally going to have it as a one-shot, but added the next chapter b/c the response was so positive and talking about it with people gave me more ideas. :) Chapter 1 was written in about a week, and chapter 2 took about three weeks.

What was the initial inspiration for your story?

This post from Mellow_Yellow, which made me think about Mickey's line about Ian being alien-looking, plus my childhood love of the book series Animorphs, which had an alien character named Ax who, when in human form, had comedic and sometimes emotional hijinks trying to understand the human experience (often food-related). It looks like that post was in March, but I didn't start writing the actual fic until July, so I guess I was turning the idea of "Ian/Mickey + alien??" around in my mind for a while before I actually started.

If the story is written from a character’s POV, why did you choose this character?

Mickey's POV! I think writing this story from Ian's POV would have been much harder, since his perspective on what he's going through would be way more complicated and require more info-dropping for the reader than Mickey's. (Ax does have Animorphs books in his POV, but they're in the first person with an assumed human reader, so the info dropping feels natural.) It makes sense to me that the story felt more natural and "flow-y" coming from Mickey's more familiar POV. And this one did flow easily, much more than most of my stories.

What was your favourite scene to write?

Any of the "cultural exchange" scenes, where Ian is asking for Mickey to explain about a human thing, and then Mickey wants to know if Ian's world has anything similar. So, them talking about ice cream or music, for example. Obviously having Mickey explain stuff is funny and banter-y and thus easy to write, but I love that he also wants to know about Ian's reality from before, even though it's even harder for him to understand (or Ian to explain) than the reverse.

How did you come up with the title?

It's the name of the whole "aliens talk about Earth measurements" trope on TVTropes, and it comes from a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is one of my favorite books. It's also a CONSTANT joke in Animorphs, as listed on the tropes page. ("It will take one of your hours." "We're on Earth, Ax. They're everyone's hours.") I did intentionally want this story to be "here is this specific trope, Ian/Mickey style," so I leaned into it with the name, as a nod to how unapologetically tropey it really is.

I think I once saw someone refer to the two chapters as being part of the reason it's "two" minutes, which is great and I love it, but that was just a coincidence, as I wasn't originally planning two chapters.

Are there any little moments or references you hope readers will notice?

References I've talked about before: I was big into Elliott Smith at the time, so the record-store owner is based on him ("Sam" is from one of his song titles), and the bartender is also named after one of his songs (Clem, short for "Clementine"). The record store is based on one I used to walk by on my commute to work, including the sign in the window. Mickey makes a joke about Icelandic nose flutes because of this ancient mini documentary about the filming of LOTR that I taped onto a VHS when it first aired (before Two Towers came out!!) and watched over and over with my fellow nerd friends. ("Very difficult instrument to master!") And the thing about Ian wanting to walk around with his shirt unbuttoned because he saw an action star do it on TV was a real argument I had with my mother when I was in preschool.

None of those were intended for readers to get, just jokes between me and myself really! I'm my own first audience, I guess.

Ian saying "I'm LOST" was, now that I think about it, probably a subconscious quote from Lilo and Stitch, aw.

Was there anything you struggled to write? If so, how did you overcome this?

Ah, it's been too long so I don't remember anymore! Except I remember that chapter 2 was much slower to write than chapter 1, because I wasn't in that same flow of immediate inspiration (rare and precious). Hence, one week for chapter 1, and more like a month for chapter 2. And I see I posted about a sex scene taking me forever around then, so that would be the one at the end of chapter 2. Choreography of where everyone's limbs are going can be exhausting, let's be honest.

Favourite line in the story?

"Yes!” Ian says. “That’s what I want. You. To be with me.”

(Clearly owing a debt to season 4's "this where you want to spend your day off?" / "you're here" convo, but coming in several years ahead of season 10's "i wanna be where you are, Mickey." Anyway, Ian Gallagher's romantic nature, boiled down to its bare essentials)

Did the storyline change in any way as you wrote the story?

It doesn't really have much of a storyline, if we're being real, since it's more of a "slice of life" situation! So, nope.

If you are writing a particular trope or genre, was it your first time writing this?

Haha, yes, it was indeed a particular trope!! :D I don't think I had ever written it before, that I can think of. But I definitely did a lot of sci fi in general after that.

What are you most proud about in the story? (plot, characterisation, dialogue, twist/cliffhanger, etc)

Honestly I'm just so happy that it made other people happy enough that sometimes people still recommend it to other people almost TEN YEARS later! That's always makes me glow with joy. The story amused and delighted me as I was writing it, but I did not especially think it was going to be well received. Some parts of Shameless fandom were kind of judgey about anything that was too "weird" back then; you can see how nervous I was from my preemptively self-defensive tag about Ian being in human form and my "well, that's . . . whatever that is" author's note at the end. But as it turned out, no one was mean about it (to my face, anyway, haha!) and I'm so glad that I did post it, after all.

Reading back the story now, is there anything you’d change or add?

Yes! I was reading through it just now to pick out a favorite line, and I saw that Ian had a line where he referred to the concept of "luck." They have a whole convo explaining "luck" to him in the Halloween special, so that would make no sense. Whoops! That's the kind of thing that happens when you write a sequel years and years later. Fixed now. None of you saw nothing, got it?!

I also think that the very first joke doesn't work well ("We put butter on it. Uh, the cow stuff. Not the body stuff.”) b/c I don't think that Mickey knows what "body butter" is anyway, so he wouldn't think to differentiate that. But luckily (?) I don't think readers usually get that that is what I meant by that phrase, anyway. So it's a flop joke that kind of unflops itself? So I've left that one alone. If I ever think of a good fix, I'll probably fix that too, though, b/c it does haunt me ever so slightly.

(I skipped some questions here b/c I'd already covered parts of them in my yapping above)

Anything else you’d like the readers to know about the story?

Rereading it now, their grocery shopping is a hilarious insight into what I was capable of cooking myself in my early 20s (not much!). That list would definitely look different if I wrote it now, but after all, people do write what they know, sometimes. :)

In closing, to paraphrase a blurb about NONA THE NINTH: You have loved alien!Ian, and alien!Ian loves you. And it truly means so much to me. 💚👽🍞

#toyem

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#toyem