Mirror M*A*S*H: the making
This is a fairly detailed discussion with myself about the writing of a longish (28 thousand words or so) AU set in a Mirror universe of M*A*S*H. If you want to read it, all the parts are here: Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, and part 14.

Back around mid-November 2004, I was struggling to write a section of a story. (Fourth story in a tetrology which currently has the half-serious name The Wages of Gin.)

So I did what I often do when stuck: I closed down the serious story, opened up a nice blank Word file, opened up my mind, and let my fingers do the thinking, as it were. Sometimes what results from this process is a weird little short story: see the 500 files. Sometimes what results is a full-length story, though not one I would ever set out to write in my right mind: see Cold Freedom. (Most often, of course, what results is nothing much at all: junk of the mind.)

This time what came out was a couple of thousand words or so of "What if Hawkeye were to visit a brothel and discover that one of the slave-whores there was Father Mulcahy?" or something like that. I'm a slave-story fan. I was unsurprised that this had come out.

I had no plans for where this was going to go. I posted it on my livejournal. I got a couple of enthusiastic responses, I was still getting stuck on my serious story, so a couple of days later I posted some more.

I decided that it was okay to stop when I got stuck, write some more of this stuff, and post it whenever I got 2000 words or so of more crack out. And I was still getting stuck, dammit.

I went on quite happily doing this for a couple of weeks. I'd linked to it from mash_slash, and people were showing up and obviously reading it and commenting more and more enthusiastically. On reflection, this was an early warning, but it didn't look that way at the time. I was just having fun.

I still didn't have any idea where this story was going at the point when I posted part 7. What I was doing, as ellen_fremedon so vividly described it in her 2nd December post, was happily thinking up Really Evil Things that could happen to Father Mulcahy if he'd turned the corner and walked into Slave Story Universe and now he couldn't get out. I had plans for doing things with Radar's telepathy, with Francis's skill at poker, with Trapper's genuine kindness for Francis (yes, I think he does get some credit for at least trying to make his rape painless/undamaging, given that he saw nothing wrong with raping Hawkeye's slave at all), and so on. And, obviously, I meant to play with the fact that Hawkeye was unable to achieve an erection when (in his right mind, that is, not when just out of OR after a 48-hour session) he was confronted with a bed-partner who was plainly, visibly, terrified of him. I could think of half a dozen ways of ending it, but I saw no reason to end it any time soon, or even think about how to end it, when I was having so much fun just playing: whispering all of you a secret story that could go on and on and get better and better. Kind of (she says presumptuously) like Kipling must have felt when he got the first idea of writing Kim: never mind a plot, just keep Kim rambling across India with the lama forever and ever Hawkeye and Mulcahy fucking with each other's minds forever and ever. With the added fun that I could madly make up M*A*S*H dialogue, which got funnier by contrast with the situation in which they were using it. Which is how M*A*S*H humour works, isn't it? It's an intolerably funny show because it's set in a war zone: if it were doctors on an army base back in the US out of danger, it wouldn't be as funny because there wouldn't be the dark themes of death and destruction running through it. In the same way, it was funnier for me thinking up dialogue for Hawkeye and Trapper and the rest just because they were in a Mirror universe of M*A*S*H, which made the mainlineMASH look sunny by comparison.

I have to admit (and please don't take this the wrong way, Ellen) that commentary from ellen_fremedon marks the point when it stopped being fun. Perhaps it had to be: eventually MirrorM*A*S*H would have developed plot, structure, and thus - inevitably - an ending. I'd written most of Part 8 at this point, and I can't point out to you exactly where between the end of Part 8 and the beginning of Part 9 it had stopped being a roller coaster ride through what Ellen called the Id Vortex, but it had... and I can't even blame the mention in Making Light, though that made me see that I had to now plan on making an end to the story, since I really didn't want to have MirrorM*A*S*H so publicly on display while it was still in process, and I didn't exactly like having it all friends-only, either. (It isn't, any more. But no one's commented on the Making Light post in weeks, and the Onion has a new set of horoscopes, so I'm just not going to worry about it. Besides. Done now.)

I was still surfing the Id Vortex. (The scene in Part 11 with the chocolate? Pure Vortex. Oh yes.) But it wasn't driving the story any more. Rather than just picking out the best current in the vortex, the one with the screamiest views, I was actually trying to figure out how to guide the story through and out to an ending. I still wasn't dead sure how it would end: until it occurred to me that Mulcahy would see being martyred for his faith as an acceptable end, I still thought I might palm him off on to Winchester for a few days until the Colonel found out.

It didn't occur to me until halfway through Part 12 (at which point I could not go to sleep till I was done with it) that how MirrorBJ would convince Mulcahy to help him wouldn't be by torturing Francis. No.

The reason it ends where it does is because, though I can see there's a whole story to be written - maybe several stories - on What Happened Next, they won't be Id Vortex stories. At least, not for me. I would like to find out what happened next (and not only in the mainlineM*A*S*H universe, but what happened to Radar and Trapper and so on back at the MATH 4077th), but finding out would be work, not play. (Maybe I should issue a challenge for January: if you liked MirrorM*A*S*H, write me a sequel, and I'll post the sequels on my website on 1st February....)

It's been fun, though. Great fun. Thank you all very much for staying with me for the ride.


Update: limyaael wrote a couple of fascinating posts on Slavery and Unequal Relationships, which I strongly recommend. (Based on writing fantasy, not on fanfic/slash.)