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flamingnik requested the Glee poly family series, a/k/a Tied Up In Strings, and left choosing the specific section up to me, so here is some commentary on the first story in the series, Gimme Some Signs (October 2012).Series: Tied Up In Strings
Series title from Scala and the Kolacny Brothers cover of "Somebody":
Someone who'll help me see things
In a different light.
All the things I detest,
I will almost like.
I don't want to be tied
To anyone's strings.
I'm carefully trying to steer clear of
Those things.
But when I'm asleep
I want somebody
Who will put their arms around me
And kiss me tenderly.
This was at the height of my OMG LOVE/FUUUUUUCK YOU HATE for Glee, and this song captured some of that. It also made me think of Lauren, and how she was so self-possessed, and how she was looking ahead (to being recruited for wrestling, to getting out of Lima). That was sort of thrown to us as asides, especially compared to some of the others trying to prove themselves (specifically, I was thinking about Puck and Quinn, but it's a small town, and those sorts of feelings exist a lot. For more on this, see "Her Body is a Weapon," in which Lauren asks Shannon Beiste, the most badass adult Lauren knows, for help), and I wanted to explore it further.
Series Summary: The last thing any of them expected -- except maybe Brittany, who despite some of the wild things she said and believed, had an uncanny knack for understanding the emotional turmoil beneath any surface -- was that by the end of senior year, the entire senior glee club would be in one big interchangeable relationship. They called each other a team and a family, and that was true enough as it goes, but at the same time it told the whole story, it blurred the details. The mix and match was complicated enough in high school, but faced with the outside world after graduation, they decided they had two options: Let the relationship(s) die a post-graduation death, or fight like hell for each other no matter how hard it got.
When you've somehow managed to build your entire world around a group of opinionated, passionate, driven people, it really shouldn't come as a surprise when they all throw themselves at option number two.
These are scenes from their lives.
And then I realized how badly I wanted to write Glee poly family. At this point, it was inevitable; I was already writing Lauren/Puck/Tina/Mike, and going on and on about how much I loved the friendships and team vibe and why you gotta hate, show? Yeah, poly family was just around the corner at that point, and then it was here!
I went back through to see if I started blogging about Glee poly family a lot before this story, looking for the point it made sense to me, and I think this halfway liveblog of Sexy is where it really began.
At the time, I said I didn't even know where it came from, and probably I still don't.
Title: Gimme Some Signs (October 2012)
Summary: Lauren Zizes turns nineteen far from home and all the people she
Oh, my love of playing with parentheticals and font formatting. Also, Lauren choosing her words with such care; if you don't say love, it's not love, no matter how much it is.
I still prefer my most of them are the same age theory than whatever Glee did in season three.
Gimme some words I can live by
Gimme commandments to know
Gimme some fables and proverbs
You gotta gimme some signs where to go
"If It Ain't Broke, Break It" by Meat Loaf
October 2012
The title comes from the Meat Loaf song, obviously. I love his dramatic rock operas. It's amazing I don't use them in stories more often.
I added the "October 2012" when I realized there was no way I planned to write the Glee poly family in a linear fashion. I didn't even know how many stories there would be, or if there would be anymore, so might as well just label it and be done.
Lauren’s away at college when she turns nineteen, far from her home and her family and her friends. Her high school glee club. That’s how she describes them when her college roommate asks about all the pictures, reverting to outdated labels because they’re easier than the long, long truth.
She asks the day after they move in together. Lauren, despite how she wants to feel, finds herself missing them so damn much she finally crawls out of bed at five a.m. after trying and failing to sleep for three hours and starts slapping pictures on the wall. Mo sleeps through it.
The next day, in between orientation and the big party the football players are throwing -- Mo’s brother and her boyfriend are both on the team, and Lauren wonders if that gets weird sometimes, but it’s nice to have someone around who already knows everything that’s going on -- Mo finally notices and asks about them.
Friendships! Created family! Lauren bonding with her new roommate! Relationships too complicated for easy language! I'm pretty sure this fic is just pure wish fulfillment, all awesome things I wanted from the show but was never going to get.
Lauren can't admit how much she misses the others, not even to herself, but she sure can fill her space with memories of them. You'd think I was dealing with my own first time away from home as much as I wrote about Lauren and what it would be like to leave claustrophobic, nosey, gossipy small town Lima.
Lauren stops in the middle of putting on eyeliner -- which makes her a little sad, because it’s eyeliner Quinn gave her and Tina was the one who taught her really neat tricks with it and that makes her think about the first time Sam put on make-up for them, smudged eyeliner and blue nail polish, and that reminds her of the really freaking hot hook-up that happened after the party -- and goes to stand next to Mo. Together they look at the pictures, and Lauren focuses on them instead of letting herself think about how much her heart hurts.
Once again, Lauren tries to tough it out instead of dealing with her emotions. In my head, she sometimes can handle them with aplomb and sometimes cannot. She's a young woman on the verge of becoming an adult, and has put herself in the middle over very complicated relationships, and that would be a hard thing to deal with, especially from afar. Plus there's that little worry in the back of her head: I like this woman, more or less. What if she reacts badly to learning I'm queer and poly? My understanding of how that feels influences a lot of my writing of Lauren in both the Glee poly family stories and the foursome stories.
Little details make stories for me, so Quinn shows affection through gifts, and Tina puts her make-up talents to good use, and goddamn would Sam be hot in make-up. Friendships + sexy times = AWESOME.
Photography isn’t her thing, but with a group like glee club, there is basically someone with a camera at every single event, and she doesn’t just mean their competitions. For graduation, Rachel organized photo collections for everyone, and though Lauren likes to pretend she didn’t get even the slightest bit misty-eyed over them, the truth is, all of them were struck a little speechless and this weird mix of happy-sad at what was basically a perfect gift.
The pictures were tucked into photo boxes, with a single gold star placed perfectly in the center of each lid, and organized chronologically by event, each with a little card listing the date and what was happening, and each picture has a couple labels on the back, one with the event and date and one with the names of everyone in the picture.
(”Whose bright idea was it to give Berry a label maker for Hanukkah?” Santana mutters, but her eyes are suspiciously bright. She reaches the picture of her and Brittany curled together in one seat on the bus home from Regionals that year, their heads tipped together and pinkies linked even in sleep and her breath hitches; when Rachel bounds up, she wraps her arms around her in a fierce hug and gives her a kiss.)
I see some of the parents as camera happy. (Well, if Glee could write decent parents consistently.) Especially the Fathers Berry, Mercedes' parents, and Brittany's mom. Of course there would be a billion photographs of all the competitions and performances and parties and summers spent lounging in the sun.
I'm not a Rachel fan (I don't usually actively dislike her, she just often hits all my buttons for SHUT THE FUCK UP RIGHT THE HELL NOW), but I try to write her in a way that is positive, by including little details that are maybe actually ridiculous but the thought behind them is sincere, because I think, at least as she gets some development (that doesn't revert, goddamn, Glee, what is up with that), she is sincere, she just doesn't always know the first thing about what she wants to do.
Brittany + Santana = <3 Plus cuddle times on the bus. This comes from marching band and winter guard competitions and Spanish club trips and all the devious fun we'd have on the buses, but also all the cuddling and friendship times, too.
Mostly, I wanted to show that even if they don't always get along with each other all the time (I think Santana and Lauren will always clash some, and Santana and Rachel, etc.), that at the core of it (at the heart of it, to be super cheesy), they love each other hard.
“That’s my high school glee club,” Lauren says and crosses her arms over her chest, her best glare at the ready. Yeah, maybe she still thinks show choir is stupid, but that doesn’t mean anyone else gets to say it is.
Oh, Lauren, so big and so bad and so protective of the things she loves.
(This is all character, not author, too. Then and now, please feel free to tell me how horrible Glee is, I AGREE. And I haven't watched since the end of season two, but whatever.)
“Oh, cool, you sing?” Mo grins. “Do you like karaoke? That’s basically my favorite thing in the world next to running. There’s this great little place nearby, you can rent out a whole room for pretty cheap and they let you bring in alcohol and everything. We’ll have to go sometime.” She’s got this easy way about her, and though Lauren doesn’t really like new people -- or most any people -- she’s already decided that life will be better if she doesn’t actively hate her roommate. That Mo’s kind of fun so far is just a bonus.
Private karaoke rooms are the GREATEST. I don't even sing and I love them.
“We should,” Lauren says. She looks at the pictures again. “My friends sang everywhere in high school, for everything. So yeah, I sing.”
(For Brittany’s eighteenth birthday, they all gave her serenades, sometimes in groups, sometimes solos. Santana? Totally a solo. Rachel too. Kurt and Blaine sang to her together, and the faces Blaine made while he danced had Lauren trying so hard to hide her laughter -- damn, okay, it’s Brittany, no way was Lauren going to ruin her birthday -- that she ended up falling off the bleachers and cutting the hell out of her arm.
Then in the shower later -- because she was way too hurt to wash her own hair, Puck said and volunteered -- he tried to sing all sexy but slipped and she cracked her knee so hard lunging to catch him that for a second she thought she broke it.
Her first thought wasn’t about what it would do to her wrestling career or even how much it hurt, but how the hell she was going to explain to anyone how she’d managed to hurt herself so badly twice in the same day without letting it slip that her boyfriends were sometimes ridiculous, okay, can you blame her?)
I'm pretty sure Lauren spends a great amount of time sitting around with her I'M JUDGING YOU look on her face, even when she's on the phone or video chat with one of the others. RIDICULOUS. Yet (I hope) you can see how much she loves them.
They go back to getting ready after that, and the party’s pretty fun, but when they come stumbling home at three a.m., slightly drunk and absolutely exhausted, Lauren still lies awake awhile staring at the pictures she can see by the streetlight spilling in through the open blinds.
And we're going to end this with, sing out if you know the words, Lauren feeling things but not discussing them even with her herself. She misses her people and she's not that far from home, but Chicago (and Shimmer and school) feels like a new world. I wanted Lauren both competent and vulnerable and believably in love, and I think I captured those things here.
So that was a thing.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-19 08:35 pm (UTC)