lise: The last part.
This was written months before the bulk of the story. We had the first section, and a line about the chocolate condoms, and the dictionary, and *this*.
kel: Of course, we spent about a thousand years fussing over the exact nuances. Originally, Lise actually had the word "end" after the last line, but I made her take it out and add the Neil Gaiman quote.
lise: Did I? You were right, then.
kel: Yes.
lise: It was incredibly hard to actually envision writing this story until we had this section written out. Because we fiddled with it, sure, but we didn't really change the essence of it at all from the very first draft.
And I, at least, had no idea of where we were headed until I saw those thumbtacks, and then I knew exactly what the rest of the story was.
I don't know if it was the same for you, kel, since I think I originally wrote the end, but.
kel: You know me. I always write from the end.
Lance doesn't remember how it happens, he's just staring at a bulletin board. He went out and bought thumbtacks, he thinks. Thumbtacks is where it happened, where it started.
There's been a bulletin board in Lance's office, a map with Justin's whereabouts, for the last year. Not because Lance has been following Justin like Elvis or anything, just because there's only so much you can do when you're not writing a book and avoiding your phone.
Justin's appearances are random, and dated. Tabloids place him in Idaho, at a convenience store. In San Diego, buying milk and out for dinner with people Lance doesn't recognize. There's a fuzzy picture in that article from the Examiner, and he's got a copy of it in a stack of papers in his desk. An internet message board has pictures of Justin in his hometown, and Lance has those printed out and stuck between the pages of another file.
He called a friend last week, asked for some help when he was watching the News on mute and saw the same map beside the CNN anchorwoman's face. She was grim and talking silently, and he didn't turn the volume up but the ticker-tape below her said 'two new murders'. So he made a call and then he got the file and he read the file and then he decided he needed more thumbtacks. He went out and bought a new box, and now he's sitting on his desk and staring, and that's when it happens.
Blue thumbtacks on every place where Justin has been spotted in the last two years. Idaho, Memphis, and a cluster all around the Bay area; those ones are familiar. Yellow thumbtacks hold up random notes, a postcard from JC in Italy from last summer, and NSYNC's first press release, Lance's car insurance papers that need renewing.
Purple thumbtacks are currently stuck into gruesome crime scene photos: houses broken into and ransacked, bloody footprints. He got the police reports and FBI profile yesterday. All of that is in his hands, or pinned up in purple, right now.
It's the red thumbtacks that are disturbing Lance the most. The irony that was intentional five minutes ago is now making him sick, red thumbtacks for where the police found the bodies. The first thumbtack, in the middle of the map, is alone and isolated, the middle of Nebraska and not even near a major city.
Number two is somewhere outside Memphis, but this is a map of the whole of America and so there isn't room to label "outside Memphis". The little red pin sits right on the city itself. It's jostling for room with a blue pin, as well, with a tag that says 'three times, last year and three months ago' stickied as close as it can get.
The third red tack, Lance put on top of Seattle WA. He never liked Seattle, it was too rainy and there's a little purple thumbtack on top of this one, as well, because her body was found in her house, laying on the kitchen floor. Its blue neighbor has fallen out twice, the two of them too close together to properly stick in the board anymore.
Four and five sit snugly atop of San Diego, with a forest of little blue pins nestled in between. A piece of paper with all of Justin's appearances in Southern California is wedged in the frame right beside it. The crime scene, purple south of San Diego, is almost lost amid the blue and red. national enquirer
Six is back in Tennessee, this time by Nashville. Red and purple and blue, red and purple and blue. Seven and eight and nine and ten and he ran out of thumbtacks five minutes ago with half a file to go.
Lance's eyes start to water, staring at the bulletin board. It's all just a wash of color, too many pins and they were all trying to crowd around each other. He traces the roads between Memphis and Boise and Seattle and San Diego and everywhere, hits a red and blue thumbtack.
Lance puts the papers down carefully, and picks up the phone.
~
"Some of this story is true."
-- Neil Gaiman, "An Introduction"
lise: I really don't understand quite how inaccessible this story is to some people, either. But I guess that's me. I tend to prefer stories where the negative space, the things around the text, hovering between words but never said, are what's important. Like Joss Whedon's buffy episode "the body".
Maggie says it's a staple of Canadian film.
kel: Lise said that we were only allowed to do commentary for this story if we didn't give away the ending, but I'm not even sure that I have anything to give away. In the Frequently Asked Questions of my career in fandom, "What happens at the end of 'Flesh Mechanic'?" is way, way up there. And to be honest? I have no idea. When we were writing this story, we were so tight in Lance's POV, that I honestly have no idea what Lance is going to do. Is he going to call the FBI? Is he going to try and call Justin? I don't know. When this story got reviewed by twist_of_lemon on livejournal, people complained about the ending and Katie said something that I just love, the thing about the end is that Lance could really be calling JC to ask him if he wants to go to coffee. You just don't know.
lise: I think that goes back to the idea that, I don't really consider us the writers of this story. I mean, sure, we wrote Lance's scenes, and we compiled a lot of evidence, much of it fake.
But the story wrote itself, first in the creation of it, the way that the parts worked together to form this whole picture and secondly in the way that people received it.
kel: We were in the right place at the right time. The atmosphere of fandom and the way that Justin was perceived actually became ripe to receive the story while we were in the process of writing it.
lise: Because we're not the writers, I think we know only as much as the audience knows. The extra information we have on hand - like that Justin scalped people with Chris's VMA - is just an inside joke; it's nothing more fundamental to the narrative than what's already there.
kel: When we were writing the story, we figured that either a bunch of people would tell us that we were sick fucks and that we should get the fuck out of fandom or that we'd get a couple pieces of feedback from people who were our friends. We never ever expected that this story would have the wide spread appeal that it did.
lise: We managed to write some words, but the actual formation of the story happened after. Because the parts formed together to create a cohesive whole - this is going to head into structuralist theory, I fear - and the way that each section of the story related to each other was more important to the narrative than what they said.
Just like the way the story related to the larger parts of the fandom, the links and the structure between the fic and the concept behind the fic, and what was actually going *on*, was more important than anything we actually *said*.
So I can honestly look at this story and not have any feeling of authorship whatsoever. Because the fundamental concept that it managed to convey was celebrity. Which was very much unexpected.
And I could go on and on about celebrity and theory, but there's been a lot of discussion about it elsewhere, so I'll stop.
kel: I'm not sure how to end this, which is maybe why I didn't want the word "end" to appear on the last page of the story.
kel: So, instead I'll just say, "Some of this story is true."
lise: How much, we'll have to wait and see.