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teratornisSo argentum_ls and I have been continuing to work on and post our Highlander: The Agent series, a collection of stories focusing on Matthew McCormick, post-canon. We've been posting weekly for more than six months now (closer to seven, really), and we just wrapped up the third main story last night:
People Like Us (30641 words) by argentum_ls, Teratornis
Chapters: 11/11
Fandom: Highlander: The Series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Matthew McCormick, Original Characters, Reverend Bell, Derek Worth
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Canon-Typical Violence, Beheading, Minor Character Death, TV Logic
Series: Part 6 of Highlander: The Agent
Summary: While investigating a string of murders in Louisiana, Matthew gets an unexpected opportunity to reconcile some more of the mistakes of his own past.
So I wanted to talk about the process a little bit.
This story was the second story actually written for this series. At the time, that was also dubiously where it was planned to fall in the series order, but we always knew some stories would probably get moved around. This one got shifted to maybe-number-seven, and maybe-number-six, and for a good while it was probably-number-four, before it settled into being story three.
As a result, a lot of rewriting happened in this one, but that's not the only reason there was a lot of rewriting.
The concept for this story came up pretty early on. We knew about from the start that we wanted to include Derek Worth somewhere in the series, and we had some basic ideas of a plotline surrounding him. That discussion had somewhat lapsed, however, by the time I hammered out the first few hundred words of this story and dumped them in LS' lap one day without warning.
Yeah. A lot of the process has sorta been like that.
Despite having a fairly strong start (though it's changed a lot as a reflection of how many times this story moved around in the series, and the things it needed to reference when it finally found its place), and knowing that Derek would be involved and roughly what the plot was, I spent a lot of time saying not much of anything in this story. I had a lot of space to fill between the beginning and the end, and I wasn't initially sure how to fill it and where to take their investigation, so what resulted was a lot of big chunks of rambling introspection that didn't achieve much of anything.
Or I suppose it did let me slowly tease a real plot out of the story, once I figured out more or less how to get where I was going. LS was definitely a massive help with a lot of it, and made some great suggestions about what to add and how to handle it. The swordsmith can be credited to her, I believe.
So the first draft got done, and it was pretty okay, but then we wrote like four more stories for the series and this one ended up in the third spot. The edits, when I finally came back to that first draft, were exciting. All of that rambling introspection had to be either trimmed down or cut completely to make way for actually interesting and plot-relevant stuff, and there were a whole lot of references to past stories that needed to be added in. Not to mention some references to the then-tentatively-first story (now sixth story) that needed to be removed.
And that was before![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
black_dwarf and idelthoughts got to it for beta reading. Fortunately, beta edits went pretty smoothly, I think. I spent a little while going >:c about some of the bigger changes suggested, but they were the correct changes to make.
I was really excited to post this story, and I'm really very pleased with it, in all. It was a lot of fun, and I loved being able to bring in Derek and Reverend Bell, and some of the original characters in this one were a delight.
And now, onto story four!
argentum_ls and I have been continuing to work on and post our Highlander: The Agent series, a collection of stories focusing on Matthew McCormick, post-canon. We've been posting weekly for more than six months now (closer to seven, really), and we just wrapped up the third main story last night:People Like Us (30641 words) by argentum_ls, Teratornis
Chapters: 11/11
Fandom: Highlander: The Series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Matthew McCormick, Original Characters, Reverend Bell, Derek Worth
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Canon-Typical Violence, Beheading, Minor Character Death, TV Logic
Series: Part 6 of Highlander: The Agent
Summary: While investigating a string of murders in Louisiana, Matthew gets an unexpected opportunity to reconcile some more of the mistakes of his own past.
So I wanted to talk about the process a little bit.
This story was the second story actually written for this series. At the time, that was also dubiously where it was planned to fall in the series order, but we always knew some stories would probably get moved around. This one got shifted to maybe-number-seven, and maybe-number-six, and for a good while it was probably-number-four, before it settled into being story three.
As a result, a lot of rewriting happened in this one, but that's not the only reason there was a lot of rewriting.
The concept for this story came up pretty early on. We knew about from the start that we wanted to include Derek Worth somewhere in the series, and we had some basic ideas of a plotline surrounding him. That discussion had somewhat lapsed, however, by the time I hammered out the first few hundred words of this story and dumped them in LS' lap one day without warning.
Yeah. A lot of the process has sorta been like that.
Despite having a fairly strong start (though it's changed a lot as a reflection of how many times this story moved around in the series, and the things it needed to reference when it finally found its place), and knowing that Derek would be involved and roughly what the plot was, I spent a lot of time saying not much of anything in this story. I had a lot of space to fill between the beginning and the end, and I wasn't initially sure how to fill it and where to take their investigation, so what resulted was a lot of big chunks of rambling introspection that didn't achieve much of anything.
Or I suppose it did let me slowly tease a real plot out of the story, once I figured out more or less how to get where I was going. LS was definitely a massive help with a lot of it, and made some great suggestions about what to add and how to handle it. The swordsmith can be credited to her, I believe.
So the first draft got done, and it was pretty okay, but then we wrote like four more stories for the series and this one ended up in the third spot. The edits, when I finally came back to that first draft, were exciting. All of that rambling introspection had to be either trimmed down or cut completely to make way for actually interesting and plot-relevant stuff, and there were a whole lot of references to past stories that needed to be added in. Not to mention some references to the then-tentatively-first story (now sixth story) that needed to be removed.
And that was before
I was really excited to post this story, and I'm really very pleased with it, in all. It was a lot of fun, and I loved being able to bring in Derek and Reverend Bell, and some of the original characters in this one were a delight.
And now, onto story four!
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Date: 3 Aug 2025 04:31 (UTC)no subject
Date: 3 Aug 2025 04:36 (UTC)