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Author's commentary on "Every 16 Hours"
Continuing to experiment with putting my Quodo meta here instead of on Tumblr. This is a "behind the scenes" piece for my fic Every 16 Hours. As always, I talk too much. (n = 6516 words)
Long fic is long
So this is the longest fic I've written by a lot. And that includes all my unfinished fic too -- for example, I have several other multichapter WIPs I've been working on for years, and they are still only about half the size of this fic. I'm very glad to have finished this fic and posted it, though, because I felt weird having the longest thing I've ever posted to AO3 be my insanely long Quodo manifesto. I mean, I love that manifesto but it's also kind of ridiculous that my spewing all my Quodo feelings dwarfs all my other fic. Well, not anymore!
The only piece of my writing that is similar in length is the one NaNoWriMo novel I wrote over a decade ago, although that one is both shorter than this fic (IIRC, I cut it very close to the 50k line with my NaNo novel) and also not fanfiction (arguably -- it's a rewrite of a fairy tale so could be kind of considered fanfiction of a sort but not the type I usually write).
Probably the reason why I managed to write something so long is that it's a lot of disjointed scenes that are more or less standalone. And also a lot of time passes in the fic, and I had to have enough content to convey that.
How did this fic start?
Basically, this all started when I was writing for xslytherclawx for Pine4Pine in August of 2021. She listed cheesy rom-com plots in her likes, which of course works really well for Quark and Odo, so I wrote up a list of possible trope-y ideas -- which included a time loop plot, a roommates AU, and an accidental soulbond/mutual mind-reading sort of setup -- as well as looked at lists of rom-com movies for inspiration.
I wrote up some initial ideas for the time loop plot, first trying to decide what was the instigating event and who was affected (Quark, Odo, or both). In these initial brief notes, I wrote: "Probably better for pining if it's only one [of them] because that's lonelier. I kind of like it being Odo because of the mechanic that every time he regenerates, time resets." I also came up with some ideas of moments that would work for a time loop sort of plot -- Odo seeking out assistance in fixing it, Odo eventually being able to carry out both sides of a bantery exchange he has with Quark (this never made it into the fic), and Odo struggling to keep his form because he is trying to squeeze out as much time as he can from a single cycle (this did make it into the fic, although I always envisioned that it would be a key emotional moment, but instead it ended up kind of just one moment of many generic ones rather than a core emotional beat as it seemed to me when brainstorming). At this stage I also brainstormed that one of the Orbs of the Prophets might be involved -- canonically, the Orbs are very much used for some Time Travel Bullshit plots in DS9 (most notably, the very silly "Trials and Tribble-ations" episode (5x06)), so it seemed an obvious choice. (From my notes: "Maybe an orb arrives on the station, or is being moved and Odo accidentally comes into contact with it?")
Ultimately, though, I ended up tabling this idea because (1) I otherwise had no ideas for a plot, including the core piece of a time loop story, which is what is the condition for exiting the loop (either from a Doylist/narrative point of view ("at what point in the character's character development can/should they exit the loop") or from an in-story/Watsonian point of view ("what is the in-universe mechanical solution for the loop"), and (2) it was unclear when/how/if the pining elements would make an appearance in the story, which was important for a pining exchange! So in the end, I went back to the drawing board to evaluate possible ideas based on their pining potential, eventually going with a "pining while in a friends-with-benefits type relationship" type idea where it was easier to make sure the final product would have plenty of pining without a lot of setup.
But at some point after this exchange wrapped up, my brain started doing a thing which sometimes happens, which is just generating snippet upon snippet for a story, almost faster than I can write them down. This started happening sometime in November 2021. Most of the snippets were basically little humorous bits of dialogue between various characters as they help Odo with his loop or comment on it, as well as snippets from the "late" part of Odo's time loop, where Odo is clearly very familiar with Quark (used to interacting with him over and over), very lonely, and a bit unhinged from being in the loop so long.
In the first category were things like Dax and Sisko's playful banter where Dax lightheartedly says all she has to do is figure out how artifacts they don't understand interact with a person whose biology they don't understand -- should be simple enough! Another early scene that shaped what the story would eventually be is a conversation between Quark and Odo where they have predictably opposing views on the notion of using a timeloop to seduce people. Another idea that came out in this early stage which helped solidify the fic was the idea that, in the background of Odo's loop, O'Brien must surely be suffering (just a humorous gag that tickled me while writing and so made writing and coming up with additional ideas for this fic more fun, and which also provided a bit of a familiar "fixed point" for Odo's day that set the tone for his loop more generally).
In the second category of "late-timeloop" snippets was the snippet mentioned above of Odo not wanting to regenerate and reset everything as well as the scene where late-timeloop Odo hits on Quark in a very Curzodo-like way. These snippets, especially the last scene, which was pretty fleshed-out, would function as a kind of anchor for the story, setting up a point I would eventually need to get to.
With the snippets I had written so far, I had enough to figure out a general arc or theme to the story. Odo starts off (being quite businesslike and prudish) focused entirely on the issue of getting out of the loop (point A). However, by the end, Odo is quite similar to what he was like when he merged with Curzon Dax: very confident, more experienced than Quark, and (having been mindbroken from being in a timeloop so long) having stopped giving a fuck about various things he used to care about (point B). All throughout the fic, Quark forms a contrast to Odo: at the beginning, he encourages Odo to play around and experiment, and he also has a crush on Odo that Odo is oblivious to; by the end, Odo has more experience of and knowledge of Quark and of being in a relationship with Quark than Quark can even imagine, reversing their usual disparity in experience and investment in the relationship from what it was at the start.
In order to get from point A to point B (the anchor point I knew I wanted/needed to get to), it was clear that Odo needed to go through some gradual changes where his stiffness and rigidity eventually get relaxed -- he needed to slowly open himself up to having new experiences, and then over time he needed to become more and more familiar with Quark. At this point, my mind had come up with enough snippets that I was able to brainstorm this plot as a route from A to B: "Possible plot: Odo starts off the loop pursuing Kira (an idea he gets from Quark). Somehow this turns into sleeping with Quark? Odo sleeps with Quark out of convenience because Quark is the most intimate with him / is the one who is the most willing to go from 0 to 100 in under 16 hours, and takes the edge off of his loneliness. I was thinking that I want maybe the end part of this fic to be that the time loop ends (for reasons??), Odo still feels isolated and is unsure if he wants to pursue a relationship with Kira or Quark or both or neither." (Following this, there is a note about how figuring this out happens in the context of getting therapy -- more on this plot point later.)
Core to this plot is the contrast between Kira and Quark. Kira is the person whom Odo has a crush on from the very start of the loop, but she has not really ever considered Odo in that light (although like in the show, she is willing to give it a try). So, very quickly, Odo hits a ceiling where there's a limit to how much his and Kira's relationship can develop in 16 hours. By contrast, Quark is the person who has a crush on Odo from the very start of the loop, but Odo is oblivious and has not really ever considered Quark in that light. So basically, Odo very quickly develops past the point where Kira can match him in terms of affection and intimacy, but it takes much longer for this to happen with Quark, which is something Odo picks up very early on when it comes to physical experiences and only much later understands is ALSO true when it comes to the emotional side.
At this time, having the anchor point where I knew roughly where Odo would eventualy end up (emotionally speaking) late in the loop allowed me to also write (very early on in this process) the last segment of the fic, what would become the "Aftermath" chapter. (Hilariously, in my old document for this fic, before I separated the snippets I was writing into multiple chapter files, I labeled the after-the-loop section as "Chapter 2" not realizing how much writing it would take me to get Odo to where he needed to be by the time the time loop ended...) This aftermath section was written very roughly because I knew I would need to go through and improve the flow and fix up the specific details once the rest of the fic had been fleshed out, but I just wrote down a lot of the complicated emotions and the emotional beats that Odo goes through, from kind of business-like and optimistic he will be able to reintegrate into society, to realizing the emotional tangle he still has regarding Quark, to finally talking to Quark, which leads to a temporary distance between them before a reconciliation. So from very early on, I had the complete ending written, which is a nice feeling especially since this ending is very emotional and feels-y so made for nice reading when I was getting frustrated writing the rest of the fic.
Research, research, research
After coming up with some of the bones of the plot, I started drilling down into some more detailed research to decide on some of the specifics I needed in order to write the mechanical parts of this time loop plot.
Probably the main one was canon review to research the Orbs and the vedeks to figure out if my planned idea for the initiating incident to be an encounter with an Orb while it's being transferred (on/off) DS9 was viable. As part of this I looked into whether there seems to be any Orb permanently hosted in DS9's shrine. It's possible there is, but it also seemed plausible that the Orbs rotate between different monasteries/temples/whatever and it seemed like multiple Orbs have at some point been housed (temporarily?) at DS9 (the Orb of Prophecy and Change and the Orb of Contemplation), so that seemed fine. Memory Alpha was very helpful for finding information related to the Orbs including episodes they appear in to review, and also for finding out the name of the vedek who lives on DS9.
Related to this, I also wanted to nail down when in the series this story would be set. Early seasons worked fine, but in the anchor scene, I had Quark explicitly reference Curzon merging with Odo during Dax's zhian'tara, which meant that this story would have to be after that (3x25 "Facets"). Of course, Quark's line was a throwaway joke that I could remove, so this wasn't a hard constraint but if I could make it work, I wanted to keep it in. With the tentative plot I had come up with, where Odo's progression is pushed forward by romantic interest in Kira, the best place to do this seemed to be after Odo is conscious of his feelings for Kira (so after 3x14 "Heart of Stone") but also before he gets together with Kira or even before his relationship with Kira and his experiences with love get too complicated (as they do in 5x22 "Children of Time"). As I had already written the "Aftermath" section, I knew that Odo would be in therapy after exiting his loop and so I temporarily considered setting it in season 7 and having the counselor be Ezri, but then that would either require a completely different relaxation plot than the one I had come up with, or going very AU with Kira and Odo's relationship or something, so I quickly threw that out and decided to go with a generic Federation counselor (in this case, the one who treated O'Brien (offscreen) in 4x19 "Hard Time").
Going even a bit more specific, the ideal timeframe for the plot idea I came up with was the window when Kira is single (hence why Odo might seriously consider asking her out), which gave me the range of 3x13 "Life Support" to 4x13 "Crossfire." So luckily, everything seemed to be working out so far! I could get most of what I wanted just by setting it in the 3x25-4x13 range.
Part of the reason why I needed to nail the timeline down is because, depending on the timeframe, a different set of Orbs was a possibility to use in the story. For example, while the Orb of Time was probably the most obvious choice for a time loop plot, it only comes into Bajoran custody in 5x06 "Trials and Tribble-ations" so I wouldn't be able to use it here.
The other options were: the Orb of Prophecy and Change, the Orb of Wisdom, the Orb of Contemplation, or make one up, I suppose. Of these, the Orb of Wisdom was promising partly because of its connection to Quark (Quark speaks to the wormhole aliens through it in 3x16 "Prophet Motive") -- this ended up not really being all that useful, though -- and partly because it seemed thematically relevant to a story where "learning experiences earned through making mistakes" was a feature. The Orb of Prophecy and Change wasn't as thematically relevant ("change" maybe, but "prophecy" no), and Contemplation was similarly OK.
Another bit of research I had to do throughout the writing process was trying to come up with enough problem-solving cycle filler to make it plausible why it would take Odo so many cycles before he found the solution. In order for my story to work, he had to stay stuck in the loop long enough to start fraying at the edges... but this is quite hard to imagine happening given that he has the resources of some of the best and most competent Federation scientists nearby to draw on as well as comprehensive databases to search through, etc. And wacky sci-fi problems like this typically get solved in the course of a single episode in the show, so it's odd for them to drag on so long. So I tried coming up with a lot of red herrings / possible roads to go down that would eventually lead to a dead end. In order to research the technobabble I needed for this fic, I heavily relied on this category page on Memory Alpha listing all pages dealing with particles and would browse it for things that sounded interesting, which would also give me links to Star Trek plots and technology that made use of that particle, which was helpful. (I love Memory Alpha so much!)
With this, I was able to draft the first three chapters pretty easily. However, the problem of how Odo's loop works/gets solved started getting a bit more complicated as I got nearer to the end of the loop. At this point, while I had answered the Doylist question of when narratively Odo needs to get out of the loop (after he is exhausted and broken down by it, sometime after the anchor point), I actually still hadn't answered the Watsonian question of how exactly Odo exits the loop. At this point, I had already mainly rejected the possibility that the time loop would end because Odo meets some kind of condition -- I think I generally prefer time loops that are kind of random chance / a random space wedgie you get sucked into one day, rather than ones that resemble a curse with clear break conditions, or that have a Purpose (some kind of didactic or karmic function). Instead, I wanted the time loop to end just by chance through scientific perseverance.
In addition, the ending I'd already written imposed some additional constraints -- that ending relied on (1) other people knowing that Odo is in a time loop (otherwise, I was worried that Odo as a character might be inclined to keep his whole time loop a secret and not actually get therapy...), and (2) Odo being faced with the dilemma of how to handle his relationship with Quark outside the loop. Because of those constraints, I then knew that Odo's loop had to end on one of his problem-solving loops where he's enlisted people's help in getting out, and that time would continue normally from that moment onward (so that it would then be common knowledge that Odo had been stuck in a time loop). I also knew that Odo's relationship with Quark would need to be normal/unchanged in that problem-solving loop (otherwise there's no real dilemma for Odo). So I came up with a plausible last loop taking into account these constraints.
I actually considered having the solution to the loop be that Odo is finally (after a very long time) able to make contact with the wormhole aliens, who fix his problem and also offer him the option of resetting him back to who he was at the beginning of the loop. (Probably some inspiration here from what they do to Zek at Quark's request in 3x16 "Prophet Motive.") I kind of liked this idea because it would hammer home the theme of wisdom, where Odo has the choice between being ignorant and foolish but emotionally unburdened as he was at the start of the loop vs. being wiser and more experienced but having bought that wisdom very dearly with a lot of life experience and memories that he now has to carry with him. A neat idea, but I couldn't make it work because Odo of course couldn't choose the path of innocence (I mean, he could, and that would be quite canon-compliant, but it would personally break my heart, so NO). The only real option was for Odo to consciously choose to keep his memories and his wisdom, as difficult as keeping them would be. But this ruins the ending I had already written because Odo making that conscious choice would implicitly mean he is also consciously choosing to keep his feelings for Quark even if they give him pain, which kind of preemptively solves Odo's whole "Aftermath" dilemma before it starts!
So in the end I decided: nope, Odo doesn't get a choice in this. He gets out in a cycle where everyone knows that he's been looping and he's never presented with the option of forgetting.
What was the inspiration for the themes of this fic?
Note: Spoilers for the movies Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, Edge of Tomorrow, and The Notebook follow.
So WeaverOfWords asked me where did I get the notion that time loops involve this ethical dilemma where you want to experience new things and get to know people more deeply, but doing that too many times leads to a deterioration in your sense of other people's agency. And I realized, a lot of the themes of this fic must have been sparked by this episode of the Be the Serpent podcast on time loop fiction I listened to maybe a few years ago. I don't know how I got linked this episode but I was recced it somehow and I really liked the discussion in it of various features of time loop stories. In particular, several of the points made in this episode made it into my fic in some form: the notion that what time loop stories do is heavy-duty character work (specifically, they force a character to try new things that they wouldn't have thought to try before); the uncomfortable aspect of Groundhog Day where the looper treats people like NPCs and how this is quite similar to the experience of playing/saving/restarting games (video games are probably the art medium best suited to emphasizing player/character agency or lack thereof); and that there is such a disparity in experiences between the looper and everyone else (including the looper's love interest) that it would be interesting to see a detailed exploration of how you deal with after the loop.
All of these aspects made it into my fic in some way!
In addition, there are specific time loop movies I've watched that I also think heavily inspired parts of this fic:
First, Groundhog Day (1993): I watched this movie for the first time several years ago, and one thing that surprised/impressed me was that the movie did so much with the whole single day time loop setup. It explored it really deeply, and explored so many different emotional reactions one can have to being stuck in a time loop, all in a single movie. In particular, you can separate out the mood of Bill Murray's character as happening in different "phases":
Phase 1: Horrified - "Omg, I'm stuck in the worst town ever reliving the most tedious gig... forever?? KILL ME NOW."
Phase 2: Mischievous - "Wait a second... No consequences? Nothing I do matters? 😈"
Phase 3: Bored - "I've done everything I wanted to do. What's left?"
Phase 4: Nihilistic/suicidal - "Nothing I do matters. 😩"
Phase 5: Existentialist - "Nothing I do matters. So might as well be nice. 😎👍"
I talked about this movie with my partner who basically summed up the core of a time loop mechanic as "divorcing actions from consequences." And there are all sorts of ways someone might react to their actions no longer having consequences -- glee, despair, etc. -- but eventually they'll arrive at a Stoic/existentialist sort of worldview, which is what the main character, Phil, eventually settles on, which is that if your actions don't have clear consequences/meaning, then what ultimately matters is your actions and that they have meaning to you.
Odo's character growth in "Every 16 Hours" is very different because he starts off at such a different place from Bill Murray's character. Odo is already the kind of person who is very Stoic in the sense that he will always do what he thinks is right, regardless of what the fallout is, to the point of being quite stubborn/too much this way. So there isn't that much similarity between Phil's arc in Groundhog Day and Odo's arc here, but this conversation with my partner and the movie certainly did inspire parts of the fic. For example, Quark's natural inclination toward time loops is very much Phase 2 and that forms an interesting contrast with Odo who would be as uncomfortable doing something he believes is morally wrong in a time loop as he would outside of one. Part of the interesting narrative tension, therefore, goes via seeing Odo relax his own high standards and learn to live his life a bit more like the way Quark does.
I was summarizing this post to my partner and he had this to add:
Hmm I guess that sounds about right! It certainly is consistent with the way Quark and Odo each treat ethical dilemmas in the loop throughout the fic.
Another big, obvious influence on my story-writing here is a more recent time loop film, Palm Springs (2020). One memorable aspect of the film is that it introduces you to the timelooping character from the perspective of an outsider, which is a really interesting and fun element. The perspective character sees a guest at this wedding who is just clearly in the "not giving a fuck" late stage of a time loop, and I liked that bit of meta/genre-referencing aspect of the movie, where it assumes the viewer knows some of the "tropes" of single day time loop fiction and can recognize them playing out. That also probably inspired some elements of my fic because I very much wanted time loops to be a thing characters are aware can happen (although some of them are better than others at understanding how time loops work or find it plausible that someone might be in one) and Odo is in a time loop with full knowledge of what can happen to someone psychologically in a time loop.
The other major piece of inspiration I got from this movie is the theme/major plot point that where the character starts in the loop affects how livable the single-day time loop is for them. On one hand, you have the main character and his love interest (Nyles and Sarah) who find the time loop a living hell because the day they're repeating opens with them in a relationship with someone utterly undeserving of their love, which is a reminder of all the life mistakes they've made up to this point; this is contrasted, however, with another character trapped in the loop, Roy, who also hates and resents Nyles for trapping him there, but on some days, just has a good day because he has a wife and children he loves that he doesn't mind spending the whole day with even though it's the same day over and over again. This plot point is also present in Groundhog Day -- one of the reasons why Bill Murray's character is so alienated in his loop is because he spent his life up until that point being a misanthropic jerk.
These elements of "what you have at the start of the time loop is all that you get, and that makes a difference" and "a time loop might be more bearable if you can spend it with people you love who know and love you too" was incorporated in my fic with Odo regretting the life choices he has made that have resulted in him being so distant from the people he cares about, but also that he is fortunate enough to have Quark.
Third, Edge of Tomorrow (2014) is another time loop film that I suppose inverse inspired this fic. That movie is almost perfect except the ending. The rest of the movie does a really good job at building up a very bittersweet pining dynamic, where the main character experiences all these intensely intimate experiences with someone over the course of the loop, but the way the loop is, their relationship goes back to being strangers each time the loop resets. But then at the end, they have the love interest kiss the looper on a cycle with very little intimacy or relationship development between them, which almost retroactively implies that the two of them have always had some kind of mutual chemistry or latent attraction all along, which completely ruins the bittersweet pining dynamic so carefully established in the rest of the movie.
Anyway, I wished the movie had leaned into the dynamic it had built up and gave it a proper ending, rather than an ending that brushes past all the angst and messiness and complicated feelings of having had all these intensely intimate experiences with someone who remembers none of it. As the above-mentioned podcast episode pointed out, that extremely asymmetric dynamic is itself interesting and worthy of exploration, and so that inspired a good chunk of this fic.
Finally (and somewhat related to this point on asymmetrical relationships), parts of the late loop are inspired by 50 First Dates (2004) and also probably The Notebook (2004) too, where you have a long-term relationship between two people where one person keeps forgetting the relationship and has to be caught up from square 1 each day, while the other person remembers, which is such an uncomfortable dynamic lol -- it's in some sense romantic but it's also weird and discomfiting too. However, whereas those movies are mainly told from the perspective of the forgetting person who is in some sense reliving the relationship with completely fresh eyes each time, this fic is told from the perspective of the remembering person.
The common Quodo plot
As I discussed in this post, I think a plot that works really well for Quark and Odo can basically be summarized as "Quark and Odo have a very intimate experience that is kind of fake but then after much emotional journey, they both realize they would like that intimate experience again but Real this time." I don't know why this kind of plot works so well for Quark and Odo, but I do think more generally, a lot of fic tropes exist for the purposes of creating this "false intimacy that leads to real intimacy" scenario and it's a frequent element of romance plotlines too. Whether it's sex pollen or other altered mental states, fake dating, anonymous dating, living out a fantasy with a hologram, soulmates, bad guys made them do it, seeing a future where you're together, etc. etc. they all share this feature of having an intense but fake intimate experience, having a weird reaction to that, and then the emotional core of the fic lies in accepting, like, "yes I do actually want this."
I guess this kind of plot works so well for Quark and Odo because their relationship is so antagonistic and their values so opposed that if they do have feelings for each other, it would take something pretty visceral and hard to ignore to get them to realize those feelings and have to confront them. It's also of course good for pining because the fake intimacy situation is so close to a real relationship but it very much is not.
Anyway, this fic is very much an example of that. Even though Odo and Quark get together a lot throughout the fic, it's all in a sort of fake pocket-universe sort of way. So then the final obstacle that has to be overcome is going from those kind-of-fake experiences to the conclusion that the real deal is something Odo would like. Like in a lot of my other fic with this kind of setup, the fic ends before Quark and Odo actually get together, which is kind of an odd choice. 🤔 But somehow that feels right. You kind of know how it will play out from here, because the fic gave you an idea of that in the "fake intimacy" version. The main emotional work has already been done
What was the hardest chapter to write?
Chapter 5, hands down. This one was difficult because I write scenes down in chapters once I think of them, but chapter 5 remained quite empty and "??? fill stuff in here" until very late in the process, despite containing the anchor scenes. This chapter was difficult because there weren't really much constraints or things that HAD to go in; it was more like, I had a bunch of contextless ideas for what could go into this chapter (because the idea featured a late time loop Odo), and the trick was trying to figure out how to slot it into a scene that Accomplished Something and didn't just feel like random filler. It's also the chapter where the most time passes, which also made it quite a bit longer than I was hoping it would be.
If there was a "goal" to this chapter, something that it absolutely had to accomplish, it was simply sketching out a plausible route from where Odo was at the end of the last chapter (a kind of emotional high point having realized he has feelings for Quark and that this kind of retroactively makes all the mistakes he made with Quark (out of ignorance) okay) to late-timeloop Odo who has been with Quark so many times that it's kind of effortless now.
One thing that kind of helped here is that I wanted the writing on this chapter to be a bit more disjointed and episodic to reflect that Odo is kind of losing it, so that allowed me to put in some random, kind of contextless thoughts going through Odo's head. Unfortunately, though, whenever I wrote Odo and Quark spending a day together, the writing went back to how it was in previous chapters, a very detailed play-by-play of the whole day with a lot of different moments packed in, leading to a very uneven chapter, where there are these very linear, detailed, lucid date scenes that match the style of earlier parts of the fic, and just some random free-floating thoughts in between. It's possible I could have probably rewritten it to have a more consistent writing style, but I spent so much time writing the big scenes and there were so many different moments in them that I would have hated to cut, so I decided just to let it be.
Another difficulty in this chapter is that it featured a scene I wrote very early on but which spent most of the writing process cut from the fic / with no clear place where it could be inserted in the fic. The scene was the one where Quark (knowing about O'Brien's recurring shoulder issue in the loop) ends up not able to stop laughing when he sees what Odo means about it always happening. I was very attached to this scene especially because I wanted to put in a lot of Quodo dynamics in this fic, and this dynamic is one that closely resembles their mischievous dynamic where they team up to bully O'Brien (and Bashir) at the end of 6x14 "One Little Ship." However, this scene is quite tricky to make work because it relies on several facts: (1) Quark in this cycle needs to know about the loop, but (2) O'Brien needs to not know about the loop, (3) Odo and Quark must be spending the day aboard DS9 and encounter O'Brien, and (4) Odo must not have already solved the O'Brien shoulder problem. This means it has to be a relaxation cycle, one where Odo has told Quark about the loop but has not publicized this information in general. There are pretty heavy constraints on where this cycle could occur in the timeline.
I finally figured out it had a chance of working in this chapter in the place where I put it. However, another difficulty presented is that in order for the joke to work, I needed to do the setup for the O'Brien joke but I probably also needed to let enough time pass for the reader to possibly forget about this detail and forget that it's relevant. In other words, I needed to add some other distracting filler before I let the punchline of the joke drop. So this chapter kept on accumulating more and more scenes/conversations/moments just to justify this joke! Probably the most work I've ever done for the sake of one gag -- I basically wrote a 3000+ word date cycle just to provide the context and padding for this punchline. I really worked hard to keep this scene in!
Anyway, one last challenge with this chapter was that getting the progression of Odo's mood/character right was important, and especially challenging when the content of each cycle varied so much. I ended up needing to use Scrivener to swap the scenes around a lot to keep the pacing sort of balanced and try to order things by when I felt they should occur in the loop. Without Scrivener, trying to rearrange and renumber certain cycles would have been a nightmare.
Why aren't there sex scenes?
Basically, the reasons were that (1) I wanted my partner to read this fic and he just will not read scenes involving Quark and Odo having sex (this is apparently not something against the Quodo pairing itself, because he loves reading my Quodo fic in general, nor is it a thing against my smut writing because he's read that too, but apparently just the image of two people like Quark and Odo having sex grosses him out for some reason), and (2) I wanted to post this fic on my main and I try to keep things pretty M-rated or lower on main.
I'm pretty happy with the final result, but I do think the fic probably would have been stronger if all the sex scenes weren't fade to black because I could have done some characterization work during those scenes and given an idea of how Odo and Quark's dynamic during sex evolves over time too. And I kind of get the feeling that in a very boring, repetitive time loop, trying out different kinds of sex with Quark could probably keep someone entertained for quite a while. I was also hoping at some point (probably late chapter 4 or early chapter 5) to include a moment where Quark for the first time has an "*eyesquint* Have you done this before?" reaction when he and Odo have sex, but I couldn't find an existing scene to put it in, and it seemed not important enough to make a new scene for, so I left it out.
But yeah, I guess the lack of sex scenes probably saved me some time in writing! If someone wants to write some of those missing scenes, though, that would be fun!
A bit of an odd place to end my commentary but this piece is long enough as it is! Anyway, I hope people enjoyed this fic and these bits about the process of writing it. It was a blast to write!
Long fic is long
So this is the longest fic I've written by a lot. And that includes all my unfinished fic too -- for example, I have several other multichapter WIPs I've been working on for years, and they are still only about half the size of this fic. I'm very glad to have finished this fic and posted it, though, because I felt weird having the longest thing I've ever posted to AO3 be my insanely long Quodo manifesto. I mean, I love that manifesto but it's also kind of ridiculous that my spewing all my Quodo feelings dwarfs all my other fic. Well, not anymore!
The only piece of my writing that is similar in length is the one NaNoWriMo novel I wrote over a decade ago, although that one is both shorter than this fic (IIRC, I cut it very close to the 50k line with my NaNo novel) and also not fanfiction (arguably -- it's a rewrite of a fairy tale so could be kind of considered fanfiction of a sort but not the type I usually write).
Probably the reason why I managed to write something so long is that it's a lot of disjointed scenes that are more or less standalone. And also a lot of time passes in the fic, and I had to have enough content to convey that.
How did this fic start?
Basically, this all started when I was writing for xslytherclawx for Pine4Pine in August of 2021. She listed cheesy rom-com plots in her likes, which of course works really well for Quark and Odo, so I wrote up a list of possible trope-y ideas -- which included a time loop plot, a roommates AU, and an accidental soulbond/mutual mind-reading sort of setup -- as well as looked at lists of rom-com movies for inspiration.
I wrote up some initial ideas for the time loop plot, first trying to decide what was the instigating event and who was affected (Quark, Odo, or both). In these initial brief notes, I wrote: "Probably better for pining if it's only one [of them] because that's lonelier. I kind of like it being Odo because of the mechanic that every time he regenerates, time resets." I also came up with some ideas of moments that would work for a time loop sort of plot -- Odo seeking out assistance in fixing it, Odo eventually being able to carry out both sides of a bantery exchange he has with Quark (this never made it into the fic), and Odo struggling to keep his form because he is trying to squeeze out as much time as he can from a single cycle (this did make it into the fic, although I always envisioned that it would be a key emotional moment, but instead it ended up kind of just one moment of many generic ones rather than a core emotional beat as it seemed to me when brainstorming). At this stage I also brainstormed that one of the Orbs of the Prophets might be involved -- canonically, the Orbs are very much used for some Time Travel Bullshit plots in DS9 (most notably, the very silly "Trials and Tribble-ations" episode (5x06)), so it seemed an obvious choice. (From my notes: "Maybe an orb arrives on the station, or is being moved and Odo accidentally comes into contact with it?")
Ultimately, though, I ended up tabling this idea because (1) I otherwise had no ideas for a plot, including the core piece of a time loop story, which is what is the condition for exiting the loop (either from a Doylist/narrative point of view ("at what point in the character's character development can/should they exit the loop") or from an in-story/Watsonian point of view ("what is the in-universe mechanical solution for the loop"), and (2) it was unclear when/how/if the pining elements would make an appearance in the story, which was important for a pining exchange! So in the end, I went back to the drawing board to evaluate possible ideas based on their pining potential, eventually going with a "pining while in a friends-with-benefits type relationship" type idea where it was easier to make sure the final product would have plenty of pining without a lot of setup.
But at some point after this exchange wrapped up, my brain started doing a thing which sometimes happens, which is just generating snippet upon snippet for a story, almost faster than I can write them down. This started happening sometime in November 2021. Most of the snippets were basically little humorous bits of dialogue between various characters as they help Odo with his loop or comment on it, as well as snippets from the "late" part of Odo's time loop, where Odo is clearly very familiar with Quark (used to interacting with him over and over), very lonely, and a bit unhinged from being in the loop so long.
In the first category were things like Dax and Sisko's playful banter where Dax lightheartedly says all she has to do is figure out how artifacts they don't understand interact with a person whose biology they don't understand -- should be simple enough! Another early scene that shaped what the story would eventually be is a conversation between Quark and Odo where they have predictably opposing views on the notion of using a timeloop to seduce people. Another idea that came out in this early stage which helped solidify the fic was the idea that, in the background of Odo's loop, O'Brien must surely be suffering (just a humorous gag that tickled me while writing and so made writing and coming up with additional ideas for this fic more fun, and which also provided a bit of a familiar "fixed point" for Odo's day that set the tone for his loop more generally).
In the second category of "late-timeloop" snippets was the snippet mentioned above of Odo not wanting to regenerate and reset everything as well as the scene where late-timeloop Odo hits on Quark in a very Curzodo-like way. These snippets, especially the last scene, which was pretty fleshed-out, would function as a kind of anchor for the story, setting up a point I would eventually need to get to.
With the snippets I had written so far, I had enough to figure out a general arc or theme to the story. Odo starts off (being quite businesslike and prudish) focused entirely on the issue of getting out of the loop (point A). However, by the end, Odo is quite similar to what he was like when he merged with Curzon Dax: very confident, more experienced than Quark, and (having been mindbroken from being in a timeloop so long) having stopped giving a fuck about various things he used to care about (point B). All throughout the fic, Quark forms a contrast to Odo: at the beginning, he encourages Odo to play around and experiment, and he also has a crush on Odo that Odo is oblivious to; by the end, Odo has more experience of and knowledge of Quark and of being in a relationship with Quark than Quark can even imagine, reversing their usual disparity in experience and investment in the relationship from what it was at the start.
In order to get from point A to point B (the anchor point I knew I wanted/needed to get to), it was clear that Odo needed to go through some gradual changes where his stiffness and rigidity eventually get relaxed -- he needed to slowly open himself up to having new experiences, and then over time he needed to become more and more familiar with Quark. At this point, my mind had come up with enough snippets that I was able to brainstorm this plot as a route from A to B: "Possible plot: Odo starts off the loop pursuing Kira (an idea he gets from Quark). Somehow this turns into sleeping with Quark? Odo sleeps with Quark out of convenience because Quark is the most intimate with him / is the one who is the most willing to go from 0 to 100 in under 16 hours, and takes the edge off of his loneliness. I was thinking that I want maybe the end part of this fic to be that the time loop ends (for reasons??), Odo still feels isolated and is unsure if he wants to pursue a relationship with Kira or Quark or both or neither." (Following this, there is a note about how figuring this out happens in the context of getting therapy -- more on this plot point later.)
Core to this plot is the contrast between Kira and Quark. Kira is the person whom Odo has a crush on from the very start of the loop, but she has not really ever considered Odo in that light (although like in the show, she is willing to give it a try). So, very quickly, Odo hits a ceiling where there's a limit to how much his and Kira's relationship can develop in 16 hours. By contrast, Quark is the person who has a crush on Odo from the very start of the loop, but Odo is oblivious and has not really ever considered Quark in that light. So basically, Odo very quickly develops past the point where Kira can match him in terms of affection and intimacy, but it takes much longer for this to happen with Quark, which is something Odo picks up very early on when it comes to physical experiences and only much later understands is ALSO true when it comes to the emotional side.
At this time, having the anchor point where I knew roughly where Odo would eventualy end up (emotionally speaking) late in the loop allowed me to also write (very early on in this process) the last segment of the fic, what would become the "Aftermath" chapter. (Hilariously, in my old document for this fic, before I separated the snippets I was writing into multiple chapter files, I labeled the after-the-loop section as "Chapter 2" not realizing how much writing it would take me to get Odo to where he needed to be by the time the time loop ended...) This aftermath section was written very roughly because I knew I would need to go through and improve the flow and fix up the specific details once the rest of the fic had been fleshed out, but I just wrote down a lot of the complicated emotions and the emotional beats that Odo goes through, from kind of business-like and optimistic he will be able to reintegrate into society, to realizing the emotional tangle he still has regarding Quark, to finally talking to Quark, which leads to a temporary distance between them before a reconciliation. So from very early on, I had the complete ending written, which is a nice feeling especially since this ending is very emotional and feels-y so made for nice reading when I was getting frustrated writing the rest of the fic.
Research, research, research
After coming up with some of the bones of the plot, I started drilling down into some more detailed research to decide on some of the specifics I needed in order to write the mechanical parts of this time loop plot.
Probably the main one was canon review to research the Orbs and the vedeks to figure out if my planned idea for the initiating incident to be an encounter with an Orb while it's being transferred (on/off) DS9 was viable. As part of this I looked into whether there seems to be any Orb permanently hosted in DS9's shrine. It's possible there is, but it also seemed plausible that the Orbs rotate between different monasteries/temples/whatever and it seemed like multiple Orbs have at some point been housed (temporarily?) at DS9 (the Orb of Prophecy and Change and the Orb of Contemplation), so that seemed fine. Memory Alpha was very helpful for finding information related to the Orbs including episodes they appear in to review, and also for finding out the name of the vedek who lives on DS9.
Related to this, I also wanted to nail down when in the series this story would be set. Early seasons worked fine, but in the anchor scene, I had Quark explicitly reference Curzon merging with Odo during Dax's zhian'tara, which meant that this story would have to be after that (3x25 "Facets"). Of course, Quark's line was a throwaway joke that I could remove, so this wasn't a hard constraint but if I could make it work, I wanted to keep it in. With the tentative plot I had come up with, where Odo's progression is pushed forward by romantic interest in Kira, the best place to do this seemed to be after Odo is conscious of his feelings for Kira (so after 3x14 "Heart of Stone") but also before he gets together with Kira or even before his relationship with Kira and his experiences with love get too complicated (as they do in 5x22 "Children of Time"). As I had already written the "Aftermath" section, I knew that Odo would be in therapy after exiting his loop and so I temporarily considered setting it in season 7 and having the counselor be Ezri, but then that would either require a completely different relaxation plot than the one I had come up with, or going very AU with Kira and Odo's relationship or something, so I quickly threw that out and decided to go with a generic Federation counselor (in this case, the one who treated O'Brien (offscreen) in 4x19 "Hard Time").
Going even a bit more specific, the ideal timeframe for the plot idea I came up with was the window when Kira is single (hence why Odo might seriously consider asking her out), which gave me the range of 3x13 "Life Support" to 4x13 "Crossfire." So luckily, everything seemed to be working out so far! I could get most of what I wanted just by setting it in the 3x25-4x13 range.
Part of the reason why I needed to nail the timeline down is because, depending on the timeframe, a different set of Orbs was a possibility to use in the story. For example, while the Orb of Time was probably the most obvious choice for a time loop plot, it only comes into Bajoran custody in 5x06 "Trials and Tribble-ations" so I wouldn't be able to use it here.
The other options were: the Orb of Prophecy and Change, the Orb of Wisdom, the Orb of Contemplation, or make one up, I suppose. Of these, the Orb of Wisdom was promising partly because of its connection to Quark (Quark speaks to the wormhole aliens through it in 3x16 "Prophet Motive") -- this ended up not really being all that useful, though -- and partly because it seemed thematically relevant to a story where "learning experiences earned through making mistakes" was a feature. The Orb of Prophecy and Change wasn't as thematically relevant ("change" maybe, but "prophecy" no), and Contemplation was similarly OK.
Another bit of research I had to do throughout the writing process was trying to come up with enough problem-solving cycle filler to make it plausible why it would take Odo so many cycles before he found the solution. In order for my story to work, he had to stay stuck in the loop long enough to start fraying at the edges... but this is quite hard to imagine happening given that he has the resources of some of the best and most competent Federation scientists nearby to draw on as well as comprehensive databases to search through, etc. And wacky sci-fi problems like this typically get solved in the course of a single episode in the show, so it's odd for them to drag on so long. So I tried coming up with a lot of red herrings / possible roads to go down that would eventually lead to a dead end. In order to research the technobabble I needed for this fic, I heavily relied on this category page on Memory Alpha listing all pages dealing with particles and would browse it for things that sounded interesting, which would also give me links to Star Trek plots and technology that made use of that particle, which was helpful. (I love Memory Alpha so much!)
With this, I was able to draft the first three chapters pretty easily. However, the problem of how Odo's loop works/gets solved started getting a bit more complicated as I got nearer to the end of the loop. At this point, while I had answered the Doylist question of when narratively Odo needs to get out of the loop (after he is exhausted and broken down by it, sometime after the anchor point), I actually still hadn't answered the Watsonian question of how exactly Odo exits the loop. At this point, I had already mainly rejected the possibility that the time loop would end because Odo meets some kind of condition -- I think I generally prefer time loops that are kind of random chance / a random space wedgie you get sucked into one day, rather than ones that resemble a curse with clear break conditions, or that have a Purpose (some kind of didactic or karmic function). Instead, I wanted the time loop to end just by chance through scientific perseverance.
In addition, the ending I'd already written imposed some additional constraints -- that ending relied on (1) other people knowing that Odo is in a time loop (otherwise, I was worried that Odo as a character might be inclined to keep his whole time loop a secret and not actually get therapy...), and (2) Odo being faced with the dilemma of how to handle his relationship with Quark outside the loop. Because of those constraints, I then knew that Odo's loop had to end on one of his problem-solving loops where he's enlisted people's help in getting out, and that time would continue normally from that moment onward (so that it would then be common knowledge that Odo had been stuck in a time loop). I also knew that Odo's relationship with Quark would need to be normal/unchanged in that problem-solving loop (otherwise there's no real dilemma for Odo). So I came up with a plausible last loop taking into account these constraints.
I actually considered having the solution to the loop be that Odo is finally (after a very long time) able to make contact with the wormhole aliens, who fix his problem and also offer him the option of resetting him back to who he was at the beginning of the loop. (Probably some inspiration here from what they do to Zek at Quark's request in 3x16 "Prophet Motive.") I kind of liked this idea because it would hammer home the theme of wisdom, where Odo has the choice between being ignorant and foolish but emotionally unburdened as he was at the start of the loop vs. being wiser and more experienced but having bought that wisdom very dearly with a lot of life experience and memories that he now has to carry with him. A neat idea, but I couldn't make it work because Odo of course couldn't choose the path of innocence (I mean, he could, and that would be quite canon-compliant, but it would personally break my heart, so NO). The only real option was for Odo to consciously choose to keep his memories and his wisdom, as difficult as keeping them would be. But this ruins the ending I had already written because Odo making that conscious choice would implicitly mean he is also consciously choosing to keep his feelings for Quark even if they give him pain, which kind of preemptively solves Odo's whole "Aftermath" dilemma before it starts!
So in the end I decided: nope, Odo doesn't get a choice in this. He gets out in a cycle where everyone knows that he's been looping and he's never presented with the option of forgetting.
What was the inspiration for the themes of this fic?
Note: Spoilers for the movies Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, Edge of Tomorrow, and The Notebook follow.
So WeaverOfWords asked me where did I get the notion that time loops involve this ethical dilemma where you want to experience new things and get to know people more deeply, but doing that too many times leads to a deterioration in your sense of other people's agency. And I realized, a lot of the themes of this fic must have been sparked by this episode of the Be the Serpent podcast on time loop fiction I listened to maybe a few years ago. I don't know how I got linked this episode but I was recced it somehow and I really liked the discussion in it of various features of time loop stories. In particular, several of the points made in this episode made it into my fic in some form: the notion that what time loop stories do is heavy-duty character work (specifically, they force a character to try new things that they wouldn't have thought to try before); the uncomfortable aspect of Groundhog Day where the looper treats people like NPCs and how this is quite similar to the experience of playing/saving/restarting games (video games are probably the art medium best suited to emphasizing player/character agency or lack thereof); and that there is such a disparity in experiences between the looper and everyone else (including the looper's love interest) that it would be interesting to see a detailed exploration of how you deal with after the loop.
All of these aspects made it into my fic in some way!
In addition, there are specific time loop movies I've watched that I also think heavily inspired parts of this fic:
First, Groundhog Day (1993): I watched this movie for the first time several years ago, and one thing that surprised/impressed me was that the movie did so much with the whole single day time loop setup. It explored it really deeply, and explored so many different emotional reactions one can have to being stuck in a time loop, all in a single movie. In particular, you can separate out the mood of Bill Murray's character as happening in different "phases":
Phase 1: Horrified - "Omg, I'm stuck in the worst town ever reliving the most tedious gig... forever?? KILL ME NOW."
Phase 2: Mischievous - "Wait a second... No consequences? Nothing I do matters? 😈"
Phase 3: Bored - "I've done everything I wanted to do. What's left?"
Phase 4: Nihilistic/suicidal - "Nothing I do matters. 😩"
Phase 5: Existentialist - "Nothing I do matters. So might as well be nice. 😎👍"
I talked about this movie with my partner who basically summed up the core of a time loop mechanic as "divorcing actions from consequences." And there are all sorts of ways someone might react to their actions no longer having consequences -- glee, despair, etc. -- but eventually they'll arrive at a Stoic/existentialist sort of worldview, which is what the main character, Phil, eventually settles on, which is that if your actions don't have clear consequences/meaning, then what ultimately matters is your actions and that they have meaning to you.
Odo's character growth in "Every 16 Hours" is very different because he starts off at such a different place from Bill Murray's character. Odo is already the kind of person who is very Stoic in the sense that he will always do what he thinks is right, regardless of what the fallout is, to the point of being quite stubborn/too much this way. So there isn't that much similarity between Phil's arc in Groundhog Day and Odo's arc here, but this conversation with my partner and the movie certainly did inspire parts of the fic. For example, Quark's natural inclination toward time loops is very much Phase 2 and that forms an interesting contrast with Odo who would be as uncomfortable doing something he believes is morally wrong in a time loop as he would outside of one. Part of the interesting narrative tension, therefore, goes via seeing Odo relax his own high standards and learn to live his life a bit more like the way Quark does.
I was summarizing this post to my partner and he had this to add:
Oh, so basically, Odo is a Kantian [someone who believes that the important thing to do is to treat people like agents and to not violate their rights]. Meanwhile, Quark is a utilitarian -- the right thing to do is to make the largest number of people happy. And so if other people's happiness is being wiped out by the loop, utilitarianism in a time loop basically becomes a kind of egoism [concerned with making oneself happy first and foremost].
Hmm I guess that sounds about right! It certainly is consistent with the way Quark and Odo each treat ethical dilemmas in the loop throughout the fic.
Another big, obvious influence on my story-writing here is a more recent time loop film, Palm Springs (2020). One memorable aspect of the film is that it introduces you to the timelooping character from the perspective of an outsider, which is a really interesting and fun element. The perspective character sees a guest at this wedding who is just clearly in the "not giving a fuck" late stage of a time loop, and I liked that bit of meta/genre-referencing aspect of the movie, where it assumes the viewer knows some of the "tropes" of single day time loop fiction and can recognize them playing out. That also probably inspired some elements of my fic because I very much wanted time loops to be a thing characters are aware can happen (although some of them are better than others at understanding how time loops work or find it plausible that someone might be in one) and Odo is in a time loop with full knowledge of what can happen to someone psychologically in a time loop.
The other major piece of inspiration I got from this movie is the theme/major plot point that where the character starts in the loop affects how livable the single-day time loop is for them. On one hand, you have the main character and his love interest (Nyles and Sarah) who find the time loop a living hell because the day they're repeating opens with them in a relationship with someone utterly undeserving of their love, which is a reminder of all the life mistakes they've made up to this point; this is contrasted, however, with another character trapped in the loop, Roy, who also hates and resents Nyles for trapping him there, but on some days, just has a good day because he has a wife and children he loves that he doesn't mind spending the whole day with even though it's the same day over and over again. This plot point is also present in Groundhog Day -- one of the reasons why Bill Murray's character is so alienated in his loop is because he spent his life up until that point being a misanthropic jerk.
These elements of "what you have at the start of the time loop is all that you get, and that makes a difference" and "a time loop might be more bearable if you can spend it with people you love who know and love you too" was incorporated in my fic with Odo regretting the life choices he has made that have resulted in him being so distant from the people he cares about, but also that he is fortunate enough to have Quark.
Third, Edge of Tomorrow (2014) is another time loop film that I suppose inverse inspired this fic. That movie is almost perfect except the ending. The rest of the movie does a really good job at building up a very bittersweet pining dynamic, where the main character experiences all these intensely intimate experiences with someone over the course of the loop, but the way the loop is, their relationship goes back to being strangers each time the loop resets. But then at the end, they have the love interest kiss the looper on a cycle with very little intimacy or relationship development between them, which almost retroactively implies that the two of them have always had some kind of mutual chemistry or latent attraction all along, which completely ruins the bittersweet pining dynamic so carefully established in the rest of the movie.
Anyway, I wished the movie had leaned into the dynamic it had built up and gave it a proper ending, rather than an ending that brushes past all the angst and messiness and complicated feelings of having had all these intensely intimate experiences with someone who remembers none of it. As the above-mentioned podcast episode pointed out, that extremely asymmetric dynamic is itself interesting and worthy of exploration, and so that inspired a good chunk of this fic.
Finally (and somewhat related to this point on asymmetrical relationships), parts of the late loop are inspired by 50 First Dates (2004) and also probably The Notebook (2004) too, where you have a long-term relationship between two people where one person keeps forgetting the relationship and has to be caught up from square 1 each day, while the other person remembers, which is such an uncomfortable dynamic lol -- it's in some sense romantic but it's also weird and discomfiting too. However, whereas those movies are mainly told from the perspective of the forgetting person who is in some sense reliving the relationship with completely fresh eyes each time, this fic is told from the perspective of the remembering person.
The common Quodo plot
As I discussed in this post, I think a plot that works really well for Quark and Odo can basically be summarized as "Quark and Odo have a very intimate experience that is kind of fake but then after much emotional journey, they both realize they would like that intimate experience again but Real this time." I don't know why this kind of plot works so well for Quark and Odo, but I do think more generally, a lot of fic tropes exist for the purposes of creating this "false intimacy that leads to real intimacy" scenario and it's a frequent element of romance plotlines too. Whether it's sex pollen or other altered mental states, fake dating, anonymous dating, living out a fantasy with a hologram, soulmates, bad guys made them do it, seeing a future where you're together, etc. etc. they all share this feature of having an intense but fake intimate experience, having a weird reaction to that, and then the emotional core of the fic lies in accepting, like, "yes I do actually want this."
I guess this kind of plot works so well for Quark and Odo because their relationship is so antagonistic and their values so opposed that if they do have feelings for each other, it would take something pretty visceral and hard to ignore to get them to realize those feelings and have to confront them. It's also of course good for pining because the fake intimacy situation is so close to a real relationship but it very much is not.
Anyway, this fic is very much an example of that. Even though Odo and Quark get together a lot throughout the fic, it's all in a sort of fake pocket-universe sort of way. So then the final obstacle that has to be overcome is going from those kind-of-fake experiences to the conclusion that the real deal is something Odo would like. Like in a lot of my other fic with this kind of setup, the fic ends before Quark and Odo actually get together, which is kind of an odd choice. 🤔 But somehow that feels right. You kind of know how it will play out from here, because the fic gave you an idea of that in the "fake intimacy" version. The main emotional work has already been done
What was the hardest chapter to write?
Chapter 5, hands down. This one was difficult because I write scenes down in chapters once I think of them, but chapter 5 remained quite empty and "??? fill stuff in here" until very late in the process, despite containing the anchor scenes. This chapter was difficult because there weren't really much constraints or things that HAD to go in; it was more like, I had a bunch of contextless ideas for what could go into this chapter (because the idea featured a late time loop Odo), and the trick was trying to figure out how to slot it into a scene that Accomplished Something and didn't just feel like random filler. It's also the chapter where the most time passes, which also made it quite a bit longer than I was hoping it would be.
If there was a "goal" to this chapter, something that it absolutely had to accomplish, it was simply sketching out a plausible route from where Odo was at the end of the last chapter (a kind of emotional high point having realized he has feelings for Quark and that this kind of retroactively makes all the mistakes he made with Quark (out of ignorance) okay) to late-timeloop Odo who has been with Quark so many times that it's kind of effortless now.
One thing that kind of helped here is that I wanted the writing on this chapter to be a bit more disjointed and episodic to reflect that Odo is kind of losing it, so that allowed me to put in some random, kind of contextless thoughts going through Odo's head. Unfortunately, though, whenever I wrote Odo and Quark spending a day together, the writing went back to how it was in previous chapters, a very detailed play-by-play of the whole day with a lot of different moments packed in, leading to a very uneven chapter, where there are these very linear, detailed, lucid date scenes that match the style of earlier parts of the fic, and just some random free-floating thoughts in between. It's possible I could have probably rewritten it to have a more consistent writing style, but I spent so much time writing the big scenes and there were so many different moments in them that I would have hated to cut, so I decided just to let it be.
Another difficulty in this chapter is that it featured a scene I wrote very early on but which spent most of the writing process cut from the fic / with no clear place where it could be inserted in the fic. The scene was the one where Quark (knowing about O'Brien's recurring shoulder issue in the loop) ends up not able to stop laughing when he sees what Odo means about it always happening. I was very attached to this scene especially because I wanted to put in a lot of Quodo dynamics in this fic, and this dynamic is one that closely resembles their mischievous dynamic where they team up to bully O'Brien (and Bashir) at the end of 6x14 "One Little Ship." However, this scene is quite tricky to make work because it relies on several facts: (1) Quark in this cycle needs to know about the loop, but (2) O'Brien needs to not know about the loop, (3) Odo and Quark must be spending the day aboard DS9 and encounter O'Brien, and (4) Odo must not have already solved the O'Brien shoulder problem. This means it has to be a relaxation cycle, one where Odo has told Quark about the loop but has not publicized this information in general. There are pretty heavy constraints on where this cycle could occur in the timeline.
I finally figured out it had a chance of working in this chapter in the place where I put it. However, another difficulty presented is that in order for the joke to work, I needed to do the setup for the O'Brien joke but I probably also needed to let enough time pass for the reader to possibly forget about this detail and forget that it's relevant. In other words, I needed to add some other distracting filler before I let the punchline of the joke drop. So this chapter kept on accumulating more and more scenes/conversations/moments just to justify this joke! Probably the most work I've ever done for the sake of one gag -- I basically wrote a 3000+ word date cycle just to provide the context and padding for this punchline. I really worked hard to keep this scene in!
Anyway, one last challenge with this chapter was that getting the progression of Odo's mood/character right was important, and especially challenging when the content of each cycle varied so much. I ended up needing to use Scrivener to swap the scenes around a lot to keep the pacing sort of balanced and try to order things by when I felt they should occur in the loop. Without Scrivener, trying to rearrange and renumber certain cycles would have been a nightmare.
Why aren't there sex scenes?
Basically, the reasons were that (1) I wanted my partner to read this fic and he just will not read scenes involving Quark and Odo having sex (this is apparently not something against the Quodo pairing itself, because he loves reading my Quodo fic in general, nor is it a thing against my smut writing because he's read that too, but apparently just the image of two people like Quark and Odo having sex grosses him out for some reason), and (2) I wanted to post this fic on my main and I try to keep things pretty M-rated or lower on main.
I'm pretty happy with the final result, but I do think the fic probably would have been stronger if all the sex scenes weren't fade to black because I could have done some characterization work during those scenes and given an idea of how Odo and Quark's dynamic during sex evolves over time too. And I kind of get the feeling that in a very boring, repetitive time loop, trying out different kinds of sex with Quark could probably keep someone entertained for quite a while. I was also hoping at some point (probably late chapter 4 or early chapter 5) to include a moment where Quark for the first time has an "*eyesquint* Have you done this before?" reaction when he and Odo have sex, but I couldn't find an existing scene to put it in, and it seemed not important enough to make a new scene for, so I left it out.
But yeah, I guess the lack of sex scenes probably saved me some time in writing! If someone wants to write some of those missing scenes, though, that would be fun!
A bit of an odd place to end my commentary but this piece is long enough as it is! Anyway, I hope people enjoyed this fic and these bits about the process of writing it. It was a blast to write!