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Author's commentary on "Mission to the Dominion"
This is just some behind-the-scenes notes on the process of writing my fic, Mission to the Dominion. This post contains spoilers for the ending quite early in the post, so I recommend not reading it unless you've finished reading the whole fic itself. (n=2769)
Unconventional Courtship
I started writing this fic around June 2022. It was written for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
unconventionalcourtship, an event that runs every year (usually from April to June) and basically challenges people to write a fanfic that is based on the summary of a Mills and Boon or Harlequin-style romance novel. In the past, I've thought about participating in this event and so spent some time picking out summaries that seemed promising for Quodo and putting them in a doc. (And there are a lot! Because a surprisingly large number of romance novels involve a gruff/emotionally-closed-off lawman of some kind, which is very Odo -- I talked about this here.)
In 2022, I actually didn't have any plans to participate in UC, but then in June I got sick with COVID, and basically while I was stuck in bed and feverish, my mind didn't have much to do other than brainstorm fics, and... basically, I started getting a bunch of ideas for one of the summaries I had picked out as having ~Quodo vibes~ but which I otherwise didn't have any ideas for. The summary was this one:
By this point, I had already decided a while ago that "Russia" here was going to be the Gamma Quadrant, and this summary gave me post-canon vibes, where Quark was on an important assignment for the Ferengi Alliance, but was stuck doing it with Odo. I kind of envisioned Quark and Odo had parted non-amicably and so they have a kind of "bitter exes" vibe, hence why Quark is not very happy about this arrangement. Meanwhile, post-canon, the Dominion is kind of dangerous or something, and Odo is missing Quark and worried about his safety, and so he becomes very clingy and overprotective, which of course gets on Quark's nerves (quite possibly inspired by the post-canon Quodo dynamic in this fic by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
spacebubble). Even though there are plenty of other ways to interpret this blurb, that premise got cemented quite early and never changed.
My Fever Brain Wrote a Third-Act Breakup
I didn't really have much other than the premise suggested by the summary, but while I was sick, I started getting some images of scenes that might be part of this fic. One of these was where Quark gets fed up with Odo's touchy-feeliness and yells at him that if he wants to be with him, then he should be with him, but if he's just going to go back to the Link again, then Quark doesn't want to have anything to do with him. And then afterward, they have this quiet heart-to-heart talk where Odo explains why he's being so tactile and they agree to keep it professional.
Then later, I got an idea for an impulsive getting-together scene: Quark gets himself in trouble (somehow), and Odo is angry and they're arguing, but they also have all this built-up "you almost died" tension/relief between them and so the argument very rapidly becomes kissing.
So then I was like, "Hm, interesting." I did really like the idea of Quark and Odo impulsively getting together. I feel like that sort of impulsive, "thank god you're alive" get-together also really suits their vibe but I'd never been able to put a scene like that in any of my fics. But then I was kind of stuck at a choice point: what happens after the impulsive get-together? It seemed like the possibilities were (1) Odo could walk it back and go back to being cold to Quark again, or (2) he could decide to be with Quark.
Normally, when I'm at a crossroads like this, I tend to explore both possibilities and see if I run into any issues, or come up with a list of pros/cons for each possibility and then decide based on that. However, because I was sick, I couldn't really do that, but in the end I didn't really have to, because my fever brain was still coming up with snippets. In this case, my mind did initially think that Odo's instinctive inclination would be to draw back and retreat, but then when he actually thinks about doing it, he realizes that doing that would upset Quark too much and make him unable to finish the mission and so he decides to pretend to be staying with Quark until that's done.
At this point, I was just like "Hm......" at that because I couldn't see how the relationship could recover from that breach of trust, but I decided to tentatively write it down as a possible scene anyway.
And then, even though I was a bit doubtful about this direction, my brain just kept on coming up with snippets that would follow from this path. So at this point, I came up with all the dialogue Quark says when he finds out Odo lied to him and Quark chews him out. And then the scene where Quark goes crying to Ishka and then spends a while after that avoiding Odo.
At this point, I was like, "That's a pretty 'stereotypical rom-com' plot element... but fine, it certainly fits the Vibe. But how are we going to fix the relationship now?? Maybe we should backtrack--"
My fever brain: Right, right... So, I HAVE MORE SNIPPETS. [Snippets: The parts where Odo is talking to Rom and confessing he does want to be with Quark, but just thinks it's not possible, and where he doesn't want to leave until Quark tells him how to make it better.] Of course, Odo does eventually decide to pursue the relationship with Quark, but then there's the issue of how Odo can get Quark to believe that he MEANS it given that the last time Odo said he'll stay, he went back on it.
Me: Right... That's what I was worrying about earlier...
My fever brain: He does it by turning into a solid again.
Me: ...Uhhh...??? That actually works...?!
So yeah, basically, while I was sick, I somehow managed to brainstorm the whole third-act plot arc of a romance novel (the third-act breakup) in one shot without needing to backtrack or explore other alternatives. I'm not really sure how to explain how this happened; my best guess is that somewhere in my brain, I have a very intuitive understanding of romance plot arcs, and also how these arcs might fit Quark and Odo's particular characters. And so, even when I'm sick and lacking in concentration, I can still somehow grope around and find the plot elements I need in order to craft parts of a romance story.
On the Backburner
Despite having the climax of this fic all set up and written out in the form of brief snippets, I ended up putting this fic on hold for roughly two years. The ideas I mentioned above came after Unconventional Courtship was winding down and after I had already given up on doing anything for UC 2022. So I was fully intending on finishing this for UC 2023, but then when April came around, I realized that this fic was going to be chonkier than I could probably do in the writing period for Unconventional Courtship, and also I was tempted to do an ambitious project forfandomorienteerchallenge (this became my Quodo comic). In the end, I decided to skip UC 2023 in order to participate in Fandom Orienteer Challenge and to use wipbigbang to finish up some of my WIPs instead, and then I largely spent the bottom half of 2023 doing exchange fics...
So when UC 2024 rolled around, having missed my chance to write this fic for two years, I was eager to make 2024 the year when I did this one for real. This year, I was also running a Quodo-themed "finish your WIPs" event (Quo-do the Thing), which had a writing period from April until July(/August). However, the writing period for UC was April to June, so while I WAS able to use this project for both events, I needed to cram the writing in Apr/May/Jun and couldn't use the extra month or two for the writing in this one.
Brainstorming
I was in a good place at the start of this work period, though, because this fic had never been far from my mind and, even when I was working on other projects, I did manage to put a bit of time into plotting and brainstorming, which is what made me realize this project was going to be a bit meatier and more complicated than my typical fic project.
For example, just the first couple of chapters required making a LOT of decisions that (unlike the feverish writing process described above) were not easy to make and required a lot of exploration, pros/cons lists, backpedaling, etc. For example, I had to decide what exactly had (and had not) happened between Quark and Odo at the end of the series that left Quark so bitter. I had to decide what kind of mission Quark was on, and this decision had to be made together with my decision about exactly what kind of life-threatening trouble Quark gets in (which I hadn't actually decided). I went back and forth among a couple of options.
The problem with this fic is that, even though the third act was done and I had written an opening chapter or two that I liked, that still left around two-thirds of the fic in a completely open "???" sort of state.
Leading up to the April work period, I talked with my partner and a friend to try to brainstorm *what* exactly about the Dominion is dangerous; what kind of issues might Quark and Odo encounter during their trip. I also picked their brains, trying to get a sense of how the Dominion is governed i.e. how member states relate to the larger Dominion.
This was really helpful, because I find writing much easier when I have a lot of constraints, and having at least some idea of what the Dominion would be like post-canon was at least a starting place. But in other places, I was basically on my own. The structure of the opening chapters was largely up to me, as were the planets Quark and Odo visited and what the cultures were like and so on. Since I was short on time and needed to give myself enough structure to do some project management (see next section), I arbitrarily decided to go with Rule of Three and have Quark and Odo visit three planets over the course of the story, and then assigned important plot/relationship development events to each planet. While this event allocation ended up changing over time, the overall structure ended up staying more-or-less the same.
Project Management Time
So I calculated that I had nine weeks in the April/May period. Works for UC have to be posted during June, and June 14 is the last day to sign up, so even if I didn't have to be *entirely* finished with drafting by May, I knew that I needed to at least have made significant enough progress that I felt that a June posting date was within reach.
I looked at my attempt to cluster events into chapters and determined that I had maybe 12 chapters to write, which meant at *least* one chapter per week. One chapter a week was my estimation of how much I could write at the most, and so even with that ambitious pace, I would have several chapters dangling at the end of May. But since that chapter to-do list included the third-act chapters I'd already written the major beats for, I optimistically expected that writing the last four chapters or so would be easier/quicker, so this plan didn't seem entirely unfeasible.
As I wrote, I noticed that my chapters were pretty consistently coming out around 2000 words each, so I later set an alternative goal of either 1 chapter OR 2k words each week, which turned out to be helpful because I ended up needing to add more chapters, and some of them ended up being significantly shorter than 2k. So having the equivalent word count goal kept my output pretty consistent over the project.
I did daily writing sprints throughout April and May to hit my weekly progress goals. My draft at the beginning of April was 6k words and I finished drafting in mid-June, at 28k words, so that is pretty close to 2k words a week. I left some placeholders in chapters, and also ended up going back and adding several Odo chapters to add some clarity, and so by the time I had completed edits at the end of June, the fic was roughly 33k words.
I posted my first chapter in June because it was ready to go even though my edits in later chapters weren't finished yet -- I don't know if it's actually allowed to post partial fics on your posting date for UC, but in any case, I figured it was fine because at that point I knew that I had a complete fic on my hands, so it would definitely be a finished and fully posted fic, just not in June.
Writing at this breakneck pace (for me at least) was kind of similar to my experience with doing NaNoWriMo in the past, which is that (in order to hit my output goals) there was just NO time to edit. I could leave some placeholders or notes for me to fix or revisit a part of a chapter, but next week, I needed to write the next chapter under the assumption that all the decisions I had made in the previous chapter were final. This was a very weird experience, different from my normal writing process, but it was probably good for this fic because so much of it was under-defined, so forcing myself to make a lot of decisions and then just roll with it was needed for this project and didn't end up causing any issues.
Post-canon Playlist
Some of the chapters in this fic link to some music I feel fits the mood of the chapter. These are all drawn from a playlist where I dump songs that I feel work for post-canon Quodo vibes. Listening to this playlist was really helpful when writing!
I had plans to sort of organize this list and maybe curate them into a fanmix where the tracks are ordered so that they form a kind of emotional "arc" with the songs, where the arc is something like:
- Songs where Quark is missing Odo in the Link / songs where Quark is bitter about Odo leaving him
- Songs where Odo in the Link is missing Quark
- Songs where Quark has "gotten over" Odo
- Songs where Quark meets Odo again and it's clear he's not over Odo
- Happy getting together songs
But yeah, I am too lazy to do that, so have my whole playlist instead.
Final Thoughts
I think that's about it for this commentary. This fic was pretty challenging -- I especially struggled with the worldbuilding since making up alien races is just not my strong point. But I hope that there was enough variety in them to be interesting. Overall, I'm quite pleased that I was able to write a pretty meaty post-canon fic for Quark and Odo, and one quite different from my other post-canon fics (Written Correspondence and Return -- I actually wrote Return after I had started writing this fic, so I purposely tried to make it as different as possible in terms of dynamic, headcanons, etc. from what I was planning for this fic).
I have had people tell me my endings are a bit too abrupt, so one of my final edits for this fic was to tack an extra scene onto the end that's a bit of an epilogue. I hope you enjoyed, and let me know what you think!
Unconventional Courtship
I started writing this fic around June 2022. It was written for
unconventionalcourtship, an event that runs every year (usually from April to June) and basically challenges people to write a fanfic that is based on the summary of a Mills and Boon or Harlequin-style romance novel. In the past, I've thought about participating in this event and so spent some time picking out summaries that seemed promising for Quodo and putting them in a doc. (And there are a lot! Because a surprisingly large number of romance novels involve a gruff/emotionally-closed-off lawman of some kind, which is very Odo -- I talked about this here.)In 2022, I actually didn't have any plans to participate in UC, but then in June I got sick with COVID, and basically while I was stuck in bed and feverish, my mind didn't have much to do other than brainstorm fics, and... basically, I started getting a bunch of ideas for one of the summaries I had picked out as having ~Quodo vibes~ but which I otherwise didn't have any ideas for. The summary was this one:
419) MISSION TO SEDUCE - SALLY WENTWORTH
Her personal bodyguard
Allie had teased him, insulted him, but still she seemed to be stuck with Drake Marsden as her official chaperon! He'd been appointed to look after her during a crucial assignment in Russia, and he refused to leave her side--day or night....
Just because Allie was pretty and petite didn't mean she needed Drake's protection! And she simply refused to be seduced by him. At least, that was the idea. Until her twenty-four-hour bodyguard decided the safest place for her was in his bed!
By this point, I had already decided a while ago that "Russia" here was going to be the Gamma Quadrant, and this summary gave me post-canon vibes, where Quark was on an important assignment for the Ferengi Alliance, but was stuck doing it with Odo. I kind of envisioned Quark and Odo had parted non-amicably and so they have a kind of "bitter exes" vibe, hence why Quark is not very happy about this arrangement. Meanwhile, post-canon, the Dominion is kind of dangerous or something, and Odo is missing Quark and worried about his safety, and so he becomes very clingy and overprotective, which of course gets on Quark's nerves (quite possibly inspired by the post-canon Quodo dynamic in this fic by
My Fever Brain Wrote a Third-Act Breakup
I didn't really have much other than the premise suggested by the summary, but while I was sick, I started getting some images of scenes that might be part of this fic. One of these was where Quark gets fed up with Odo's touchy-feeliness and yells at him that if he wants to be with him, then he should be with him, but if he's just going to go back to the Link again, then Quark doesn't want to have anything to do with him. And then afterward, they have this quiet heart-to-heart talk where Odo explains why he's being so tactile and they agree to keep it professional.
Then later, I got an idea for an impulsive getting-together scene: Quark gets himself in trouble (somehow), and Odo is angry and they're arguing, but they also have all this built-up "you almost died" tension/relief between them and so the argument very rapidly becomes kissing.
So then I was like, "Hm, interesting." I did really like the idea of Quark and Odo impulsively getting together. I feel like that sort of impulsive, "thank god you're alive" get-together also really suits their vibe but I'd never been able to put a scene like that in any of my fics. But then I was kind of stuck at a choice point: what happens after the impulsive get-together? It seemed like the possibilities were (1) Odo could walk it back and go back to being cold to Quark again, or (2) he could decide to be with Quark.
Normally, when I'm at a crossroads like this, I tend to explore both possibilities and see if I run into any issues, or come up with a list of pros/cons for each possibility and then decide based on that. However, because I was sick, I couldn't really do that, but in the end I didn't really have to, because my fever brain was still coming up with snippets. In this case, my mind did initially think that Odo's instinctive inclination would be to draw back and retreat, but then when he actually thinks about doing it, he realizes that doing that would upset Quark too much and make him unable to finish the mission and so he decides to pretend to be staying with Quark until that's done.
At this point, I was just like "Hm......" at that because I couldn't see how the relationship could recover from that breach of trust, but I decided to tentatively write it down as a possible scene anyway.
And then, even though I was a bit doubtful about this direction, my brain just kept on coming up with snippets that would follow from this path. So at this point, I came up with all the dialogue Quark says when he finds out Odo lied to him and Quark chews him out. And then the scene where Quark goes crying to Ishka and then spends a while after that avoiding Odo.
At this point, I was like, "That's a pretty 'stereotypical rom-com' plot element... but fine, it certainly fits the Vibe. But how are we going to fix the relationship now?? Maybe we should backtrack--"
My fever brain: Right, right... So, I HAVE MORE SNIPPETS. [Snippets: The parts where Odo is talking to Rom and confessing he does want to be with Quark, but just thinks it's not possible, and where he doesn't want to leave until Quark tells him how to make it better.] Of course, Odo does eventually decide to pursue the relationship with Quark, but then there's the issue of how Odo can get Quark to believe that he MEANS it given that the last time Odo said he'll stay, he went back on it.
Me: Right... That's what I was worrying about earlier...
My fever brain: He does it by turning into a solid again.
Me: ...Uhhh...??? That actually works...?!
So yeah, basically, while I was sick, I somehow managed to brainstorm the whole third-act plot arc of a romance novel (the third-act breakup) in one shot without needing to backtrack or explore other alternatives. I'm not really sure how to explain how this happened; my best guess is that somewhere in my brain, I have a very intuitive understanding of romance plot arcs, and also how these arcs might fit Quark and Odo's particular characters. And so, even when I'm sick and lacking in concentration, I can still somehow grope around and find the plot elements I need in order to craft parts of a romance story.
On the Backburner
Despite having the climax of this fic all set up and written out in the form of brief snippets, I ended up putting this fic on hold for roughly two years. The ideas I mentioned above came after Unconventional Courtship was winding down and after I had already given up on doing anything for UC 2022. So I was fully intending on finishing this for UC 2023, but then when April came around, I realized that this fic was going to be chonkier than I could probably do in the writing period for Unconventional Courtship, and also I was tempted to do an ambitious project for
fandomorienteerchallenge (this became my Quodo comic). In the end, I decided to skip UC 2023 in order to participate in Fandom Orienteer Challenge and to use wipbigbang to finish up some of my WIPs instead, and then I largely spent the bottom half of 2023 doing exchange fics...So when UC 2024 rolled around, having missed my chance to write this fic for two years, I was eager to make 2024 the year when I did this one for real. This year, I was also running a Quodo-themed "finish your WIPs" event (Quo-do the Thing), which had a writing period from April until July(/August). However, the writing period for UC was April to June, so while I WAS able to use this project for both events, I needed to cram the writing in Apr/May/Jun and couldn't use the extra month or two for the writing in this one.
Brainstorming
I was in a good place at the start of this work period, though, because this fic had never been far from my mind and, even when I was working on other projects, I did manage to put a bit of time into plotting and brainstorming, which is what made me realize this project was going to be a bit meatier and more complicated than my typical fic project.
For example, just the first couple of chapters required making a LOT of decisions that (unlike the feverish writing process described above) were not easy to make and required a lot of exploration, pros/cons lists, backpedaling, etc. For example, I had to decide what exactly had (and had not) happened between Quark and Odo at the end of the series that left Quark so bitter. I had to decide what kind of mission Quark was on, and this decision had to be made together with my decision about exactly what kind of life-threatening trouble Quark gets in (which I hadn't actually decided). I went back and forth among a couple of options.
The problem with this fic is that, even though the third act was done and I had written an opening chapter or two that I liked, that still left around two-thirds of the fic in a completely open "???" sort of state.
Leading up to the April work period, I talked with my partner and a friend to try to brainstorm *what* exactly about the Dominion is dangerous; what kind of issues might Quark and Odo encounter during their trip. I also picked their brains, trying to get a sense of how the Dominion is governed i.e. how member states relate to the larger Dominion.
This was really helpful, because I find writing much easier when I have a lot of constraints, and having at least some idea of what the Dominion would be like post-canon was at least a starting place. But in other places, I was basically on my own. The structure of the opening chapters was largely up to me, as were the planets Quark and Odo visited and what the cultures were like and so on. Since I was short on time and needed to give myself enough structure to do some project management (see next section), I arbitrarily decided to go with Rule of Three and have Quark and Odo visit three planets over the course of the story, and then assigned important plot/relationship development events to each planet. While this event allocation ended up changing over time, the overall structure ended up staying more-or-less the same.
Project Management Time
So I calculated that I had nine weeks in the April/May period. Works for UC have to be posted during June, and June 14 is the last day to sign up, so even if I didn't have to be *entirely* finished with drafting by May, I knew that I needed to at least have made significant enough progress that I felt that a June posting date was within reach.
I looked at my attempt to cluster events into chapters and determined that I had maybe 12 chapters to write, which meant at *least* one chapter per week. One chapter a week was my estimation of how much I could write at the most, and so even with that ambitious pace, I would have several chapters dangling at the end of May. But since that chapter to-do list included the third-act chapters I'd already written the major beats for, I optimistically expected that writing the last four chapters or so would be easier/quicker, so this plan didn't seem entirely unfeasible.
As I wrote, I noticed that my chapters were pretty consistently coming out around 2000 words each, so I later set an alternative goal of either 1 chapter OR 2k words each week, which turned out to be helpful because I ended up needing to add more chapters, and some of them ended up being significantly shorter than 2k. So having the equivalent word count goal kept my output pretty consistent over the project.
I did daily writing sprints throughout April and May to hit my weekly progress goals. My draft at the beginning of April was 6k words and I finished drafting in mid-June, at 28k words, so that is pretty close to 2k words a week. I left some placeholders in chapters, and also ended up going back and adding several Odo chapters to add some clarity, and so by the time I had completed edits at the end of June, the fic was roughly 33k words.
I posted my first chapter in June because it was ready to go even though my edits in later chapters weren't finished yet -- I don't know if it's actually allowed to post partial fics on your posting date for UC, but in any case, I figured it was fine because at that point I knew that I had a complete fic on my hands, so it would definitely be a finished and fully posted fic, just not in June.
Writing at this breakneck pace (for me at least) was kind of similar to my experience with doing NaNoWriMo in the past, which is that (in order to hit my output goals) there was just NO time to edit. I could leave some placeholders or notes for me to fix or revisit a part of a chapter, but next week, I needed to write the next chapter under the assumption that all the decisions I had made in the previous chapter were final. This was a very weird experience, different from my normal writing process, but it was probably good for this fic because so much of it was under-defined, so forcing myself to make a lot of decisions and then just roll with it was needed for this project and didn't end up causing any issues.
Post-canon Playlist
Some of the chapters in this fic link to some music I feel fits the mood of the chapter. These are all drawn from a playlist where I dump songs that I feel work for post-canon Quodo vibes. Listening to this playlist was really helpful when writing!
I had plans to sort of organize this list and maybe curate them into a fanmix where the tracks are ordered so that they form a kind of emotional "arc" with the songs, where the arc is something like:
- Songs where Quark is missing Odo in the Link / songs where Quark is bitter about Odo leaving him
- Songs where Odo in the Link is missing Quark
- Songs where Quark has "gotten over" Odo
- Songs where Quark meets Odo again and it's clear he's not over Odo
- Happy getting together songs
But yeah, I am too lazy to do that, so have my whole playlist instead.
Final Thoughts
I think that's about it for this commentary. This fic was pretty challenging -- I especially struggled with the worldbuilding since making up alien races is just not my strong point. But I hope that there was enough variety in them to be interesting. Overall, I'm quite pleased that I was able to write a pretty meaty post-canon fic for Quark and Odo, and one quite different from my other post-canon fics (Written Correspondence and Return -- I actually wrote Return after I had started writing this fic, so I purposely tried to make it as different as possible in terms of dynamic, headcanons, etc. from what I was planning for this fic).
I have had people tell me my endings are a bit too abrupt, so one of my final edits for this fic was to tack an extra scene onto the end that's a bit of an epilogue. I hope you enjoyed, and let me know what you think!
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