Better Not Be Stingy or Your Nightmares Will Come Truuuue

Well, here they are - the final set of chapter notes for HOAW. For better or worse!

Happy Halloween!

Chapter 10:

References:

- The Real Ghostbusters - "Roben's Spirit Guide", Morgana's reference material, is a take on "Toben's Spirit Guide" from RGB.
- Morgana's backwards-spell to open the door ("Nepo rood") is a reference to Zatanna from DC Comics.

Somehow Morgana watching calmly as candy flies through the air strikes me as funny. I guess because it seems to imply that this is an everyday occurence for her, or at least something she's used to.

I had a real problem in writing this chapter, because I honestly really wanted to have the rain pouring down (SO spooky, you know) but I also needed Gos to be trick-or-treating the whole time. Well, I was always more than willing to go out in the rain on Halloween, but I think I might be pushing it in this one. ;)

Another track from the Beetlejuice soundtrack inspired the tone of this chapter once DW and co. go into Beth's house. All the funhouse stuff is there specifically because the track has funhouse-style music in it. Is that cheating?

Richie was hard to write because he was more or less unsympathetic. Even giving his reasons for doing what he did failed to make him sympathetic. More scenes are written from his POV mostly so that I could try and figure him out a bit. Stella was more straightforward - she made a decision rashly and then regretted it when her spell started to claim Beth, so she decided to cancel it. Richie was harder because he didn't have the regret that Stella had, nor was he inclined to give up his chance at freedom the way she was. Not that I think it was a mistake for me to write him that way, only that it made it harder to find a way to *like* him.

Anyone wondering how, exactly, zombies could burst through the floor of the house's *second story* to attack DW can consider that he's also being attacked by staircases and banisters. *G*


Chapter 11:

References:

- None for this chapter!

Some of the transitions here are jarring; I'd had some constructive criticism when I wrote these scenes that jumping from POV to POV within a scene was poor writing (although the person who told me that was much much kinder in their phrasing *G*) because it implied omniscience. So I was trying very hard to have only one POV per scene, or at least not a whole lot of hyper bounce-arounds. Over time I found that this method of writing didn't work for me, and tried to adapt it so that if I switched POVs in a scene I could at least have a clearer transition to it (which may have been what the commenter actually meant), but at this point it's just choppy little scene changes but with how they're structured I don't want to take the time to reorder them.

Always feel kind of good about myself when I reach the point in a fic where DW gets to be heroic. Since I am at that point in this fic (after 11 chapters!), I now feel good. Also, I liked writing him fighting Malachai, since I feel like it's the most in-character I have DW in this entire fic.

Y'know, rereading this now, I find something very moving about LP's statement that he would never give up trying to save Beth, even when he could no longer see her... I guess that's lame, being enamored with my own writing, but honestly, when it comes to the Beth/LP stuff I am oddly hard to please with my own writing so I thought it was worth noting that I actually *liked* something. (A lot of the other parts in here either leave me cold or even make me cringe a little... I *so* overwrite these things, or else I underwrite them.)

My hope is that Richie's sudden change of heart is a) believable, and b) kind of endearing. I would like it to be one of those moments where you kind of grin a little while reading it. If readers didn't like him up to now, I hope maybe they forgive him a bit at this part.

On the other hand, in retrospect I do wonder if perhaps Richie ends up becoming a bit of Marty Stu, joining Darkwing in fighting Malachai. I had intended it just to give him a purpose for being there, but it does feel to me like it takes away some of DW's thunder, now. Oh well, once again - what's done is done.

Oh yes. I think I failed to mention before now that, rather than sounding the slightest bit like Michael Keaton OR Beetlejuice (lol), the voice in my head for Richie is Steve Buscemi. Very weasely. (I am allowed to say that because, believe it or not, I have the hots for Steve Buscemi, and have for abooooouuuut... five years now? When did I see "Ghost World"? That long, anyway.)

The old "house pulling itself apart" idea came ultimately from The Haunting but I do believe that it's been in a lot of haunted house films.

The brief, quiet conversation between Morgana and Darkwing at the end here is meant to feel very intimate - I sort of wanted to acknowledge a bond between them.

Epilogue

References:
- The Last Unicorn, for Stella's "remembering" tea; the influence here was the laughing skeleton who "remembers" wine enough to get drunk off of it when it's not really there.
- The "going into the light" idea is not specific or unique to one source, but I was thinking explicitly of The Frighteners in this one. Which is kind of odd given how I use it, but oh well. *G*

Although Stella is definitely at peace in the end, I also found something a little chilling about her and Richie simply... *disappearing* like that, and ended up reflecting that in Beth; this is why, despite her sympathy to Stella, Beth is left more unsettled by this ending than anything else.

You may be left wondering if this is for certain the end, or if there are still any ghosts in Beth's house. Well, short answer "yes" with an "if", long answer "no" with a "but..." No, that's a Simpsons quote. The answer is, there are not *currently* any ghosts in Beth's house. If you can call that an answer...

With a hip, hip and a clippety-clop

Every year in October I say to myself "I am going to finish that update on 'The House on Avian Way' so that I can repost it." And then I don't. Well this year guess what? I did! I also put together a buttload of chapter notes for it, which I will be posting anon! (Probably starting tomorrow.) It is not yet uploaded, either at ff.net (the version there is still the old one) or on my webpage, but it will be soon.

Meanwhile though, I thought that in preparation I would post a sort of history of the fic.

I am, as anyone who knows me personally can attest, a freak about Halloween. I've had to grow out of it in recent years, due to lack of time, but in the past I would decorate not only my house but my webpage and blog, as well. I always wanted to write a ghost fic for the Webfoot Weavings, but for years I had no good ideas. In the late 90s, when I was going to school in Canada, two things converged to make inspiration strike:

First of all, I was reading a Rescue Rangers fic with ghosts in it. I found a lot of it to be genuinely chilling, but was let down by the ending. What I liked about the first part, however, was enough to get me thinking of how *I* would write a ghost story; and secondly, I bought the soundtrack for Beetlejuice, written by Danny Elfman. The music in that movie is very original, at once spooky and cartoony, to fit the tone of the movie. I used to listen to the CD in my car while driving to and from school, and after a while, with this possible ghost story on my mind, the score started to inspire scenes.

To be honest, I don't remember what the initial storyline was, except that in the barest bones kind of way it was what it is now: Beth's house is haunted and the characters have to solve the mystery of just WHO is haunting it. or what, or whatever. :) Over the next couple of years I kept going back to the idea, and in 2000, I started writing it. I then spent the next five years working on it. :D

The title was originally meant to be a place-holder, but after a while I discovered it fit nicely. I think this might have been one of the first fics I worked on where I wrote out of order; I kept finding that I couldn't figure out precisely where to go from one spot, so I'd move on to a later one. Also, this was the first *fic* I wrote out of order; I had previously completed "Something In the Air" but had at least one more to go, possibly two, before this one was to take place. I knew, obviously, what was going to happen in those two (or I thought I did) but had no idea when they would be written.

I think I had about half of it, maybe even more, finished by the time I got married in 2002. I didn't want to release it without having it beta read, so I had to track down some readers - my friends Jess and Amanda were absolutely ESSENTIAL in the completion of this story, and in fact, it's more or less how Amanda and I got to be friends and not just general DWD acquaintances. :D

It still took forever and a day for me to finish this thing off. The ending was impossible to write. I wasn't sure just how I wanted it to go until I got there. And so finally in 2005 it was not just finished but beta'd, corrected, and I finally posted it on FF.net, where it fell a bit flat. Heh. ^_^;; In the next few years I actually finished one of the stories to come before it - "High, Dry, and Flooded" - and despite having had that in my head for *years* already the ending took a direction I hadn't expected and I ended up invalidating a good portion of what I'd written and released in HoAW. Figures. So this is why I had to go back and update it. And I held off because I felt like, why do that before I have the one in between HD&F and HoAW finished? (That one is "All About Elizabeth") I might just invalidate it again!

Well, I have gone long enough without updating it. I hate having it just sit there all defunct and all. So I'm finally posting the durn thing.

Of course, now it has spoilers in it, because it takes place after the story I'm currently working on and it does talk about the end of that story. This time I am pretty certain that story will end the way I think it will, btw. ^_~ But heck, if you've come this far, you probably don't mind. :D

HoAW has influence in a lot of my favourite books and movies, *most* of them about ghosts: The Haunting is a HUGE influence, as is Beetlejuice (of course) and even The Blair Witch Project to an extent. Quite a few others are in there too, as noted in the chapter notes to come. I did not include a soundtrack listing, but I might in the next week if I have the time to go through and match up the tracks.

Not a lot of the story has changed, and the really "important" parts are all the same, but still I hope those who choose to will enjoy rereading "The House On Avian Way" as much as I enjoyed writing it. How corny is that? ^_^