Post-Story Notes on Winning Days

The Music: Each book was named for a song, the lyrics of which usually fit well with the theme of each part of the story. You can go here to learn more about this music and hear it as well.

Introduction: If you're here then you've hopefully read the story and are looking for more notes on the thought processes behind the fic. Either that or you're just that bored. Either way, read on for more info on how Winning Days was developed. In fact, don't read this page if you've not read the story but intend to...spoilers might be discussed below.



The Three Elements: Three major sources of inspiration merged to spark this story. Below I'll try to explain each one, as well as noting ideas that changed and evolved along the way.

A dream: I stopped including this claim in notes within the story itself as apparently, many see "inspired by a dream" and start clicking the backbutton furiously. I figure I already have the subject (VV) and the fact that I tend to write songfics (another big scary taboo in the fic world) going against me, so why add another?
Of course, I can discuss that here now that you have presumably already read the story and made your judgments.
Basically, I'd been watching VV eps for the first time in decades and it influenced my dreams to say the least. I had a particularly vivid one and wrote some feverish notes the next morning, jotting down all I could remember. I'll be honest and say it was extremely melodramatic and that the OC in the story, Keira, was a giant honkin' sue in dreamland. My subconscious mind looooves Mary Sues, much to my chagrin. It might be an amusing thing to try to dig up those first notes...
Anyway, realizing that if I was going to turn this into a fan fic to be shared on the net, I was going to have to scrap most of the plot of the dream, as overly-dramatic and Sue-laden as it was. Pretty much all I kept from it was Keira's most basic character and the circumstances from which she ends up an unwilling guest on the Explorer.
Examples of things I scrapped would be:

Keira's entire race being obliterated in the beginning. One of many raging red Sue flags, burninated ;)

In fact, a lot of focus in general was taken off Keira, which is one reason the spy story line and the Jeff/Lisa/Ginger love triangle arcs were brought in. In the dream, Keira actually ended up bedding a canon character. Cookies if you can guess who, but no - wasn't Jeff! That got axed in the light of day, heh.

She was not treated well by the Drules in the dream, in many overblown and graphic ways that I ended up blunting in the actual story. No need to play up the po' little OC card! Sandu was brought in later to make sure all the angst wasn't dominated by Keira, either.

She died tragically at the end of the dream after being sent off from the Explorer, on her way to start a new life - shot down ruthlessly by the Drules. RIP, Susie!! I gave her a happy ending, relatively speaking, in the fic just to spite my dream self. It worked.

From the dream, I did get a distinct notion that this story *had* to be broken up into four "books" having three parts each and meticulously pre-planned each part ahead of time. However, I tend to start fics with shortish chapters (6-7 pages) and end up with longer ones toward the end. This was exaggerated here by being so "locked in" to what I was trying to accomplish so I don't know if I'll ever do that to myself again. I usually always write with an idea of what I want to do and how long roughly it'll take me to get there, but this was just too much. I actually added the idea of the epilogue in halfway through as I knew there was just too much building to have it fit in my pre-defined borders. We needed to see the characters - the main ones in the fic, anyway - a few months after the fact to find out how it turned out for them. Since I didn't want to tack it on the end of the last chapter, which was long enough as it was (plus, I don't like putting big time jumps within a chapter), an epilogue seemed appropriate. Other than a basic version of Keira, I also took from the dream the use of Nerok and his devine asshattery.

A reference: The next element that went into this fic was the spy arc, which I actually got inspired to do by a canon reference. In one of the earlier episodes, when Hazar was still not such a good guy, he mentions a spy on the Explorer feeding him information. It was mentioned almost in passing and never elaborated on. And the info that was passed on was benign - basically just reported the VF were relaxing and off-guard.
This got my gears turning as to what REAL damage a Drule spy could cause and furthermore, what if the spy was not Drule at all but "one of their own"? Having my confused OC around supplied a nice foil for him to further mess with teams.

Reworking of Canon: At the risk of sounding like a fan snob who thinks they can whip up a "better" version of canon and propose how it should have been done, I did run this story concurrent to the canon, starting about midway through when Hazar started having his change of heart. Not because I thought I could do it better, but I thought the other elements of the story would work well in the canonverse and there was some things I wanted to either explain or expound on that canon didn't. So yes, the idea of reworking canon figured into the story as well, but you'll notice I did keep a lot of the key main events from the series.
Honestly, despite super deer, Coconuts, and any other bits of bad dubbing and cheese whiz that were 80s toons and Voltron, I wouldn't change canon for real at all. I have a fondness for the story and the characters as presented, and wanted to stay as faithful as I could to it while going a little further and making it written for an adult audience, too.

Miscellaneous: I also dropped other ideas and scenes along the way, most of them minor and overall irrelevent. Even when I have things planned out, I tend to add subplots and main plots grow all sorts of tentacles and such. It can get messy! So sometimes I decide some things have to be glossed over or dropped entirely, especially if it doesn't move the story along.
For instance, there was going to be some steamy lovin' in portions of the story, but I ended up leaving a lot of the romance implied and to reader imagination. Unless I'm writing a lemon, I don't see the use in a steamy sex scene unless it otherwise is key to something else...other than establishing two characters are now boinking, that is. I thought about making an NC-17 version of this story by adding the scenes back in but you know what? Just use your imagination and heck, whatever pairing floats your boat. Everyone wins!