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On Thursday, post three things you love about a story.
Okay, I’ve been saving this story - Back In Time For Dinner - for a special occasion, and this is it. A year ago today, I was planning my NaNoWriMo story when I got ambushed by what, I later found out, is called a plotbunny. I had been ambushed by another (dirtier) one about a week prior, and had written it out, and now I had the ‘but how did they get to that point?’ thought. And I worked through an idea on how Phineas and Isabella could end up together by getting trapped together in the past.
But, I didn’t have time to write it up. I had a Real Story to write, starting the next day. And the next day, I wrote 1528 words of Real Story to start NaNoWriMo. And then, on November 2, I opened the Real Story, took one look at it, closed it, and opened a new file in Drive. Initially I called it “Lost In Time”, but the title changed after somebody else posted a story with that name. On that first day, I wrote 1272 words of it, a first cut of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2, up until they get to the river.
I waited until my AO3 account invite arrived in mid-December to start releasing it; this gave me time to finish it, then spend a month or so polishing it, and the story is definitely the better for it.
As my first released story, I’m obviously very fond of it. Three specific things I love:
- I love Phineas’s automatic reaction to hand Isabella his shirt when she gets soaked. I hadn’t planned that; I’d just thought having her fall in the water made sense. This was the first time I’d had a character surprise me. (It’s far from the last.)
- I love that it feels like a real episode. There’s a Perry/Doof subplot, albeit a minimal one. There’s multiple storylines going on at once. There’s even a song. Most of the Phinbella I write ends up not feeling like Phineas and Ferb because there’s no inventions or -inators; this one works.
- I love Linda’s reaction at the end. She walks into her backyard and sees her son and the neighbor making out, and her reaction? She calls the girl’s mother and tells her that he finally figured it out. (In Firsts, we see that they’ve been waiting for this moment for months, maybe even years.)