Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic FDK: Ten Years in the Making (16/?)

Ann, I think you've made my week. Or maybe even my month. (I'd go further, but there's always the chance my husband will peek over my shoulder, see what I'm writing, and be offended). The fact that anyone is thinking about my fic when I haven't posted anything new is really pretty neat.

So, you can probably tell already that I did not take your post as criticism (although, as I've said before, I like your criticism – it's very constructive). And I do see the story in a pretty similar way as you've explained it here. It's a world where Lois and Clark exist but stopped being Lois and Clark. It's been so long that they are having trouble getting there again. I think I found this idea particularly interesting for the very reason that despite the fact that I grew up with a brother who is still a Superman fanatic (in a somewhat scary sense), I never really got all that into any Superman movies, comics, the old TV show, etc, except Lois and Clark. I find Lois and Clark intrinsically interesting. In my eyes, Superman is just a nice plot device. (Sorry, I'm sure I've offended some of you with this. But this is just my view. Having the aforementioned Superman fanatic as a brother, I recognize that others find Superman as important a character as Lois and Clark.)

So for me, Lois and Clark not being Lois and Clark is just so wrong and so weird, I had to write it. And I have to say, I tried hard to make Lois a real person before Clark shows up again – getting over her depression, taking care of Sammy, etc. And while I do kind of like the image this makes of Lois, a slightly softer Lois, she still isn't Lois to me. Lois is someone, like Clark, who does everything she can to make the world a better place. Taking care of Sammy is useful to Lucy, but Lois was meant for bigger things.

The analogy with Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is really interesting. I hadn't really thought about it in this way – Lois needed to talk, Clark just kept doing, but it is very accurate. It was just the way I saw them acting. So, I guess I buy that men and women are like that. Well, some of them, at least.

Yes! This is exactly right (in my mind, anyway). For years, Jonathan and Martha have been telling Clark to just tell her, but he stubbornly refuses to. His reasoning is that it would only hurt her to know that he was alive since he can't have a relationship with her. But this only works because he's such a lunkhead he doesn't see that he is the reason she's so depressed – he's already hurt her. And this is why he's depressed now. Because while he is a lunkhead and more than a bit self-indulgent (in my mind, at least, this is why Clark in LnC manages to propose to Lois before telling her his secret – because he has decided that Lois must choose Clark over Superman and apparently she must do it in a ridiculously final way), he does truly love her. And so now that he gets how much he hurt her, it's like ten years of guilty have been poured on top of him. In Clark's eyes, he would never do anything to hurt Lois, so he can not deal now with the fact that he has.

I can only hope that the rest of my fic is compelling as well. I have to admit, my biggest weakness as a writer is that I write things that make the story interesting to me at the time and deal with the consequences later. I did not start this story with any thoughts about kryptonite dust. I wasn't even thinking about an A-plot. It was just at some point, I decided the B-plot would be better served if Clark passed out. So I wrote that and hoped I'd think of a good reason why he had. Viola – kryptonite dust was born. But not until after I'd already posted the part with Clark passing out. So, honestly, there's still parts of this story I haven't figured out how I'm going to solve. Honestly, the only reason Clark didn't “come back to life” sooner than he did was that I had no idea how to do it. And this does make me think I could do something stupid and ruin the whole thing.