“… Than Meets the Eye”, End notes

[aadler]

[ Endnotes posted 24 Mar 2015 ]

Where did the idea for the story come from?

The first germ of the idea was from the magic jukebox itself: something that would take somebody to the past for as long as the right song was playing (obviously, that changed with the final version); in fact, the original working title was “Yesterday Once More”, from the early-’70s Karen Carpenter song. I’m not sure when I got the notion that Joe Mannix had once been involved with a young Joyce not-yet-Summers, but it took hold of me. I even started a basic draft of the story … and it stalled dead, it wasn’t ready, there wasn’t enough there yet. As I’ve touched on elsewhere, what I had was a situation, and it needed something more to make it a story.

It lay untouched for years. Then, sitting on a hilltop in Kurdistan with nothing to do (2003, a few months after the initial Iraq invasion), I happened to think, it surely would be interesting if Sheila was involved in this, and with that one final spark I had the story finished in a week.

Is there any particular significance to the title?

Two layers of meaning there, but neither really deep. The first is the obvious: there’s more in Sunnydale than meets the eye, at least at first glance. The second … well, Joe is a private eye, and the weird situation in this town — which does include Sheila — is what’s waiting to meet him.

What is the thing I like most about this story? the thing I like least, or about which I feel most doubtful?

Like:

• Though I’d touched glancingly on other fandoms (in “Voices in the Dark”), this was my first full-out crossover, and I don’t feel any cause for disappointment.
• I’d done more than a few non-Scooby POVs before, but Joe provided my first opportunity to study Buffy and her friends from a completely external perspective. I liked the results. The most obvious was his assuming Giles to be Buffy’s father (which, check “Morning’s Echo” for my own take on that, but Joe was the first person in my Backstage ‘canon’ to think it), and his dismay about the seeming violence inherent in his beautiful Joyce’s oldest daughter. Possibly most telling, however, was his rage at seeing the spark of someone smoking a cigarette in a crypt within site of Joyce’s graveside … he couldn’t know — but we do — that this actually meant Spike found a way to see the funeral. Even if I did it myself, that was good.
• Mostly, though, I liked the way I managed Joe’s characterization. His internal voice was clearly different from the Joe Mannix we saw on TV in the ’60s and ’70s; I borrowed some of the sense of melancholy and semi-poetic insights from Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer. And he really was tough, and skilled, and determined, and still so totally out of his depth when it came to dealing with Sunnydale.

Dislike:

Nothing. This story gave me no end of pleasure, and still does.

Is there anything I think I could have done better, or might do differently if I had it to do over?

Not as such, but there is one tiny little thing that I sort of left unaddressed. If one compares the timeline of the story to that of the show, well, it certainly looks like Dawn’s attempt to bring Joyce back would have fallen sometime during Joe’s visit to Sunnydale. I did what I could to keep those events from intersecting, but let’s face it: his magical reunion with her wouldn’t have been much before (or after) Joyce’s empty body showed up to knock at the door of her old home, before Dawn regained her common sense and broke the spell. Should the story have found any way to acknowledge this parallel set of events? I don’t think it would have been an improvement, but I do still sometimes wonder.

Do I have any plans to follow up on this story, or to use the character(s) or situation in a subsequent fic?

Sheila has appeared at least twice more: a dream cameo in “Queen’s Gambit”, and then a segment in “Echoes from the Battleground” (in which, in fact, Tana’s drama scholarship is first made known to her). And there’s an idea that I’ve been gradually putting together over the years, but first I have to get another story out of the way, maybe two others, before I can get to it …

If I ever get that far, it’s to be titled “This Precious Ache”. Maybe mentioning it will spur me to get done the things that will allow me to go ahead and write it.

Any observations to add at the end?

A few things. I’d done something like it before, but in this story I started really paying attention to internal links: i.e., things that would actually connect this story to others in the Backstage canon apart from my simply listing them together. Souled-Sheila’s appearance was one, and I already mentioned the Tana-scholarship follow-up in “Echoes from the Battleground”. Giles’s assumed paternity of Buffy was another, and the reappearance of St. John of the Cross church (“Twilight’s Last Gleaming”). Even Joe’s opening comment about ‘that little Missouri town where every living soul simply vanished overnight in 1998’ was a reference to “Solitaire Till Dawn”, and Sheila’s final question about whether L.A. has riding stables harks back to the claim by ‘Nika’ (“Shadow and Substance”) that she fed from horses rather than ever taking human blood. From this point on, I’d be doing more and more conscious shaping of stories to accentuate these links. Part of the fun, if you care about such things … and I do, so for me it’s a lot of fun.