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bedlamsbard · 7 years

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I know you have had a lot of little ideas for random Rebel's AU's that haven't made it past concept writing -- is there a reason that Backbone made too full story vs any of the other concepts? I know time can be a huge limiting factor for which ideas get more fleshed out so I was just curious. How do you pick which stories to write full out when you have so many awesome ones?

This is actually a weirdly complicated story because it depends on a lot of factors, of which the various concepts are the least of them.

Back in late spring/summer 2015, it was either going to be Backbone or Trade All Your Tomorrows, the Kanan and Hera time travel story, which actually preceded Backbone’s earliest concepts. (You can still read the Tomorrows concept writing, if you like.) Checking the dates, it looks like I started doing concept work for Tomorrows right after the Rebels S1 finale aired. (And my earliest Rebels fic was a follow-up to Call to Action.) There were a couple of stories I started but didn’t go anywhere -- a Kanan and Hera story set after AND, and then the werewolf AU, which was just for fun and which I never intended to potentially fill out into a full story. There was another story about Kanan having to go undercover as an Imperial officer that never even made it to the concept stages. (You can find any of the posted concepts in my cut scenes and concept writing tag.)

Now, what was going on at the time is that Queen’s Gambit was actually still in progress, because I didn’t wrap up Gambit until June 2015. As I recall, I wrote about 30K of Tomorrows in March 2015, then dragged myself out of Rebels hell because I needed to finish Gambit. This was in about late April. The earliest Backbone stuff I started doing was in late May, and then Gambit wrapped up at the beginning of June.

I had always intended to take a break between Gambit and Watchtower, and there is actually a completely different story I meant to write then, because as originally planned, Gambit was going to wrap up around the end of summer 2014. Now, obviously this did not happen, because I moved cross-country and started graduate school. The story that I had planned to write was a TCW AU where the chip triggered early in a lot of clones and Anakin ended up framed for that and had to go on the run with Rex. Well, Rebels started airing in fall 2014, and over the course of the following eight or nine months I got really into Rebels, and in the run-up from Call to Action to FatG I decided that I really wanted to write an Inquisitor!Kanan story, somehow, someway. But I just didn’t really have a route to that that I was really interested in at the time.

In late May 2015, as I was half-crazed from (a) finishing Gambit and (b) taking a summer course in French, I had my “wait, what if it is ISB Agent Hera and Inquisitor Kanan?” breakthrough. So I was turning that over and turning that over and talking that out at various people, but at that point I still intended Tomorrows to be my next big story.

In the meantime, several different things happened.

Lords of the Sith came out -- well, it actually came out in late April, I just did not read it until the end of May. “Siege of Lothal” aired at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, and I got a friend who had attended to tell me how much it contradicted the Tomorrows and agents of the Empire concepts. And, most crucially for Tomorrows, Kanan - The Last Padawan began in April 2015.

Now, if you’ve read the Tomorrows concepts, you know that Depa Billaba’s clone troopers play a major role. However, because I did up all the Tomorrows concepts before TLP came out, those clones are all OCs. TLP also very plainly lays out how inexperienced Caleb was at the time of Order 66, so all my background for Caleb and my clone OCs all got very quickly jossed by canon in one fell swoop. I did keep working on Tomorrows for a while after that, but I really dislike writing at a moving target, which TLP was at the time, and then Tomorrows got set aside so that I could finish Gambit. I’d also done some plotting and some concepts for something that was called the post time travel story, which dealt with Caleb and Hera and the repercussions of their time travel years after Tomorrows had wrapped up. (It looks like the latest dates on that are mid-April 2015, so about the same time as Tomorrows.)

When I finished Gambit I was still weighing Tomorrows and the story that didn’t yet have a title, but which I was calling the agents of the Empire AU. Now, Gambit isn’t a time travel story, but its prequel, Wake the Storm, is, and I was really unwilling to write two time travel stories so close together. (Wake wrapped in February 2014, but Gambit is essentially a straight continuation of Wake.) And the other thing is that with Tomorrows while I had the concept, I actually did not have an action plot. I like action plots. I like them a lot. It’s really hard for me to write a story without one, and Tomorrows was essentially a whole mess of emotions but no plot.

However, I did have an action plot for the agents of the Empire story. (And this plot has actually consistently remained the same for the past two years, though it got filled out a lot.) And I also had people who were willing to talk about it, which is a really good way to get enthused about a story. For a while after Gambit wrapped I was alternating working on Tomorrows and agents of the Empire concept writing, but Tomorrows eventually trailed off as I got more into the agents of the Empire story, and eventually it got shelved entirely and I dug into what later became On the Edge of the Devil’s Backbone.

Now: a lot of things that were originally written for Tomorrows ended up in Backbone, like Alecto Syndulla, her sister Clotho, and I believe that Cham’s sisters Seku and Aleema were originally conceived of for Tomorrows as well. Tomorrows was written with a much darker backstory for canon!Hera that involved her entire family being murdered, and for those that were in the Rebels fandom back in S1 and before the bulk of S2 aired, you may remember that there was a lot of discussion about what Hera’s backstory actually was -- if her father was dead, if she had been enslaved and that’s where her markings came from, what had happened to Ryloth after LotS, and so on. If you look at the Tomorrows concepts, you can see some of this there in the Hera scenes. When I was doing the backstory for Backbone, I didn’t want to go with any of that because I am a pretty contrary person and it had just tipped over from “plausible” to “I am very contrary and am going to do the exact opposite.” Which is why Backbone!Hera’s mother is still alive while Tomorrows!Hera’s mother is dead, along with most of the rest of the family.

Now! “Homecoming” didn’t air until February 2016, and if I remember correctly, the S2 trailer that aired in summer 2015 didn’t feature Cham Syndulla, though I think the special features from the S1 DVD/Blu-Ray release mentioned that we would see Cham Syndulla in S2, but that wasn’t until September 2015, at which point Backbone was already in progress. The omnibus Rise of the Empire, which includes Tarkin and A New Dawn, also includes a short story about a fifteen-year-old Hera, but that didn’t release until October 2015. Backbone started posting in July 2015, and at that point between LotS and AND there was NOTHING that dealt with Ryloth, so I had a relatively free hand to work. I wanted to do some things that I knew canon would never do -- I mean, beyond the fact it was an Imperial AU -- which is why the Free Ryloth fleet exists and why Hera’s extended family is featured so prominently.

So that’s the backstory for Backbone.

Now, over the past year and change I’ve done a lot of smaller concepts, and none of those were ever intended to make it to a full story stage, because if you look at them closely, you’ll notice that they’re all actually Backbone AUs in one variation or another. I don’t multitask well, which is why I haven’t done any concept writing for Watchtower yet and why I haven’t done any concepts for non-Backbone-based Rebels stories. Like, do I have some that I have ideas for? Sure; there’s a “post-AND Kanan and Hera meet Baze and Chirrut on Jedha and have an adventure” story that would be cool, and there’s a “pre-Wrong Jedi arc Caleb drags Ahsoka and Rex into an adventure on Coruscant” story that would be adorable. But if I do that, knowing my brain, there’s a really good chance that I won’t go back to Backbone, and come hell or high water I am going to finish this story.

(There is one piece of concept writing for the sequel to Backbone that will not be written, but I try not to do sequel concepts because things change in progress.)

#backbone behind the scenes #godoflaundrybaskets #bedlam answers

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