So I’ve not really been into Hawaii Five-0 fiction yet. I’ve drabbled a little, but nothing has caught my fancy; just really the “Commander Octopus” series; the first two are pretty darned good!
My cohort sent me a link to “Home Improvement” on AO3 by JiM and kalena, and said, “Trust me – you’ll like it.” So I started reading it. Then I got confused and had to put it down.
Then I started again. Put it down again. Started. Down. Started. Down.
I finally called her and said, “Dude… WTF?” I went on to explain that the fic is majorly confusing to me. I mean, in the first 500 words, we go backward and forward in time, in and out of dream states and the like. And not a single bit of it is identified by the author. Even major points between Danny showing up at the office to get Steve and them showing up at a dogfight aren’t really defined. I was reading, but wasn’t really “getting it”. And the more I read, the more frustrated I was getting.
Then she told me what the trick was – to read the story with your internal editor turned on. That’s what she’d done, and it worked for her. And you know what? It worked for me, too.
This is a really well done piece of fiction, as long as you come at it knowing that about the first 1/2 of the story needs you to engage your internal editor as you’re reading. It gets much better (less distracting scene differentiations) the farther along that you go. Trust me, it’s well worth the read. And at more than 30,000 words, it’ll take you a while to get through it. But like I said, trust me – it’s well worth it.
And to the authors: Just a little cleanup at the beginning – maybe even just a single “*” to indicate how it moves from timeline to timeline or such. Just a little, that’s all it needs. But you know what? The line ‘The Williams Anal Experience’ is the best four words ever strung together in the history of the English language!!! Okay, of slash, but still!!!!
We don’t even have a section/tag for this… I’m just going to put it under “review” ’cause it mostly is.