m/m Contract Law (Complete Story 5/4/20; Bonus Material Added 5/15/20)

[Ro20316]

Bravisimo!

A SPectacular end to this amazing tale.

Thanks for wrtting this.

 

[Lefty]

Definitely one of the best stories I’ve read on this site.  Great characters, plot, dialogue, hot sex- what more could you ask for except pictures lol.   But your descriptions were vivid enough! Can’t wait to read more of your works. 

[SeaMusc]

So well written.  So well paced.  Bravo, TQuintA,  I can't wait to read more from you. 

 

[MuscleJoe]

Haha.  Nice one Quincy!

[MuscleJoe]

On 3/16/2020 at 11:01 AM, TQuintA said:

    “But you’re my big brother.  I don’t want to fuck you!”  He tackled me while tickling.  I had no vision of us fucking.  Thankfully.

Having a gay brother too.  That scared me!!!  Ugh.  

[TQuintA]

Bonus Material

I had such a blast writing Contract Law that I wanted to give some behind the scenes peaks.

My friends who are familiar with my writing have a nickname for me: The Monarch of Prewriting.  I do so much prewriting; it’s insane.  For my other story, Hey, Big Guy, I literally wrote out each of the main four character’s class schedules, I filled a calendar to track the timeline of events, and I wrote pages of various scratchings and dialogue ideas.  I have a similar mountain of prewriting for Contract Law.  Because I do so much prewriting, not everything can make it into the story (for instance, in Hey, Big Guy, Dave originally had an older brother named Riley—that whole subplot was cut).  Last night, I went through the pile of prewriting for Contract Law, and I found some fun gems.  Some of them were character notes or plot points that didn’t make their way into the final draft.  Some of them are substantial changes to how I told the story.  Some of them are just neat.

The biggest change between the prewriting and the final draft is the narrator.  In the original notes, Eenie and Mo took turns narrating the story from their point of view.  It was supposed to change narrators every chapter—Eenie got the odd chapters; Mo the even ones.  I have pages of notes about what happens to Mo when his brother isn’t around.  I sketched out the scene where Mo interrogated a bedridden Hugo Tyler, I wrote some dialogue for Mo and Alexander’s first lunch together (I salvaged the joke about flightless birds because I loved it too much), and I sketched out three or four potential dates Mo and Alexander went on (including their three-way with Izzy).  However, as I developed the story, I realized that Mo figured out “whodunnit” well before his brother, and that would create structure problems—essentially, he would have to be withholding evidence in his own internal thoughts, which makes no sense logistically.  So, I made Eenie my sole narrator, converted most of the Mo chapters into dialogue, and cannibalized anything else I could, coming up with a reason Ian would be in the room for it to happen.

In addition to Hugo Tyler, I also cut another character: Elias Duarte.  Originally, Garrett’s father was still alive.  Ian didn’t think Garrett was magic; he thought Elias had cast the spell as a favor to his son.  The two-chapter long future vision Ian has of his life with Garrett included Ian bonding with his ersatz father-in-law and learning a lot about magic, more than even Mo knew.  In that protracted vision, originally Ian learned about how maledictions had a long history of being tests, and that people who passed the tests would be rewarded if they passed—a fact he later shared with Mo.  I just gave a shortened, character-appropriate version of this as dialogue to Mr. Carr after the reveal.  In the version of the story where Elias is alive, when Ian and Elias met in the real world, Ian feels close and connected with this man, and Elias can intuit that the two of them know each other.  He calls Ian his “quasi-pseudo-anachro-family.”   Despite this intuition, he didn’t have any substantial connection with Ian, and then he went into a long explanation of time paradoxes and closed causality loops.  Originally, too, Elias—in the real world—made it clear that Vernon couldn’t have hired a caster because the caster’s guild had banned him.  I cut it because it was just SO LONG, Elias wasn’t that interesting of a character (saints seldom are), and both Vernon and Garrett could be ruled out as suspects without Elias.  I also decided I didn’t want Vernon to know about magic.

Here’s a list of character notes that were in my prewriting but didn’t make it into the actual story because I cut them or there was no occasion for them to happen during the plot:

·       Oz really likes mustard.  He puts it on everything.  I wrote a few jokes about Oz living on toast and mustard in Germany, but they weren’t funny, so I cut them.

·       Garrett had a 4.0 GPA in college and was president of his school’s fashion club (he was a well-dressed art major, after all).  Because of his presidency and his very close friendship with Dennis, most of his classmates just assumed Garrett was gay, and still do.  FYI, in case it matters to anyone, Garrett is canonically bi, more attracted to women than men.

·       Quincy, although only 18, was fired from his last internship for hacking into the company’s bank accounts and stealing money.  It was a company that specialized in banking security, so they fired him and didn’t call the authorities because they didn’t want to embarrass themselves.  I almost squeezed this in when Mo realized that Quincy had added himself to the accounting database, but there were more pressing plot points, and it made the chapter drag.

·       Quincy was originally a very, very low-level magic user who could understand computers in a vaguely supernatural way.  I cut that because it was too much of a coincidence for there to be two (three with Elias) magic users in the story.

·       I was surprised when I found this next note because I don’t know what I even thought I could do with it, but I transcribe it faithfully for you here: “Ian is allergic to artificial peach flavoring.”  Again, I don’t know how that was going to be useful, even for a throw-away joke.

·       The Bailey family made its initial money from copper mines in the 1840s.  Most of their current fortune came from sound investment and venture capitalism through the Bailey Group, but the family still sees copper as a power color or good luck charm of sorts.  Originally, Vernon was going to have glasses with copper frames.  I cut it because it felt hokey and silly and took way too long to explain.

·       Although Vernon Bailey was born in Massachusetts, he was the first Bailey to be born there: the rest of his family are from Michigan and New York.

·       Vinnie Carr is an American Revolutionary War buff—to the point that he has participated in dozens of Revolutionary War re-enactments.  In fact, originally the photo on his desk that tipped Mo off wasn’t of Vinnie’s wedding but of him in full re-enactment costume.  I changed the photo to a wedding photo because that felt more natural and gave me an excuse to have Cheryl pre-transformation in a photo as well.  When I cut that picture, the whole American Revolution thing went away too.  I almost kept it; I drafted a lot of dialog about how happy Vinnie was to be in Boston for all the landmarks and such, but it would have drawn too much attention to him, and I kinda wanted people to forget he was a character until I did the reveal.

·       Izzy’s ex-boyfriend was originally arrested on drug charges; Izzy took the mailroom gig to get money for an expensive lawyer to get him out of jail.  Thus, when he has his three-way with Mo and Alexander, he was essentially cheating on his boyfriend.  I decided that was too gritty for the tone of this story and too messy a subplot for a relatively minor character.

·       When he was an undergraduate, Mo was approached to do porn and almost said yes.  He even picked his own porn name: Dallas Coxwood.

Some other tidbits:

·       The original title was A Crash Course in Contract Law, but I decided that was too long.

·       I have a whole abandoned set of vocabulary about magic users.  It’s all in modified Renaissance-era Italian.

·       I’ve never been to Boston, but my grandmother was born and raised there.  Because of this, I wanted to sneak an Easter egg referencing my grandmother into the story.  The inside of my grandmother’s purse smelled like pennies and wintergreen.

·       “C&G” stands for “Carr & Grice.”  Carr is Vinnie Carr, and Grice is Kenneth Grice.  Apart from his first name, I have no notes about Grice whatsoever.  Considering the amount of prewriting I do, this is hysterical to me.  I drew a map of Ian and Oz’s condo and the floor layout of C&G.  I had two different calendars (one with plot points, one with growth scenes).  I did research on Boston geography and landmarks, Renaissance Italian, and 1840s copper mines.  This is why I am called the Monarch of Prewriting.  And yet, in all of that, all I wrote about Kenneth Grice is that his name is Kenneth Grice.

·       Jayce Wilco wasn’t originally a pseudonym.  There’s a ridiculously convoluted process I use to randomly generate character names, and the process randomly generated “Jayce Wilco” for my porn star character.  It was such a hoot that the porn star randomly got such a porn-y name, that I decided to give him a real name.  I almost just made his real name “Bryan” with no last name but decided instead to go through the random-name-generation process for his real name too.

[Rorange]

u literally build a world!!

[Desato]

That is really interesting. I have a bunch of spreadsheets for stories that I have never written. I also make artwork for what I envision the characters to look like, just to give a more accurate description. You take things to another levels with all of their backstories. I should definitely do that to keep myself in check

Great story. It was so enjoyable to read all of the twists and turns. My only critique is that your weights at taller heights were very low. I'm 6'5" 270, and the way you described Eenie at 6'6" 270 (for example), he was positively massive. The way he was described would have to be closer to the 350-400 lb range.

[Mdlftr]

I really appreciate that you gave us insights into the artistic process.  I can see how all the pre writing background and research would help. The magic pretext for the story was stated in such a matter of fact way that it seemed more plausible, than if it had come out in the usual breathelss  exposition that many magic based stories provide.

This was an exceptionally well written, detailed, nuaced story with fully fleshed, believable lead characters.  I'll admit I was totally mislead as to who the actual instigator of the magic was, and the motivation, while plausible, was totally not what I was thinking.  I kept thinking the whole set up was an elaborate revenge scheme.  What else would motivate someone to enact such a complicated, extended scenario with so  many moving parts? IT turns out it was bro-mance or strong friendship of a straight guy for his gay best friend.

*sigh*

How nice

How unexpected.

 

Thank you for writing this. 

[MuscleJoe]

Whoa

um.  I’m loss for words