Kid!Fic Addendum

In relation to this rant:

I spent the weekend among family; the occasion was the birthday party of a bright and voluble three-year-old. As my family breeds like Kennedys, there were quite a few kidlets in packed into a short age range.  None of them have been ID'd as having developmental issues to my knowledge.

1) The birthday girl, the voluble three-year-old, who was a right little chatterbox until she got overtired
2) Another girl a week away from her third birthday, who was mostly silent but occasionally spoke a quiet complete sentence to her mother or grandmother.
3) A five-year-old boy not noticeably more talkative than child #1
4) A two-year-old girl who never uttered a word or word-like sound in my earshot
5) A two-year-old boy, same
6) A six-year-old boy who never interacted with me personally but was clearly talking to other people
7) A newborn baby (2 mos) who slept, cried, and pooped and didn't do much else.  
8-10) Some other boys in the 6-10 range with whom I did not interact.

Determining "normal behavior" in kids from this sample is pretty hard given #1 and #2 are the exact same age (two-week difference) yet could not have been more different in presentation.  (I will add that #1 has very hands-on and involved parents and #2 does, ah, not.)  General lessons to draw:

Two year olds don't really have a lot to say.  
The kids who did speak were speaking actual words and not "cute" baby talk
Newborn babies are really quite boring.

Fic: "Among Thieves"

So, some time ago I posted a fragment of a WIP that featured a post-war Lester and Faval banging around Verdane and encountering an adult and thoroughly "embittered" Dew.  My comment at the time was that aside from Faval being the Bad Cop to Lester's Good Cop, nothing actually happened in the story.  It revolved around two "high concept" ideas: Adult!Dew and "LOL Lester looks like Lex."  That ain't enough.

Well, I think I'm in the process of fixing that.

I always liked the premise of the story and really wanted to fix it, but at first I was afraid it was just inherently not a story.  Lester made a suitable POV character of a "type" I prefer-- reasonably intelligent but not super-observant, not terribly quirky, pretty vanilla-- but didn't have much going on and Faval was just coming across as off-key and pissy more often than not.  Dew was fun but that was it.

Then I ended up dumping the meta/headcanon content about about three other problematic WIPs into the framework of this one and hey, I think I like it a tons better.

( Notes )