Sarah's Writing Blog

Jeyne Westerling and Robb Stark are a modern day fairytale, a celebrity “IT” couple, a glamorous fantasy for the everyday, working-class Westerosi to aspire to!

Well, at least, until Jeyne goes missing that is. Then the fairy tale turns into a horror story, where Jeyne is presumed dead and lost in the somewhere in the expansive Stark Nature Preserve, and her handsome young fiance is rumored to be the cause of her dissappearance.

Brienne Tarth is an outsider looking in on the nightmare, and as a park ranger at the Stark Preserve, she’ll do whatever she can to clear Robb’s name, including working with the arrogant, dickish, and infamous Jaime Lannister, a former cop turned private investigator.

Brienne and Jaime hate each other, and blend like oil and water, but they’re united on one shared goal.

Find Jeyne, dead or alive, and find out what happened to her.

Read Chapter 1 here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62897734/chapters/161057680

Read the most recent chapter here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62897734/chapters/212515451

Hey been a long time!

As always, my biggest writing challenge is inconsistency and motivation, but anyone reading this probably knows that already so let’s actually talk about something new.

This chapter was kinda hard because it’s, you know, the culmination of a lot of hard work and tension I’ve been building up for awhile. I’ve been putting the seeds of romantic attraction in both J and B’s chapters for the past several, so I hope it doesn’t seem like a shock narrative wise.

I want the kiss and then sudden distance to be interesting and emotionally intense, not trite and dumb as many miscommunication tropes in romance can come off. I’m trying to set it up in a way that makes sense with the canon version of the characters and this universe’s version of the characters.

I’m thinking that since Jaime is intuitive and passion driven, of course he is the first to kiss, the first to touch, the first to be open about his want. But at the same time, Brienne is his only real friend and companion, he has a lot to lose should their relationship suddenly turn cold (remember he has no idea that she loves him), which causes him to hesitate.

Brienne wants Jaime, and is aware of the want, but when a person cannot see themself as being desirable then suddenly desire becomes frightening and impossible. Which is why she kisses back but does not advance, and takes his hesitancy as an immediate rejection.

In the later half of the chapter I introduce Jon and Sam into this fic. HOORAY! The boys are back in town baby!

If you’re a clever cookie (or really anyone who’s read a story before) you might be assuming that they’ll have a larger part in the story later, and you’d be right. The addition of Sam and Jon was not planned in the original draft, but I like to leave my drafts with breathing room for improvisation which makes the writing process more enjoyable for me. (And yes, I would also agree that writing detailed drafts and sticking to them might result in more mature, and cohesive works but I’ll deal with that later!)

Someone suggested Tyrion in one of the comments on one of the earlier chapters, which I seriously considered, but there wasn’t a way to fit him in, and I wanted to maintain the JB intimacy for a little while longer. But I did agree that our couple needed some help to make some progress, and the finer details of the plot needed some tweaking since I had moved things around.

I like Jon pretty well, and Sam too (I like any fat character with a name since I’m a fat person in real life and a lot of characters that are fat are only mentioned as “the fat woman” or “the big man,” and go unnamed forever on) but I will not attempt a POV chapter for either of them. It would irk my formatting vision and it would honestly be kind of boring for me, but I look forward to writing them.

What stands out to me the most about Jon and Sam are their different types of intelligence. Jon, despite being a kind of isolated person (or maybe because of it) has a pretty good understanding what makes people tick, what they think and how they view the world. Sam sees things in a wider way, he can make long term plans and knows what each component of the plan would be.

I hope I can write them well enough to not take you out of the story!

Anyways, that’s it for this chapter retrospective, please comment here or on the chapter itself if you have any questions or anything to add!