As I recall, the discussion on MA around the end of 1999 had to do, among other things, with time. According to officially licensed guides and whatnot, the travel time between Coruscant and Naboo (and Tatooine, for that matter) is several weeks, but of course in the movie we see the takeoff and the landing and it's as if only a few hours have gone by. This is a persistent problem in Star Wars in general -- where does the time go? So I thought I'd try to address that a bit. Mali Wane, Terri Hamill, and the incomparable [name deleted] (who can no longer use the handle she was using at the time) were indispensable, giving me the title, multiple betas, and film dialogue, which at the time was tough to come by. Terri had a VCD or some such thing, with subtitles in something like Balinese; I relied on that once or twice, but mostly on my memory and theirs.

Future Perfect was my first effort at slash, and approximately my second at fan fiction in general. (A friend and I began writing a gen SW novel in college; in high school, I wrote a paper on Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods that I now realize falls under the heading of "reinterpretive fiction," like Grendel -- it tells the story of a secondary character from that character's point of view. Fan fiction, in its way.) I look at it now and ... well, I don't hate it, but I sure hate some of the choices I made in it. The epithets alone make me squirm.

Past Conditional carries the thing through the end of the movie -- adhering to canon, I like to think, as much as possible (except for, you know, the slash thing). I see a difference in style already. Present Progressive is my concession to the weepiness in fandom over the death of Qui-Gon Jinn, and an attempt at a solution to the problem of why Ben Kenobi and Yoda disappear when they die, while Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Vader don't. It's got some stuff in it that I like a lot.

---

Future Perfect
Past Conditional
Present Progressive