Well, chapter three is up at fanfiction.net. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a sequel to my story Consequences, a Stargate: SG-1 fic that goes AU in the middle of the episode "Broca Divide." In that story, Jack was infected earlier and so didn't stop Carter in the locker room. I have read so many saccharine stories that start out that way. This was my reaction to that:.

There are a lot of stories where something happens and Sam gets pregnant (Broca add-ons, Beneath the Surface add-ons, situations of the writer's own devising). In the majority of them, this causes Sam and Jack to immediately profess their undying love and live happily ever after. One or both are happy to give up their career (or at least SG-1) for this, or the Air Force decides to ignore it and they manage to save the world on a daily basis while the baby's in day care and still find time to be model parents. Jacob is thrilled to be a grandfather, with no problems as to how it came about. Both Jack and Sam automatically know exactly how to get along, and neither has any issues at all. The story doesn't end "happily ever after" because they're into that part by the end of the first paragraph.

I would not advise a diabetic to read such a story, as he or she might go into sugar shock. I would like my story to be a rather more realistic look at what happens when two people who don't really know each other and who have significant obstacles to overcome suddenly find themselves on their way to becoming parents. This doesn't mean that the ending will be unhappy, or that it will be depressing to read. It simply means that in order to get to the "happily ever after" part, both Sam and Jack are going to have to do a bit of growing and learning about themselves and about each other. Which is not always fun for the person doing the growing, but (imho) makes for a much more interesting story. YMMV.

By the end of Consequences, Jack and Sam are together and the big issues have been mostly worked out. New Lives begins about a week later, but if you're expecting happily ever after ... well, we'll get there eventually.

Any way, I'm finding NL a lot harder to write than Consequences was. I've fallen back on my old writing style of just trying to get 500 words a day done. Just writing for the word count. It's more mechanical than I'd prefer, but on the other hand, right now it's the only way I'm getting anything done. NL feels very 'talky' to me, and I'm not sure if I'm hitting the right amount of exposition or not, or if some scenes feel repetitive. What I need is a beta who won't spare my feelings. If anyone wants to volunteer for the job, please let me know.

Oh, and I get a large chunk of story written before I even start posting, so anyone who volunteers will get to read stuff weeks before it gets posted anywhere. (I do this so even if I hit a dry spell and don't get anything written on a story for a while, I can keep up a regular posting schedule while I get my writing schedule back on track.)

Minor Spoilers:

In the section I just wrote, we hit the first big AU element besides the pregnancy itself and its direct results. Jacob has come out to Colorado Springs so Sam could tell him about the pregnancy in person, and he is being an asshole. (Don't get me wrong, he's one of my favorite characters, but in the two episodes he was in before he was joined with Selmak, he was most definitely a jerk.) Anyway, Sam's upset because of something he said, and so Daniel decided that he needed to go cheer her up a bit, or at least provide some emotional support. After all, the files that were recently delivered to the SGC have been sitting in some warehouse since the early 1940s. There's no rush to go through them, right?

Check out the episode "Torment of Tantalus," season one. And think about what might have happened if Daniel had looked at that tape just a day or two later. It probably won't get mentioned directly in the fic, but there you are.