Rec and a new WIP

Fic rec: I haven’t posted any recs for ages, and this isn’t because there isn’t good stuff being written. Rather the reverse, in fact, because there’s more good stuff around than I can keep up with. I’m sure that there are some that I have read where I’ve been in so much of a rush that I haven’t left feedback. There is one story, however, that I simply have to rec. Masks and Mirrors by pfeifferpack. An ingenious S5 tale that goes AU from ‘Forever’ in a twist unlike anything that I’ve ever seen anyone do before. WIP, 4 chapters complete so far, but she hasn’t put them into Memories yet and so you’ll have to go forward from the Ch. 1 that I’ve linked. She’s aiming for weekly updates. It’s not beta read at present but that doesn’t show apart from an occasional typo. Quite simply delightful.

New WIP from me: I had planned to work on the next chapter of ‘Sunnydale Passions’, to be titled ‘Nights of the Gnu Republic’, today, but I can’t get into the right frame of mind. Instead I’m working on the next ‘Tabula Avatar’ chapter. Hopefully that will go up tomorrow although home decorating commitments may interfere. My new WIP (see below) won’t interfere; it’s low priority because I’ve got 2 months in which to complete it and it’s going to be fairly short.

I know that a lot of you are not reading ‘Tabula Avatar’ because of the crossover element but taking ‘Twisting the Hellmouth’ into consideration it is actually proving to be my most popular story ever. I even discovered someone on a non-BtVS board rather grudgingly describing it as flawed but the best of a bad bunch on TtH. Not an opinion I agree with, and other people on the board jumped in immediately with a heated defence of Marcus Rowland (ffutures), but it amused me nonetheless. By contrast ‘Lonely on the Mountain’, which I thought would win me a whole new audience, went down like a lead balloon (or Walloon!) in the Xander-centric fic world. TA is easy to write, I can whip off a chapter in half of the time that it takes to write anything else, and so it will remain my primary focus for the foreseeable future.

The new story, ‘Love Potion #9’, is lower priority. I’m writing this for the seven_seasons community in which May and June will be devoted to Season 3. It’s a Spuffy community and I haven’t done S3 Spuffy before. I do have an S3 sequel planned for the S2 story The Hounds of Love, but it’s going to be a short, with more jokes and fighting than romance, and I wanted to do something more specifically along the lines of the community’s raison d’être. Spuffy is where I first made my mark (although I’m not really any kind of shipper, I just like there to be a romance going on between swordfights and I don’t really care who it’s between) and I need to keep my hand in.

I intend to have it finished before I post it there – this is not going to be an epic, probably something around the 20,000 words mark at most – but I’m going to put it up here as a WIP so that I can make changes if it doesn’t strike the right chords with readers. I’m putting Chapter One up today simply because alwaysjbj has just posted a rather neat little Spuffy ficlet set during ‘Lover’s Walk’ and that is exactly where this story kicks off. As you will see, however, this universe diverges from canon in one important respect even before the event that triggers the story. It’s an ‘insert Dawn here’ fic.

This chapter is 2,450 words. Rating PG-13 so far, I think, but I’ll crank it up to R later.

(  Love Potion Number 9: Part 1 )

Rec and a new WIP

Fic rec: I haven’t posted any recs for ages, and this isn’t because there isn’t good stuff being written. Rather the reverse, in fact, because there’s more good stuff around than I can keep up with. I’m sure that there are some that I have read where I’ve been in so much of a rush that I haven’t left feedback. There is one story, however, that I simply have to rec. Masks and Mirrors by pfeifferpack. An ingenious S5 tale that goes AU from ‘Forever’ in a twist unlike anything that I’ve ever seen anyone do before. WIP, 4 chapters complete so far, but she hasn’t put them into Memories yet and so you’ll have to go forward from the Ch. 1 that I’ve linked. She’s aiming for weekly updates. It’s not beta read at present but that doesn’t show apart from an occasional typo. Quite simply delightful.

New WIP from me: I had planned to work on the next chapter of ‘Sunnydale Passions’, to be titled ‘Nights of the Gnu Republic’, today, but I can’t get into the right frame of mind. Instead I’m working on the next ‘Tabula Avatar’ chapter. Hopefully that will go up tomorrow although home decorating commitments may interfere. My new WIP (see below) won’t interfere; it’s low priority because I’ve got 2 months in which to complete it and it’s going to be fairly short.

I know that a lot of you are not reading ‘Tabula Avatar’ because of the crossover element but taking ‘Twisting the Hellmouth’ into consideration it is actually proving to be my most popular story ever. I even discovered someone on a non-BtVS board rather grudgingly describing it as flawed but the best of a bad bunch on TtH. Not an opinion I agree with, and other people on the board jumped in immediately with a heated defence of Marcus Rowland (ffutures), but it amused me nonetheless. By contrast ‘Lonely on the Mountain’, which I thought would win me a whole new audience, went down like a lead balloon (or Walloon!) in the Xander-centric fic world. TA is easy to write, I can whip off a chapter in half of the time that it takes to write anything else, and so it will remain my primary focus for the foreseeable future.

The new story, ‘Love Potion #9’, is lower priority. I’m writing this for the seven_seasons community in which May and June will be devoted to Season 3. It’s a Spuffy community and I haven’t done S3 Spuffy before. I do have an S3 sequel planned for the S2 story The Hounds of Love, but it’s going to be a short, with more jokes and fighting than romance, and I wanted to do something more specifically along the lines of the community’s raison d’être. Spuffy is where I first made my mark (although I’m not really any kind of shipper, I just like there to be a romance going on between swordfights and I don’t really care who it’s between) and I need to keep my hand in.

I intend to have it finished before I post it there – this is not going to be an epic, probably something around the 20,000 words mark at most – but I’m going to put it up here as a WIP so that I can make changes if it doesn’t strike the right chords with readers. I’m putting Chapter One up today simply because alwaysjbj has just posted a rather neat little Spuffy ficlet set during ‘Lover’s Walk’ and that is exactly where this story kicks off. As you will see, however, this universe diverges from canon in one important respect even before the event that triggers the story. It’s an ‘insert Dawn here’ fic.

This chapter is 2,450 words. Rating PG-13 so far, I think, but I’ll crank it up to R later.

(  Love Potion Number 9: Part 1 )