Words in the Heroes' Tongue

Here is the sixth chapter of my BtVS/Conan crossover The Witch’s Promise. It’s almost a year since I posted the preceding chapter; sorry. Here’s a reprise of the summary; Willow, trying to bring back Tara from death in ‘Seeing Red’/‘Villains’, is offered the chance to divert her to the Hyborian Age instead of to the realms of the dead. She accepts – but now Tara is stranded in a far-off, and long ago, alternate past full of danger (and hot lesbians).

Crossover between ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and the ‘Conan’ stories of Robert E. Howard (not the movies!). Rating R. Conan has been captured by enemies and Tara, together with a beautiful lesbian warrior girl, seeks to rescue him. 8,800 words.

( The Witch’s Promise: Chapter Six )

Here is the fifth chapter of my BtVS/Conan crossover The Witch’s Promise. Willow, trying to bring back Tara from death in ‘Seeing Red’/‘Villains’, is offered the chance to divert her to the Hyborian Age instead of to the realms of the dead. She accepts – but now Tara is stranded in a far-off, and long ago, alternate past.

Crossover between ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and the ‘Conan’ stories of Robert E. Howard. Rating R. Conan has been captured by enemies and Tara, together with a beautiful lesbian warrior girl, seeks to rescue him. 8,300 words.

( The Witch’s Promise: Chapter Five )

For the first time since February 13th I’m posting fic. Here is the third chapter of my BtVS/Conan crossover The Witch’s Promise. Willow, trying to bring back Tara from death in ‘Seeing Red’/‘Villains’, is offered the chance to divert her to the Hyborian Age instead of to the realms of the dead. She accepts – but now Tara is stranded in a far-off, and long ago, alternate past.

Crossover between ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and the ‘Conan’ stories of Robert E. Howard. Rating R. May contain traces of femslash. This instalment is exactly 6,000 words.

( The Witch’s Promise: Chapter Three )

I know I should be getting on with my existing Works In Progress, especially ‘Tabula Avatar’ and ‘Came the Thunder’, but (as happens all too often, I’m afraid) I’ve been distracted by a plot bunny. This is one that’s been kicking around in my mind and my ‘Outlines and Rough Drafts’ folder for quite a while. All I needed to turn it from a sketchy outline into a working draft was a spark – and, as I was working on my ‘Writing Original Characters’ presentation for the writerconuk event, that spark was struck. I made an oblique reference to it in the presentation (“Hmm. Actually I think I’ll write that one myself.”) but once I started writing the character in question didn’t quite turn out the way I’d hinted.

This is a sequel to the BtVS/Conan crossover The Hour of the Troll that I wrote two years ago. In that story Willow’s spell to banish Olaf to the Land of the Trolls misfired slightly and sent him to join Conan the Barbarian in the Hyborian Age.

Now Willow, seeking to bring Tara back from death in ‘Seeing Red’/‘Villains’, is given the chance to save Tara by sending her to the Hyborian Age in Olaf’s wake. She accepts – but, with Tara stranded ten thousand years ago in an alternate past, will Willow ever be able to get her back? And Tara no sooner arrives there than she is immediately plunged into deadly peril…

Crossover between ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and the ‘Conan’ stories of Robert E. Howard. I’m posting the Prologue and Chapter One together because of the Prologue’s extreme brevity. Rating R, may contain violence and femslash. It’s not intended to be very long, probably about the same length as the original Olaf story or a little longer, but you know how tales grow in the telling. This installment is 4,750 words.

( The Witch’s Promise: Prologue and Chapter One )

Belated happy birthday to verboseartistry, who hasn’t posted since July 06 and so probably won’t see this greeting.

I’ve been unwell for the past couple of days. Something between a cold and flu, for I had aching joints and felt very weak as well as having the sore throat and runny nose, and I was sent home from work in the early hours of Saturday morning. I spent much of Saturday in bed, and did not go to work last night, but I’m much better now with only the conventional cold-type symptoms remaining, and those at a tolerable level.

I wasn’t feeling well enough to write on Friday and so I didn’t get my ‘Olaf meets Conan’ story finished then, as I had planned, but I’ve completed it today and here is the final part. For the preceding sections, go to Part One or Part Two. The whole story is 14,355 words. This part is 5,570 words, rating R.

Summary; crossover with the original Robert E. Howard ‘Conan’ stories rather than with the Schwarzenegger movies. Willow’s spell to banish Olaf to the Land of the Trolls goes awry and sends him to the Hyborian Age. There he meets Conan the Barbarian and gets involved in the affairs of a small city-state with a dying king, two rival temples, and two beautiful princesses.

( The Hour of the Troll - Part Three )

Happy birthday to paratti

I must apologise to those of you who are awaiting updates of my WIPs. I promised the conclusion of ‘Life, Resumed’; there has been no ‘Tabula Avatar’ update since December 27th; and curiouswombat is pressing me to make my contribution to the next chapter of our shared fic ‘Access All Areas’. Alas, I got distracted by a plot bunny (as booster17 guessed would happen) and I just couldn’t resist.

When I was looking up examples of ‘authorised sequels’ last week, in connection with my diatribe on the subject, I happened to notice that there was not a single work on ‘Twisting the Hellmouth’ that is a BtVS/Conan crossover and I mentioned that fact in my post. Booster said ‘I give it one week before you have a Conan crossover up there’; he knows me too well. Even as I was reading his comment I was savagely attacked by the plot bunny in question.

I tried to resist it, but to no avail, and this is what I’ve been working on when I should have been doing other things. It’s another one of my Where Did Olaf Go? challenge fics, in which Willow’s spell at the end of Triangle misses its target slightly and sends Olaf to somewhere other than the targeted Land of the Trolls. This is a crossover with the Conan books, the original Robert E. Howard stories, not with the comics or the (somewhat cheesy) Schwarzenegger movies. Not as overtly humorous as most of the other works in my Olaf series. Part One of three, 4,500 words, PG maybe edging towards R in the later parts.
( The Hour of the Troll - Part One )