I posted Chapter Two of the Willow/Willow fic ‘Playing With Herself’ earlier today; in case anyone who’s interested missed it, because of the odd posting time, it’s HERE.

Fanfic writing meme (gacked from dawnofme).
1 Why do you write fanfic?
2 When did you write your first fanfic and which fandom was it for?
3 Which fandoms do you, or have you, written for?
4 Do you read much fanfic or do you mainly write?
5 What comes easiest for you when writing?
(dialogue, descriptions, plot, characterizations, humour, angst...)
6 Which genres do you mainly write? (action, angst, dark, drama, horror, humour...)
7 Which genres will you not write?
8 Are reader comments/responses important?
9 Do you use a beta reader?
10 Which is your favourite character to write fanfic for and why?
11 Which are your favourite ships (including friendships) that you write the most?
12 Do you have characters that are so strongly established that they're in your heads?
13 Which characters are you most comfortable doing a POV for? Which is the hardest?

( Answers under the cut )

Belated Happy Birthday to danel4d, Happy Birthday to magic_wanderer

Another day of busy writing – well, no, I’m lying. I’m writing a section of ‘Tabula Avatar’ featuring a character I’ve never written before, and I only own one book in which he appears, and so I’ve been reading fanfic to help me get the feel of him. No, it’s not Drizzt – but there is a connection...

Also the sequel to one of the best ‘Neverwinter Nights 2’ modules has just come out and I haven’t been able to resist playing it. And there’s the constant beta-work on ‘Return of the Key’... As a result I’m only 242 words into the next TA chapter.

Results of my Music Meme quiz:
1st gipsy_dreamer 7 ½, 2nd curiouswombat 6 ½, 3rd appomattoxco 4, 4th daibhid_c 3, 5th zanthinegirl 2 ½, 6th equal miss_186, brunettepet & cat63 with 2, 9th equal booster17 & willowgreen on 1.

( Answers to the music meme quiz )

Ten fictional women who I think are awesome.

(Meme gacked from sp23, who gacked it from shipperx, who gacked it from sdwolfpup)

01) Modesty Blaise
02) Sister Fidelma (heroine of a series of historical detective novels by Peter Tremayne)
03) Machiko Noguchi a.k.a. Da’dtou-di ( Prey, Hunters’ Planet, & War by Steve and Stephani Perry)
04) Amanda Garrett (Choosers of the Slain, Stormdragon, Sea Fighter, & Target Lock by James Cobb)
05) Niles Etland (The Demon Breed, by James H Schmitz)
06) Charity Selborne (Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart)
07) Hu San-niang (The Water Margin)
08) Emma Peel (The Avengers)
09) Viconia DeVir (Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, & Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal)
10) Yu Shu-lien (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, played by Michelle Yeoh)

Narrowly missing out were Jaheira, Ellen Ripley, Vi the Vampire Slayer, Ilona Costa Bianchi, Eowyn, Tara, several Mary Stewart heroines from other books, and Beatrice (Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing). Buffy disqualified herself in an alley leading to the police station.

Gacked from shadowscast and thedeadlyhook

‘Use MS Word’s Autosummarise tool to condense a long story down to a 100 word or less drabble.’ shadowscast did it with ‘Sock Puppet’, thedeadlyhook did it with ‘Dirty Back Road’. The results were somewhat Dadaist to say the least.

I did it with ‘Tabula Avatar’, all 215,235 words of it; and then I did it with ‘Lonely on the Mountain’ (14,000 words). Finally I auto-summarised ‘Merry Sport’ (5,600 words). Here are the results.

( ‘Tabula Avatar’ in 30 seconds, no bunnies )

( ‘Lonely on the Mountain’ in 98 words )

( ‘Merry Sport’ (NC-17) in 99 words )

Happy birthday to jedibuttercup, Queen of Crossovers

Late in my time-zone, but in time in hers, and that’s the important thing.

And Happy Birthday to ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. Not that it’s ten years today for me; we didn’t have satellite TV then and I didn’t see it until it was first shown on the BBC about a year later. I was hooked right from ‘Welcome to the Hellmouth’ (well, until Molly arrived in ‘Bring on the Night’, but we shall speak of her no more).

This seems to be an appropriate time to do the ‘Five Favourite Fics’ meme. I’ve been writing fanfic, one way or another, all my life; unread by anyone other than family until the Internet gave me a way of making my stories available to a wider audience. A lot of people seem to like them. It was very hard to whittle this list down to 5. There was no room for ‘Merry Sport’, or ‘Noggin and the Vampire’, both of which I love; but this is my personal top 5 of my stories.

1) The Cloak of Mist. An original fic rather than a true fanfic, but set within the parameters laid down by the Buffyverse. Set in the Isle of Man in the year 1014 AD. In the aftermath of the slaughter at the Battle of Clontarf, with the islanders mourning their dead and anxious for the missing, a newly-called Slayer must face a horde of undead Vikings to free the island from a dreadful curse. It’s based on authentic Manx history and folklore and, in Bahey Dhone, I feel that I have managed to create a truly memorable original heroine.

2) Days of No Trust. Also original fiction, and with an even more tenuous connection to the Buffyverse, but continuing the tradition of a strong female central character. Set in the ‘Reiver’ era, that century and a half of lawless bloodshed that ravaged my people’s homeland, it’s a historical romance with lots of violence and a little magic. Summary: The Borders between England and Scotland in the year 1580. Every girl dreams of a handsome hero to save her from the villains, they say, but there's never such a hero around when you need one and Anne Collingwood's hopes must rest on a disfigured murderer with a death wish. And on her little bit of magic. It's not much, against seventeen ruthless killers, but it's all she has.

3) Lonely on the Mountain. My entry for ludditerobot’s Scatterlings and Orphanages “Africander” ficathon. Xander in Malawi, the land where I was brought up, pitted against an unusual and lethal vampire.

4) The Lonely Goatherd. rahirah was discussing her preference for fics that are not all-human AUs, and she said I don't like Spike as a Lithuanian goatherder. I resolved to write a story in which Spike was a Lithuanian goatherder and to make her like it. It’s canon-compatible – or was before the Season 8 comic revelations, anyway – and not an all-human AU at all. Featuring Vi, my favourite of the Potentials, and Evaldas the Goat.

5) Tabula Avatar. I haven’t included any other WIPs in this list but, at 200,000 words already, this is too big to ignore. ‘Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn’ was the first fandom in which I dared to put my writings on-line. When I hit upon a way of combining it with the Buffyverse I couldn’t resist. Putting Spike together with Viconia, the multiverse’s undisputed queen of snark, was just too big a temptation; and the results have turned out to be just as much fun as I anticipated. Although not necessarily for the characters.

I don't think that anyone is going to get the remaining songs and so here are the answers.

( First Lines Meme - Answers )

Back to working on 'Tabula Avatar' and 'Life, Resumed' now. I'm flipping back and forth between them as the mood takes me. Hopefully I'll get the current chapters of both finished during these five nights off work.

Gacked from ljs

I Believe.

I believe in Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. I believe in Lin Chung, Hu San Niang, the Tattooed Dragon and the rest of the Nine Dozen Heroes. I believe in Leon and ‘No women, no kids’. I believe in Judge Dee Jen-djieh, Chao Tai, Ma Joong, Tao Gan, and Sergeant Hoong. I believe in Chmee, the Kzin formerly known as Speaker to Animals. I believe in Nile Etland and her genetically-engineered otter friends. I believe in Dachande (Broken Tusk) and Machiko Noguchi aka Da’dtou-di (Little Knife). And that the movie that reused some of the book’s ideas sucked dead Xenomorphs through a straw.

I believe in Jaheira, in Viconia, in Minsc and Boo. And I believe that Boo really is a Miniature Giant Space Hamster.

I believe in Rincewind, in Sam Vimes, in Arch-chancellor Ridcully, and in Carrot and Angua (although I’ve developed a slight case of Carrot/Sally shipping because Angua’s insecurities are starting to get right up my nose).

I believe in Number Ten Ox and in Master Li, who has a slight flaw in his character. I believe in Ogami Itto and his son, forever wandering. And in Buck Duane, the Lone Star Ranger.

I believe that the game’s afoot. That somewhere Alan Quartermain stumbled upon lost civilisations. That John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke, secretly watches Tarzan movies and laughs himself sick at their dire portrayals of him. And I believe in Doc Savage and his Famous Five.

I believe in redemption.

Redemption for Viconia, for Spike, for Willow, for Little Krell, for Chen Lung, for Leon, for Lady Snowblood, for Jonathan, for Faith, for Ilona Costa Bianchi, and most of the time for Angel. Often even for Harmony. But not for Andrew. Or for Graham Poll.

And I believe that Charlie Croker managed to get everybody safely off the coach and salvage most, although not all, of the gold.

But most of all I believe that SixApart is a division of Wolfram & Hart and, alas, not the division headed by Ilona Costa Bianchi.

(and that is why I’ve created a Greatest Journal account with the same user name as here. All the cool grown-ups are doing it; some say we’re lemmings, but I say that we’ve seen the iceberg up ahead and are booking our seats on the lifeboats.)

Happy birthday to julia_here

zubiemom and alwaysjbj tagged me with this meme: Explain your LiveJournal name and its meaning. When you're done, tag as many people as there are letters in your name.

speakr2customrs is a contraction of my pen-name, Speaker-to-Customers, as that was too long for LJ. Speaker-to-Customers comes from the warrior aliens the Kzin (see my icon) in the 'Known Space' books of Larry Niven. Only those Kzinti who are nobility, or who have won titles through great achievements in battle, have names. The rest are styled by their professions. "Weapons Officer", "Flyer", "Telepath", "Slaverstudent", and, most memorably, "Speaker to Animals". Speaker to Animals is a junior diplomat in the Kzin embassy on Earth, and his job is to speak to humans. (the Kzin don't rate humans terribly highly). Speaker is one of the protagonists of Niven's most famous novel, "Ringworld", where he becomes a great hero and wins the name of "Chmee".

My job is to speak to customers (I work in the call centre of a major UK bank's offshore & international offices) and so I styled myself from my profession. It's as simple as that.

I'm not going to do the tagging part, however. 15 is just too many. Feel free to do it if you want.

My mother arrives from Australia tomorrow; although I'm on my 5 nights off work now my normal furious writing pace may suffer. However I've been putting quite a few drabbles up at 1001waysto_dust recently without posting them here; check them out if you want to see Angel getting dusted in a wide variety of ways.