Aw, hey! The Fang Fetish Awards round 10 has bestowed some shiny awards on a couple of my stories. Congrats to flistians ubiquirk, psychoadept, herself_nyc, soft_princess, and mireille719 as well!

( Nifty banners behind the cut... )

Also: Remix/Redux 7 signups open! I'm just announcing in advance that if I get assigned to nwhepcat a third time I'm going to ask for a mulligan. Heh.

I'm tickled pink to report that "Breaking Glass", a story about Giles and Ethan on holiday, about magic, and about portals, got some lovely attention from the Fang Fetish Awards round 9. The notes from the judges made me particularly happy.

And I note that flistians sahiya, ubiquirk, firefly_124, and mireille719 also got some well-deserved kudos. The fandom was ready for stories about Giles and Snape, ready and eager. More crossovers, please!

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You'll notice, perhaps, a new feature of my all-singing, all-dancing, all-automated, untouched-by-human-hands fic archive: serieses now have all in one printable versions. E.g., the Breaking-Glass-verse stories. My question for you: how do you like your printable versions? Are they more useful when tuned for offline electronic reading or do you really print them? Would you prefer PDFs?

In other news, I think I might be in love with Scrivener, but I need to live with it a while longer before I'm sure. Most "writer's editors" are gimmicky junk; just use a plain-text editor, shut up, and write. There is no silver bullet. But Scrivener seems to provide me with the tool that I need when I'm outlining, and to transition well to prose-writing. And it imports from MultiMarkdown-formatted text files, which is the plain text markup mode I use for all my story source.

Okay. One more item for tonight. There will be no predictable new fic from me for a while: the WIP I chose to make progress in is, um, gonna take about 50K more words to conclude. Hey, at least I now have an outline I can believe in telling me I'll need all those words! Anyway. No new fic any time soon. So, to scratch what I hope is a mutual itch, DVD commentary time, in which we all prove that the author isn't dead to us no matter what the critics say.

Pick a story that I haven't done already. I'll write commentary. Maybe I'll do two, if inspired.

"An Antique Roman", a story about Ethan's troubling yet somehow satisfying take on "Amends", got two shouts out this weekend: it got the nod in Round 8 of the forbiddenawards along with the marvelous "The Giles Thing" by drsquidlove and "Sometimes A Cigar" by allyndra. And then firefly_124 fangirled it! My weekend is made!

Many thanks to shitsu_tonka for the prompt (Angel? to be shouted at? hmm!) and to emmessann for the beta ("get Buffy out of this story" in more diplomatic terms, which was exactly right).

Then when I re-scanned it (as my species of OCD moves me to do) I edited out an Americanism in Giles-speak. Sigh. We conjugate "to get" differently from our cousins. And we give "different" a different preposition, too. Among a myriad other small things to get right. If I get 50% of them right in a story, I feel like I'm doing okay. Thus I come right back down to earth.

Either two short stories or one longer one for spring_with_xan later today. I was the king champeeeeeen of procrastination yesterday, so I'm still frantically typing today.

And speaking of spring_with_xan, check out nwhepcat's ficlet yesterday, written to my promptlet: "Roadside Assistance". I nurse a secret passion for the Citroen. Though if Tony Head had had his way, Giles would have been riding a bike with a sidecar in the early seasons. I think... that needs to be written.

Fang Fetish Awards round 8 winners were announced. This was their Mystical Origins round, with a section for Dawn and Connor stories. (Dawn seems to have been more popular than Connor.) "Fenrisulfr" was nodded to as runner-up for Best Dawn Pairing. The winner in that category was "Key to My Heart" by Spikeslovebite (Dawn/Xander).

( The banner... )

I'm kinda curious myself what happened the next morning.

Bodice Ripper round 10 awards were announced today, and this year's summer_of_giles stories were all over it. How much did I love SoG this year? Mmmmmm.

Many grats of the conga variety to flistians penwiper26, sahiya, firefly_124, soft_princess & mireille719 (who are an ultra-cute unit in my head these days), theblackmare, sweetdoggie, noelia_g, gileswench, and glimmergirl!

Wow, that's a lot of Giles writers on my flist. However did that happen?

Also, "Dust on his hands from the sky", "Thusia", and Tradition & Protocol got some love.

Round 9 of the Bodice Ripper Awards were just announced.

Big shout out to theblackmare, who won the Best Plot and Best Gen awards for "Blood Oranges", a season 4 gen story that filled me with glee. And marmalade. And to apreludetoanend, who won Best Fanart for that great Band Candy icon set. The Best Slash Pairing category was full of great stories, including the fabulous "When Two Crafts Meet" by sottovoce07.

Er, some of my stories kinda got stuff too. "Emergence", Tradition & Protocol, and The Fruit Story all got nods. Thank you!

Hey! I just put up all kinds of katekat1010-made banners on my old-fashioned static site. At the ends of stories, so that you are not troubled while you read by graphics. Also I tweaked the css a tad to fix the navigational links in the upper left, so they don't vanish when the page scrolls. I strive to keep the page readable above all else, with dark sans-serif text on a light background. And a text window that doesn't stretch too wide: maximal readability is at 60-70 characters per line.

I have no idea what the fonts look like on Windows, though. It's Gills Sans if you got it.

People seem to really like that fruit story with the G-man and the Xan-man, which makes me happy. Also, Giles and Watson bonding over the Mikado and the business with the sword in the desert have their bannerage.

Made lots of progress on the wrong story. "Thusia" is at 3500 words. Title might change. The writing bath this evening was enlivened by the Lush Ma bar, and this time the kitten did fall in. Hee!

Bodice Ripper Awards round 8 is a bit of an embarrassment of riches! "The Adventure of the Displaced Watcher", "Apples, Oranges, and Pears", and Ars Draconis all got nods.

Also getting the nod: katekat1010's banner for "Reconnection"!

Hey! "Apples, Oranges, and Pears" was runner-up in round 5 of the Fang Fetish Awards in two categories.

First category: Best Gen and other pairings. The winner was Out of Africa by spikendru and my fellow runner up was the ouch-inducing and excellent "Cuckoo in the Nest" by liz_marcs.

The other category was Best Fluff/Lighthearted, which this story certainly was. The winner here was Fanfic Made Me Gay by jameschick. My fellow runner-up was entrenous88 with Cuddly Predators, which I have been meaning to read for ages. Because: kitten! Which, if you ask me, is the very definition of fluff.

I am having severe difficulties voting for some categories in Bodice Ripper round 8. E.g., best smut fic: two of them were written just for me and how the heck I am supposed to decide which one is least appropriate to read in my workplace because of, well, you know, flushed faces and all? Aigh!

You're going to have to vote in this one and make the tough decisions, because I think I'm just gonna hafta punt in that category.