Two stories in progress, plus the usual fidget story (aka drawer fic that sometimes shows up in public eventually): Giles/Spike prawny character fic (very late for ficathon) and Giles/Xander plotty Xmas fic. The fidget story is also G/X. Drunken!Giles fic is due later this month but I know exactly what I'm doing for it. Heh. I have a number of other things in varying states of completeness that might lurch forward and demand attention at any time. The only thing I'm disciplined about is the carving out of writing time from my life thing. Once that time begins, the brain is utterly unleashable. Mostly I attempt to lure it into writing what I want it to by waving shiny things in front of it.

My professional working habits are way more like that than I'm happy to admit.

The kink meme seems to have slowed down with 15 responses posted. There's at least one more I wanted to write, a prompt requested by two of you; will attempt to post some time in the next couple of days. I like that all of the responses are solidly character-driven pieces. In particular, Wesley got some fine writing. I loved the Giles/Wes hands prompt & response. (Thus I reveal that neither was mine. Will list the ones I wrote at the end of the week, I think, unless it picks up.)

Today's pleasure is "100 Things Crowley Would Do Before the World Ended", a Good Omens fanfic. This is an anonymous-at-the-moment seasonal fest fic. Awesome.

Another pleasure today is my order of soap from Wylde Ivy, which included bay rum soap for Mr P. Mmmmmmmm.

Random: Proof that Australians know how to have fun.

I've been staring at khaoschilde's new manipulation of young Giles all day. The Giles of "Gas-Ring Alchemy" looks like that, though he's a bit shaggier. Add to this her manip of young Ethan looking properly Seventies-haired, and you have 'em close to how I see them. (Both images are shirtless but otherwise worksafe.)

None of this has been helping me write anything in an unrelated storyline with an approaching-fifty Giles in Cleveland with a mop-headed Xander. ( And I'm stuck, so therefore... )

This review of K J Parker's Engineer trilogy in Strange Horizons gets at what I'm liking about Parker's books. Parker's prose is also refreshingly straightforward.

Okay, I'm off to write GX angsty character-driven not-quite pr0n. Though it would be nice to know where my spouse is. Huh.

I did some tinkering with my story archive, particularly on the tags and pairings pages to experiment with some info design concepts. And to get myself going with Prototype, the hugely popular Javascript framework for ajax-y things. Am not happy with its current graphical design, sigh. I'm such a plodder when it comes to the visual. Anyway. Tell me what you think of that concept for displaying tags.

The tags themselves are amusing. I need to do another pass through all the stories to add a few content tags, but the ones that are there are somewhat alarming about recent trends in my writing. I really should make myself write 100% pure gen for a while.

I have been outlining my first story for summer_of_giles. I have a strict schedule for myself that should end up with a draft being done in time for a sane beta-read and significant revisions. Ha. Ha. It's not one of the two stories I told my poor beta-reader I intended to write. I think the way to get me to write a specific story is to have me definitively commit to writing something else.

I note that of the three stories planned for SoG, none are gen. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Speaking of Summer of Giles, it's off to a good start! I'm thrilled with everything so far. I call out kivrin's stories for your attention if you'd like to start with something short: "A Proposition" (gen, with Lilah) and "Don't Forget" (G/X UST).

I do not approve of people posting stories like this Core Four story over several days instead of in one complete burst the way the god of all high-on-magic foursome smut stories intended.

I intend to write a stern letter to the management. Who manages squid? Octopi? Cuttlefish?

Note also that it's a complete lie that it doesn't have character development. I hate authors who lie about stuff in their notes! Hate! HATE. Only posting complete stories could possibly move me to forgive.

Hey, flist! Hit me with some anime/manga recs!

Some things to know:
- Practically the only anime series I've ever watched was Haibane Renmei, and I loved it. Thank you, former officemate B!
- Though I also love most everything Hayao Miyazake has done. <3 Tonari no Totoro.
- I prefer realistic art styles to really cartoony ones.
- I like my women strong.
- No tentacles, kthxbai.
- But if something violates all of these and is still awesome, please tell me about it.

"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.

Hey, peeps! Check out what an intrepid remixer did with "Substitute" (gen, Xander, Giles, post-Becoming): "Copper and Moonlight" (The Mimi and Rudolfo Remix)". The remix shifts the points of view to Giles as he gets through the day after "Becoming". Ouch. And ouch again.

The very handy remixredux08 tagging system means that it's easy to find all the Giles stories. Check 'em out. Remix is tons of fun.

Due dates:
April 12: Remix Redux story
May 3: Giles/Spike h/c
May 11: something for spring_with_xan

Otherwise in fic production news, here's the story: ( It's 90% whinging! ) Let's move on to things you can read and enjoy right this instant.

Two serial WIPs for you to check out this week, one of which is coming to a finish, and one of which looks to be still in the warm-up phase:
nwhepcat's "House of Women" - post-series, Cleveland, Xander/Faith, with a houseful of new-minted Slayers and readjusting former Watchers. Like, oh, Giles and Wesley.
ljs: Safe Space - Giles/Anya natch, with what I can only describe as a cameo-crossover, surprising and entirely satisfying. (I cheated and read the latest segment even though I haven't read most of the middle ones yet, gah, bad fan me.)

Signups are open for the Giles round at hetfic_minis. Requests are already in for Giles with Cordelia, Dawn, Willow, and Jenny. Give it a shot! 500 words! Like falling off a log!

Outlined my Every Slayer Needs a Watcher story last night. 5000 words, I'm thinking. Want to take bets on long it'll turn out to be? Winner gets to laugh at me. Wait. sahiya is already laughing.

( Fanfiction I've read in the last few days... )

Argh. Argh. Argh. Story panic. Have worked on three stories in the last two days, none of them the one due Sunday. Now have no choice; must crunch. Which is what makes them all suck every time: no time to ponder them over and figure out what's really going on. No. Stop. Don't think like that.

Might pitch it entirely and write something from scratch. Blindfolds, revelations, Giles/? is the prompt.

Am liking this essay on Deathly Hallows; not finding much to argue with at the moment. Which makes me sad.

wesleysgirl has kicked off a Jossverse fic rec meme.

Please post in your own journal recommending 5 (or more) of your favorite Jossverse fics. Stories should be the ones that best remind you of what you loved about the shows -- this can be the dialogue, the characters, the plots, the angst, the humor, or whatever you find yourself missing the most. (It's okay to include self-recs on your list! You can also choose to do only BtVS or Ats stories instead of both. Do what you feel like.) Comment to this post with a link to your post, and I'll compile a master list of the recs so that we can all feel the love. Feel free to pimp this far and wide!

There are few things I love doing as much as cheerleading for stories that make me happy, so I present my five all-time favorite Giles stories ( after the cut... )

Um. Gosford Park == good. I need to watch it again, possibly while taking notes, because I think I am fascinated by that screenplay.

Wednesday's post will be the first third of the new story, which is still tragically untitled. Not even a working title worth considering. At the rate I'm going, I'll be lucky have even that done. Seriously blocked, all weekend.

But stop reading this. You should be off reading new fic. theblackmare has posted the first part of her new story, which follows on from "Blood Oranges". Kipling, mythological creatures, the Initiative, the Slayer coming into her power, and a whole lot of Giles.

The Dance of Water and Stone: part 1 / part 2 - genfic, FRT

Don't listen to all that nonsense about me helping. All I did was some html stuff. It's all her.

And then please note that khaoschilde has worked her usual magic.

You know how sometimes you beta-read things for people and just explode with joy at what you're reading? I love this experience. I had it today. I read a fragmentary start at this a few months ago, but now it's a complete thing and I am happy:

glimmergirl: Psychopompos - Giles/Wesley, FRT

annlarimer: "Turkey with Fireworks" and "Don't".

Hot Fuzz fic that made me laugh! FRM for some language, of the sort that simply won't bug you if you enjoyed the movie. Bang-on voices, and the tone is just right.

Things with Giles to read!

summer_of_giles has begun, and 47_trek_47 kicks it off with "Oasis", a scorching Giles solo flight. Two whole months of new Gilesy things every day. Yes!

But SoGgy stories are not the only ones we have to read this week. We also have penwiper26's next chapter of Home Repairs.

And ljs has been extra-productive recently:
Who's Telling This Story? (which made me laugh)
Reading the Signs, part 1 and part 2 of 2. Very different tone here, a tense season 7 setting. I'm settling down now to finally read part 2... And my judgment is that you have to go read this right away because this is the real deal, people. NOW.

Wild ride so far today, with some fast hacking at the last second to support a demo of the app I wrote a proof of concept for over the last three days. Fun times discovering that the demo-er is going to be using hardware completely different from what I had been targeting. I also have a rant about how to interview programmers that none of you want to hear.

Anyway, that's taken care of. Now I can move on to more important things, like pointing you to the sahiya's response to my tagfic prompt: "Five Pay Phones Buffy Almost Called Giles From", which shows us Buffy during her summer alone in LA. And I can also confidently say that sahiya's next story will be a very satisfying thing about Giles and Xander. But of course you all know to wait eagerly because you have been following her writing with much attention ever since "Supervised Slacking". (OTP or anti-slash issues aside, that is.)

Now... um. Now what? Uh. Coffee. Need more caffeine. I am not yet swimming in it. And possibly I need a shot of whisky to go with.

glimmergirl attempts to make up for luring me into doing Remix under false pretenses by remixing one of my stories voluntarily and not as part of a group activity:

"Unplanned and Perfect", a remix of "Planning Ahead". Buffy/Giles.

Go! Enjoy! Leave feedback!

I think I'm a sucker for the world-building aspect of AUs. I want explanations for the origin of Slayers that are cooler than the slapdash one the show gave us. Also, I want a Council of Watchers that behaves in some sane fashion that has a deeper explanation than "this is what we needed it to do this week".

So apparently I am cheerfully supplying many answers. One per story series. I just wrote an origin of Slayers story for this new Greek-myth-influenced series, and it was a lot of fun to do.

I've got a totally different origin story for the "Breaking Glass" universe stories. And another one for "Cloud Animals". A magic system in "Breathing". Another magic system in "Reconnection".

I think I have the most fun when I stop worrying about whether things are good in some abstract sense, and just worry about whether they're good in the "I'd think this was cool to read" sense. When I write for my future amnesiac self, I do best at pleasing all of you as well as me. And my inner amnesiac wants neat backstories.

My inner amnesiac wants to write "A rose for Ecclesiastes." It also wants to write Against a dark background, but probably with a less horrifically grim ending. (That's a good review, by the way, and I strongly recommend Banks if you have any interest in SF. Best living writer of it, to my taste.)

What do you want to have written?

Am I re-reading Conan Doyle for research for the story due next Saturday? No. Am I writing the story that's due in a week? No. Am I writing anything else? No. So what am I doing?

I am re-reading Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" and gnashing my teeth in envy. I want to write that. Not that, but something like that. All my writerly ambitions, present in that story. Allusion and metaphor and a corker of a character in the narrator. An ancient civilization with a vast history. On Mars.

Well, it's nice to have ambitions.

(The link is to the text of the story. But please go buy it if you love it. Zelazny is dead, so I wouldn't call it a duty to the artist, but he has an estate. It's collected in one of the greatest SF anthologies of all time.)

It's about time for me to recruit some more people to post weekly or fortnightly on giles_fic_recs. I'll put the initial call out here.

The job is not hard: once a week, recommend a story or stories to Giles readers. All the fun is in how you do it. Maybe you cover a broad range of Giles fandom, or maybe you dig deep with an expert view into one aspect of Giles fandom. Sell the stories to the readers! I often write summaries that are completely different from the ones the authors wrote, because I'm trying to coax a slightly different audience into trying it.

The task is as much or as little work as you want it to be. I've spent hours building themed rec lists some weeks, and other weeks spent five minutes writing up a little blurb for a single story I loved a lot. It's also not a long-term commitment. Recommend stories until you run out of suggestions, then step aside and enjoy somebody else's taste for a while.

Rules are very simple: never recommend yourself, mark adult stories as adult.

( And we're all set! )

Hey! Several new chapters of Pointy Horns and Black Hats were posted since I last looked! This is a long story about a Giles who went to Hogwarts because his dad married Snape's mom. The two of them were very uneasy stepbrothers, enemies and then reluctant allies. A modern story is interleaved with the tale of Giles at school.

Big fun, I think.

This morning's reading, which has dreadfully delayed my acquisition of this morning's coffee, is:

glimmergirl: Palimpsest - Buffy/Giles, FRM
The story that is written over by the story the others prefer to see.

sottovoce07, The Serpent's Coils.
Giles visits Wesley in LA, drawing him out of his office at Wolfram & Hart for a short talk.

Shivering with potential, this story is.

The buffyversetop5 community has now opened its doors for two weeks of top five lists, for fan material produced in 2006. Once again, I'd like to make sure our beloved Giles is represented.

Make your suggestions! Or hey, write your own top 5 lists! It's fun, and the more people do it, the more fun we all have. Since I'm the reading type, I'm going to concentrate on stories. I'll try to cover the full range of pairings, in an attempt to represent the goodness of Giles fandom. But maybe you know way more than I do about a particular pairing, or about the best icons.

If I'd had my act together, I'd have a list or three made already. Bah. I am lazy.

( Five things from summer_of_giles... )
( Five Giles Ficathons... )
( Five great Giles stories... )
( Five Works in Progress... )

I've now posted all four lists to the comm.