Valyssia

So how would you like to tell me where to get—er, I mean, what to do?

Now’s your chance.

Check here for details.

I actually had a lovely birthday this year. Thank you for all of the kindness.

Thank you to theladymerlin and skargasm for the shiny balloons and the pretty pink pony for my Eljay profile page.

Thank you to kerkevik for the cute little drabble. No one has ever written anything for me before, so that was an especially wonderful treat.

Thank you to xclaire_delunex for the beautiful picture and the well wishes that preceded it.

Thank you to velvetwhip for the sparkly greetings and the kindness.

Thank you to whedonist for the sexy e-card, the amusing thoughts and the fresh Garbage. Gotta love Garbage.  

I wrote about a thousand words on my birthday. They were fun words and I very much enjoyed playing.

I watched Game of Thrones season two, episode seven. I’m waiting for the finale to render a verdict, but so far G.o.T. lacks something it had last season. I’m not even sure I can quantify what that is. I’ll simply say that I don’t believe it to be quite as good, which still places it head and shoulders above pretty much everything else on television. In fact, it could drop a couple more pegs and remain be perfectly safe. I hope it doesn’t.

My neighbor, Karen, brought me a cute card and took to me to see The Avengers, which was incredibly sweet of her. I understand the popularity now. I haven’t had that much fun at a movie in memory. Not in recent memory, but in memory. Strangely enough it wasn’t a film that I found myself wanting to analyze. It was just fun for the sake of fun and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Raw mind candy of the tastiest sort. Very curious. Thank you Joss.

The day wound down with Femslash Today. I was a wee tad late in compiling my issue because of the film. And my father called while I was working. We had a pleasant chat about movies and television, goings and doings, and moving. He and my step mother have found another place to live. He only badgered me a little for my insistence that I finish my Buffyverse projects before I wander out into the snark infested waters of producing original fiction. He’s concerned and he means well. He was also quite flattering. All of the above makes such speeches tolerable, if not enjoyable. A pep talk with guilt.

*laughs*

I concluded my day with a little bit more of The Hunger Games. I’ve been listening to the audiobooks and thoroughly enjoying them. I love the casual style of the first person prose Suzanne Collins produces. Her protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, is wonderfully accessible, sympathetic and well rounded, a strong, yet beautifully flawed female character. The supporting characters are rich. The environments well rendered without weighing the narrative down. I’ve spied a couple of technical issues that have bothered me, but overall the series is very good.

The wound she describes Peeta having in the first book would be a ‘how are you going to spend the last fifteen seconds of your life?’ sort of injury. To my mind he should’ve bled out long before infection or blood poisoning set in.

I also had a great deal of trouble grocking how Rue might jump tree to tree and not rustle the branches, thus alerting the ‘career tributes’ to her presence. The ‘tracker jacker’ scene was particularly difficult for me to get my head around. Perhaps there was some wind that I missed in the narrative that masked the sound? I don’t know. The reality is that while a ninety pound girl sounds very petite, the leaping is still the equivalent of chucking nearly two bags of dog food at the top of a tree and expecting silence.

Yes, I know, I’m a bitch.

I can’t help it.

Hope that doesn’t spoil it for anyone. Feel free to disagree. That won’t be anything new.

The twenty-sixth round of the Sunnydale Memorial Fanfiction Awards is under way. My work has been nominated in the following categories:

The River’s Daughter	•  Best Drama •  Best Pairing Unconventional •  Best Romance •  Best Series •  Best Unfinished
Empty Spaces: Another One Closes	•  Best Quickie •  Best Characterization (Drusilla)
Empty Spaces: A Single Step	•  Best Plot •  Best Angst
Vicarious	•  Best Crossover Movie •  Best NC-17 •  Best Slash

Thank you so much for your support!

Vanishing (2011-12)
Chapters Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight.
Buffy/Willow, FRAO, 30,596 words.

I’m including chapter eight in this tally. Though the final scene wasn’t released until the first of May, the bulk of the chapter was published on the twenty-eighth. The final scene was completed and betaed by the evening of the thirtieth. That’s close enough for me.

A bit of weirdness here tonight for you folks that are following along with Vanishing. Sorry about that. I had a chapter swell to unreasonable proportions. That always makes me nervous. I feel like the reason it happens is because I’ve managed to hit a bout of not-so-much verbal diarrhea. My beta and pre-reader have both assured me that that isn’t the case. They claim I’m adding ‘depth’ to the story.

Yay! Go me!

So the sitch is this: The interactions between Buffy, Willow, Xander and Giles interleaved with Kennedy and her latest drama worked well. I could’ve cut them down to one chapter of Kennedy and one chapter of Buffy and it would’ve been okay, but I liked the interleaving. The two scenarios were playing out at the same time. The thing is that working through the two scenarios led to a chapter north of ten-thousand words. That’s just too large by real world standards.

I know. I know. I’ve done that in the past. You can’t blame a girl for trying to get better, can you?

So anyway, I didn’t want to publish one piece without the other. It would’ve felt like I’d left you hanging. Telling a story in incomplete snips is just bad. But the thing is, I’m not done with part two. I have about 1200 words of the final scene written. It’s not something that leaves any of the other interactions incomplete, so I went ahead and posted all of chapter 8 except for that scene. Feel free to read it as it sits. It’ll all feel happily finished. I should be able to drop the final scene in by early in the week and you can come back and read it all by its little lonesome. It kind of belongs all by its little lonesome anyway.

I’ll make another post with a link to a second cut when the whole thing’s complete. You’ll be able to click and go right to the part you want to read.

The Taming the Muse prompt that I’ve claimed will be in that final scene. The rest of the prompts I’ve claimed are present in the published material. But because of the incompleteness, I’m holding off on making those posts. I’m also holding off on publishing this to AO3 and Near Her Always. I can’t really drop a scene into a chapter and say, “Hey! Come back! There’s another scene,” so waiting really is the better option. I had to post tonight because of TtM. Sometimes timing just sucks, but I’m faking my way through it.

Anyway, enjoy.

Oh, and footnote: the chapter title is a funny. I asked Howard what comes after Yoko and he replied, “Imagine.” It was a great little quip that made me laugh. Thing is, we’re both too geeky not to Google. The two albums that John Lennon released after he left The Beatles were called Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins and Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions. And I thought what a marvelous name for a chapter. Go figure, it overflowed and split.