valyssia

My very first pieces of fiction were part of a series called Thirteen Steps. Naturally, as the author and a somewhat freakishly compulsive perfectionist, I view them as pretty much complete crap now. But there was something about them. Other people didn’t see them as crap. They encouraged me.

And here I am.

A friend challenged my thinking about a story that I’d written in that series. The original name of the piece was For Marie. I rewrote it in first person with some plot modifications and I was hooked. The compulsive tendencies took over and the entire series was re-plotted.

Yeah, I know…

That was December of 2008. Very little has changed from that original outline.

Well, a lot has changed. We went over the bit about me being a perfectionist, right? I know it’s annoying. I can’t help it.

My point is that the core concepts have remained intact and I’ve made no changes based on the release of the comics. I’ve barely been paying attention to them. I own them. Or most of them. I think we all do. It’s another compulsive thing. I buy them. I bag them. I ferret them away in a custom bookshelf that my roommate the woodworker built for me specifically to hold comics. But I just can’t bring myself to read them.

Anyway, in my reality Twilight isn’t analogous with the Garden of Eden and he probably isn’t Angel. Twilight is something very different to me. And Buffy isn’t going to become a god. She’s going to become something so much better: a human being. I like telling human stories. It’s a thing.

Once you make a character a god, what the hell do you do with them? Bigger, badder, faster, more…?

That’s not a game I like to play.

The first five stories follow a pattern. Each individual piece is presented from a single point of view, in first person, with no chapter breaks. They are in effect, formatted as short stories, though at least one of them defies that description. It’s a wee bit long. Like novel length. Gosh, I do love to prattle on.

Being the perfectionist, I occasionally go over older material and read to refresh the details in my mind. That’s what I’m doing now. But I’ve been allowing myself the luxury of changing words and adding commas. As I reread, I’ll be posting the material here. I’ve even baited my beta reader Howard Russell into making a pass.

Hope you enjoy it.

ATS First Light

Cover Art by Buffylover

Table of Contents

Epitaph

Prayers of the Martyr

Benevolent Sun

eBook

This eBook includes the stories The Outsider, The Noose, Blue, and Gravity.

To view it in PDF format, click on the image. You may then save it from the Adobe interface.

Should you wish to convert this for use on your Kindle, cellphone or tablet PC try Calibre eBook Manager.

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