Valyssia

I’m pretty sure some of you are asking that.

I’m sitting here on the couch with my laptop. Across from me on my desk there’s a monitor and keyboard. I have a desk machine too. Actually, two of them and a KVM, but who blood cares? The desktop of my poor desk machine is covered in little GUI sticky notes. You see, I haven’t had time to write. I’ve been too damn busy with the beta of Crimes and…

*sighs*

(More on that sigh later.)

It took me three days. I read the third act again, added a few thises and thates and reposted it. One of the larger thises that I added back in is the material I cropped from scene two. I just think it flows better. I appreciate that it really is too long. It’s an info dump…a long, kind of painful, tedious info dump. But then entire third act is up till the one something I’ve been headed for from the beginning happens. It’s couched well enough in angst and annoyance not to be too awful to read. (I hope.) Faith spends the entire third act catching up. After the second act, that shouldn’t be horribly surprising.

Back to my sticky notes…

So I have this fantastic idea, whatever, wherever, whenever…usually when I’m lying down trying to sleep. I hear the character’s voices in my head. That’s a nifty thing. It also might be a sign that I’m losing my mind, but whatever…I go to the one machine that’s always on and dutifully paraphrase what the voices tell me. The idea turns into a sticky note. Lots of goddamned sticky notes.

Those sticky notes will eventually become what I’ve been referring to as the ‘bridge scene.’ Technically it’s an epilogue to Crimes, but with an ongoing mythology such as I have with A.T.S. where one story has kind of jacked the ride a scene is needed to bridge the gap between what happened here and what happened before. It’ll channel you back in to the rest of the story.

It’ll also be Buffy’s first turn at the wheel in, uh…one-hundred and thirty-eight-thousand or so words.

Anyway, if you have questions or you feel that the ending was abrupt, please be patient.

Summary: My goal when I began this project was to replace the events of No Future for You with something perhaps slightly more compelling. Where I ended up bears almost no resemblance to the root story. Instead of replacing a mere four books in the series, I replace something closer to six. It’s a mess…an extremely controlled, intentionally created mess.

The first act is primarily composed of a cutesy romance. There are, of course, elements that defy that description, but the core story is a romance wrought with your standard coupling angst. I never lose sight of that even when stuff goes straight to hell. That’s what second acts are for, right?

So, if you’d like to see one of your favorite characters spread thin like too little butter on dry toast, this is the story for you.

Should you want to know more before you read, this entry will better explain what I had in mind.

Rating: Adults Only Please: Graphic Sexual Situations and/ or Gratuitous Violence.

Warning: Start with the Carlin Seven and work your way out. This one’s pretty much got it all: overt violence, torture, graphic sex, the death of a minor character, candid deliberations on the affects of trauma both physical and sexual… It won’t be for everyone.

Word Count: 148,939.

Comma Guy: Howard Russell.

Pairing: Buffy/ Faith.

Disclaimer: Another day, another…they don’t pay me anything at all. I just do this to amuse myself and you. That’s what allows me and mine to slip under the radar while playing with characters created by those more fortunate than us.