Here's another in one of my very, very occasional series of transcripts of the official commentaries from the 'Buffy' DVDs - or in this case, from the 'Angel ' DVDs. It's an exception because I was given a specific request to make this the next commentary I transcribed - so here it is.

As before, I've reproduced it as faithfully as possible, but left out verbal tics like "like" and "you know " and "sort of". Also, I sometimes found it hard to tell which of the two men were speaking, so I used my best judgement to assign each line to the right person. If you spot any errors please let me know.

JB> lines spoken by Jeffrey Bell, Co-Executive Producer
TO> lines spoken by Terrence O'Hara, Director of this episode.

I've just finished uploading my 2009 fic to the Archive Of Our Own. Now I'm puzzling over the important questions, like is it better to abbreviate that as AO3, AO³ or as AooO! The last has a wonderfully werewolfy kind of vibe to it, but the first is perhaps more sensible.

I've seen at least one person puzzling over what this is all about, so maybe a brief explanation.

( Read more... )

My initial impressions are:

Uploading my existing fic is as easy as pasting in the URL of the LJ page into a text box and pressing a button. You can even batch up to ten fics at once. \o/ Well, I then have to edit it to delete the introductory blurb that appeared above the LJ cut in my journal originally, but that only takes a minute.

The tagging system works like a dream. Start typing in 'B' 'u' into the 'fandom' box and it autocompletes 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with an option to click on 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie)' or 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer (RPF)' instead. Entering the characters and pairings works the same way. Once you've posted, click on a tag and it brings up a page showing every fic about that character, which you can sort by writer, date, rating, or whatever.

There are a few glitches when you try to edit fics, but nothing that makes it unusable.

There are features for bookmarking and reccing fics and leaving comments; I'm not sure if these are active yet. (I've seen a few bookmarked fics, but the menu option seems to be disabled - presumably the feature's still being tested).

So far the most popular fandoms, after one day in open beta, are:

Stargate Atlantis - 632 stories.
Harry Potter - 428 stories.
Supernatural - 362 stories
Buffy - 353 stories.
Due South - 328 stories.

If anyone has a spare Archive Of Our Own invitation lying around, I'd be happy to offer it a good home with me. :-)

ETA: Got one! Thanks. :-)

(My email address is in my user profile).

Since I began writing fanfic in October 2006 I've written a total of 138,673 words in three years, of which 29,844 was written this year. I've written a total of 113 fics, or 143 if you count each chapter of a multi-chapter fic separately. 62 of those fics were drabbles, 51 of them were longer than that.

My three longest fics are:

• Hiywan's Story - 24,244 in 8 chapters.
• One Day In The Life Of Buffy Summers - 12,999 in 10 chapters.
• We Just Declared War - 12,562 in 6 chapters.

My average fic is 1,227 words long. If you exclude the drabbles, the average is 2,598 words.

I've written nine fics with explicit sex: 7 femslash, 1 het, one male!solo.  The people who got lucky were Willow, Kennedy, Tara, Buffy, Dawn, Faith, Saga Vasuki and Spike's coat.

14 of my fics involved the death of a human, and five with their experiences in the afterlife. I've wiped out the entire world once. Two fics have dealt with conception and birth. Two fics have specifically mentioned menstruation.

The character I've written about most often is Buffy, with Willow in second place.

Excluding drabbles, my 51 fics include 3 about Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles, 1 about Dollhouse, and 47 about the Buffyverse (although 6 of those were crossovers, including one with TSCC and one with Dollhouse, the others being with Aliens, Pern, Elric and Planescape).

Most of my 'Buffy' fic is post-TV series. Some of it is pre-series (and some of that is way, WAY pre-series); and a very small amount is during-series. So, inspired by angeariawondering whether to catalogue her fic into chronological order, I decided as an exercise to see if I could put all of mine into sequence. The challenging part, of course, is that some of these fics are mutually contradictory. I've written Buffy's final death scene three times, twice in glorious battle and once of old age, peacefully in bed: they can't all be right! So I decided which one would be my own fanon, and marked the others 'AU'. Same for all the other contradictions, so hopefully now it all makes sense...

Having done this, it's interesting to see which periods and seasons I've written most fics about. See if you can guess, before you look under the cut. :-)

( My fic, in chronological order )

That's it for now. :-) For links to the fics, see sidebar with fic index. And finally, a question; who's the most obscure real-life person you've given a cameo in one of your fics?

It's nice to see that Season 8 can still bring surprises. I think I've worked out what's going on in that final scene, but now we'll all have to wait two months to find out if it's the right guess...

Anyway, on with the review.

This amused me. :-)  For all you doubters who never saw any subtext between Buffy and Faith on the show... (you know who you are):


Eliza Dushku posted on Twitter last week that she was planning her Halloween costume, and the following conversation resulted.

# Random Twitter person 1: Would it be really ironic if you went as Buffy? Maybe not.

# Eliza: I did her once. It was enough.

(Five minutes later, a hasty amendment...)

# Eliza: I PLAYED her once.

# Random Twitter person 2: SO TOTALLY think Buffy and Faith shuda hooked up... for at least ONE episode. Dont YOU ? ;)

# Eliza: U never saw lost episode of Buffy?

Hiywan's Story has just won all sorts of pretty things at the Absence of Light Awards:

Angst: Best Gen
 

Angst: Most Original

Judge's Choice

And this is the citation for the Judge's Choice Award:

There are a lot of things that from appearances only go against this fic - it's set thousands of years before Buffy is born, it's comprised basically entirely of OCs (since we know squat about the First Slayer from the show, I'd say she counts too), and it's gen. But the massive world-building and research put into this, the haunting moral choices, and Hiywan's struggle to find her place in a society with incredibly firm gender roles make this so, so compelling. stormwreath takes the barest of stories from the show and breathes a whole new colorful life into it, creating a cast of characters who we can't help but root for.

Congratulations to the other winners, a category which includes at least 10 people on my flist. And thanks to snowpuppies and her fellow mods and judges for being generally awesome. :-) I'm not only saying that because I won, either. ;-)
 

After I wrote my recent story about the First Slayer, Blood, Some Of It Mine, lavastarasked me about what Hiywan's people do to mark births, marriages and deaths. So here, drawn from a mixture of historical ethnography and shameless making-things-up, is an account of the rites of passage of the Five Trees Clan.

Rating: PG.
Warnings: Childbirth, breastfeeding, infanticide, menstruation, sex, polygamy, incest, divorce, homosexuality, heterosexuality, scarification rituals, death, etc etc.
Disclaimer: The beliefs and social strictures of the Five Trees Clan are not necessarily endorsed by the author.

( Rites of Passage )

I've written a short stand-alone fic about Hiywan, the First Slayer before she became a Slayer. For those of you who've read Hiywan's Story, this takes place about six months after the end of that tale. For those of you who haven't - well, Hiywan's in her early/mid-teens (which makes her an adult by the standards of her people) and has just been made Guardian of the Five Trees clan, a tribe of stone age hunter-gatherers living in East Africa about 8,000 years ago.

In this story, we discover why Hiywan's clan have learned to treat her with wary respect, both in general but especially at certain times...

2351 words, rating 15 for moderately graphic violence, sexual references and lots of blood, both human and animal. (See end for author's notes.)