Commenting on fic

In the past day or so, I've seen several people offer to comment on stories they've written. This sounds like a pretty interesting thing to do. So, people, please help me avoid doing real work by choosing something that I've written and asking me to comment on it.

Remembering

altariel1 asked me to talk about Remembering, which is one of the older things on my site. It's an epilogue to what was the second or third fanfic I ever wrote, Heroes Lost. And that title is quite deliberately not a link, because that story is pretty awful. Not to mention featuring explicit non-consensual het. Anyway, the basic plot of it is that during the Babylon 5 episode "War Without End" it's Delenn rather than Sheridan who gets her time stabilizer hit, and instead of being unstuck in time she gets shuffled over to the Blake's 7 universe and into Servalan's clutches. The events following results in Delenn and Cally getting killed, and Ivanova and Marcus staying behind on the Liberator when the White Star returns home (to their own doom, presumably, since they've failed to save Babylon 4).

Fast forward a year. The Space City birthday party looms. I'm trying to figure out something to write. Suddenly, a thought strikes, as they do. In the B7 canon, the main characters never actually manage to deal with their losses. They retreat into fanaticism (Blake), substance abuse (Vila), paranoia (Avon) and things like that, but they never handle it and get over it. Which is what makes the series so much fun, but that's another story.

Anyway, in my crossover they had Marcus Cole present. He's a ranger. Rangers are, according to something he says to Franklin, trained in dealing with loss, defeat, anger and that sort of feeling. So he wouldn't just stand idly by and watch people descend into self-destructive behaviour. He'd try to fix things. Because that's the sort of person he is. And he'd almost certainly use a ritual to do the fixing, because he was trained by the Minbari, who have rituals for everything. So I wrote the story about how Marcus forces the crew of the Liberator to perform a remembrance ritual for the lost.

By chance, this happened to be at the same time as our late High Priestess was training us in designing rituals. I'd spent many, many hours writing and re-writing rituals, discussing them with my sisters in the coven, figuring out what worked and what didn't. A lot of that training got used when writing the end of the story. I still remember how terribly frustrating it was to write a ritual specifically not to be magically effective. It still contains much that is psychologically effective, though, and I have since been in rituals using some of the same techniques that I used in the story. So in a weird way this SF tale is the most blatantly religious story I've ever written.

I like Remembering. It's a good story, that does pretty much exactly what I wanted it to do. Its main flaw is, I think, that it's a sequel to a crap story and doesn't work very well without it.

Two Girls, One Cave

seaya asks for comments on Two Girls, One Cave. Which is a much more straightforward story than Remembering, since it's explicitly nothing more than an excuse to get two cute girls together and have them have sex with each other. I vaguely remember trying to figure out a reasonable way to get Willow and Gabrielle to meet and jump into the sack, and failing to find one that wasn't far more work than I felt like doing. There was also an element of having seen far too many stories in which Xena and Gabrielle find a cave with a convenient hot spring in it, where they proceed to bathe and then happen make love for the first time... So, I guess, in a way it's a self-referential protest against the kind of story that it itself is. Which is far too postmodern for anyone's good, really. I should be ashamed.

Looking at it again, the Willow in it is very second-season. It might be interesting to do a another, similar, story with the roles reversed, so a post-Chosen Willow meets a second-season Gabrielle.

Annals of the Librarian Attack Force

An anonymous commenter who I strongly suspect to be Jonas Ahrentorp (there can't be that many people reading this from Tietoenator) asks about Annals of the Librarian Attack Force.

It really started with Is This the Complaints Department?, even though that's not a part of the series. It was the result of me suddenly thinking that Jenna on B7, Ivanova on B5 and Gabrielle on Xena all had reasons to complain about how their lives were written. So I wrote about them doing that (and having sex, of course). By the end of the story, it occured to me that both Jenna and Ivanova left their series' before they ended. So what if they went and did something together? Enter the Librarian Attack Force.

I think the seed to the LAF was Rachel Weisz' character in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, followed by vague plans to make a roleplaying scenario for a convention out of it. The RPG thing never went anywhere, but the idea kept festering until there was a thread on Freedom City about crossovers. That's when it occured to me that I were I left Jenna and Ivanova at the end of Complaints was a perfect place mix up almost any character I could think of. I chose to limit myself to characters that weren't regularly visible in any series at the time of writing. That is, characters that already had steady jobs wouldn't be working for the LAF. Absolutely anyone else was fair game. It was also one of those cases where a couple of characters insisted on getting written about a lot more than I'd planned. I never really intended to write more than the first two parts, but Gabrielle and Faith insisted that I don't leave them hanging like that. So part three got written (and I think it's the best bit in the series). Then we went on vacation. Honeymoon, even. Two weeks on a cruise ship with no Internet resulted in parts three-and-a-half and four. Part five followed out of sheer inertia, and then I ran out of steam. And, looking at the logs, that was also when the stress at work started getting really bad.

I have about 2500 words of part six written, and I have the plot laid out. If anyone would be interested in seeing the story reach an end, just drop me a note. I'm an attention whore when it comes to my writing; it takes very little encouragement to get me going.