Links to all fanfiction I've written in various fandoms. That I'm admitting to.

( Alias )


( Angel the Series )


( Babylon 5 )

( Battlestar Galactica )


( Breaking Bad )

( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )

( Citizen Kane )

( David Copperfield )



( Doctor Who )

( Farscape )

( Earth: Final Conflict )

( Heroes )

( Highlander: The Series )

( Historical Fiction )

( Lost )

( MCU )
( Merlin )

( Mythology )


( Once upon a time )

( Order of the Air )

( Penny Dreadful )

( Rome )

( Star Trek: The Original Series )


( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine )


( Star Trek: Discovery )


( Star Trek: The Next Generation )

( Star Wars )

( Sunset Boulevard )

( The Americans )

( The Beatles )

( The Borgias )

( The Godfather )

( The Medici )


( Torchwood )

( X-Men )

( The West Wing )


( Crossovers )

Watched the second season of Bridgerton, which was frothy fun. Of all the (gazillion) things to snap me out of its cheerfully anachronistic universe, though, was various characters going "ugth, but we can't, he's our cousin!" at the prospect of a fourth degree cousin as a potential match. (And no, they didn't grow up with him, none of them had met him before, so there was no closer relation by raising.) Leaving side even the "first cousins = incest" thing is a distinctly modern equation, fourth degree? That feels as likely as the Bennet sisters objecting to Mr. Collins not because of his, well, Mr. Collins-ness, but because he's their cousin. And in the British aristocracy of any fictional or real incarnation, it's probably harder to find someone you don't share at least some ancestors with.

((I mean, I laughed at myself for minding, because Bridgerton never claims to be anything but what it is, but the "4th degree cousin, ew!" thing did what all the string arrangements of Material Girl could not.)

Have some multifandom links:

Interesting discussion of the Spielberg take on WEST SIDE STORY; some arguments I agree with, others I don't, but it's definitely worth reading.

Fire in the front yard: short but to the point take on an AU where Darla got cursed with a soul and Angelus is the one who dies seven episodes into s1 of BTVS; specifically, what then happens in Innocence?

Song of Women: a lovely vid focused on Börte, Genghis Khan's first wife, and her relationship with him, using footage from the 2008 movie "Mongol".

The Unsent Letters Exchange is online! I participated for the first time this year, and received a lovely story in one of my older fandoms, The Borgias: Amor Vincit Omnia, which consists of a series of letters written by Giulia Farnese to Lucrezia near the end of season 1. The Giulia & Lucrezia relationship was one of my favourite elements of the series and I was sad that the show let it fade it to the background after s1, so I treasure fanfiction focusing on it, all the more if it's so clever and affectionately written.

I myself wrote two stories in two different fandoms, and since neither of them involves a single Prussian, I'm going to let you guess.

Meanwhile, here are some early favourites among the other stories:

Good Omens: Tokens of Esteem: exccerpts from Crowley and Aziraphale through the millennia, witch historical tie-ins to die for.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel the Series: Notes I'll never pass: letters from Faith to Buffy from prison, painting a portrait of Faith's ongoing redemption arc as well.

Sherlock Holmes Stories: Nuts and Bolts: Dr. Watson corresponds with his publisher and gains an editor. A real gem.

Many a year ago, I wrote an Angel/Six Feet Under - or, more properly, an Angel/Buffy/Six Feet Under - crossover called The Burying Kind, in which Angel hires the Fishers as funeral directors after the mid s5 (of AtS) episode You're Welcome. Various BtVS characters also show up for the funeral in question, as well as all three Fisher siblings from Six Feet Under. But one thing I wanted to avoid was a meeting between Buffy and Spike, because that would have meant going AU, it would have distracted from the central focus of the story, and it wouldn't have been doable in a few lines. Thankfully, You're Welcome had left Spike canonically at a point where he doesn't show up chez Angel & Co. for one more episode, so I could simply let it be elsewhere. Since I later realised that the Chenowith siblings, Brenda and Billy, aren't in the story, either, I've always joked that clearly they've run into Spike for the duration of this tale. hannah has now asked me what would happen in such an encounter.

Well, for starters, it always depends on which point of canon for all the characters in question. In my crossover story, it's s4 of Six Foot Under and s5 of Angel the Series (meaning it's also post-Buffy), which means we're talking Billy at the point of his life where he has it most together, Brenda is past her own deepest crisis as well and has it together, they can interact again without maximum awkwardness, and Spike is on the heroic side of things. (Though somewhat shaken about having been conned in the last episode.) Which means no one gets killed or turned, but in the best SFU tradition, I would say everyone gets high. (I don't remember, can Jossverse vampires get high on drugs without the filter of drugs? Considering they can get drunk on alcohol and Spike smokes, I'm assuming so.) Also, given Spike is pretty good at deducing unspoken tension and messed up backstories, and the Chenowiths are brilliant at it, they probably figure out what each other's big red buttons are very quickly. At some point, things like

"I don't see what the big deal is about having to watch your parents have sex. Try having to stake your mother while she's coming on to you!"

Billy and Brenda: look everywhere but at each other

probably happen. As well as snark about how you can never escape your family and even end up in their line of business despite all your intentions to the contrary. (Given what Spike's currently doing and Brenda's late season decision to become a therapist.) On-his-meds Billy who is at that point in canon doing well as an art teacher probably tells Spike to get back into poetry and is the origin of Spike trying a poetry slam a few episodes later.

Now, if pre-show Billy and Brenda met pre-BTVS Spike (with or without Dru), I'd say a threesome is definitely in the cards, Brenda gets turned into a vampire, and absolutely not on his meds Billy ends up dead. Whether courtesy of Spike or because getting drained by his sister is his secret fantasy of solving his issues at this point is up to debate.

The Other Days

Dear Brits, I would say you have my sympathy for the Orange Menace landing on your shores in a few days, except that you actually just had his spiritual twin resigning, whereas in our current political grotesque the German equivalent of Johnson in selfishness and destroying-the-country-for-career-purposes resigned from his resignation and wasn’t fired from the cabinet to much of Germany’s regret, either. Also, World Cup. So really, go you! But do make every second of the Orange Menace’s stay as hellish for him as possible.

Fictional apocalyptic scenarios are so much easier to deal with than much of the globe being on a self-destruct as well as others-destruct course, of course, so to the safety of fiction I go and bring more recs:

Jessica Jones
(And also Daredevil and Avengers):

Hurt my knuckles punching the machines: what the tv Marvel crowd did after Infinity War happened, Jessica and Matt centric, but with roles for everyone. No Luke Cage s2 spoilers, since the story, which has just finished, was begun before LC s2 dropped.


So in my recent MCU ramblings I wished, among other things, for stories featuring Nick Fury and one or several of the Avengers that took into consideration how he actually interacts with them, and lo, here‘s this beauty of a vignette featuring Nick and Tony post Civil War:

Let the earth leave you for an hour

Buffy:

Better than being a hero Buffy and Dawn, in an achingly beautiful take on the relationship between the sisters.


X-Men:

Westchester, Redux

Erik and Charles post X-Men: Apocalypse, Erik‘s pov.

Just a little more than 24 hours from now, I'll be sitting in an air plane en route to the South Pacific. Between packing, I noticed I haven't said anything about the big Buffversary two days ago. It was and is a dear fannish love of mine; I watched it partly in German, partly in English, as its original broadcast fell into the time when overseas fans like yours truly started to figure out how to, hm, watch episodes not yet broadcast on German tv, and something I wrote during my most recent rewatch still applies: BTVS was one fannish experience where I didn't just enjoy one character/storyline/ship, I loved and love the entirety. From the moment Darla vamps out in the pilot teaser to the moment Dawn asks Buffy what she wants to do now and Buffy, realising that for the first time in her life she actually has all the choices at the end of Chosen, from s1 line up to the s7 line up of characters, I love it all.


Me and the late, great Elizabeth Taylor, it seems, who watched the show with her great grandson. Now there's fannish company!

First, a definition of terms. „Heroine“ doesn‘ t mean „favourite character“, i.e. I won’t list my favourite female villains here, or those highly ambiguous ladies like Skyler White. However, I don’t just use “heroine” as equivalent of “main protagonist”, either, but as “female character prone to heroic actions” (which allows me to draft the occasional supporting character *g*). And all the characters I list are fictional. So. This being said. In no particular order:

- Jo Grant (Doctor Who): let’s be honest, I could give a Companions only reply post, and then it would be still incredibly hard to choose just five. But I have an incredibly soft spot for Jo, possibly because she was badmouthed to me so much before I got to “meet” her – she was presented as the epitome of the “bad” Companion, “useless screamer”, “brainless bimbo” and what not. Whereas I found her to be brave, with a talent to escape (Jo’s joke about being an escapologist is fact-founded), funny, kind, very loyal and loving but able to make up her own mind if she disagrees with the Doctor on something, and committed to making the world a better place beyond her time with the Doctor; when Russell T. Davies brought her back after decades for the Sarah Jane Adventures two parter “Death of the Doctor”, I was thrilled to learn Jo has spent those last decades travelling the world as a hippie activist and matriarch of a large family of hippie activists. In a word she likes to use, Jo is groovy. And I love her to bits.

- Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer): Buffy wasn’t originally my favourite on BTVS, that was Cordelia, but she became my favourite heroine and BTVS character in the later seasons and has remained so in the years since. Quips, penchant for shoes, inferiority and superiority complex all wrapped up into each other, strong capacity for friendship and uneven love life, the entire package.

- C.J. Cregg (The West Wing): because C.J. is who I along with a lot of other people want to be when I grow up, even though I’m nearer to fifty than to forty now. First she made being the press secretary of the White House heroic (nobody managed this one before or since), and then she moved on to saving the world on a daily basis as chief of staff. Also she’s tall and never made an attempt to hide it. And nobody sings The Jackal the way she does.

- Jadzia Dax (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine): because Jadzia is a scientist, a good fighter and knows how to party; because she really enjoys hanging out with other species, and not just the “cool” ones (Dax & Quark friendshipper forever!), and not with that somewhat patronizing air some Federation types have; and because she is arguably ST’s first on screen canonically bisexual regular character. Also? She has a way with words. “Pity. You’d be surprised what I can do in a pair of size 8 boots.”

- Sister Julienne (Call the Midwife): the show made the entire Midwife profession look heroic (long overdue, that), and I love all the characters in various degrees, but Sister Julienne, the head of Nonnatus House, played by Jenny Agutter, is the graceful, quietly strong anchor for everyone else. Not that she’s always serene and invulnerable to loss of confidence; we’ve seen her upset and grieving, and having a crisis, too. But then she rallies, be it alone or with the help of her colleagues whom she has supported through their crisis (this show is great on female solidarity). If I had to pick a fictional medical professional to be at my side when I’m in bad shape, I’d pick Sister Julienne no matter whether this involved a gynological problem or not. I’d have complete faith in her ability to help me through. Now that’s a heroine for you.


The other days

I'm currently in Prague again (as enchanting as in April, though as then, I'm not here for sightseeing), so have little time, but did manage to browse throught this year's remixes. Here are some I especially enjoyed:

Buffy:

Letters never sent (The Crumbled Sheets Remix

Xander, trying to tell Jesse's parents what happened in the BTVS pilot. It's a story entirely composed of letter attempts, terse, gutwrenching and all too likely.

Fairy Tales:

Feathers and Nettles (The Sibling Remix)

Based on Anderson's tale of the six swans, a story about the youngest brother and his sister. Bittersweet.

Galaxy Quest:

Like no business I know (The Climbing Uphill Remix)

How Gwen experienced the show. Loved it.

MCU:

Magic Boxes (The What Remains Remix):

Howard builds magic boxes and out of them come weapons. Tony is his greatest creation and his worst nightmare.

Takes the various versions of Howard movies and Agent Carter have presented and creates a coherent whole. It also includes the encounter between Peggy and Vision I never knew I wanted until I read it!

From intrigueing and muccamukk:

In a new post, list ten fic that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” works, or even all the same pairing or fandom, just the fics that have touched you or that stuck with you somehow.

I'm sure I could come up with ten more, but these are the ones that came immediately to mind (and which I could find again online!):

1.) From Me To Q by Julia Houston (Star Trek: The Next Generation). Star Trek in its first three incarnations is one of my oldest fandoms, and the time when TNG and then DS9 were broadcast was when I started to get aquainted with fanfiction, first via fanzines and then via the earliest online archives. Finding this particular story was like striking gold. It's TNG; it's plotty, like a well written episode complete with ethical dilemmas; it's Picard/Q (which was what I was looking for when finding the story) but uses the entire TNG ensemble well; it takes the most reviled of fanfic clichés, the Mary Sue, and gives it a highly original twist. (Well, back then it was original, for all I know, it's been often imitated since.) Also, the dialogue sparkles. In short, I fell in love, so much so that I gave Voyager, which I had almost given up upon, another shot, simply because Julia Houston back then was also writing Voyager reviews and I adored her writing that much.


2.) Last Set Before Closing, by Kat Allison. (Highlander: The Series). HL was another early online fandom of mine, and this story left me shaken and breathless the first time I read it. On the surface, not much happens in this tale, which is set several years after the series ended; Joe Dawson is very old, not far from death, and his mind has started to wander; Duncan visits. Behind that simple description hides one of the best and most gutwrenching stories I've read in any fandom, which at once gives us the relationship between Joe and Duncan, and how both of them relate to Methos, about friendship, about mortals and immortals, and at the same time manages to say something very personal to anyone who has an older relative. (Until then, I don't think I had ever read fanfiction tackling a rl subject such as aging, its physical and mental decline, so unflinchingly, and with a beloved character, no less.) Another reason why I love it is this: at the time when it was first posted, its take on Methos was pretty much unique and went directly against how most fans then wrote him. (Probably still does.) And yet I find it entirely plausible.


3.) Changed Utterly by Parda (Highlander: The Series). Another HL story. Parda was a writer I interacted with a lot during my HL days, both as a reader and as a writer. This story is still my favourite of hers, and at the time it was first posted struck me as one of the best meditations onf grief and surviving I had read i nthe fandom. It's set about a year after the show ends, wherein Duncan is still dealing with Richie’s fate, when he sees Cassandra again. Not present in body but very much in thought are Methos, Connor and Richie. What to do when you’ve both done and experienced the unforgivable is a question with a dozen answers and none, and all the characters here are dealing with it. Poetic and profound.


4.) Father's Heart by Fernwithy ( Star Wars). Still my favourite Star Wars story, many years later (this was written shortly after The Phantom Menace was released). Set between trilogies, it pulls off something a lot of people tried since, and does so in a credible way: Vader and the child and later teenager Leia forming a tentative friendship, which falls apart with a vengeance as she grows older and experiences the Empire at its worst. In addition to a terrific take on Leia and Vader, Bail Organa and his wife (who in this version is one of the former handmaidens, Sabé) as well as some original characters are compellingly written. ( Not to mention it caters to two of my narrative soft spots: non-romantic intense relationship, relationship that breaks up because of politics and ethics (and rightly so). ) I was only ever at the periphery of SW fandom, not least because I happen to like the prequels, but this story made me search for and read a lot of SW fanfiction for a while. It was years before I found its match.


5.) Freefall by Penknife (X-Men movieverse). This is an X2 AU, ensemble story, Scott pov, and one of the earliest penknife stories I read. X2 had just been released. As after X1, I hunted for stories that weren't Wolverine/Rogue. Hard to imagine for current day fans, but back then it was actually difficult to find Magneto/Xavier stories, or stories that featured Mystique in a prominent role, or stories that featured Scott at all. Bingo, thought I, when I found this one, and little did I know I had also found a favourite writer in many fandoms more. Oh, and I think this was the first AU I really liked (the twist is that Scott realises a bit sooner what's going on during the prison visit at the start of the movie, with the result that he and Xavier end up as fugitives together with Magneto and Mystique; it's Jean who gets captured instead). Until then, I had avoided AUs. After reading it, I gave them a shot.

6.) Ten Thousand Candles by Andraste. This is another early story by a future favourite writer; Charles Xavier post X2, trying to cope with all that happened (read: ( spoiler for big X2 twist )). Back then, Charles Xavier centric stories were incredibly rare; stories in which he wasn't either the wise mentor type or trying to win Erik back were even rarer. What he experiences in X2 is pretty horrifying, and I loved finding a story which addressed that. Of course, Andraste turned out to be the biggest Xavier expert in the planet, but I didn't know that then. :)


7.) Bed of Bones by Roz Kaveney (Buffy the Vampire Slayer): I had spotted Roz on a couple of Buffy discussion mailing lists (remember those?), but this was the first BTVS or fanfiction in any fandom tale of hers that I had read, and it was sharp, poetic, and made the First Slayer(about whom at this point we only knew what Restless had mentioned) into a fascinating character. I was wowed. It also raised my standard of expectation re: fanfiction creating mythology in present day or futuristic fandoms to no end.

8.) Queen of Spades by Astolat (James Bond: Casino Royale): Ah, ye golden days when the Craig Casino Royale had been released and for the first time in my life I actually went and looked for Bond fanfiction, because Dench!M and Craig!Bond dynamic in that movie had gripped me in and fascinated me. (I had also loved Eva Green as Vesper and her relationship with Bond, but not in a way that made me look for fanfic.) And again, I hit gold. I think this probably was the first Bond/M story online. It set a most pleasing trend - for the next few years, you could rely on Yuletide including some great and sharp Bond and M fanfiction. (And then came Skyfall which brought the avalanche of Bond/Q and the Bond movies were no longer qualified for Yuletide, but that's another story.) Now, most combinations that have one character in a position of power over the other character are hard to sell to me as pairings, but there are exceptions, and Queen of Spades made me realize Dench!M and Craig!Bond were such an exception for me, because wow. (It also made me realise that I had a new story or rather old story archetype, not necessarily always as pairings, I love the gen variations, too, but: Morally ambiguous queens and their morally ambiguous battered knights, bring them on! Though only if the Queen is the older of the two. Read: Dany/Jorah does nothing fo rme.)


9: Working Order by Eatscissors (Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles). John/Cameron is a pairing that intrigues me but which I find more interesting on the actual show than in most of fanfiction, because, imo as often, fanfic tends to simplify and dispense with much that makes this particular relationship so layered, starting with the fact that Cameron is a machine, no matter what she looks like.( Some spoilery ramblings about John and Cameron on the show ensue. ) Working Order, by contrast, addresses this and the other issues between them head-on while also being one of those stories where the explicit sex is part of the character exploration instead of reading as just being there for its own sake. For a reader like me who often finds sex scenes (both slash and het) reading like involuntarily funny gymnastic mannuals, with the participants interchangable to other fandoms and thus not very interesting, this was an eye opener. Really well written.

10.) Petrarchan Sonnets from the Vatican by Petra (The Borgias): I was and am grateful for all the stories I got in exchanges, and often loved them to bits, but this one will always remain special. Its just that awesome. It's a story in the guise of a fake article about the discovery of sonnets between L.B. (now who could that possibly be in Borgias fandom?) and person unknown, female and apparantly her tutor. Complete with the sonnets. And the commentary. Absolutely delightful, needless to say, poetic (my Yulewriter's ability to compose Petrarchan Sonnets with clever allusions to events from the show's first season still stuns me), and full of subtlety, and the wit and love for language that the characters in question display on the show as well (and did in history). (And now I'm grieved again that the Lucrezia and Guilia relationship post s1 fell by the wayside on the show, but never mind me.) If I could ensure that just one bit of Borgias fanfiction survives, this would be it.

Breaking Bad:

Article about R.J. Mitte, the young actor who played Walter Junior/Flynn in Breaking Bad. The other day I've come across a wisecrack again that Junior/Flynn gets no characterisation in the show beyond liking breakfast, and that's rubbish. He's not a main character, but he's a part of what made Breaking Bad great - here's a very good discussion of what the show does with him - and acting wise, I can think of no higher compliment than by the time we get to Ozymandias in season 5, R.J. Mitte is able to hold my attention for his character and his character's reactions in what is arguably the show's finest hour when all the main characters and their actors bring on their A-Game.

Buffy and The Hunger Game:

Katniss, Buffy and the cost of heroism

and the earlier:

Mockingjay and Season 6:

Both have spoilers for the entire Hunger Games book trilogy, so if you're a movies only fan and don't want to be spoiled for the second half of Mockingjay, beware. Otherwise, good posts pointing out the thematic similarities. I don't agree with all the points re: the movie adaptions, but these posts are very thought inspiring.

Doctor Who:

And lastly, a fun viewing: Dancing to the Doctor Who theme at the Cardiff airport in 1979!