fpb | the advantage of occasionally reading stuff you know you are going to hate

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the advantage of occasionally reading stuff you know you are going to hate

I hate the whole Anita Blake concept, from beginning to end. But it has given me the missing bit for my abandoned Buffy project, "...if all the heroes lose?" - just give Anita a change of sex and she will make a perfect villain. In fact, you don't even need the change of sex, but it was established that the villain of ...IATHL? is male.

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"I feel as if glass shards were being pounded up my urethra"

My own is not so severe but I have never been able to read more than about 20 pages of any of her books.

You might try and see if a sex change op really hurts your concept.

Since my interest in HP fanfic is of a low order of visibilty I'd be interested in seeing what you do with BtVS. Ever done any crossover?

It is actually a crossover - Buffy goes to Britain to be an Auror. I have done one Buffy fic - http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1944139/1/What_if_Glory_had_won - odd when you consider how much I like the series, but I guess that Joss Whedon's horrendous ignorance of history, that makes JKR look like a PhD by contrast, has a part to play. I had intended ...IATHL? to be my main narrative and include all sorts of characters inluding my own superheroes, but I don't know now whether that would work. Some ten chapters got done and then I lost direction. But the thing about Anita Blake - and now I have to confess, I only read some fanfic - that is both horrendous and wholly modern is how the monstrous and naturally evil - necromancy, vampires, werewolves - is normalized through the vehicles of money and sex. Because vampires are a political and financial power, a modus vivendi is reached with them. Because various kinds of monsters go to bed with Anita, suddenly they are pleasant and interesting as well as monstrous. This really is amazingly in the spirit of the age. I had already intended my villain, Sir Julian Riddle (answer to your immediate question: YES!) to be a societal corruptor, someone who rides the worst waves of modern culture, and a media magnate, and now I know what he will be doing and how he will be doing it.

I may be the most faithful reader of Stormy Petrel; over the last couple years I think I've at least looked at every post since 2004.

I remember the Glorificus fic well; 'twas excellent.

I think I glanced at the Buffy/Auror thing but my HP antibodies kicked in and I went no further with it. Flipping thru July 2005 quickly I see no sign
of IATHL.

I did a short crossover of BtVS with Fritz Leiber's time war novel The Big Time.

It attracted some attention but was lost forever when the Buffyguide server
crashed, alas.

http://fpb.livejournal.com/79890.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/80180.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/80457.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/81345.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/81470.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/81946.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/82392.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/83653.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/85893.html

A good bit of it needs rewriting now, of course.

DANKE!

Read through the 1st 5; very promising though Rupert's PC preachiness about homophobia to Dawn gave me a case of sore buns. The flight over the Grand Canyon and Houston brought back memories.

I'm touched by HP'S relations w/LL. Is she from the canonical Potterverse?

Entirely NOT. Laura was a childhood friend of mine

I'm especially glad that the flight over the South-West worked for you, whom I take to be from those parts. It was entirely made up, with an atlas and memories of photos and documentaries. I've never been anywhere near.

I didnt think I remembered you mentioning any trip to flyover country.

I had assumed youd been spending time on Google Map.

(taking a ridiculously grandfatherly attitude:) Google Map didn't yet exist in them days, son. Just a good old-fashioned and very detailed atlas (which had cost me a fortune in times gone by, but then I love maps).

Or maybe older uncle; ANNO ORTUS 1953

That's why I said that the grandfatherly attitude was ridiculous. A.O. 1962 - let's make that an older brother, shall we?

As for your Buffy/Leiber crossover, which sounds great - any chance you could try and rewrite it? (I know that I completely lost at least one comic I did back when I was doing small press comics, because I lost the originals and can't find any prints.)

I'd need to remember that The Big Time is actually a stage play in novel form (FL came of a tribe of actors). It's a particular type of stage play; a 'closed room' mystery ala Sartre Pirandello and Chekov; with a ticking nuclear bomb in a corner of reality sealed off from space-time to give it that hot curry picquancy. It was actually performed as a play around 1982.

My story is set after BT so the bomb crisis is resolved. I'd have to think of some plot constraint that would lend a similar urgency to Dawn's relations with Sid Greta Beau Doc and Lily etc. Tentatively, Dawn must be gotten back to our time before the Spiders find out she is in the Place and forcibly recruit her into the Change War. (It's Spike's fault of course; he opened the interdimensional portal through which the demons chased Dawn).

Reluctantly I'd probably leave the Spider Soldiers out, though it might be fun to see Dawn trade quips with Erich, Greta's snide Nazi boyfriend.

A reader told me Dawn's intial dialogue with Lily was the funniest thing sh'd read in quite a while. I miss it, a little.

PS have you looked at John Wright's latest on Harry Potter and Tom Simon -
some interesting stuff there.

"Sir Julian Riddle (answer to your immediate question: YES!) to be a societal corruptor, someone who rides the worst waves of modern culture, and a media magnate"

Yeah, sort of. More like a mixture between Murdoch, Berlusconi and Richard Branson, because for the purposes of my story he has to be some sort of glamorous media star as well as a billionaire. But I do want to play up all the sides of media and big business corruption - especially the manipulation of glamour, the old game where dreary or actively contemptible people and lifestyles are given a kind of sheen that demands admiration for no rational reason at all.

Actually, now I've gone back to the early chapters if ...IATHL?, which I published in this LJ starting July 2005, I can see all sorts of thematic and plot connections between what I did there and the idea of an Anita Blake-like complex of villains. I am going to see if I can develop an outline and then take it from there, and I will try to break down thematic and ideological elements into narrative points in order to have a developing plot.

And as there has to be a vehicle for Sir Julian Riddle to become fully human (he starts as a Horcrux), I might even have a woman somewhere in the story, and make her Anita Blake-like. so as to underline the point.

Again, forget about the Horcrux. I've a better idea.

I was a fan of Anita Blake back when she was a Catholic virgin. I even got to write an essay for a book of Anita Blake essays, where I wrote about why Vamires and Werewolves are the romantic heroes nowadays. The author did not like my essay because she objects to romance...but the essay got a lot of notice.

You are right, though, that she really could be a villain now.

"A Catholic virgin"? Takes some effort to imagine that from what little I've read.

Yes. In the first seven books, she is a Catholic virgin who will not sleep around. The books had good mystery plots and the romance seemed realistic.

Then the author split from her husband, who Richard the Werewolf was based on, left her church, and started a different lifestyle and the books lost their plot and became, basically, porn.

Edited 2011-08-15 13:46 (UTC)

Nice.

(Also I am in favor of Buffy-related projects generally. :D)

In that case, http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1944139/1/What_if_Glory_had_won

That was amazing. I was afraid when I first started reading that it would bleak and grim and horrible, but--you took it in a completely different direction, and it was wonderful, in the literal sense: full of wonder. I actually still have tears in my eyes.

So thank you for that!

(Also, thank you for this bit: "Willow, soon to become the world's most powerful sorceress, stood in the shadow of the battle and felt, even where she did not see, the greatness and the glory of what was taking place. So she was cured of an illness she did not even know she had..."!!!!)

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the advantage of occasionally reading stuff you know you are going to hate

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IATHL

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SON? I CD BE YO' PAPA!

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REWRITING 'DAWN IN THE CHANGE WORLD'

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AHA! THE MURDOCH, MALIGNANTLY MAGNIFIED...

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