tkp on a prompt from jgracio (you evil person you) has written a fantastic post-Never Fade Away story called Man's Best Friend.

There are no words for how awesome this WiP is (there's two parts so far...long parts). It's all about Angel, Spike, and Illyria rebuilding their lives with the help of Nina. Gwen makes an appearance, as does David Nabbit. Gunn hovers in the background like a shadow, and the loss of their old lives blankets all the characters. The story swings from "three years before" to "three years ahead," juxtaposing then and now to bring out the subtle shadings of all the characters and their journey.

Go. Feed the author. And enjoy a pleasant way to while away a Sunday afternoon when the allergies are killing you.

Unh, well, when I say "my" remix story, I don't mean the one I wrote. I'm not going to make anyone guess, either, because...well there's a good reason for it and I can't tell you why because that might give away which one is mine.

Any-hoo.

My remixer did a fabulous job with my original, which was a misguided attempt at trying my hand at minimalism. He/she hung muscle and flesh on them thar bones and came up with a very sweet little B/X story. It appears that I lucked out again this year.

The only thing that confused me was the link went to the original, half-destroyed version on Fanfiction.Net (Thanks to all those Pit of Voles updates, a lot of the formating got stripped away.) That's when I realized that I never unhid the version I transfered to LJ and I never linked to the shiny formatted version in my "all my fics" post.

I am a dumbkoff! Deeeeeeerrrrr, Liz! Way to go!

Anyway, here's my original (shiny new LJ version!) Two Words, in which Buffy has an early morning conversation with Xander, but you only see her half of the conversation. Xander not only doesn't speak, you don't see him at all! Wheeee! An experiment in writing!

And here's Wake Up Slow (Second Time Around Remix), wherein it's an actual, full story! Now complete with a Xander! And Xander's half of the conversation! And Xander thoughts, even!

Yay!

Once more, a remix that's bigger and better than the original, folks. Go give the remixer some big love for working with a really minimalist piece of fluff and giving it some sweet legs.

I'm a bit floored by this one, mostly because I didn't think I stood a chance for this one. Dismay is such an old story.




Also, congrats to booster17, who won runner-up in the same category for his fabulous I Really Don't Like Mondays.

To see all the winners for the Wanton Folly awards, go here

I keep meaning to pimp this baby, and I keep forgetting.

redrikki has written a follow up to At the Cross Roads Well Met, wherein Xander hires himself one trickster God named Eshu for a handful of palm nuts.

Go read the charming and wonderful Goddess in the Water. The plot? The Eshu and Xander show. One is an ancient African trickster god with an eye for the ladies. The other is a young, one-eyed Californian who is way out of his depth. Together, they fight supernatural crime.

Go, go. Give lovely feedback so redrikki will write more!

mara_sho has officially announced the The White Knight Awards Round 4 Winners.

Let me congratulate all the winners on my FList, including annakovsky, bastardsnow, crazydiamondsue, entrenous88 (Best Overall Author, chica! Double congrats!); fiareynne, keith5by5, julia_here, lit_gal, lwbush, nemo_gravis, nwhepcat (And double yay! The Ballad of Carl Whitman, the Remix/Redux of my story Revelations that she wrote last year won something!); redrikki, sunnyd_lite, as well as anyone else on my Flist that I might have missed.

Here are some pretties that I got under the cut:

( Pretty Plaques Under the Cut )

Congrats to the other winners again, and a big "thank you" to mara_sho for again organizing the awards and making the plaques.

Remix/Redux

Yes, I know. I owe people emails (waves!) and I will get to them tonight. Yesterday was much busier than I thought it would be.

Anyway, I'm sure half of you already know that sign ups have started for Remix/Redux V over on remixredux.

Deadline for sign-up is February 10, so you've got time to think about it before opening yourself up to a re-write. Last year I got the awesome Ballard of Charles Whitman by nwhepcat which was like my most awesome present ever.

In case you're wondering, that's what prompted the creation of my complete Fanfic Index Post yesterday. I needed at least one central list for whoever ends up remixing me. (Whoever you are, I hope you like Xander, dude!)

Putting together the quickie index was also a fun kind of exercise. I discovered my output has been a hell of a lot higher than I thought it was, coupled with the realization that I'm not nearly as bad about finishing stories as I thought I was.

Fun facts:

• I wrote 32 stories over a period of 5 years (and think about how long some of those stories are)
  
• Out of 32 total listed stories, I have 6 WiPs
  
• 2 of those WiPs (Behold, Little Padawan! and Facing the Heart in Darkness) will be finished by February 17 when the remixredux assignments are handed out because I want both stories available to the remixer
  
• Two more of those WiPs (Nobody Never Gets to Heaven and Water Hold Me Down) are slated to be completed this year (barring real-life barriers)
  
• Which will leave me with 2 WiPs to complete (No Myth and The Acme Heartbreak Repair Kit) in 2008 — assuming something real-life-ish doesn't get in the way like I hope it will (no, can't talk about it because it's an idea of an idea kind of thing)
  

I know some people want more detail, and I'll probably add it in at a later date. It was just that I needed a useful and navigateable list for whoever gets me for remixredux.


WKRP in Cincinnati

Thanks to the marvelous desoto_hia873, I now know that Amazon is taking pre-orders for the first season of WKRP in Cincinnati.

Yes, I ordered it. Yes, it was for me. I've never pre-ordered anything in my life and I just did for WKRP in Cincinnati. And I will do it for every single season they see fit to release.

No. I'm not counting down the calendar days until I have WKRP in my hot little hands. Not. At. All.

Underwater at work, but I promised myself that I would pimp iyalode's BtVS-based Xander-in-Africa drabbles here.

The Africa drabbles are still a WiP (she's planning on hitting every country), but each drabble is picture-perfect stand-alone. They are numbered, and I would recommend reading them in order to see the character arc. Go, read, and give a little love.

Warning: Although these drabbles are mostly gen, one drabble more than hints at a het pairing of Xander/OC.



Also on the BtVS fanfiction-front, I had five seconds to glance at my FList this morning and caught this from othercat. Using the the six-word sentence style everyone is now so mad about, she constructs an entire story in 66 words.

Check out Epic Dark Fic in Sixty-Six Words. She manages to pull off more in less than 100 words than most people can pull off in 10,000. Fabulously dark, more for what it hints at than in what it actually says. To say more would give it away.

Warning: What's hinted at is slash Spike/Xander, but with one of them an unwilling participant. Even if you're slash-phobic, check this one out anyway. You won't be at all sorry.

It's now official. mara_sho has invited me on board to be one of the mods for I Need a Parrot, the XanderZone for the BtVS Writers' Guild.

I'll be joining othercat in wielding dictatorial god-like mod power to approve or reject stories for inclusion in the archive.

Of course our standards aren't, like, a mile high. It's more like, "Does it at least try to adhere to English standards? Does it even look the littlest bit like Xander? Is there a blessed lack of character-bashing? COOOL! Come on down!"

All genres and pairings and even stories that totally lack pairings are welcome. (Imagine that! An archive site that actually has a separate category for gen! YAYE!)

Actually, in looking at the numbers, I'm chargrined that there aren't more people uploading stories to the archive.

Yes, I am guilty of this. To rectify it, I've started uploading my shorter stories there (for now) and I'm in the middle of fixing the formatting mess that is Whisper. I'll be working to get more of my stuff over there in the next few months.

In truth, the new version of eFiction is actually a lot easier to use than the older version, so uploading stories through the interface is nowhere near the pain it used to be. And now that there are mods in charge *cracks knuckles* the issue of hackers breaking into the site and uploading malevolent software should be a thing of the past.

So, for all the peopple who've written Xander out there or have a few Xander stories they want to throw on an archive site for easy searching, don't forget to keep I Need a Parrot on your list.

If you just want to keep up with the latest stories to be posted to the site (the traffic is not terrifically heavy...at this rate it's maybe a couple of stories a day), you can sign up for the site's syndicated feed here on LJ at ineedaparrot.

ETA: Note that the ineedaparrot syndicated feed picks up new stories that have been uploaded to the I Need a Parrot story archive and provides a link to those stories.

It does not capture anything that's been posted to the LJ community i_need_a_parrot, which is also a Xander-centric fanfiction group, but is strictly an LJ thing.

The two are related in that they're both owned by mara_sho, and they're both focused on Xander as a character. However, they both serve very different functions. What appears on one is not going to appear on the other.

I hope that makes things more clear.