What are you reading?

Amends the Next Time, a post-Apocalypse Nowish (Rain of Fire) Gunn/Wes story.

I sometimes read fanfic and want to red-pen it, and never send feedback because it would be full of "You have no notion of subject-verb agreement." I think I should've gone into editing instead of Latin.

And the evil Farscape fans (whom I love) have now planted Giles meets Aeryn in my head and it won't go away! There is no sex but I think extensive intellectual warfare might work.

[link]

Weep. Weep weep weep. Post The First stuff in Buffy.

I sometimes read fanfic and want to red-pen it, and never send feedback because it would be full of "You have no notion of subject-verb agreement." I think I should've gone into editing instead of Latin.

I often want to red-pen things. In a past life, I proof-read and red-penned things all the time. Now, however, I mostly just beta-read and do an occasional copy-edit-on-the-fly when we're pinched for time at work.

p.m. marcontell -- Misha pointed me here because of your comments on "The Last Virtue."

I was a beta reader on that -- or as much of one as I could be, in the holiday rush. And while I would certainly never presume to speak for anyone else about their work, I will say that I disagree that the story, or her work in general, is plot-driven rather than character-driven. Heck, TLV barely has a plot at all; the Kwanzaa framing device is mostly there as a container for the various studies of Gunn's interactions with the rest of the crew. And the discussions I have with Yahtzee about her work are almost never "But Spike needs to get the amulet back to Giles in time for the frobznitz to work!" and almost always "I think that Wesley would be hesistant to be the first to reach out after everything they've been through, even if he wants to be." That is, about the characters, not the plots, which are frequently massively rewritten in her stories to fit where she thinks the characters are. You might disagree with her readings of the characters, but she's not the sort of writer who says "oh, wouldn't it be cool if Lionel Luthor took up tap-dancing?" (Which, now that I think of it, it would, but precisely because it would be so wildly out of character. Still, I'm not going to write it. You see my point.)

Anyway, that's me venting. And hi.

I sent feedback.

Good. Because Sheila and Te are the reason I started reading Wes/Gunn, and they're the reason I started writing Wes/Gunn, and when they both stopped writing Wes/Gunn, I got very cranky.

But my love of Sam is pure and obsessive, because he is Sam, and thus worth dying for. Or killing for. Rather than based on "Oooh! Pretty!" Although he is that too.

Me, except I want to smooch him.

http://archive.shriftweb.org/archive/13/istanbul.html

Sigh. Chick stole my premise. This is what I get for waiting forever.

I loved Second of Our Reign until the end, when I felt like the bottom fell out of it.

Oh, man, I loved it. I thought it was perfect. You didn't like it that the real Harry went away with Sirius et al?

I wouldn't have mentioned the Last Virtue here if I didn't think it was worth reading. My only LV caveat is the one in whitefont in the comments I made about 30 posts back or so. The one about the silver. White font to the left.

The plot vs. character thing is more from other works (specifically, The Uninvited Guest) of larger and more ambitious scope. And yes, perception of how one character would react in a given situation is very much YMMV, but sometimes, they do seem like they've been fitted awkwardly into situations where the reactions read a little more like they needed to be there than like reactions the character would have, if that makes sense.

She gives very good Cordy, which is rare.

Her Wes reads a little off (which may be my Uninvited Guest issue in a nutshell), however a large part of that is the fact that I'm a primarily Wescentric writer, so many, many Wesleys feel off to me. I'm hypercritical about the characters in which I'm most invested. (Wesley, Buffy, and, oddly, Fred, even though I don't write much Fred.)