Ficcety fic fic fic.

So, remix got revealed! May I recommend once again checking out Thus Do I Abide (The Foggy with a Chance Remix) by sevendeadlyfun, which is an excellent Spike/Dru piece?

Also! I got reworked again in a rather wonderful fic about Helen of Troy from Remix Madness, which it now appears is by our very own bruttimabuoni: Return (the Dreamless Sleep Remix) has Helen rocking very very hard - and being clever and insouciant and careful.

And, finally, I have been waiting to mention via_ostiense's fantabulous Doctor Who fic Ecce Medicus Donnaque!, for which I had the absolute massive pleasure of being a beta. It reworks the Doctor and Donna's visit to Pompeii into a series of Cambridge Latin Course-style passages, with masses of humour and a really good range of syntax and tone. If you want to brush up on your Latin, I think via_ostiense's fic will actually help you learn, as well as being very entertaining.

As for me, I *cough* got a bit over-excited in Remix Madness, but can at least start off with my 'real' remix, which ended up being for Neither Lovely Nor Temperate by nothorse, a fic about Giles in the summer after S5.

( Commentary Ramble )

And there I was with my fic, for which I owe massive thanks to bruttimabuoni for betaing and guiding me towards a much tighter remix than where I started off. It's PG at the most, about 2300 words, with no AO3 warnings, but discussion of death and grief.

Another summer and Giles can’t grieve. But he’s not the only one with reason to.

( Darling Buds of May (Rough Winds Hardstep Dub). )

Remix Madness Post 1: Buffy POVs

I am sorry for the spam that is about to begin... But I have a thing about not wanting to group too many fics together in a single entry, especially if they're reasonably long or different in tone. These two at least I can group together, because they're both responses to Spike fics which had me (of course!) create Buffy's companion POV, in both cases a few episodes after the original fic.

The first takes bruttimabuoni's Rosetta, which is a S5 Spike POV minific BMB wrote for sb_fag_ends using the Rosetta Stone for a great discussion of interpretation and reading-as-understanding. It was set just after I Was Made To Love you, so I chucked my (168 words, G, AO3 warning free) Buffy POV fic just after Intervention:

( Transcription (Demotic Tongue Remix). )

The second was a response to ruuger's Through the Looking Glass, which is a missing scene from Beneath You and really gets into Spike's mind at the time as well as the whole performance aspect of Spike's Big Bad persona. I chucked Buffy at the same concept during Selfless (545 words, G, AO3 warning free):

( Image Object (Angles of Refraction Mix). )

Poetry Remixed (Remix Madness Post 2 Mix)

One thing I thought it would be fun to get into for Remix Madness was some poetry - either turning it from prose or trying to rework a poem (it's almost like music, people, ooooooh). Luckily, stultiloquentia put her name in the sign up box, which meant I could work with one of my most favourite fanpoems - Illyria Writes a Poem (What country, friends, is this?) - which is a beautiful sestina of shiny sounds and images, all about Illyria's displacement and sense of displacement that comes from her grief, with poetry the means through which she replaces herself as a humbled writer rather than a big, prophesied, written thing (a sense of order growing from a form without scansion and rhyme scheme the way only a sestina can grow it). I read over it again and found wanting to know how the 'world', as it were, felt about Illyria's shifting position within it - from omnipotent God-King to human-esque poet, which gave me a very obvious first line, as you'll see. The poem's construction gave me a sense of verse length and cyclicity, as well as key words: again, rhyme, home, grief, insects, hand. I decided 'again' could be conceptualised into the remix-concept itself, but everything else got in there. Then, I won't lie, there was some very productive freestyling. Then some equally productive editing.

I ended up with 120 words of AO3 warning free G poetry about nature watching Illyria somewhat askance: :D

( Write My Country New (Fearful Suppliant Mix). )

Remix Madness 3 (MIX MIX MIX)

When I saw that deird1 had signed up for Remix Madness, I knew there had to be at least one fic of hers I could have fun remixing - your output tends to flash by me so fast, Mez, that I find it hard to keep up, but you write so much varied stuff! I needed to find something. And what I found was Deep into the Well, the AU of late S5 where Angel and Spike make the choice to save Fred after all. I haven't seen another AU of this scenario and deird1 really grabbed me with it, because it felt like a lot of its darkness came from the same place that the show irked me around Fred's death anyway - that Fred as the (by then) token woman in the Angel Gang was some extra special lovely object that needed to be cradled and protected (or, as it was, grieved over with that extra special type of manpain). So I wondered what would happen with things turned around, with Fred reacting against all that. I have never written Fred, either, so it seemed like a good challenge. Even if this is definitely a dark version of Fred (Amy Acker, I think I owe you an Claire Saunders some inspiration here).

PG-13; ~1000 words; AO3 warning free (but deffo angsty).

( Dug Too Deep (Too Many Mornings Mix). )

Remix Madness 4 (Madness Madness Cracky Madness)

ANTESCRIPTUM (if such a thing exists): I actually also posted another fic at seasonal_spuffy yesterday for the free-for-all day, which is here on DW and here on LJ. It's called Walking at Midday, and is, so I have termed it, a piece of angsty/squishy/fluffy smoosh set in S7 after GID, in which Spike tries to deal with the trigger on his own and has to put up with an awful lot of bother from the First Evil. There's a Sphinx in it! Erm...

So, of course my jaunt in the Madness ended up where it began - with Spuffy! And even bruttimabuoni! What I did not anticipate, however, was that my amusing pootle would end up essentially as long as my main remix, which took far longer to write. Just goes to show, doesn't it? Anyway, Strange, Charm, Peppermint (Or Just a Jump to the Left) is a fic in which practically every Buffyverse character who ever had an alter-ego (and let's face it, gang, that's most of them) reverts/is turned into that alter-ego, doesn't know what's going on, and it's up to Cordelia Chase, star of stage and screen, to save the day. It's fun, it's wacky, and certain constants have sad!poet!William mooning over a turned off Buffybot. It seemed all too necessary that he would write some terrible William poetry over her perky self. Only then it seemed necessary that she woke up. And then it seemed kind of necessary that they both got a grip (because there was still the mystery of how the actual alter-ego spell worked, and this seemed like a prime opportunity to let it all play out). Fun was had, basically, even if thinking through the mechanics of a sex bot did gross me out a little more than it ever has before (which is funny, since there's a certain drabble of mine...). More fun was then had in titling the thing. Someone else is amused, right? (Also, gillo, you may recognise hints of how you read FFL, which really works for me now. That place is totally a high class brothel.)

PG-13; 2300 words; AO3 warning free though with a certain slant of sexual situations brought about by non-consented spell, depending on how you read the dynamics of personhood happening here.

( Charming Strange Peppermint (The Polonius Shot First Remix). )