The Farmstead

And so we continue! Book IX will be coming very soon, which is possibly the only excuse I have for the ever-so-slight cliffhanger ending of this one... Hope you enjoy!! Massive thanks to brutti_ma_buoni and verity for their super-betaing. :D

As usual: Spuffy (as I always forget to say, not that it makes much impression here); PG-13; ~4000 words (~530 lines); warnings for the series of death and denied agency, with only brief mentions in this book. Extra note, though! The origin myth of the Watchers' Council sketched out in this book is very much dependent on a conversation brutti_ma_buoni and I had a while ago, so credit needs to go at least half her way. (Said conversation may well make it to your screens in a less scattershot form at some point, by the way, so watch out!)

Willow tells her tale; Illyria is challenged.

[VII]

VIII

      Although she always knew she’d have to tell
Her story, Willow wishes she could wait,
That she could bail and put it off until
Tomorrow, maybe, when she’s had some sleep.
But Buffy’s looking angry, disbelief
A threat and challenge in dry, hazel eyes.
( ... )

Sorry this took a little longer than anticipated! But now it's here - and is possibly my favourite book so far. There's Spuffy! Meta-chat with Virgil! A cameo by a character I love! Not to mention that this book means we are HALFWAY THROUGH!! (Hooray for visible milestones!!)

Many many thanks to my betas for this book, brutti_ma_buoni, fulselden and ladyofthelog, who were excellent in their comments. I hope people enjoy. :)

PG-13; ~4000 words (~530 lines); warnings for the series of death and denied agency, with lots of issues around death this book.

Spike and Buffy deal with where they've landed; Illyria is tempted.

[V]

VI

      The vastness of the darkness all around,
The plangent loneliness which fills the black
And, biting at his tongue, the bitterness
Of acrid air: it feels like it should be
Too much for Spike. ( ... )

!!! I know, I know, it took long enough, didn't it? Still, I have a new plan of attack called doing chapters in groups, to make the reading experience a little more pleasant. V will be posted this evening as well and VI is COMING SOON in actual real terms (like maybe the weekend?), rather than Spikeid terms of soon meaning maybe a year...

THANK YOU a thousand times to my awesometown betas of these books, brutti_ma_buoni, ladyofthelog and fulselden. Your critiques were awesome! Thanks also to ariss_tenoh for discussing with me the scansion of some words in this book I don't often hear.

Warnings: we are still very much dealing with the fallout from death and denial of bodily agency. A less important pseudo-warning is for the prevalence of OCs and minor characters in this book - we return to our favourites in Book V, so this evening, but I think this is an important book nonetheless and they haven't been completely forgotten, so I hope you still enjoy it!

As usual, it's around ~4000 words (~550 lines) and rated PG-13, with a touch of the swearing.

The Slayers meet another group of people who are fighting in LA.

[III]

IV

      The Slayers run on hearing Buffy's cry,
Retreat without co-ordination, turn
About and almost trip on all the feet
Around them. ( ... )

I did another sb_fag_ends ficlet - Half-Loop Topstitch, set almost immediately post Sleeper. It's a little bit sad. :(

But, in news of more serious fic, I'm hoping to find some lovely people who could help me get the next three books of my Spikeid (IV-VI) ready for public consumption. Anyone who likes/understands poetry/scansion, I would really like to ask you for help, especially if you've read the Aeneid as well (or any epic really). It's a bit of a tall order: each book is around 4000 words and they're all in iambic pentameter, but I'm really hoping to get opinions on the three as a sequence and then post them quite soon after one another (not least because IV is heavily OC-focussed). So anyone who has a reasonable amount of time on their hands and would like to fill it with slightly awkward pentameter, um, hi! Do you fancy critting something?

(And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, because it's been a long time since I posted about this, I've got the first three books up, starting from here. ;) )

I had something much different planned for the Who Are You ficathon, but it wouldn't happen - so I wrote a Buffy-Illyria swap instead!

PG (if that); about 1000 words; partially inspired by The Owl and the Nightingale; set post-NFA in one of my futureverses where Buffy and Illyria are friends; slightly strange; no material for 'standard' warnings beyond what happened to Fred.

What can you trust when your instincts are gone?

( The Beauty of the Stars. )

Oh, the Romans... Sometimes Always they amuse me so. As part of trying to work out whether or not we can say whether there was any sort of moral/sexual geographical zoning in Pompeii (say whether there was a 'red light district', to quote an exam paper - I say not in literal terms, but in ideology/perception/phenomenology yes, definitely) I've been reading the records of inscriptions around the town - ie. the dirty graffiti, basically.

( Cut for NSFW Romans! (And more! Incl. street poetry!) )

This is where I hope to call on the great ranging knowledge of my flist: my grandpa took my family to see the stage version of Terry Pratchett's Nation at the National Theatre a couple of weeks ago and the play was pretty awful, but I was passing by a book stall on the South Bank and poked through the poetry section, not looking for anything in particular, and happened upon a little book covered with card and very thin leather, entitled POEMS. in gold lettering, in a quite pointy caveman-esque type font. Amongst the knackered paperbacks it caught my eye - however, on opening it up I couldn't find the author's name (there's a foreword signed THE AUTHOR but that's it). Flicking through, none of the poems were familiar, and since it was the sort of Romantic pastoral kind of thing I quite like I thought I had to buy it - it was only a fiver and I reckoned I would never see them again otherwise.

I kind of assumed, though, that a quick google-fu would tell me who the author was and reveal that I had just managed to find a really weird edition of someone fairly standard but generally believed to be crap. But I can't find them at all! So I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for methods of enquiry? Or wild stabs in the dark (especially of date):

The collection contains a massive load of quatrains, some specifically in the style of Omar Khayyám and others in the Rubáiyát form, 'Three Chinese Pictures', some haikai (with a footnote explaining it's an exclamatory Japanese form - they're all 17 syllables but in random amounts per line), 'inscriptions for sundials' and various other occasional things including the one I've typed up below the cut, which is a reflection on Sibelius' incidental music for The Tempest (quite a few imply the author was into music):

( Read more... )

I might just say they're by Spike and have done with it. ;)

So I feel obliged to chat about it on my personal journal too! I have:

Positive Exposure

R/NC-17; c.13,600 words (in two parts); no particular warnings besides pervasive misogyny.

Safe in the bosom of the A-List, Spike is set up on a date with Buffy: the world's most hated tabloid trash. Wackiness refuses to ensue.

This is a fic set in late 2005-ish (maybe a bit later), springing off from the point in Buffy S8 and AtF when everyone becomes famous (so post AtF #17 and S8 #21 (Harmonic Divergence). Considering I haven't actually read the comics all that closely, it's hopefully still accessible for people who haven't read them. bogwitch and spiralleds did a fantastic job as betas (though, heh, guys, you might not recognise parts of the story anymore...). I have rather clung to my use of 'till' as a preposition though.

and

Five Poems Spike Wrote about Buffy (and One that She Wrote about Him)

PG-13; two sonnets, 17 lines of hendecasyllabics, two lumps of free verse + a Buffy poem; no particular warnings

This is kind of self-explanatory. There's one poem from S5, two from S7, one from AtS S5 and one from post-NFA. Buffy's is in some sort of domestic futureverse. Naturally.

Does anyone out there know how to keep abreast of decent modern poetry? (I always say I love poetry, and then over time it feels like posing and just something I say, and then I read some and remember. All the bloody time.) My internet skills are above average and yet I have no idea what/where to monitor.

Anyway, today I read Laura Dockrill's Mistakes in the background after being enchanted on a flick-through. Dockrill's an illustrator as well as a poet, so much of the time poetry crosses over into cartoons into comic strips - the whole book is an experience to hold and read to yourself, rather than being simply textual, a sort of final rejection of the recitation ideal (this poetry does not apologise for being written down and bound). She writes about everyone - mums dads, children, snails, the one nerdy bloke in an office - though I'll admit that one of the main reasons I like her is that she sounds like someone so definitely of my generation (and has to be from in or around London). She talks about Salad Fingers for Christ's sake... The collection is unrepentantly light-hearted, but there's still an everyday sort of darkness underneath it all, ready to strike if you start thinking about things too hard.

Also? The book includes a free sheet of wrapping paper and a page of stickers!!

Imagine this in handwriting, with the illustration of a girl holding an arm over her face (ETA: or look at this Amazon picture):

"Why am I so stubborn
???"
She asked, ramming her fingers
into the jar of silver skinned
onions - all the glossed up and
slippery, made her thumbs numb
and vinegary -
a food that bit back ... HARD.
"Perhaps" Said her mother,
"You were once a pickled onion yourself -
forever avoiding to be jarred."