astridv

Flying with Turkeys by Florrie (AtS)
Cordelia/Angel; PG; humor/fluff; 2200 words
Summary: Cordy sends Angel shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. Confusion ensues.

This one made me giggle when I sorted through my vintage fic collection the other day.

Another Buffy rec; I'm enjoying a trip down memory lane...
My So-Called Unlife by HonorH (BtVS/AtS)
Gen; characters: Harmony, Cordy, Angel; humor; 3293 words
Very funny story. Set between S1 and S2 of Angel - a few months before 'Disharmony' aired, but the dialogue could've come straight from that ep.

"You know, I really thought you'd understand, Cordy," Harmony pouted. "Everyone from the old high school gang is so totally harsh now that I'm a vamp, you know, and Jeanne Montrose even keeps a bottle of holy water in her purse. It's so uncalled-for. Do you know what that stuff does to my complexion? I thought that you'd at least be nicer, since you're sleeping with a vamp . . ."
"I'm not sleeping with Angel!" Cordelia protested.
"Really?" Harmony blinked. "Why not? He's yummy. Hey, if you're not sleeping with him, could I . . ."
"No," said Angel
"No," said Cordelia.
Harmony slumped back into the chair again. "See? I'm, like, an outcast."

Home by anr (BtVS/AtS)
SUMMARY: She's not going without a fight.
31,971 words; Angel/Cordelia; NC17; AU off The Wish (BTVS 3x09)

"Leaving Hell" is an AU set in the brave new world that Cordy created in The Wish. When I saw that anr now wrote a sequel, all these years later, there was actual squeeing on my part.

Cordy is in LA, trying to fix what went wrong but Anyanka has other plans... gripping story with a satisfying ending. If you like Cordy and Angel together, run don't walk over to anr's LJ. (If you haven't read Leaving Hell yet I'd start with that.)

I hesitate to rec WIP but I'm reading a really fun, well-written Angel/Leverage crossover right now. So if you love both shows, check out this one: Maṭṭaltu by LithiumDoll. It's five chapters and 23,000 words in and I'm enjoying the heck out of it.
Summary: Things are going pretty well for the Leverage crew, until Lindsey McDonald shows up on their doorstep. Then, not so much.

Hardison raised an eyebrow. “We’re going to run game on the creatures of the night?”
“That a problem?”
He grinned. “Nah, man. I got holy water, I got stakes and I got blueprints - we’re good.”

---

rec of the day will be going on vacation soon (at least I HOPE it will! Hope I'll manage to get out of the country in spite of the air traffic controllers and their labor dispute. Fingers crossed.)

A Girl Worth Fighting For by bookelfe (FMA)
gen; PG; Characters: Approximately every Armstrong in canon, and some I just made up; ~4,600 words
Summary: An argument among the Armstrong children is resolved with a history lesson. written for fma_ladyfest

I love this fic to bits. Amestrian history, elegantly combined with the sparkly awesomeness that is the Armstrong family. It doesn't get any better. (I feel like I should write this rec in sparkle font.)

A Reasonable Facsimile (Chuck)
Characters: Morgan Grimes, General Beckman, and a boatload of sketchy OC's
Spoilers for 4x01; gen; PG; epidode tag, humor; 2600 words

This is delightful, funny and just the right amount of cracky. And it's perfectly in character, both for Morgan and for the show.

Easy Listening by emungere (Chuck)
gen; PG; Chuck & Casey; spoilers for 1x06; short
Killing Chuck is not an option. Not. An. Option. He has that written on a post-it stuck to his bathroom mirror, so it must be true.

some more Casey:
Knitting by Innie (Chuck)
gen with background Ellie/Devon; short
Summary: Casey gets roped in.

Yeah, so they're civilians, and he's sworn to protect them, but now that he's met them, he isn't so sure that he really would take a bullet for them. They're so wide-eyed and trusting, so full of enthusiasm and high-fives, treating him like he belonged in their weird little family. It's damn unsettling.

For remixduello amaresu submitted The one where Jack and Vala ended up on Fandom Wank, which prompted this remix by beatrice_otter: A Collection of E-mails from the SGC Archives (the Wanky Wormhole Remix) (SG-1)
Vala writes Wormhole X-treme Danning/Levant badfic. Jack thinks it's OOC and says so online. Cam writes up the wank report. Teal'c provides screencaps (and gets one of the funniest lines I've read in fanfic). And the best thing is, it's all canon-compliant, if you want to squint. I love Wormhole X-treme.

Death by Fondue by ameretrifle (SGA)
gen; PG; humor; 1730 words
Summary: With the advantage of hindsight, John realized that he probably should've known something was wrong the first time he'd noticed he hadn't seen Rodney for more than five minutes. But it's a party, he'd thought. He's probably out there having fun, he'd thought. God, he must have been more drunk than he'd thought.

Thankfully this was recced on stargateficrec, because it was posted in 2007 and I somehow missed it until now. This is a really funny planetside fic with a number of great OCs.

x-posted from stargategenrec: untitled Sheppard-Caldwell ficlet by sholio (SGA)
gen; PG; Characters: John Sheppard, Stephen Caldwell, (Torren Emmagan); Spoilers: 5x01
I like how this scene shows the mutual respect and understanding that the two have developed over time.

Attack of the Cookie Monsters by Barb Cummings (rahirah)
Buffy/Spike & kids; PG
There are cookie monsters. They attack.
And the whole thing is illustrated. ♥

I'm sensing a theme here. Maybe I'm getting enough angst from my job and therefore need a lot of lighthearted, cracky fic for balance.
TBC

Hero Gets the Girl by bironic (SGA)
Rodney/Buffy fantasy, Rodney/Jennifer; PG-13; 425 words
Summary: What? It was no secret he had a type. (Flashficlet for two prompts at Battle IX: Buffy/Rodney, sarcasm; Jennifer/Rodney, hero.)

I really liked this. Cute, in-character, neat use of the prompts.

Bathing in Jordan by alixtii (AtS)
Cordelia/Kate; post-NFA; PG-13; 917 words
Summary: Sometimes baptism isn't a one-time deal.
Really good character voices. I only wish this fic was a couple thousand words longer but even so it's an intriguing scenario that made my brain spin and imagine the stories to come. (it also appears to be part of a larger series, which I haven't checked out yet.)

My favorite feature of the AO3 is the tagging system, hands down, because now it's possible to find the rarer stuff with just a mouseclick. I was always begriping the lack of fic about Kate Lockley, arguably one of the most interesting characters on the show (ymmv but please not in my LJ), but now... well, there's still not a lot but at least it will be much easier to find. I'm really hoping a lot of people will make use of the archive and upload their older work so the AO3 can unfold its full... awesomeness potential. :o)

I'm happy to announce that the archive is back online, in large parts thanks to landrews, littleheaven70, and psychofilly at dbfandom.com, who offered us a subdomain at their site (and went through quite a bit of trouble to get it set up).

Here's the new location of the archive: http://bbfarchive.dbfandom.com

The search engine as well as all the other scripts appear to be running fine, with the exception of the Quicksearch engine which for some reason produces blank html pages. I worked around that problem for now by simply listing all the stories on one page - bypassing the quicksearch links altogether - until I find the time to fix it.

In the meantime, I thought maybe I could save some time by asking you guys for help with these links: those are the links to offsite stories that have become defunct over time. If you happen to know working links for any of the fics listed below, please comment here or mail me at astridv at livejournal dot com. ( list of broken links )

(x-posted to bbf)

I spent most of today working (except for the one hour I took off to go running, which was awesome) and I finished all the sketches for my current project. Tomorrow I'll just have to prep them for emailing. Right on schedule for once. :o) I want to finish this in a timely manner, so I don't have to do a rush job when it's time to take off for Comic Con.

Man, by the time this book is done, I'll have deserved a vacation.

On a different subject, no idea what the frek happened to the Better Buffy Fiction Archive. I haven't heard from our gracious host at s8219 yet, so I have no idea what's going on. I'm hoping that the domain just expired or something like that. Given that the site went offline only days after scribesds's sites got hacked, I'm not overly optimistic though. I just googled around a bit and was kind of stunned how many Buffy archives have been hacked since last year. WTF? Seriously, what's the point of hacking a fanfic site of all things. But I guess looking for the point behind vandalism is... pointless.

In any case I have made a complete backup so even if the current version should be really lost, it should be possible to get the thing up and running again quickly, once I know where to set up shop. Just don't know when I'd have the time to do it. I suppose the time-consuming part would be figuring out how to change the file permissions, and I'm not exactly looking forward to that. :P

Alright, something more pleasant: Buffy fic rec
Apples, or Answers to Unanswerable Questions by lips_like_candy
Pairing: Spike/Buffy/Angel
Q) How do Spike, Buffy, and Angel end up together?
Five very different answers. AU

tkp has written two more chapters of 'Man's Best Friend': part 2, part 3
Angel, Spike, Illyria, Nina, and a puppy, post NFA, PG. (original rec here)
I love this story fiercely. The show really comes to life when I read it.

yhlee wrote post-NFA fic as well: TIME'S ARROW.
characters: David Nabit, Angel, Spike, Illyria; 2,000 words; gen
Yoon's Nabbit is spot on, and at the same time she's turning him into that character I'm emphasizing with (never much cared for him on the show). This fic can be read as a one-shot, but I would so love to see this as a setup for a longer story, because I want to see more of this David Nabbit.

newscaper's Umbra, the alternate ending to 'Servare Vitas', is now COMPLETE.
This isn't an easy story to read, but it's rewarding... dark, bleak, and incredibly well written; I can only urge you to read it! (Don't read 'Umbra' if you haven't read Servare Vitas yet.)

lakrids404 has copied all his BBF recs in this post.

...
Now, work. I have a book deadline at the end of the month, which is in... argh. Yes. Quite soon.
Gotta catch up on work. Stoopid, addictive fanlib wank. :P

(and I just noticed that I have to do my taxes by next Friday. Yikes.
Ah well, traditionally I do them the day before the deadline. The only time I had them ready early was the year I thought the deadline was a month earlier.)

In response to the 'Fic I'll Never Write' meme, tkp wrote a story about Angel buying a puppy. And because it's tkp, she takes the crack and runs with it, makes it fly, gives it depth. One of those stories I didn't read so much as inhaled, and that left me with a smile on my face all day.

Man's Best Friend
Angel, Spike, Illyria, Nina, and a puppy, post NFA, PG.