Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 8 – Love Meme

[aadler]

 
Continuing the meme/challenge begun and tracked here.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge, Day 8 – Love Meme

In your own space, create a love meme for yourself. Let people tell you how amazing and awesome and loveable you really are. Leave a comment in this [the assignment] post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Surf the comments and find people to give love to.

Like a number of people, I thought at first that this called for me telling others how awesome I think I am. And I could do that, but it’s a relief to discover I’m just supposed to leave this up here — begging for candy — and wait to see what I receive.

I will go so far as to follow spikedluv’s lead in listing out a few prompts that can be followed, which also are things I’d like to know:

• How did you learn about me/how did we meet?
• Do you have a favorite fic by me? If so, what and why?
• Have I given constructive feedback to anything you have done? (Because if I haven’t, I should have.)
• Just say something nice but true (yes, you may have to scrounge around for something), because I’m prickly and arrogant and pretty much focused on my own stuff, but I need love just like everybody else.

And there we are.

Comments

[sparrow2000.livejournal.com]

I had a dig back through my end of year reviews, which are pretty useful barometers of my fandom experience in any given year, and discovered that I first came across your work back in 2010 when I read Otherwise a Perfect Sky – a story that just bowled me over. I’ve danced in and out of your output intermittently ever since with the out periods mainly having to do with RL reasons or just having a reading list that was ludicrously long.

One of things that I really appreciate about your writing is your craft – the smoothness of a plot structure, the care with you choose your words and shape your characterisations – that craft adds immensely to the reading experience for me. And I have said elsewhere, but it bears repeating that I really like how you write around the edges of canon, focusing on small events or characters that get caught in the tides and eddies of the grand drama of the main Buffy characters and by doing so, often give a twist in perspective to those main canon players. As for a favourite story, that’s a hard one, but I think if pressed I’d say Under the Gun – I loved the ambiguous nature of Giles in this story and how you took the continuity of the original story to build on that world. Yeah, I loved that one a lot.

And yes, you’ve commented on my stuff – your feedback on my summer_of_giles story A Single Stick of Kindling made me extremely happy, so thank you.

Keep writing and I will keep reading – perhaps not immediately when RL gets in the way, but I will get there in the end! :)

[aadler]

With “Otherwise a Perfect Sky” as your introduction to me, how did everything else I did NOT seem like a letdown?

The plotting and characterization for which you give me credit … I write the kind of stories I like to read. I’m not just having fun (though writing Buffyfic is great fun), I’m trying to build a world I can believe in, treat the endeavor with the respect it deserves. If that works for other people, bonus.

I just checked it, and my commentary on “A Single Stick of Kindling” was quite restrained. I read the story again, for context, and you deserved better than I gave you. That was nicely done.

Finally, “Under the Gun” was written quickly, to meet a deadline, after I’d determined that I wouldn’t be finishing “Into the Abyss” in time to submit it for that year’s summer_of_giles. I was satisfied by what I’d done there, but wouldn’t have listed it (and don’t) among my best works. That you cite it as your favorite just shows that we can’t always predict how our stories will be perceived, which can be a reward as well as occasional pitfall.

Thank you.