coat me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians

Which Buffy Girl Are You? Find out @ She's Crafty

fic rec: How the West Was Won (And Where It Got Us)

How the West Was Won (And Where It Got Us)
by macha

Wonderful elegaic piece of pre-series Firefly fic, with Mal and Zoe in the aftermath of the battle of Serenity Valley. Good Mal and Zoe interaction is hard to find, but macha nails both voices just right.

fic rec: In the Bleak Midwinter

In the Bleak Midwinter by Annakovsky
Buffyverse, post-Chosen. Xander and Dawn and a broken baby Jesus. Great Christmas story with perfect characterisation. Not in the least bit fluffy but it still leaves a warm something inside.

fic rec :: Dinosaur Envy (PG)

Dinosaur Envy
by What Works.
A brilliant Firefly fic from Wash's POV.

I'm a-catching up with my fanfic reading today, so expect a bundle of recs. I'm also reading a Civil War era novel, on account of my firefly boxset being on loan and me needing to get Zoe's voice right for the next chapter of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. I sort of want to get the whole story done before the winter break is over.

Not such a cunning hat

I left my hat with a European playboy. It's like leaving your heart in San Francisco except it can be returned by Fedex.

5,198 / 8,000 (64.9%)

Finished chapter 2 of Even Cowgirls... tonight and sent it off to the poor beta-reading fools friends. So now I need to work out what ought to happen in chapter 3 and 4, then make them all work in terms of interconnection etc. I'm about 700 words over where I wanted to be with the first two chapters, so I may well add a bit more to chapter 1 and increase my overall word count to 9000 or 9500.

Cunning Hat

I bought a new hat today. It is cunning. It makes me look a bit like a Dickensian urchin, but I can live with that. I've been playing Innocently Inserting Firefly Verse Speak into daily speak. Already, some people at my workplace are starting to use 'shiny', and I've got 'cunning hat' in a few times.

the power of pimpage

• Firefly fic rec:
  Palindrome
  by Nixa Jane
  Summary: It’s backwards and forwards all at once.
  Rating: R
  
  Comment by me: A lovely piece of post-movie Firefly fic, from River's point of view. Good use of tense and voice, combined with plausible dark events.



• Angel fic rec:
  Curses
  by Hannasus
  season 5, post You're Welcome. Angel is cursed again and Lorne takes them to Aggie (the reader from season 2) for help.
  
  Comment by me: a good blend of the laugh out loud funny with the Angel and Spike snarkage and shades of dark with Angel's broodiness. It reads like a good episode of Angel.

All my recs can be found on the other stuff page of my website, or you could go direct to source and watch the RSS of my delicious tag 'recs'. Now I'm back reading fanfic, after a long break, I'm keeping better track of my recs.

new fic: It's Wrong to Wish on Space Hardware

This sort of burst out on the walk home from work, after reading the challenge. So there's been no beta reading etc etc. 1300 words.

Title: It’s Wrong To Wish On Space Hardware
Author: Spikedru
Rating: PG
Spoilers: none, pre-series
Archive: http://www.aurelius.fsnet.co.uk/fiction/spacehardware.htm
Notes: In response to justvisiting’s ff_fanfic challenge. The challenge was: The crew sees a shooting star.. what do they wish for? Can be as many characters as you want.

---

I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them, but they were only sat'lites
It's wrong to wish on space hardware
I wish, I wish I didn't care


Zoe was raised in the black and there was a whole of stuff which didn't make sense if you were raised up there. Take nursery rhymes: there weren't no boughs to break, there weren't no woods for bears to be hiding in, and what in the hell was a tuffet anyway? But the rhymes and the songs were sung to the children as they were rocked to sleep by the pulsing roar of a turbine, or by the children as they skipped across the rec hall. Others always thought being raised in the black meant you didn't have any of that stuff, as if you were born with a gun in one tiny chubby hand. Still it meant there was a whole lot of things she'd never seen. Things that were as mysterious to her as how come you didn't just float about all day in zero g was to a prairie hick.

Like shooting stars.

She'd seen a comet once, back when she was a little bit. It had been passing several thousand miles away, but the pilot had invited the kids up onto the flight deck to take a look at it. Its icy tail had streamed out behind it, and little Zoe had gaped like a kid in a candy store.

Also? No candy stores in the black.

So the first time she saw a shooting star was when she was lying on her back, with mud and blood and god knows what else oozing into her uniform, in Serenity Valley.

At first she thought she'd imagined it. A sudden white line zipping across the dark sky. Like something had burned briefly on her retina. Then there was another brief flash and she finally understood why shooting stars had seemed so magical on Earth That Was. A tiny piece of the sky, falling. As another flashed across the black, long forgotten rhymes prompted her.

'I wish we were out of this gou shi festering hellhole.'

'Zoe?'

'Yes, sir?'

'That weren't a shooting star. It's our battle satellites. The Alliance is shooting them out of orbit and they're burning up as they re-enter the atmo.'

'Oh.'

She lay there for another minute or so, then glanced over to where Mal was sat, wrapped in a grey blanket and looking up at the darkness with the look of a man whose world had just been destroyed.

'Sir?'

'Yes?'

'I still wish we were out of this hellhole, sir.'

'Zoe? Don't you know it's wrong to wish on space hardware?'

---

Serenity had set down in a meadow. Although set down was perhaps euphemistic for Wash's frantic, switching hitting piloting and meadow was perhaps euphemistic for a dull plain of scrubby grass. Still, Mal had strode out into it muttering about being home on ranges before rounding up Bester and setting out in shuttle 1 for the township they were meant to be visiting. It was about fifty clicks off, and the shuttle was so loaded with legit cargo that there wasn't room for Zoe on it. Besides, Mal knew the deal was safe enough and Bester wanted to get the parts to get the engine running again after that nasty clunking sound it made as it set down. Crashed. Whatever. There was another job waiting on Paquin so the sooner they were back in the black, the better.

Which meant Zoe was left with Wash for company. She still hadn't worked out what it was that bugged her about him.

He spent the afternoon on his back in a crawlspace asking her to hand him various tools whilst he did mysterious things. Sometimes sparks would twitch and buzz and he'd make some creative curses in Mandarin. He really did love his Mandarin. Of course, it was obligatory learning on the Core planets where he'd come from instead of the haphazard way she'd learnt cradled in the belly of a ship. She left him to it when he stopped asking for the tools. As the sun started to touch the treetops, he gave up and joined her in the galley.

'I can't do any more till Bester fixes the grav boot,' he said. 'Captain not back yet?'

'No. Which means it's protein packs for dinner instead of something fresh.'

'Bet Mal stopped to get some real food and a beer.'

'Maybe he did.'

Wash was watching her as she moved about the tiny space, wiping his greasy hands with their skinned knuckles on an old rag, and it made her suddenly self-conscious.

'Thought you knew everything Mal did?' he asked.

'We're not joined at the hip.'

'No, I'd have noticed. Why don't we take the food outside to eat? There's fresh air, and a rise just behind us which would give a great view of anyone approaching.'

Zoe laughed. 'Do you think I'm always on guard?'

'Seems like your defences are never down.'

Wash dug about and found two tiffin containers and she poured the soup in. Then he produced the ugliest patterned blanket she'd ever seen from somewhere in his cabin, and a couple bottles of beer. At least the blanket wasn't grey, she thought, as she walked up the slope behind him. From this angle, and climbing like that, his ass was rather better defined than usual and she watched it with internal amusement. He spread the blanket like he was a matador, with no end of crazy flourishes and Zoe was surprised to find herself laughing.

Once the sun was set they lay back, propped up by their elbows and watched the stars come out. 'Always seem so few, when you're planetside,' she said.

'Sure, that's just atmospheric distortion, light pollution and so on. It's why I love flying Serenity. To get out there, into the black, where the stars are pure and clear and scattered like a thousand billion dreams.'

'Poetical, for a pilot.'

'The stars are poetic. The constellations are different out here, but see that bright star over there?'

Zoe couldn't see, so Wash leaned closer and put his face by side with hers. He raised his hand, pointed and she saw.

'Once upon a time, back on Earth That Was, that was Polaris. The North Star. It shone so steady and bright that sailors on the ancient seas used it to guide them, to bring them home to a safe harbour.'

'That's...well, poetical. Practical too, but poetical.'

'And that faint light-' he guided her gaze with a tilt of his head, 'was the morning star. Venus. The goddess of love.'

Zoe finally realised just how Wash was bugging her. She turned her head slightly to look at his face, so close to hers. She could smell beer on his breath but his eyes were skyward and lit with love for the black.

There was a flicker of white across the sky. A brief flash like something burning briefly on her retina. She started, and recalled just why she didn't want to ever see a regulation grey blanket again.

'Zoe? It's OK. It was just a shooting star. Guay, you're shaking! What is it...? Look, there's another...and another. It's just a passing meteorite storm.'

As he babbled on, she relaxed again. They really were just shooting stars. His arm had slipped around her earlier and now it was cautiously holding her close. She watched the stars fall then looked at his captivated face as he closed his eyes briefly.

'Did you just make a wish?' she asked, faintly incredulous but fascinated.

'Yes.'

'Do you think it'll come true?'

He opened his eyes and stared into her own. 'I hope so,' he said.

And he kissed her.

---

end

---

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meme

i hate memes. I'm not going to tag anyone at the end, you know. And yes, I used to break chain letters at school. i am not afraid. The gods of the memosphere have no authority over me. Strike me down, I dare yer!

Bam, the queen of the cover snark, did tag me though.

• Three screen names that you’ve had: Magrat, Moosifer, spikedru.
• Three things you like about yourself: my nails, my self-suffciency, my shoe collection
• Three things you don’t like about yourself: my wide personal space, picking at things instead of either leaving well alone or sorting them out properly, my volume control.
• Three parts of your heritage: Irish, Scots, Basque. No, really, there was a DNA thing and my ancestors are Basque. I think it explains a lot.
• Three things that scare you: ladders (or rather going up high ladders), the dubious state of governance of the UK and its increasigly lack of respect for civil rights, Brussel sprouts.
• Three of your everyday essentials: caffeine, waking up with the Today programme on the radio, reading snarky blogs
• Three things you are wearing right now: Brown straight-leg low waist cords, a white green and brown cowboy shirt from J C Penneys that I found in a retro clothing shop. Calf-length brown leather boots (slightly scuffed).
• Three of your favorite songs: Chelsea Morning by Joni Mitchell, Days by either the Kinks or Kirsty MacColl, #2 by Blur.
• Three things you want in a relationship: companionship, screwball comedy style banter, an acceptance that I really, really don't like having my feet kissed.
• Two truths and a lie: I am a natural redhead, my grandmother was born in 1883, I can roll my tongue.
• Three things you can’t live without: a cat, my books, caffeine.
• Three places you want to go on vacation: Oregon (to visit a dear friend), SW India, Africa.
• Three things you just can’t do: Ski, stand on the left on a tube escalator, cook.
• Three kids names: George, Georgina, Lily
• Three things you want to do before you die: go to a New Orleans Mardi Gras (was supposed to go this coming year but...), visit the Antartic (or the Artic - which one has the penguins?), learn to cook.
• Three celeb crushes: Spike (not James Marsters but Spike - "so you'd prefer the mass murderer to the actor?" someone asked me), Rupert Everett, Dominic Monahan.
• Three of your favorite musicians: Saint Saens, Neil Hannon, Rufus Wainwright
• Three physical things about the opposite sex that appeal to you: long skinny legs, eyes, scruffyness.
• Three of your favorite hobbies: reading, drinking cocktails, walking on the moors.
• Three things you really want to do badly right now: go home (am at work), get back to some writing, give a good friend a hug because she's having a shit time
• Three careers you’re considering/you’ve considered: writer, archaeologist, academic
• Three ways that you are stereotypically a boy: I like SF, I can do things in binary or hex, I am lazy around the house.
• Three ways that you are stereotypically a girl: I have over thirty bottles of nail varnish, I love high heeled snadals, I have a dimensionally transendental handbag.
• Three people that I would like to see post this meme: Nope. Come on, memosphere gods! Bring on your wrath! I deny you! I shall burn in meme hell.

Inappropriateness

You know things are going too far when your tai chi teacher mentions serenity and you think not of balancing the chi but of Firefly.

4,392 / 8,000 (54.9%)

Well, some of them are already being cut out, due to not being relevant to the plot. I just like writing Kaylee. So, here's the now cut bit.

Two coolies in temple dress code were waiting with a mule. Not the latest model, but still shiny compared to the heap of scrap Serenity had.

‘Oh, hey, cool. A Janssen-Wen triple three forty,’ she said, running her eye automatically over it. Weren’t like she could help it, just a bit of her brain liked cataloguing the hardware.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ one of the girls said.

‘Oh, you don’ need to ma’am me. I’m just the engineer. This has the chassis of the three ten combined with the control rig o’ the SR-I model, don’t it?’

‘Kaylee!’ Mal was striding down the ramp with a face like a whole month full o’ damp Sundays. ‘Let them get on with their jobs.’

‘But Cap-‘

See, it's just futuretechnobabble for the fun of writing Kaylee technobabbling.

Darn it all to heck

Damn. Damndiddy Damn damn damn. I don't need another WIP to follow. You know how it goes, you start reading, you invest, you wait a year for another entry or the whole thing dies. It's a reason I'm trying to write all of my multi-part stuff before publishing. And yet... I decided to read Book's Legacy by Jedi Buttercup over on LJ. It's a post Serenity movie Firefly fic with links to the Buffyverse. The first parts seem a little sparse and I'm not a fan of "ficlet series" - if you've got that much of a story to tell, tell it proper - but she's up to Chapter 5 now and is starting to write longer parts which have shape to them. She's captured Mal's voice for the narrative, and the dialogue for the others works well (although we've yet to see Inara). The breakfast scene in part 5 made me burst out laughing. Since good firefly fic is hard to find, I'm going to be following this WIP from now on.

tastes like...Mountain Dew (some recs)

Makd has done her big ole list of fic recs for Angel season 5. I am making some in-roads into the first post of it because, damn, that gal reads a lot of fic. Given this is just the best of the best, I shudder to imagine how much fic she actually reads in order to produce these lists. I've not even started working through the previous ones (and, obviously, my Spuffysense is tingling at what new treats might lurk in the Buffy season 7 recs). So, a handful of recs from the recs list...

• Summer Girl by Kath
  pre-Angel season 5. Wes and Angel character piece with lots of lovely detail and flashbacks to the pre-Angel season 2 summer. If that makes sense.


• Reclaimation by Jenny O
  "And one day, not an especially important day, Cordelia wakes up."
  Great Cordy AU piece. Heavy with the snark and making me laugh.

totally meh

The weather is still shitty, though I did a nice wholesome walk to the shops today, and the cat is still behind the sofa.

4,061 / 8,000 (50.7%)

still working

It's cold, windy and raining outside. The cat is huddled in its favourite hiding place behind the sofa due to overexcited idiots letting off fireworks a week before Guy Fawkes Night. there is nowt on telly that I want to watch and so...

3,826 / 8,000 (47.8%)

WIP, er, progress

Ignore the fact that "WIP progress" is a what'sit...because it actually means "Work in Progress progress". Isn't this a neat tool?

2,842 / 8,000 (35.5%)

This is from the zukutou website and shows the progress of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

Serenity in 2000 Words or Less

Serenity in 2000 words with BIG BIG spoilers, people.

JAYNE: Reavers!

REAVERS: GRAAAR!

EVERYBODY ELSE: Run away like little girls!

oh yeah, and the gorram fic

I got hold of all three issues of the Serenity comic yesterday, devoured them (not literally) and realised they didn't effect the fic I've been dawdling over since the other week. The whole thing is definitely called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and I finished part 1 of it, provisionally titled The Best Little Whorehouse on the Rim, last night but I want to write the other three parts before I post it.

The Serenity comic does a very nice job of moving us from somewhere after Out of Gas through to somewhere before Serenity the movie. Joss always seems to get some of the finest comic book artists around - the run on Astounishing X-Men is beautiful - and this is no exception. Yet the whole thing reads like a bit of a continuity exercise: villains from the series return only to make way, in the final panels, to the Agent from the film. Badger - and who doesn't love Badger? - reappears and helpfully mentions the twins who replace him in the film. The reason Book has left is revealed. It presses all the fan buttons, in other words.

nearly there

I've applied the shiny new styles to the blog, and finished reformatting all the fiction. I've even got the RSS feeds for the links on the other stuff pages to look more or less right. There is still the following to solve:

• formatting of the blogroll


• formatting of other other lists in the left hand column of the blog


• that gorram bug with IE

Good Vibrations

fic rec: Good Vibrations
There's one line in Serenity which causes audiences to burst out laughing, every time I've seen it. This little fic by liquid eyes does a really nice job of combining Kaylee's engineering skills with them other needs of hers.

the pitter patter of tiny feet in big combat boots

I've done perhaps half the work on the new look website: look at the shiny new design. You can flip between a Buffy or a Firefly style, although they both need a little work still on the basics. The remaining things to do are:

• decide the navigation
• fix that wierd thing with the header under firefox
• reformat the existing fic pages (4/7 complete)
• reformat the blog

shiny

One of the things you really notice about Whedon's work is the love of language. It is something to be played with, twirled around and twisted into new shapes and syntax. Buffyspeak is not real Valleyspeak and Firefly is in its own gorram universe of language. It's archaic, it's futuristic and it's just plain odd. Yet it is always understandable. I can't think of another scriptwriter with such a love of words and wordplay as Whedon. There's the fact that I unconsciously call things that are good "shiny" (I had to explain it to a colleague recently) or that "scary visual place" evokes a particular voice in my head. Sometimes, in an idle moment, I wonder if a handful of Firefly fans using "shiny" to denote "good" will eventually spread the word, meme-like, until the fictional meaning comes to be the norm. Then there is "corpsified" which is just a great word.

The big problem is writing Firefly fiction which evokes its futurespeak without just borrowing phrases wholesale. That's a problem with any fanfic: badfic sites always mentioning the borrowing of memorable phrases. I've been a member of the worthless word of the day mailing list for a long while now and it struck me tonight that here is a source for archaic and/or obscure words to use in Firefly fanfic. F'example:

picaroon
[Spanish picaron] /pik uh ROON/
1) a rogue or adventurer; a bohemian
2) a pirate, corsair
3) a small pirate ship
carnaptious
[fr. Sc. knap, to bite] /ka(r) NAP shus/
Scots & Irish dial. : bad-tempered, irritable, grumpy
cahooting
[fr. cahoots : collaboration, collusion]
conspiring, plotting

See? Hours of fun.

no power in the verse can stop me

What with all this new found Mal-lust, and the fact I have 1400 words of firefly fic in progress (subject to change when I get around to reading the Serenity mini-series comic*) I've decided the time has come for version 3 of the order of aurelius and this here blog. The site's going to be an archive just of my fic without all the other fripperies and folderols. I guess it'll divide into Buffyverse and Fireflyverse sections but I've been learning some css and rss tricks and I'll be using them to make it smooth. Well, maybe I can do a fic rec thing, using some cute code to make it easy to maintain...

So anyway, this is advance notice that these pages may go all squiffy for a bit whilst I piss about with code.

*which no-one told me was filling in the gaps between Objects in Space and Serenity (film). I thought it was one of those dreadful tie-in comic versions of the film and thus avoided it. And #1 is rare. Grrr.

update: the comic shop had #3, but not #1 and #2. Have got them on order.

Sure is a purdy lookin' fella

Well.

That was unexpected.

I went to see Serenity at the weekend, like all good Joss fans bumping up the take. Actually, I went twice. But at different cinemas in different cities so no-one realised I was being a menky geek. I should probably point out I was in different cities on account of travelling for work (i.e. the second viewing is on expenses).

I was late to the Firefly fan party, seeing as the phrase "Western in space" just makes me think of gou-su like Star Trek. Then when I did fall for Firefly, I fell hard. But not for any one character, or any particular pairing, just for the whole gorram set-up and story-telling. Not one of the characters got me all tingling, or caused hot and sweaty thoughts about their nekkidity. This was, I thought, a sign of my own growth and maturity. Hells, even Spike doesn't cause the same naughty thoughts as he used to. See, growth and maturity. No more crushes on fictional characters for me.

So I'm a bit surprised to discover I have developed a crush on Mal. Course, he's a bit nastier in the film and thus appealing to the side of me that likes men with dark violent thoughts but still...

(Although the nekkidity still ain't appealing. Semi-clothed. Semi-clothed is good...)

Three Deep

pimpage for Three Deep, the multi-universe, multi-programme, mutli-lovered, multi-everything virtual season by alira, Barb C, Cyn, Dori, dutchbuffy, Kalima, Klytaimnestra, macha, pip and Sylvia. Yep, that's one heck of a writing team.

extra pimpage

My pal Mags's novel is now available via both amazon dot co dot uk and amazon dot com at the very fair prices of UKP9.02 and USD12.21. Eligible for free delivery and despatched in 24 hours.

What's that? Why buy it? It is not Buffy, Angel, Spire nor anything Whedonesque...?

It's set in the Boxer Rebellion and was provoked by watching Fool for Love too many times. It has kick-boxing heroines fighting it out with sabres. What more could you want?

Otters

What are you?
I'm an otter. I swim around on my back doing cute little human things with my hands.
Thank you, you're free to go. What are you?
I'm a cow--
Get on the back of the truck!
-- Bill Hicks.

Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman in conversation. They are otters.

Gaiman: One of the reasons that both Joss and I can do some of the stuff that we've done over the years is because you're working in a medium in which enough stuff has simply entered popular culture that it becomes part of the vocabulary that we can deal with. The materials of fantasy, of all different kinds of fantasy, the materials of SF, the materials of horror...it's pop culture. It's tattooed on the insides of our retinas. As a result, it's something that's very easy just to use as metaphor. You don't have to explain to anybody what a vampire is. You don't have to explain the rules. Everybody knows that. They know that by the time they're five.

Want. Take. Have.

Buffy seasons 1-7 in one chuffing big box.

It's Not Porn, I Swear!

I am silent on the Buffyverse front. Although I am not sure whether to be amused or alarmed by the idea of a Spike movie. When someone raised it - and the various points at which it could be set - I realised I had passed the Fanfic Event Horizon because it didn't occur to me for at least five minutes that, you know, it won't be set after Angel because Spike is probably dead. I read so much post-Angel fic with Spike who survived the alleyway that I totally forgot that canonically he's dead. Again. I'm half thinking "isn't he in Rome fighting the Immortal?" before remembering that is only in Mortal Wounds, Treacle_A's fic.

Meanwhile, I have seen Serenity.

I'm also having strange feelings for the hobbity actor from Lost. All these years of Spike lust have left me programmed to like whichever character in an American series who:
a) is English
b) has a regional accent
c) is prone to rock star behaviour
d) is a scruffy skank.
Thus I find Mason from Dead Like Me rather sweet despite the fact he'd be an utter millstone if you knew him and am now considering ignoring Charlie's lack of height. Thank the Gods I don't watch House.

My main online pasttime these days is being snarky in the comments on Bam's blog. It's Not Porn, I Swear. It is Evil. It is fun.

Once More With Sequins

If I had time and photoshop skillls...

Once More Wtih Feeling by Nora Roberts cover.

extra pimpage

Smile Time : the comic.

"Angel wants to blow off steam. Things don't go quite as expected."

It's a six page comic strip of puppet!Angel and Spike. It's so adorable that everyone should read it.

more pimpage

In Between by M Phoenix (rated R).
Post-Chosen. Faith/Kennedy. Yeah, it's not a pairing I ever thought I'd go for, but it's well written and has, y'know, themes and stuff.

Unaccomodated Man by Kindkit (rated NC-17)
Giles/Oz. Mildly AU, post-Phases. Well-drawn characters, good use of themes and imagery. Hot sex.

once in the Boxer Rebellion...

I'm not dead. True, I've been absent for a very long time. You can, if you wish, imagine I have been living off rats and listening to Barry Manilow for the last year. It's not true, and I prefer to think of myself hanging around the Left Bank being all artsy - possibly saying "ciao" too much - but I am still alive. And pimping.

To wit:
Faction Paradox : Warring States
(read a preview here)

This is a novel by someone close to me and is set in the Boxer Rebellion. Mags had never even heard of the Boxer Rebellion until she watched Buffy and was utterly smitten by the Gang of Four's walk through the fire in Fool for Love. As a result, she started to research the period, then she wrote this novel set during it. It's about war, loss and reconnection; the dual between rational and spiritual; trust and betrayal. Plus, big fight scenes, oddles of blood, time-travelling Victorian voodoo cultists and tai chi.

Her editor, knowing her love of all things Spikey and being a bit of a Buffy fan himself, has done his best to remove all references to vampires from it but there are a few little nods and winks (especially for anyone who's read Mr Grieves and the Fallen Woman). And if you look hard at the cover you might notice something familiar about the western woman's clothing. If you like my writing then you might like Mags', although she is much less prone to ensuring Spike flesh is involved.

The same publisher will be publishing the sublime Kalima's novel Erasing Sherlock later this year so clearly it is a company of taste!

End of pimp

(oh, except for a swift pimp for another WIP - Three Deep by Barb C, Kalima etc etc)