Valentine Fanfic flashbacks: Inside Track and You Can’t Resist It

Hey, everybody – Happy Valentine’s Day! Did you get a chance to try the Ferris Wheel Google Doodle? What was your favorite animal love match? I kinda dug the hippo and the bird myself – at least they look like they’re having fun on the sled. 😉

I’m a bit of a Valentine’s scrooge, but trying to look for the bright side of the holiday today reminded me of a few sweet and Roswell stories that I’ve written in years past involving the season, so I’m going to ramble a bit about them, and give links to fanfiction.net in case you want to read more.

Six Sentence Sunday – climax of ‘Un-brotherly love’

Hi everybody! This time, I just had to share a bit from a Roswell fanfiction story that I’ve been working on, just because I was getting to the big moment on Friday evening and having so much fun writing it!

He charged blindly on, but could feel the alien ooze covering him from head to toe, sealing him in – he couldn’t breathe through it, couldn’t open his eyes without the Gandarium blinding him, and that meant…

“Oooh, gross.” As Kyle collapsed, somebody else’s hands gently rubbed the worst of the ooze off his face, as his own badly tainted fingers wouldn’t have been able to do. That wasn’t enough, but a little bit at a time water was applied to wash away the rest of the residue over his eyes, and Kyle looked up gratefully at Liz Parker, his savior.

“Tess?” he croaked, and got something slimy inside his mouth, and gagged instinctively. He tried to spit, but couldn’t as long as his head was pointing up, so he turned over, and immediately felt more goo oozing onto his forehead, and his flesh crawled anew.

Musing about muses.

I’ve been thinking a bit about muses lately – ever since dropping by Iggi and Gabi’s blog this weekend. Gabi is a middle grade and young adult author, a fellow campaigner. Iggi is her muse, and it’s a somewhat cute but odd-looking critter.

My muse doesn’t really have a name. I’m sure that she’s been hanging around my life ever since I was a little boy, but she was invisible until I started looking for her, which was during my Roswell fanfic phase, because a lot of my friends over at Roswell Fanatics were talking about their muses. So, when mine finally appeared to me, she showed up looking a lot like Shiri Appleby, who played Liz Parker on the show. She’s also usually around 20 centimeters tall, subject to change, and flies around without wings. Even though I’m no longer so Roswell-obsessed as I used to be, Musey appears to like that shape and has shown no signs of changing it in order to look like some newer fad.

I don’t usually see my muse at all when I’m writing, but I’m glad that I went out and found her like I did, it’s a nice way to remind me that she’s there, supporting my creative energy and doing everything she can to keep me inspired.

So – have you ever spotted your muse? If so, what is he/she/it like? If not, would you like to find a muse?

Fanfic Flashback: Divergence

This was an idea for a fan fiction story that I had been mulling over for a long time before I finally started to set it down on New Year’s eve, 2004, with the encouragement of a great friend in the Roswell fandom community, TrueLovePooh. In fact, it was actually one of those stories that had two ideas thrown together to see what became of them.

The first idea was ‘what if Alex’s death was faked by aliens?’ The way that Colin Hanks’ character, Alex Whitman, was killed off the show has always been a downward turning point in my mind – I understand some of the reasons that Ronald Moore did it, he was trying to help free Colin up for more movie work, and had the story about a high school friend of his dying in a car accident to work with – but Colin wouldn’t have wanted to do movies if they’d been able to write better plots for Alex. But anyway…

Fanfiction flashback: Not Written Yet

Okay, since a lot of readers seem to have liked my posts about fanarts and vidding, and my walks down memory lane about Roswell and Buffy, I’ve decided to start a series of posts about my fanfiction writing, and some of what I like most about the favorite fanfics I’ve written or what they’ve taught me. To start with, I’d like to tell you a bit about a Roswell story called “Not Written Yet“, which I wrote between January and April of 2005. By the way, I’m going to be spoiling the fanfic later on, so if you’d like to read it fresh, you should click on the link now.

One of the things I love most about writing fanfiction in the Roswell universe is how much fun it can be to fix the writer’s mistakes. Not Written Yet is a fix for an episode of the show called “End of the World”, which was broadcast during November sweeps in season two of the show. It’s really a turning point in the plot and character arcs for the entire season, really – and a time travel story to boot. The premise is, that a thirty-something version of Max Evans (Jason Behr,) comes back in time to tell Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby,) that in the life he lived, the two of them finally sorted out their relationship issues, lived a happy life for many years without any more angst – until eventually the fact that they were together meant the apocalypse and all of their friends dying. Future Liz helps to find a way to use an alien artifact to send her Max back through a rift in space-time to fix what went wrong, though she doesn’t have any regrets.

Future Max goes on to tell Present Liz that the events of the next few days are going to be critical to the precarious love triangle between herself, Max, and Tess Harding. In Future Max’s timeline, he asked Liz to go to a concert with him, Liz said no, Max kept asking, somehow they ended up having sex, Tess found out, and she left town in a huff. Future Max figures that’s where everything went wrong, because Tess has strong alien abilities and if she’d stayed with the rest of the gang, they’d be able to guard themselves against danger better.

So – Liz and Future Max try several things to keep these events from playing out, and eventually Liz gets her ex-boyfriend Kyle in on the scheming, though he doesn’t know about the time-traveller part. When Max comes to Liz’s balcony at the date and time Future Max predicted that they’d ‘cement their relationship,’ he finds Kyle already with Liz in bed, and jumps to the obvious, but not entirely accurate conclusion about what’s happened. Max is heartbroken, runs into Tess in the park, talks and bonds with her a bit, and Future Max whiffs out of existence, saying that his work has done and the last fifteen years of his life will never happen now.

Roswell

R is for…

Long-time readers of this blog will have probably heard me mention the television show ‘Roswell’, especially in connection with the fanfic and fanart I’ve created based on the show. It’s a bit of an interesting story how I got so involved in Roswell fandom. It’s not really one of the best shows that have been on television, but I think that possibly its flaws are just big enough to give fans room to slip through and play on their own.

I tuned into the show in the fall of 1999, after it had been on the air for a few months – mostly because I wanted to see what Julie Benz was up to since leaving Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ironically, the first episode I saw was the end of Julie’s recurring arc on the show – she returned for one more episode later in the season, and I caught most of her other episodes in reruns, but that was all for Julie.

But I started following the show – the teenage leads had some charisma working for them, the writing was witty and engaging, (Jason Katims knows his stuff, and so does most of the writing team he put together,) and most of the plot holes that crept up were easy to gloss over.

Around this same time I was participating in a crazy crossover RPG on egroups, and later yahoo groups – Roswell wasn’t part of the canon for the RPG, just Buffy, Angel, Charmed, and the movie ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ It was a lot of fun, and the moderator of the game was also a big fan of Roswell. She ended up pointing me to a few fan sites, and gave me my first taste of Roswell shipper controversy.

To explain this part fairly briefly, over most of the first season of the show, there were roughly parallel romantic arcs between three couples in the show’s teenage cast – Max Evans with Liz Parker, Michael Guerin with Maria DeLuca, Isabel Evans with Alex Whitman. Each of these pairs was one alien character, (Max, Michael, Isabel) and one human, (Liz, Maria, Alex.) There was also another teenage regular human, Kyle Valenti, Liz’s ex-boyfriend, but he was more of a foil for Max than anything else at this point.

Fanart 5: Max/Liz banners for ‘Not Written Yet’ and ‘Las Cruces Rendezvous…’

Fanart series index.

I thought I’d spotlight two different fanfiction banners for this week – I did them both during July of 2009, and they’re both centering on ‘Dreamer’ pairing stories. First, ‘Not Written Yet’, which I wrote and finished many years ago, in the winter and spring of 2005, an alternate version of the episode ‘End of the world.’