What's Good?  Thanks to hearts_blood, I did get August's recommendation-of-the-month up this past Tuesday, setting a new lateness record.  (Sorry! My blunder!)  So what do I think is so much worth the time in the little bit of August left?  Her Vachon character sketch "Nocturnal Pleasure" (2003).

        Which meant that if he skipped town, Nick would kill him, and if he brought Tracy across, Nick would kill him, and if he didn't bring Tracy across, the Enforcers would kill them both.

What's New?  In July, fkfic-l saw two authors posting three new stories.  ( List with Links )

So sign-ups continue at two upcoming FK-eligible ficathons: gen_ficathon (sign-up deadline 25 June) and oldschoolfic (sign-up deadline 30 June).  I've now signed up for one, and will sign up for the other in time.

Because the gen_ficathon sign-ups are public, I can share a current FK-participation tally:

• FK Prompts Submitted: 4 (here, here, here, and here)
  
• FK Writers Offering: 5 (here, in addition to those above)

Because oldschoolfic's sign-ups are screened, I can't do the same, but they have achieved at least one FK story in each of their previous events.

Stray thought:  You know what it seems as if no one requests?  Vachon's crew.  Surely someone should prompt for Urs, Screed, Bourbon and the wide-eyed guy with the hair...

What's good?  I'm running late on the recommendations project this month; my apologies.  Now that we're here, I am so pleased to get to highlight the energetic, enthusiastic, insightful, 1995 novel "Protect and Serve" by butterflykiki!  This unique angle on the Enforcers focuses on the human characters.

Natalie:	"Do you ever think that our lives would be a lot simpler if we just gave up on the secrecy and published the truth in the Enquirer, Nick?"
Nick:	"I don't need my life simplified that much."

What's new?  In October, fkfic-l saw one new story, a one-parter titled "Hallowe'en" by Walt D.  (Yea, Walt!)  November, by comparison, has gotten off to a sprinter's start, with three stories by three authors already!

I've spent most of my fandom hobby time lately working on my oldschoolfic ficathon story.  I got an FK prompt!  And I'm trying to deliver an episode-like response, cop-plot and all.  Eeep!  (Cop-plot stuff is hard.)  Yet in the "vacuum the cat" tradition of ducking the dreaded blank page by any means available, I've also made my second batch of "up for grabs" FK icons (below); the first was that Natpacker set, of course, and so I've now made a smattering of userpics for most other factions.  If you pick one up, please let me know, and credit as appropriate.  Constructive criticism is also welcome.

The original screenshots for many of these come from Nancy T.'s Knight Watchman; others come from Kristen's Knight Vision; and a few have actually been on my hard drive since the series was still on the air (uh, successive hard drives, that is ~g~).  I believe the FK logo GIF with the red letters was created by Nancy K.

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Someday, I may write a sequel to this novella, and it may be called "Under a Long Shadow."  Someday.  If I figure out the theme.  I know what happens next, you see, but I'm not sure it matters, because "In the Light of Day" fulfills its whole original purpose.  To write, I must have purpose.

"In the Light of Day" is a parallel-reality tale.  The break with canon comes after "Fever," and the story then progresses through "Dead of Night," "The Games Vampires Play" and "The Human Factor," reworking each episode given Nick's new mortality, until things are so different that the parallel snaps, and the alternate reality floats free.

One tidbit of which I'm fond here is Natalie's on-the-fly psychoanalysis of Lacroix, in which she concludes that no one will ever love another person as much as he has, over eight centuries, convinced himself he loved Fleur.  I also like the garden I built for Feliks Twist (but I really owe him a nice story of his own for his fate here).  And the flashbacks!  I did more research for them than any before or since (so far).  For this story, I became queen of a certain slice of Trivial Pursuit questions.  :-)

	•	Title:	"In the Light of Day"
	•	Length:	~53,000 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L in October 2003
	•	Rating:	PG-13
	•	Summary:	Nick regains his humanity, but he's not the only one.  And no one is prepared for all the consequences.
	•	Setting:	After "Fever," with flashbacks 1226-1228
	•	Characters:	Natalie, Nick, Norma, Stonetree, Urs, Tracy, Reese, Vachon, Feliks Twist, Lacroix, Myra Schanke, Janette, Others
	•	Quotation:	"Nick strolled back to his loft in the crisp morning light, feeling everything was right with his world. Granted, his arm was in a sling, his shoulder throbbed like thunder, he remained on enforced medical leave, his partner might never again pass a police physical, and the Enforcers could well be coming to get him and the woman he loved..."

My meta-parody "Grievances" is one of those few pieces that have never yet made it to fkfic-l.  I archived it on Bright Knight in 2001, but as far as I knew, no one read it until tv_elf recommended it on her LJ two years ago, when several people kindly commented on it.

It was my first attempt at comedy (well, since my contributions to the My Parental Units Invaded Earth and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt FK/DS/XF humor zine, anyway).

	•	Title:	"Grievances"
	•	Length:	~2,900 words
	•	Date:	Summer 2001
	•	Rating:	G
	•	Summary:	Canonical characters organize to protest the working conditions in fanfiction.
	•	Setting:	Where characters await stories
	•	Characters:	Vachon, Fleur, Janette, Lacroix, Schanke, Cohen, Stonetree, Nick, Natalie, Others
	•	Quotation:	"Bad day on the fic list?  Let me guess -- you spent an entire shift making love to Tracy Vetter for no emotionally established reason in no logically explained manner, and you need an aspirin and a shower?"

 

Putting this fanfiction retrospective back on chronological track, the next story up is "England's Rose."  It seems peculiar now, over a decade later, on this side of 9/11 and war and all the rest, the volume of grief lavished on Princess Diana's loss.  But at that time, much of a generation saw a mirror crack, and felt their reflection shatter.  Natalie is part of that generation.

FK's timeline warps to accommodate this story.  "Nobody dies, nobody ever dies," so that the entire cast can register reactions.

	•	Title:	"England's Rose"
	•	Length:	~5,572 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L in September 1997
	•	Rating:	PG
	•	Summary:	Princess Diana's death distresses Natalie and reminds Nick of Queen Caroline.
	•	Setting:	August 31 and September 6, 1997; Flashbacks 1981 and 1783
	•	Characters:	Natalie, Sara, Grace, Schanke, Nick, Janette, Lacroix, Urs, Vachon, Screed, Tracy, Cohen
	•	Quotation:	"Natalie had turned nineteen the summer of the royal wedding, and there had been something inescapably exciting about watching this girl, her own age, walk onto the world stage."

 

This was my first lengthy fanfiction.  I'm still pleased with it.  It shows traits of its age (among other things, I appear to have owned stock in semi-colons), but it musters an actual mystery, and builds a future and a past for the characters.  When writing it, I didn't make an outline, and I'm not sure I even knew how it would end when I began -- imperatives when writing today -- but it came like an onrushing wave, covering all the ground, and then there it was.

Tracy's guy, Paul, is my best original character yet.  Her coworkers and the people from whom she gets clues aren't just stick figures, either.  I seem to have felt much more free to invent guest stars in those days, for some reason.  You can't let them overshadow the canonical characters, of course, but the presence of guest stars is certainly canonical; rereading this story has made me wonder where that's gone for me.

	•	Title:	"Corners of the Mind"
	•	Length:	~32,200 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L in June 1997
	•	Rating:	PG-13
	•	Summary:	Resurging memories plunge Tracy into the unsolved mysteries of Natalie's murder and Nick and Vachon's disappearances.
	•	Setting:	Three years after "Last Knight"
	•	Characters:	Tracy, Reese, Lacroix, Janette, Vachon, Screed, Bourbon, Jenny Schanke, Others
	•	Quotation:	"She told him everything she had learned about that wrinkle in their reality -- everything, except that her own blood spoke of apricots and calla lilies. For now, she kept that to herself."

Fluff.  Utter, unremitting fluff.  My first fiction response to "Last Knight" was apparently thoroughgoing denial wrapped in sappiness and sprinkled with humor.  Eeep!  A few years on, this would have been satire, but at the time, I meant it just as it is.

	•	Title:	"Happiness Is"
	•	Length:	~1,700 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L in June 1996
	•	Rating:	G
	•	Summary:	Natalie and Nick chat about friends and family, happily ever after.
	•	Setting:	"Nobody Dies; Nobody Ever Dies"
	•	Characters:	Natalie, Nick, references to everyone else (that's right: everyone!)
	•	Quotation:	"How about you, Natalie Lambert Knight, love of my eight hundred and four years?  Are you happy?"

I wrote "Guitars and Roses" in the week between "Ashes to Ashes" and "Last Knight," and posted it to fkfic-l a few hours before I saw LK.  I had a Hamlet quotation in my signature line at the time, and with all the fannish grief in the air -- the story was written with someone mourning Vachon in mind -- many people naturally read the "sweet prince" as a reference to their own characters (well, the factions with male leads, anyway).  In rereading this piece, I was interested to rediscover that the story's Lacroix is convinced that Tracy was in love with Vachon; I've personally since been swayed to the position that she was not, or, at any rate, was doing her best to choose not to be.  Not that that makes her loss any less.  Or changes what Lacroix would have seen.

	•	Title:	"Guitars and Roses"
	•	Length:	~1,100 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L in May 1996
	•	Rating:	G
	•	Summary:	Lacroix approaches Tracy at the Raven after Vachon's death and Nick's request.
	•	Setting:	After "Ashes to Ashes," before "Last Knight"
	•	Characters:	Lacroix, Tracy
	•	Quotation:	"He had promised Nicholas, after all.  But when he had promised, he had not known she was in love."