Makoyi's Fanfic Recs and Other Stuff

Title: Of a Linear Circle
Author: flamethrower
Fandom: Harry Potter
Genre: AU, Historical, Founders , World-building
Pairing: Severus Snape/Nizar Slytherin
Length: Epic (700,000 words and counting)

Author's Summary:
In September of 1971, Severus Snape finds a forgotten portrait of the Slytherin family in a dark corner of the Slytherin Common Room. At the time, he has no idea that talking portrait will affect the rest of his life.

Harry Potter's fifteenth birthday starts off just like all the others...for the first few seconds, at least. The gift he receives changes his entire life.

Review:
Absolutely amazing! I love the care taken with the Founders Era culture and history, the rich OCs, the well-rounded and independent background characters coming forward, the plot twists, the wonderful writing style... just everything!  Read this!

Of a Linear Circle (on AO3)

Title: Not using filter words in a first person point of view
Author: the-writers-society-deactivated
Genre: nonfiction, resources for writers

Author's Summary:

Hello! Would you mind doing an example of not using filter words in a first person point of view? While I know that you can just switch out the pronouns for I/me/my, I just want to see it in action and when you should (and shouldn't) use the filter words. Thank you!

the-writers-society-deactivated: Hi there! I would love to! I think I’ll start out with an example with filter words and then cut out the filter words to show you the difference.
For those of you who haven’t seen my post on Filter Words.

Review:
Fantastic writing advice if you're struggling to make your first person pov stories seem less passive or reactive!

Not using filter words in a first person point of view (on tumblr)

Title: One More Time
Author: TheWinsomeWasp
Fandom: Queer As Folk
Genre: Time Travel (Redo)
Pairing: primarily Justin/Brian
Length: Very Long (106,080 words and counting)

Author's Summary:
The night of Brian's funeral Justin wakes up in his 17 year old body - what would you do?

Review:
I make no secret of my love of redo time travel, but this is fast becoming on of my favorites. I love the reassessment of priorities which is common to redo fics, but I also love the less common themes like the relationship Justin develops with his grandmother, how he pulls his resources (limited at the beginning) to make sure he avoids or at least does better with some of the bad things he knows are coming. And I LOVE the moment that Justin and Brian are reunited - the feels! Also, features artists, making art, and the art business which I love to see in fics.  It's not just all good things though - Justin's relationship with his mother, Michael's mother, and his old friends is lost - which is sad, but more real than if everything went his way.

One More Time (on AO3)

Title: GNU Terry Pratchett
Fandom: Discworld
Genre: Code!, Terry Pratchett Tribute

Author's Summary:
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the clacks are a series of semaphore towers loosely based on the concept of the telegraph. Invented by an artificer named Robert Dearheart, the towers could send messages "at the speed of light" using standardized codes. Three of these codes are of particular import:

G: send the message on
N: do not log the message
U: turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again

When Dearheart's son John died due to an accident while working on a clacks tower, Dearheart inserted John's name into the overhead of the clacks with a "GNU" in front of it to as a way to memorialize his son forever (or for at least as long as the clacks are standing.)

Review:
Fan code! This is really cool and a lovely tribute. Installing this script automatically places the phrase "GNU Terry Pratchett" in the "overhead" of your blog posts (variants available for tons of different sites) like the GNU John Dearheart in the clacks in Going Postal.

GNU Terry Pratchett (on own site)

Title: The Rivers of London Rap
Author: Doc Brown and Mikis Michaelides
Fandom: Rivers of London
Genre: song and vid
Length: 4m23s

Author's Summary:
A semi-"official" (has the canon author's approval, but still a fan work) rap written and performed in music video format by professional entertainer (and big Rivers of London fan) Doc Brown about the first 3 books in the Rivers of London series.

Review:
This is a professional quality music video and a great original rap that even people who don't like rap much can enjoy.

The Rivers of London Rap (on youtube)

Title: Mister Vimes'd Go Spare!
Author: Lunik
Fandom: Discworld
Genre: Post-canon
Length: Short (Words: 4,836)
Admin Note: rec'd on fancake

Author's Summary:
In the wake of the death of his Grace Sir Samuel Vimes, the various city watches across the disc are brought together in a way seldom observed among coppers.

Review:
So you know how, on the Disc, some things (like the laws of physics, the flow of time and causality, and the existence of gods) are a matter of belief? And you know how there are "Sammies" all over the Disc? Yeah. See Commander Vimes would probably be horrified of the idea but, the thing is, this fic makes so much sense it might just become your new headcanon.  The concept is great, but the execution, the details of it and especially of the kind of God of Watchmen that Sam Vimes would be, are just so perfect in this fic - it's fantastic.

Mister Vimes'd Go Spare! (on AO3)

I happened across a TED Talk by Sarah Kay yesterday and I was an instant fan so I have to share.  She also has a TEDx here and her own website is kaysarahsera.com.  I love the rhythm and lyrical voice.  I love the imagery and the advice.  Her work is imaginative and evocative and also the sort of work that inspires those qualities in others.  I also really like hearing her talk about getting into poetry in the first of the links - firstly because she's a joy to listen to whether she's performing a poem or telling a story or explaining how she teaches reluctant teenagers, but secondly (and perhaps more importantly) because the way that she tells us the story is kind of magical.  I mean, it's not like "the moment it all began" can ever really be called mundane, but the situation she described could have been, if she'd told it another way.  But she didn't - she told it as her own Call to Adventure, for her own real life story.  I think there's a lesson in life and a lesson in story telling in that for all of us.  Even if you're not normally a poetry fan, give her a chance because she's just amazing.

Title:  No Reservations: Narnia
Author: Edonohana 
Fandom: Narnia, No Reservations, RPF
Genre:  General, Crossover, Meta
Length: Short (Words: 6,228)
note: rec'd on fancake

Author's Summary:
I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table.

Review:
Anthony Bourdain meets Reepicheep!  I can't believe I haven't rec'd this one yet.  It sounds so crack-y but it's not.  It's well done as a story and it actually has something kind of profound to say.  This story is about a real travel show going to a perfect place but it's not quite what you might expect.  Because what they find isn't a predictably Narnia-esque discovery about goodness and faith as beauty (which would never work with a No Reservations crossover).  But nor is it, as in many deconstructions of perfection, that it's a place where surface perfection hides an ugly truth. 

They find, as so often happens in No Reservations, that traveling somewhere fantastic is seldom everything you'd imagined, but that doesn't make it any less perfect or less beautiful and that encountering new cultures is a journey of self-discovery but a relativistic one with meaningful uncertainty and bigger questions rather than the obvious answers of a life lived unchallenged.  And when it comes to Narnia specifically, they find that there is a strange power to perfect even if its not what they imagined perfect would be.  And in a weird way, I think that combination really speaks about a kind of faith independent of religion.  It's a faith that CS Lewis probably wouldn't recognize as such, but still.  And it does it without talking about faith at all, but by talking about Narnia.

And I'm not sure that message could have been told quite so well or quite so profoundly (and especially not so efficiently - this is less than 7k words, remember) without using Narnia's allegory and No Reservations' template of (paradoxically) ambiguous discovery as a medium - which I think represents the pinnacle of fanfiction.

Now, I don't actually know if Edonohana set out to write a profound commentary on faith and the clash of imagined ideals and reality.  It's entirely possible they just thought it would make for a funny story - and it is funny and it has beautiful descriptions for people and places and food (that amazingly manage to stand in pretty effectively for the missing visuals of No Reservations) too.  The Anthony Bourdain voice is incredible and just perfectly nails both the snarky irreverence and the relativistic acceptance of canon... which is a little trippy beside the allegorical fantasy world of Narnia.  Maybe I'm reading into this things that aren't actually there.  But that in itself sounds a lot like a line out of No Reservations, so maybe there's something to it after all.

No Reservations: Narnia (on AO3)
podfic available (on AO3) - though frankly the author got Anthony Bourdain's voice so spot on that I really recommend reading it because part of the magic of the crossover is how easy it is to hear him narrate it

Now with cover art:

Title:  The World on His Wrist
Author: bendingsignpost aka bendingsignpost 
Fandom: Sherlock BBC
Genre:  AU, SciFi
Length: Long (Words:~65.4k)
Admin Note: rec'd on TVTropes, rec'd on fancake

Author's Summary:
First, he is shot in Afghanistan. Second, he wakes to a phone call in Chelmsford, Essex. Third is pain, fourth is normalcy, fifth is agony and sixth is confusion. By the eighth, he's lost track. (John-centric AU)

Review:
This is a brilliant, amazing, wonderful fic.  It's very confusing at first but gets better after the prologue.  The concept reminds me a lot of the short-lived TV show Awake, though this fic came first.  Basically, every time John wakes up, its to 1 randomly selected life in progress (out of four that he's living concurrently).  One's in Afghanistan, one's with Sherlock, and two others are more mundane.  John uses different watches on different wrists to tell immediately upon waking which of the lives he's in.  This fic juggles all sorts of complicated issues like John having to struggle to keep the lives as close to in sync as possible since he's not always awake for the same amount of time in each one before he falls asleep, even for a catnap, and wakes up in another.  Plus, John's proactive, making the plot happen with his choices, gathering information across his lives, and using it to get things he cares about done.  I love the plot, with John coming around to view his predicament as an almost superpower to put him on level with Sherlock's observation skills.  It's such a complex fic and so, so well written.

The World on His Wrist (on LJ) (on AO3) and sequel Elsewhere Come Morning (also on LJ) (on AO3)