In
Their Own Words
25
July 2001
This
is the section where some of our favorite authors will share with
us (and you) their favorite stories from among their own work. The
lovely and talented Pix mentioned this idea to me in an e-mail,
saying how she thought it might be an interesting contrast with
the typical recommendations lists so prevalent on fan fic websites.
I,
of course, immediately wondered the same thing, and so, here we
are. This will be a weekly feature (we hope), with past Authors'
Picks being archived on a page called "From
the Desk of..."
So,
let us begin...
Today
we have Sarah T., who writes the best Ethan/Giles stuff I've read.
And she's pretty damn good at post-Gift Dawn fic as well.. Click
on the name of the story within the text below if you'd like to
read it.
Sarah
says...
"My
favorite of my stories is "Serves
in a Whirlwind" (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). It's
my choice because I feel it manages to accomplish two things very
much to my taste in fanfic, especially slash: it hews very close
to canon, and it presents a villain in love who still acts like
a villain. Ethan/Giles has always been one of the easiest pairings
to justify canonically--one of the reasons I'm so fond of it--and
I treated them in "Whirlwind"
very much as the show has. There are a lot of things you can't
do when you're being that restrained (like, say, smut!), but it
does require less extravagant extrapolation, and that worked to
my advantage, I think, as I tried to maintain the atmosphere of
the series in the story. Ethan, in particular, manages to retain
his integrity despite his feelings for Giles. He's very much in
love with him, but that doesn't make him a good or even an unselfish
person, and it also doesn't mean he necessarily understands him.
He wants to help him, but he has to do it on his own terms. Which
means, ultimately, that he can't, not without compromising
Giles morally or personally, and even at the end he doesn't really
grasp why. Nor does Giles understand the depth of Ethan's feeling,
the strange ways it works in his strange soul; he's blind, and therefore
unjust, to the better aspects of Ethan's nature. This inevitably
means tragedy--and yet, since each of them, almost despite himself,
manages to do something to give the other a little peace, love is
not wholly in vain.
I
also have a terrible soft spot for my very first slash story, "Turnabout,"
which was not only my first slash story, but the first
one ever finished in the fandom (Dracula: the Series). I
don't find explicit sex scenes easy to write, but apparently back
then I hadn't realized that--to my mind, "Turnabout" has my most
elegant and evocative sex scene ever. I get nostalgic rereading
it."
~~*~~
So
there you have it -- Sarah T., in her own words...
~~*~~
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