I'm a teacher, academic, and published literary critic -- British, male, middle-aged, and tall, with too many cats. (The one looking at you from my userpic is the original of ImpSec, by the way.)

And in every case, most of the characters and settings used belong to the authors of canon, and are used without permission, for fun, not for profit.

To follow any of the embedded links you must use right click and open link.

The Peaceful Vorkosiverse

Comprising Forward Momentum, The Christening Tour, Not Place but People, The Two Ivans, Tug-of-Vor, Vor and Peace, Uncle?, The Peace Memorial, & The Propaganda Cycle -- preferably in that order.

The whole thing was also an experiment, as the summary says. LMB has that rule-of-thumb about when in doubt having the worst thing happen, and my father used to say that if you wanted to test a proposition, try turning it round -- so I wound up with the idea of having good things happen instead, which made me think hard about what spilt milk Miles would want to unspill if he could, and off I went. Several hundred thousand words later ...

Risking a plug, for those as might be interested I've written about Bujold and some of the Vorkosiverse fanfic, including my own AU, in a couple of essays collected in a volume called Of Sex and Faerie: Further Essays on Genre Fiction (Humanities-Ebooks, 2010, and available as a PDF from HEB's site, from Troubador in pbk, and through Amazon's Kindle stores; the PDF is recommended for tablets or anything else with a larger screen). In part, Forward Momentum was an alternative and a companion-piece to the straight Vorkosiverse essay in that volume, called 'Of Marriage and Mutations: LMB and the Several Lives of Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan'; the other stories in the Peaceful Vorkosiverse were left-over plot-bunnies that did what plot-bunnies do, and their children. And the process of writing both non-fic and fic as a response to Bujold's remarkable work led to the second essay, called 'Of Criticism and Continuities: A Personal Account of Serial Reading in the Age of the Web', which includes a brief historical account of fic that has some C19 and earlier C20 material I haven't seen cited elsewhere.

The complete AU is also posted both at LiveJournal and AO3 (I'm Bracketyjack in both places). Both sites present long material rather more readably than FFN, and allow proper section-breaks. AO3 also allows downloads in a variety of formats, for those who'd like to read on a mobile device.

I try to reply to all comments, but it's impossible here on FFN unless the commenter is a member. If you're not, but would like to discuss something, PM me with an eddress (which you will have to spell out using DOT and AT, or it will automatically be removed by FFN's nannyware) and I'll try to get back to you ASAP.

I also edit writing on genre fiction for Humanities-Ebooks, so if anyone is interested in writing non-fictionally about their favourite genre work -- whether crime, SF&F, YA and children's lit, romance, or whatever -- do please get in touch by PM'ing me. You don't have to be an experienced writer for publication, but there does need to be something you'd like to say about a book or series that matters to you. And while the rules about quoting fanfiction in print are kinda murky, there is nothing to stop anyone writing about fanfiction for publication -- and such work would be very welcome. God knows there's enough stuff out there that deserves serious comment : just think of it as properly courteous reviewing writ large ...

B'Jack

October 2011

Five Scenes in the Life of Elizabeth III

This reverse-angle fic (not my usual thing) came into existence as the overlong prologue of a novel to be called Honor Among Thieves, in which Honor was decisively to short-circuit David Weber's increasingly glacial timeline, whack High Ridge and his vile cronies until their eyes lurched, and feed all Detweilers to a passel of vengeful treecats. With BBQ sauce. But alas, it stalled at about 70,000 words, I haven't revisited it in a while now, and I can't see that changing any time soon ; so as this bit can stand alone ...

The "Teen and Up" rating is purely for the deaths of Denver Summervale, Pavel Young and Steadholder Burdette.

Dead fics tend to distress or annoy me, so I don't intend to post the unfinished novel, unless I should happen to be bombarded with requests for it. But if you'd like another 50,000 words or so, you're welcome to drop me a PM with an eddress and I'll fire it along.

B'Jack

January 2012

See Honor Among Thieves below.

Lady Knight Volant

This long novel is canon compliant with events before Rathhausak, but overwrites the last chapter and epilogue of Lady Knight and shifts the dates of various weddings. Most but not all later canonical and extracanonical facts are adopted. The rating is a strong T, borderline M, for tauros rape and battle violence.

There are two continuity problems in Protector of the Small—the missing year in Squire, and the fate of Sergeant Connac. I assume Connac went with Sir Merric and the adult refugees, and lived. I also assume the scale of the map in Lady Knight is correct, not the various distances implied in the text, though I invent topography in the Greenwoods valley to suit myself. The missing year, notionally 457–8 or 458–9 HE, is trickier, and while I assume it was without major incident I adjust canonical dates, so Kel underwent her Ordeal aged 18 at Midwinter 460 (not 459, as in canon). I also posit that Kalasin’s canonically undated marriage to Kaddar took place, and (though it doesn’t fit politically or with regard to Daine’s children) the undated events of ‘The Dragon’s Tale’—so Skysong can talk to humans, and the opal dragon Kawit is sometimes seen in Tortall.

There are many fic continuations of Lady Knight, some excellent—but none quite did everything I wanted and I make no apology for writing another that does. One purpose was to continue the quartet’s novel-by-novel curve into greater length and more serious concerns, and the rating is for violence, sexuality, and tauroses; I have little interest in being graphic for its own sake, but readers will not be left doubting what has happened. A second grew from the way TP keeps her Tortallan series as distinct as they are interconnected, and my curiosity as to whether, say, Diamondflame ever visited Kitten in Tortall or how the sociopolitical experiment at Dunlath fared during the Scanran war. An infusion from The Immortals gave Kel her knowing animals, so that aspect needed to be projected too. This does mean that Kel and others are growing and changing, and I don’t believe she could survive events at Rathhausak and after without effects that run deep.

I also owe two impersonal acknowledgements -- to ConfusedKnight, for her remarkable Fallen, now nearing epic completion, from which I take some Scanran names and history (including Somalkt and the Bloody Plains), and which first made me ponder the plot value of tauroses; and to Sarramaks, for her splendid Festival Sequence, for the idea of using the old quarter-day and cross-quarter-day holidays as a structural principle. And two personal ones, to Matthew and to Scott, for beta-reading.

In the language of heraldry a bird 'volant' is shown in flight.

For those who like visual aids, I've posted my working-plan of New Hope and a cross-section of palisades, glacis, and moat at my LiveJournal account -- use the tag 'map'.

And for what it's worth, I have published on Pierce -- an essay, 'Of Stormwings and Valiant Women', in my collection Of Modern Dragons, a little guide to 'The Immortals', and a guide to 'The Protector of the Small' with annotations, an essay, and a note on PotS fanfic. The PotS guide also has comments by TP that include new extracanonical data concerning Jump, death magic, the killing devices and more, as well as more discursive comments on women in combat and other things. (The links are to the Humanities-Ebooks site, but all are also available in the Kindle Store.)

B'Jack

September 2012 (links updated September 2013)

And, just in, Tonnocal has done some fanart of New Hope, very pretty and pleasing. It's back-to-front (or top-to-bottom) from my p-o-v, but a delight, and Tonnocal has my warm thanks. You can see it here, on deviantart.

For those who like their barding, the Metropolitan Museum has just (wonderfully) made available online their entire out-of-print back catalogue, including The Armored Horse in Europe, 1480-1620 (2005). The PDF takes a while to load but is well worth it.

And if you want a rather disturbing glimpse of what a spidren might be like, try this short video.

ETA (February 2014) : By request (of CharmedArtist), I post below the part and chapter structure -- properly, the 'Contents' page of the novel -- so it may be seen at a glance :

Part I—Samradh
Chapter One – Returning
Chapter Two – Reporting
Chapter Three – Surveying
Chapter Four – Allying

Part II—Mabon
Chapter Five – Visitations
Chapter Six – Invasions
Chapter Seven – Explosions
Chapter Eight – Devotions

Part III—Midwinter
Chapter Nine – Kinship
Chapter Ten – Worship
Chapter Eleven – Lordship
Chapter Twelve – Hardship

Part IV—Ostara
Chapter Thirteen – Assessment
Chapter Fourteen – Impairment
Chapter Fifteen – Bereavement
Chapter Sixteen – Judgement

Part V—Lughnasad
Chapter Seventeen – Business
Chapter Eighteen – Forgiveness
Chapter Nineteen – Loneliness
Chapter Twenty – Witness

Part VI—Samhain
Chapter Twenty-One – Identity
Chapter Twenty-Two – Authority
Chapter Twenty-Three – Charity
Chapter Twenty-Four – Security

Part VII—Imbolc
Chapter Twenty-Five – Governance
Chapter Twenty-Six – Resistance
Chapter Twenty-Seven – Endurance
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Deliverance

Part VIII—Beltane
Chapter Twenty-Nine – Warison
Chapter Thirty – Benison
Chapter Thirty-One – Unison
Chapter Thirty-Two – Orison

Captain Vorpatril's Plotbunnies

The result of an attack by a half-squad of those plotbunnies, suffered while reading Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, and given what I hope is slightly more shape than just a sequence. My thanks to Scott for beta-reading.

B'Jack

February 2013

The Temple of Sakuyo

A sequel to Lady Knight Volant, a good deal shorter and (I hope) rather funnier. My thanks once again to Scott for beta-reading, even though I didn't in the end take his advice about either the Prologue or the shape of Sakuyo's Temple ; besides, I like geodesic domes, even if he doesn't.

FFN not being so good at allowing readers to see the shape and structure of a longer work, the novel's contents page is given below.

The usual thanks to Scott for beta-ing, even though I inflicted the geodesic dome on his architectural sensibilities.

Prologue -- The Best Jests Catch the Jester : New Hope and elsewhere, October 463 HE

Chapter One -- Summons : New Hope, Midwinter - February, 463-4 HE

Chapter Two -- Yaman : Heian-Kyo, 21-2 March, 464 HE

Chapter Three -- Pickles : Heian-Kyo, 23 March, 464 HE

Chapter Four -- Offence : Kiyomizu-dera, 24 March, 464 HE

Chapter Five -- Justice : Heian-Kyo, 24 March, 464 HE

Chapter Six -- Consequences : Heian-Kyo and Suzuoka, 25-30 March, 464 HE

Chapter Seven -- Temple : Edo, 1 April, 464 HE

Epilogue -- The Pilgrims' Way : Mindelan and New Hope, June, 466 HE

B'Jack

August 2015

Alerted by CharmedArtist, I discovered the havoc that FFN's interface had wrought. In my original MS, colons and semi-colons were set off by a preceding hard space (as you can see in the text posted at AO3), which makes them clearer on pretty much all screens -- and FFN had removed every last one, leaving many sentences horribly ungrammatical. With apologies to those who encountered the mangled text here, I have now (amid many obscene gerunds) re-uploaded every chapter, with the punctuation restored (though no clarifying spaces).

B'Jack

December 2015

Honor Among Thieves

This, at long last, is the alternative Honorverse novel to which Five Scenes in the Life of Elizabeth III is the prologue. It wilfully Wraps Up the Whole Thing, in a little over 200,000 words, because while I do enjoy the Honorverse, and very much admire some of the things Weber has done with it, the pace of canon has become glacially slow in the last decade, and there are limits. And while I'm not parodying Weber's prose (what would be the point?) I am, in some places and respects, gently mocking some features of his style.

For me a fic and a non-fic response to canon often happen in tandem. Forward Momentum happened alongside the Bujold essays in Of Sex and Faerie, and Lady Knight Volant alongside the Genre Fiction Sightline on Reading ... Protector of the Small. I also have lurking on my Mac a half-finished continuation of The Lord of the Rings, called The Choices of Mayor Samwise, that happened alongside Tolkien's Triumph. And so alongside Honor Among Thieves there is The Exasperating Case of David Weber. It's a long essay (c.30,000 words, not counting notes or bibliography) that was written as much in sorrow as in irritation, and both apply. Rudyard Kipling wrote of treating "triumph and disaster [...] just the same", but Weber has managed to make his triumph and disaster the same, and those things that were the Honorverse's glories have become its bane. There are three sections and a conclusion: 'Un/Economies of Scale', 'Prose and Cons', 'Dropping the Ball', and 'The Virtues of Editing'.

Anyway, the chapters of Honor Among Thieves are, for various reasons, of wildly varying lengths (ch. 5 is absurdly long), but they are contained within a reasonably taut overall structure, given below. And my warm thanks to Scott, my brother David, David Carter, and Eva FanAuthor for beta-ing, with apologies to Eva for not taking her thoughtful advice about a particular device.

Prologue -- Five Scenes in the Life of Elizabeth III

PART I -- TRIBULATIONS

Chapter One -- Harrington city & Austin City, Dec. 1916 - Jan. 1917 PD

Chapter Two -- Landing, Feb. - Mar. 1917 PD

Chapter Three -- New Berlin & Nouveau Paris, Apr. - May 1917 PD

PART II -- TRIALS

Chapter Four -- Landing, Trevor's Star, & Austin City, Jun. - Jul. 1917 PD

Chapter Five -- Landing, Nouveau Paris, & Sphinx, Aug. - Sept. 1917 PD

Chapter Six -- Landing & Harrington Duchy, Oct. 1917 PD

Epilogue -- Five Scenes in the Lives of Other People

B'Jack

September 2015

Alerted by Pax Humana, I discovered the havoc that FFN's interface had wrought. In my original MS, colons and semi-colons were set off by a preceding hard space (as you can see in the text posted at AO3), which makes them clearer on pretty much all screens -- and FFN had removed every last one, leaving many sentences horribly ungrammatical. With apologies to those who encountered the mangled text here, I have now (amid many obscene gerunds) re-uploaded every chapter, with the punctuation restored (though no clarifying spaces).

B'Jack

December 2015

Captain Vordarcy's Alliance

As the summary says, this one was one of those left-field thoughts that wouldn't then leave me alone. And it is, of course, like most Austen fic, an excuse for people to say things, particularly to Caroline Bingley, Mrs Bennet, and Lydia.

The surface is very Pride and Prejudice, but Bujold fans should find enough Vorkosiverse references in the background to keep them happy, and they get Cordelia's shopping habits in a new arena, if very briefly. In terms of correspondences, btw, Alys Vorpatril would be the unseen Countess Vorfitzwilliam, and properly Ivan's mother, while Lady Vordebourgh is the sister of Count Vorfitzwilliam and Count Vordarcy's deceased first wife.

Very early readers here on FFN will have encountered some troubling grammar, because I forgot that FFN's wrstfxz interface strips out all semi-colons and colons that have a preceding space. (Why would software do that, I ask? It's lunacy.) Now reuploaded and fixed, with apologies to any who read it unfixed.

Oh, and while my Scottish convent is of course a fantasy, there is or was, I swear, a Church of the Holy Spasm in Jerusalem. Honest.

Enjoy.

B'Jack

September 2016

The Book of Stone

I wasn't really intending to write another sequel of 230k words (bringing the series to over 750k), but I had this idea about basilisks and sieges that would not go away, and insisted on writing itself as a scene -- which then needed a novel to support it and provide some context. What can one do? And anyway, Taren got hold of me.

On the grammar front, I've learned to remove the spaces before semicolons and colons for posting here, cursing the while, only to discover that FFN's software has developed a new glitch, stripping out some spaces after italicised words. I can find no way of sorting it except re-proofing the whole thing and reposting, which would take a lot more time than I have. Sorry. If it really bugs you, try reading at AO3, where I am also Bracketyjack.

Though a slow burn, this one does have a structure and a shape, with which sight of the contents page as a whole may help :

Prologue : A Private Education -- Stone Mountain, August 454 HE

One : Breaking with the Past -- Stone Mountain, August-November 463 HE

Two : Delays and Conversations -- Corus, December 463-April 464 HE

Three : Heading North -- Great North Road, 13-26 April 464 HE

Four : New Hope -- New Hope, 27 April-1 May 464 HE

Five : Travels and Troubles -- New Hope, 2-15 May 464 HE

Six : New Arrivals -- New Hope, 16 May-19 June 464 HE

Seven : The Theatre of Gods and Dragons -- New Hope and Galla, 20 June 464 HE

Eight : Names and Negotiators -- New Hope, 21 June-17 July 464 HE

Nine : Releases -- New Hope and Rathhausak, 18 July-2 August 464 HE

Ten : The Guildmasters' Conference -- Corus, December 464 HE

Epilogue : A Public Future -- Stone Mountain, August 467 HE

Hope that helps, in some measure.

Enjoy!

B'Jack

November 2018

Earth Shaken

Patricia Briggs purists, take heed — this one spun wayout of control, like one of those faery beasts from which one realises one should not have accepted a ride.

It was a simple enough idea. In Night Broken Gary Laughingdog tells Mercy he senses the manitou of the Columbia River. So what if it woke up? That might be fun, but what sort of manitou would it be? The Columbia River is very old — it cut through the Cascades as they were pushed up — and very large, and it has been horribly messed with by human beings, who have loaded it and its major tributaries (especially the Snake and Flathead) with scores of dams and dumped vast amounts of radioactive contaminants into groundwater that enters it around the Tri-Cities. Moreover, Mercy could only beat Guayota because that psychotic old manitou was way off its home ground in Tenerife, anchored by its mortal tibicenas, but this manitou would be in its own place — and hence, I figured, unkillable, unstoppable. So it had to be on Mercy’s side. There arelimits, even if I’m given to pushing them. But what might our favourite coyote girl manage with a very old, very powerful manitou at her back, besides necessarily becoming increasingly OOC?

That was one problem, and spiralling events provided others. I’m well aware I’m playing a little fast and loose with everything from US law and politics to the storage of nuclear waste, but I kept going (with one long hiatus and one shorter one) because I was having fun, and trying a first-person voice was interesting — even though the whole has turned out more than twice as long as a first-person novel should be. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. And I’m sometimes playing fast and loose with trans-Atlantic vocabularies as well, particularly when it comes to ‘trousers’ — sorry, speakers of American English, but ‘pants’ has so many other senses in British English that it just had to be ‘trousers’, however culturally incorrect. By way of atonement, I’ve used ‘gray’ throughout, not ‘grey’, though it makes me itch, but I’ve stuck to ‘-our’ because I’m damned if I’ll be non-U, and I also draw the line at ‘programme’ — ‘program’ just looks too short to me. I’ve also tried quite hard to get the few words of Salish right, though some characters (such as the IPA marker for a glottlestop) may well not post accurately.

I started before ‘Hollow’, Fire Touched, and Silence Fallen were out, and have ignored them (in the case of Fire Touched with some relief, as I liked Lugh’s walking stick), as I have also ignored Dead Heat (without difficulty) and Burn Bright (with some distress — I liked Sage too) ; I have, though, tried to be reasonably canon-compliant as far as Night Broken. I also reached the first scenes involving a POTUS long before the present incumbent was elected, and after some soul-searching decided to ignore him too, hard as that is ; in this AU, my pointedly nameless POTUS may deserve some of Adam’s ire, but he doesn’t sell snakeoil, and I have contented myself with being rude about a different Donald for good plot reasons.

Oh, and in telephone conversations, the distant speaker is in slashes — /Blah blah./ — and the present speaker, usually but (given wolf hearing) not always Mercy, is in standard inverted commas. I had used angle brackets, which read better, but FFN's software strips them right out when the doc is uploaded, which is just daffy.

The structure runs by the days of one week:

Monday : Manitou -- chs 1-6

Tuesday : Cantrip -- chs 7-19

Wednesday : Fae and Other Spirits -- chs 20-30

Thursday : Humans -- chs 31-32

Friday : Children -- chs 33-38

Saturday : The Quick and the Dead -- chs 39-47

Sunday : Everyone -- chs 48-54 epilogue

Enjoy!

B’jack, January 2019.

Mercy for President

As a sequel to my very AU Mercyverse novel Earth Shaken (posted here in early 2019), this tale will make precious little sense without it ; and as that AU was already confessedly out-of-control, thanks to Medicine Wolf, so this one cheerfully goes even further west. I add the warning that it’s also a wish-fulfilment because I’ve given our favourite coyote-girl all the cards she needs to bounce into the White House, and then some more, so things do Go Her Way rather more than is reasonable. Mea culpa.

I had fun writing it, and I hope you have fun reading it, but please don’t complain that my Mercy is by now more than a tad OOC in various ways —that’s what happens if you start giving characters AU experiences, because they have to change to meet them. Oh and rather than retcon myself, I’m mildly adjusting canon to say Asil the Moor was born somewhat before the Battle of Tours, rather than just after it, making him 1300 rather than 1300-.

It’s insanely long, of course, but I don’t do much that isn’t, and Mercy had to do even more fast talking than usual in this one. I’m also well aware I’m taking many liberties with all sorts of things, including the electoral processes mandated by law in the USA, but this is fiction, and anyway I’m hardly the only one. And while my outgoing POTUS firmly remains namelessly ‘the Man’, with no stated party, and Mercy is even more firmly an Independent, I will say that I’d greatly prefer her to the present incumbent, and writing this was a form of escape from his deeply disturbing un/reality, as well as my own on this side of the pond. As a result it’s differently comic than Earth Shaken, though not, I hope, less enjoyable, and Mercy still repeatedly Drops People Right In It.

One warning. You can’t write a novel about a presidential election without being political, even if the preternatural is heavily involved. I refer only to the main parties, never using names, but it’s obvious, and for anyone with any knowledge of present RL representatives, so are two unnamed but implicit individuals. And while there are plenty of US political topics about which I as a non-citizen know little and care less, there are others, from race relations to gun control and mitigating pollution, about which I do care, and inevitably make my position clear when Mercy is giving major speeches. And as I am politically more-or-less covered by ‘liberal’, a term weirdly damned in US political discourse, I ask readers who dislike such politics not to complain but rather to go read something else more congenial. Sincere criticism is welcome, but I will not respond to objections that seem primarily political, there being no point.

I know the politics also makes for what some may find boring bits, but alas, I couldn’t see any way round it, given the scenario. And there is action too. Please note also that this was completed before Covid struck, and well before the violence that began in Minneapolis, and I haven’t changed anything : this is upbeat, in the end, even for those pesky vamps.

As before, in telephone conversations the present speaker’s words are in the usual “inverted commas”, but the voice over the phone is in (or, at FFN, /forward slashes/, as its interface removes angle brackets), because with wolf and fae hearing it may matter whether anyone present can hear both sides of the conversation, or only one. This does not apply, though, to calls using Adam’s encrypted system, which has full AV.

The structure is:

I : Madness and Method / 5th - 27th April / chs 1-28

II : Mayhem and Magic / 28th April - 11th May / chs 29-56

III : Masses and Mountains / 12th May - 20th January / chs 57-63

Epilogue

B’jack, June 2020.