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It does sound like a really fun idea, but I can definitely understand being thankful for a youthful endeavor being kept out of the wider world. In fact, I just watched a video on that same subject. It's quite amusing.

It really does seem a lovely subversion of the whole "child of destiny" shtick. It reminds me of something, too, but I can't for the life of me remember what.

But my vote goes to Alchemy or Chemistry. I really love And It Goes All the Way Down, it's got a great sense of mystery to it, but I just can't say no to a college student interacting with dragons and alchemy and the like, especially in Scotland.

AKA, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone... translated into Scottish.



Just from the chapter list alone, the Sorting Hat is the Bletherin Bunnet, Quidditch is Bizzumbaw, and Diagon Alley is The Squinty Gate.

Voldemort is You-Ken-Wha, Snape is Snipe, Dumbledore is Dumbiedykes, Filch is Feechs, Slytherin is Slydderin, Hufflepuff is Hechlepech, Ravenclaw is Corbieclook ... It's pretty glorious.

A few equally glorious sentences from this book:


"WHEESHT!" yelloched Uncle Vernon, and a couple o ettercaps fell aff the ceilin.


"Whit are these?" Harry spiered to Ron, haudin up a poke o Chocolate Puddocks.


Ron had awready had a muckle rammy wi Dean Thomas, wha shared their dormitory, aboot fitba.


"Whit wid you ken aboot it, Weasley, you couldnae even affort tae buy hauf the hanule," Malfoy snashed back.


He'd jist got awfie crabbit wi the Weasleys, wha keepit dive-bombin each ither and pretendin tae faw awff their bizzums.


Sae usefu tae hae him swoofin aroond ike an owergrown bawkie bird.


...It was $12 with shipping for me from the Barnes and Noble website, if you're interested in this amazing translation.

At this point, I've mostly resigned myself to the fact that all of my published missions and interludes might as well be writing for the drawer. Length of missions doesn't have anything to do with it; while my cowrites tend to be rather... on the long side (to put it lightly), my average mission is about 20 pages in a Google Doc, or 8k words. I'll get one, maybe two comments on any of them if I'm lucky.

The only thing people turn out to read these days are the bigger event pieces. Ix and Charlotte's wedding had the most responses that I'd seen on any of my missions since... well, around the time I did Little Miss Mary. The last two years, people have just... sort of stopped responding.

And yes, I know I don't exactly help the problem. I can't remember the last time I bothered to read a mission that wasn't by an author whose agents I didn't already know.

Confession time: it's because I'm petty. If nobody's reading my missions, why should I bother to do the same?

To take a specific example: Blank Sprite is perfectly enjoyable. I remember only the vaguest things about the agents, know nothing about the canons, but I've read three chapters so far and will be moving onto the fourth when I've stopped replying to things on the Board. ^_~ The problem has never been that I start reading and go 'uggh, who are all these people?' - it's that I never start reading at all.

And partly that's length. When I wrote the Woodsprite of the North mission, it was ridiculously long, clocking in at around 11,500 words. Terri's note at the top of it describes it as 'one of the more epic DOGA missions'.

Well, Of Wolves and Fellowship (my most recent full-length 'real' mission) is only 3000 words shy of that. Ix and Delta's mission at the bottom of the front page is 2000 more than it. Compare that to TOS, where around 5000 words is fairly normal. Missions have been getting longer - and I've been getting lazier.

And partly it's lack of connection. Back In The Day, I talked to loads of Boarders on MSN Messenger; I was friends with them on LJ. When Gundamkiwi wrote a mission, I didn't go 'oh, anime, skip' - I went 'hey, it's Kiwi!'. Now, even the people I know best on the Board, I only interact with here or in occasional emails. I know, other options are still out there, but I have my own issues with those - not least of which is time.

And partly, yeah, it's time. I used to read every mission that came through, because I was a university student with loads of downtime and no friends. Now, I'm at work all day, spending time with my wife in the evenings, and entertaining small children at the weekends. Whether it's 5K or 15K, I don't have the time to settle down with a mission I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy. (Most books I read nowadays are ones I've already read, too. I'm working through the latter Discworld novels at the moment, among other things.)

What can a writer do to counter that? I don't know. I've tried various things myself - short missions is my big one - but they didn't have a huge impact. Too many confounding factors. I don't know.

hS

How understandable/enjoyable should a mission be if you don't know the canon? Does it depend on the fic and what exactly's bad about it?

(And, from what I can tell, all we know about the related question "How understandable should a PPC story be if you don't know the spinoff?" is that many recent stories are having problems in this regard.)

- Tomash

I've written my own view of what would happen if a time traveller with access to the PPC's abilities decided they had the right to fix things; it's not pretty. Much like superheroes (hello, Injustice!), time travellers have to be limited in what they can do, or else you end up facing the simple question: why does anything go wrong? (Which is also a question that bugs religious people no end, though there are plenty of answers on that end.) That goes double - triple - when they're limited to a fairly compact group of people, and PPC HQ is smaller than a major city.

hS

Morgan doesn't have a monopoly on protecting the PPC - she just feels like she should. So anyone who started doing 'her job' for her would, in fairly short order, have to deal with an official visit from the Tigereye Castellan.

Which is fine if that's what you want to write (and if you get permission to borrow her, obvs); but that doesn't seem to be what you were thinking of.

My point with 'small setting' is that it sounded like you were planning on having Grace mostly move in HQ; whether you assume 1000 or 100,000 agents, that's tiny compared to the universe the Doctor is looking after. That means a roving temporal mechanic (so to speak) will either a) have very little to do, or b) be flabbergasted by the number of ways agents nearly destroy the fabric of reality, which (given the people in HQ) would lead directly to c) lots of other time travellers and the like interfering with her by trying to fix things themselves.

As to the hiatus on Emergencies... I actually graphed this a few years back, and it turned out that there wasn't really a hiatus at all. Take a look:



I'm not sure what's happened since 2015 that would qualify, but I'm certain there have been some. Just because we didn't tack the label 'Emergency' on the Blackout, for instance, doesn't mean it isn't one... :)

I still hold that time travel within HQ must be wildly dangerous; moving in a six-dimensional space that's already known to have multiple alternate timelines would be a nightmare. Your brief description for Grace's story didn't sound like it would recognise that, which is what I was responding to.

And, well... you did ask... ^_~

hS

On the this-isn't-a-good-idea side: a potential problem with Time Gentry who specialize in HQ is that they're very hard to ignore: much like Emergencies themselves, a character who is involved in running the timeline as a whole is also involved in the timeline as a whole. And that's a thing we've been avoiding for quite a while, in favor of wanting people to write their own stuff rather than being caught up in centralized continuity.

It's good! ^^

Or, if Middle-earth isn't your speed, you could try one of the other OFUs. The only trouble is, if you want a finished one, there... aren't very many.

I've just been and updated the Wiki to list all the finished OFUs I could find, and... well, <a href="https://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/OfficialFanfiction_University">there are six. That's taken from both our own records and Miss Cam's list. So yeah... if you want to read the LotR, Harry Potter, Hetalia, Discworld, Dragonball, or Pirates of the Caribbean OFUs, there's good news for you! If not... I hope you like cliffhangers.

(I hope to one day be the first person to finish an OFU sequel. Of course, to do that, I would have to actually start writing OFUDisc 2...)

hS

I could quibble over some of your concerns with Friday, but it's also the series I have the least sense of how it should go - I like Grace as a character, but I couldn't pitch the story for the first character arc there the way I could with the others.

(It also... kinda bugs me that you, having written Morgan, are saying (paraphrased) "I don't think you should write a character who protects the PPC like Morgan"? So I'm trying to avoid responding to that bugging.)

Perhaps I've mis-pitched: I wasn't picturing the story as saving the multiverse every week, that seems like it would get old quickly. Rather, I've been thinking of Grace as a vaguely Doctorly figure; albeit one whose bailwick is centered on extradimensional and interdimensional spaces. (And in the PPC, limited by some sort of understanding/policy/Department creation at ~2008 HQST, when the hiatus on Emergencies began- Grace is one of the answers to "wait, why did things stop going terribly badly all of a sudden?")

(Additional quibbling: I guess I don't think the PPC is that small of a setting, if you think of it as a fandom rather than a single world? It seems to me that there's lots of spaces for AUs and other alternate timelines and thanks to plothole shenanigans, they probably interfere with each other far more than most more settled 'verses. I could see a mess there in need of a minder or three.)

Bleh. Please understand that I really appreciate your feedback? You've written in vaguely this space before, and I deeply respect your experience- my desire to quibble is driven far more by my feeling like I've miscommunicated the idea than that I disagree with your feedback.

-Delta

"And thanks." Farah continued, pulling out a chair to sit down in. "You look pretty good too."

Once again, I feel like I'm in a stealth Jurisfiction crossover - and that's not a bad thing! New ways of looking at the multiverse are always welcome.

Interestingly, for all that this is a very action-packed chapter, it feels much more personal. This chapter is very much focussed on Sergio's strangeness; we see it through pretty much everyone's eyes. The equally strange goings-on (and do I feel a time loop forming?) take second place, and the action, for all that it's well-written, comes in third. It's a well-written chapter, with good storytelling technique.

Favourite line: What was she? A fairy with an Internet connection?

hS

Right. There are seven Shadow-Bats mini-Balrogs in the theme so far: the five I included, plus these two, who don't have official pictures yet:



Irritatingly, they don't make a rainbow; I'm colour-blind, but I'm pretty sure they line up like this:



So who are they? None of their purported names (or, as I like to call them, secret identities) appear on the lists of minis, but... what if they're nicknames? Hippo could be one of the minis for 'Fellowship', for instance - Felloship, or Followship? - and Molo could be Carmollen, the mini of Cormallen.

But Phyll? Furi? There's nothing in Middle-earth even close to those.

Perhaps instead they're seven of the ten members of the fellowship.

: Ahem...

Sorry, Lord Elrond, the NINE members of the Fellowship... but which?

Well, Molo and Phyll simply have to be minis Merry and Pippin, the Urple Bandits - look at the colours, and their names even start with the same letters! I feel like Hippo must be a Sam mini, too - look at that happy smile! D'aww.

Four to go. Is the Frodo mini being driven crazy by the Ring - or is Crase more of a Boromir? Does Vespe's war-paint make him a mini of Aragorn, or of Legolas (who I can absolutely imagine spending an OFUM arc going full Maladict and thinking he's in 'Nam)? Myzo's colour-change makes him a shoe-in for Gandalf the White (perhaps he's a mispelling of Mithrandir?), and Furi's adorable rage fits nicely for Gimli... which means Vespe is more likely to be a Legolas (since those two are inseparable), and the fact that we've got the other three hobbits means Crase should be Frodo.

So there you go - the question you never thought would be answered. ^_^ And with a bit of browsing the mini lists, plus a little creative thinking...



OR

Sham - Froedo - Glimi - Legoles - Mythrandir - Merrry - Piphin

: You're not very clear on the concept of 'undercover', are you?

Oops. Er... sorry, Miss Cam. _{I'm going now.}

hS

*looks pointedly at the Reader* Got anything you want to loan me? Just the once?

(You have to admit: a TARDIS would be great for vacation+catch-up work.)

~Z

Some interesting points. Interesting points which make me want to take some of that into account with the next thing I write! Unfortunately, I write/publish somewhat slowly, so I'm not sure how immediately effective that could be, but...I'll still keep it in mind. Especially the last two points. And hopefully I *will* be posting some things soonish. Maybe. Hopefully. End of semester is a poor time to be saying that, but I'm a daredevil today.

In terms of making the agents accessible: any tips on how to do that gently? I immediately think a bit of how JKR reintroduces characters at the beginning of each book, but possibly done more simply? For instance, kind of weaving in bits of information near the beginning, but not pausing to recap a little?

Come to think of it, Tamora Pierce does this as well...actually, if I pick up the first book of hers within reach, Briar's Book (fourth in a series), this is what I get in the first chapter:

-Briar himself, the third person POV character for this chapter, gets reintroduced bit by bit as the plot starts up. Little bits of his past and his present, what he's learning, who he is, how he acts in different situations--it gets presented through mentions, comparisons, even dialogue with other characters (including one who's never met him before, but has a very good reason for doing so). We get a good sense of who he is and where he's been (and currently is) in life without the author ever really stopping for a couple paragraphs to throw the information at us. Everything is just woven in, in a way that doesn't really seem forced--just a tiny bit introspective, if that.

-Briar's adoptive sisters and their teachers mostly just get establishing details of their names and what they do in life, though to be fair, they're not in this chapter at all. Only Sandry appears: accordingly, we get little notes on her personality, which, considering that they inform Briar's responses to her, fit in very well.

-Briar's teacher, Rosethorn, gets a lot more, which makes sense since she's quite present in the chapter. We first get her name and occupation, in the context of Briar's thoughts to do with why they're in the city at all. In the same paragraph, we find out a little bit about her strength of will, still in the same context. On the next page, we get a physical description and Briar's past reaction to it--which help establish her further, both because (though it's not mentioned now) Rosethorn is a bit vain about her face and because Briar's reaction does actually reflect on her personality. We also get a brief mention of her power and what she's actually teaching Briar. A few pages later, we get another establishing detail or two about her in connection with Briar, before she reappears in person. Then we get only one or two more establishing hints, still in the context of Briar's thoughts.

And I know it's the next chapter, but I want to mention that that one starts off reintroducing a recurring secondary character through the eyes of his niece (Sandry). It also introduces Sandry. In the first three paragraphs, we get a good bit of physical description (and a bit of recent history) in a way that makes sense. We open with them having tea and being pleased to see each other, continue with a mention that it's been a hard winter in the time elapsed since the last book, and flow into the second paragraph with Sandry reflecting on how that winter affected her uncle (using physical description to also show emotional state) and seguing very naturally from there into briefly describing why he dresses simply, which says a good deal about both his personality and his strength as a ruler. In the third paragraph, we get physical description of Sandry, with hints of personal description, in the context of her having dressed up on purpose.

And I'm going to cut myself off here, because as fun as it is to go on analyzing, there are at least three more characters to talk about, and this will just become essay length.

My point with all this? This is the fourth book in a series, with nine characters to reintroduce within the first couple chapters, not to mention bits of the setting. Looking at it, I think her methods actually could be adapted well to missions, though they might have to be shortened--though, then again, most missions don't involve eight or more agents! I think weaving in descriptions could be done, though it might take some practice and editing to make sure it flows logically. A nice little challenge! I'm going to try to take it.

Any further ideas?

--

Reintroducing agents more might also help with my own reasons for not reading all the recent missions. Those primarily boil down to:

-I don't know the canon, and if the agents didn't start off in ones I did know, and at a time when I had free time to read missions, I'm usually not going to follow them in. Unless the summary *really* grabs me, but with a canon I don't know...that can be hard.

As for what happened with Blank Sprite...I think I was actually a beta early on? The problem is: canon I don't know, characters I don't feel I know too well yet...the latest summaries were interesting, and more and more I'm thinking I might go back and read it from the beginning, but--that's the thing. When part 12 is going up, at a busy time, going back to the beginning unfortunately becomes a bit daunting, especially if you're unfamiliar with most of what's involved. However, given I'm pretty sure some of my favorite tropes showed up by the end, I may have to go back and give it a proper go. It's an impressive piece of work, and I've been both glad and impressed to watch the parts keep going up, even if I wasn't reading at the time.

~Z

I voted for Procedural Codes. It's been a long time since we had a decent look at the DIA, and with the loss of Black and Irvine's spinoff their canon is mostly appearances where they're causing way more trouble than they should for people. (I take my share of the blame in this, since Selene was I think the very first recipient of DIA harassment.) So I think this would be excellent to see - and the characters sound like a good sparking point.

For the second question, I also ticked Fish and Feathers. As (I think) the only writer for the DRD (no, I take it back; apparently someone did it way back in '05), I'd be excited to see more of it. And, again, the characters sound fun.

For the final question, I'm afraid I ticked Friday the Thirteenth as a potential problem. Time travel in HQ is... a tricky prospect, and again, I say this as culprit number one. I feel like it can work as a one-off incident (Morgan's little accident, for instance), but sustained, deliberate time travel in HQ has been wisely kept away until now. It just has too many ways to break everything - and, more to the point, too many ways that it should break everything, and would need the story to be unreasonably warped to prevent it. (A solitary example: technology which can impersonate a living being is ridiculously common across the multiverse. Therefore, if time travel is possible in HQ, someone should by now have gone back and replaced all of DAVD with holo-androids before their deaths in Crashing Down, and snuck the real agents off to hide somewhere until the present.)

I also don't like that 'thin line between HQ and Emergencies' part. 'One person protects [compact setting] from disaster every week' doesn't work very well even in more coherent settings; in the PPC, there are hundreds of people (starting with the Flowers, and running down through all the Time Lords and anyone else with temporal sensitivity) who should notice this. Would the Notary let some kid muck around in time? Would Morgan let a child do what she sees as her job, protecting HQ? Would the Flowers tolerate meddling in the PPC's already-fractured internal timeline?

hS

"Same here," she said. "It was really nice to meet you! I'm going to have to ask Jacques why he never bothered introducing us--it's a real shame this didn't happen sooner."

((:D Quite true!))

"Pull up a chair," he said, and offered his hand. "Jacques Bonnefoy, ESAS, and may I say, you look lovely?"

This chapter starts out light and easy - too easy. The fact that Sergio and Nikki are able to get exactly what they're looking for sets off all sorts of alarm bells (and it's good to see that the agents are genre-savvy enough to pick up on that!).

And then... action sequence! I think this was really well-written, and I say that as someone who has great difficulty writing action. :) It serves to increase the dissonance between the idea that the Factories are behind this, and the actual events we're seeing. I'm glad I saved this all to read at once, because I'd hate to get caught in cliffhangers down the line.

You also continue to build the background suspense over what the heck is up with Sergio's history. I'm really looking forward to getting that one answered. :)

Favourite line: “… We are being shipped by canons?"

hS

I was a bit dubious to start with - Blank Sprite is way outside my usual canons - but the story does a good job of filling me in on what's going on. It provides just enough information about the canons to support the story, without going into an encyclopaedia article.

Actually, the place where the description gets a bit overwrought is the agents. Lines like Nikki's response to Anne about the Vanguard:

“Yes. It works really well, and my magic stopped changing randomly[...] well, I still became a mermaid a couple of times while I was bathing, but I think you did a great job anyway!”

... have a bit too much of an 'as you know, Bob' feel to them at times. Something of the kind was necessary, I think, but possibly not this blatantly.

The story itself is good, and I like the way it's slowly unfolding. We start on a mission, then slip into something that sounds like a Jurisfiction story - and then the Factories rear their head. It all builds up quite neatly, and hints at more to come.

(Yes, there will probably be 15 separate review posts; I'm sneaking this in between pieces of work.)

hS

Now, in fact. I'm going to review as I go along, so watch this space.

hS

I pretty much reply to anything I read - I just don't read anything. It's a combination of a number of factors:

-I don't have much extended 'free time' on the computer, and what I do have (at home), I use for other things (ie, games).

-I don't like reading long things on a phone.

-Missions today are much, much longer than they used to be.

-I don't know most of the canons people are working in these days; relatedly, the habit of mentioning what canon a mission is in in the subject line has been lost, so the ones I do know are hidden away.

-I don't know the agents, and most stories nowadays are built around the assumption that you do. The first part springs out of all the foregoing, but it's a definite vicious cycle: I don't know the agents, so I can't get into the missions, so I don't get to know the agents...

hS

What a coincidence! Has anyone worked out the names of the mini-Balrogs yet? I definitely want one too!