I am the father of HM Grayson. She died suddenly on October 4th, 2014 at the age of 25. Her family and friends loved her deeply and miss her terribly. She was exceptional in intelligence and imagination, completing her BA and MA in History and English, and she loved writing; she was too sensitive for this world. She very much appreciated your interest and comments in these stories.

Some random personal facts about me:

I’m a proud Canadian, who took the name Grayson not from the Batman character (though I cannot believe I failed to remember the obvious pop culture reference ) but from Anne of Windy Poplars (by L.M. Montgomery, my childhood hero), where there is a little girl with many names who believes that Tomorrow will be a glorious place...

I bite my nails, except for the pinky finger on my left hand. The nail just doesn’t break in a satisfying way, so I leave it alone.

If I could be a pair of shoes, I would be ankle-high black boots, no heel, probably leather. Zippers, not laces. That had no relevance to anything else; I don't even really like shoes.

When I grow up…I need to come to terms with the fact I mostly have. Or that people never stop growing. I have to come to terms with something.

But enough about me. That's not why you're here, is it?

Author-y stuff:

When I was four I wrote my first ‘book.’ It was about a cat. I think he went to the store. I even drew the pictures for it. I’ve been writing ever since. If I’m not writing, I’m off in my imagination, so it’s better if I write. This way I can occasionally meet up with reality. The whole idea off a muse...most of the time I get all the crazy things writers said (even SM’s ‘the characters haven’t told me’; I don’t get why people attacked her for that. It made sense to me) but I’ve never had a muse. Either the characters are talking to me, or they aren’t. I guess it’s sort of the same thing, but I wouldn’t call my neurosis a muse.

As for why I’m on this website...honestly, I just got tired of writing only for myself. I’ve been lurking around this and better websites since...2001. Oh my. I’ve always been aware of fanfiction and thought it was about time I stopped lazing around and started writing it. The whole lurking part is why I understand why people don’t review more, though being an author has given me a new perspective on it. I really am trying to write for the audience, which means it’s more than nice to hear it’s appreciated.

For the record, if it's going up, it's going to be complete. I tend to write long stories, so sometime it might take me a year, but it will be finished. Feel free to send my messages with exclamation points reminding me I haven’t finished just yet.

I'd like it if you told me why you did or did not like something. The more detail the better, especially if there's something you think I could improve on. My ego can take the criticism; please, be specific. I can't get better if I'm not sure what you mean. And I do want to get better (there's a reason I'm writing fanfiction and not fiction, why I switch tenses, switch perspectives; I want to find what works for me) so please help me. If I feel like I have something to say (that won't give away half of the story), I'll respond to your review. I do try to answer all direct questions, though sometimes I have moods that make responding to e-mails, and getting out of bed, kind of tough. Know I appreciate it, even if I haven't said it.

Thoughts on my stories (containing lots and lots of spoilers):

And because I was bored and overly narcissistic (and because this kind of stuff is what I liked reading about the authors I followed), I decided to write this blurb explaining my inspiration for writing what I do. I'm spoiling everything I write so go and read the them first and then come back and maybe review while you're at it :D

I Howl and I Whine was written in a flurry of excitement. Breaking Dawn was coming out that day and because Jacob had to come back I banged off a short story about what would cause him to come home and help him on his way to getting over Bella (because the Twilight series is about BellaandEdward. I like Jacob, but that's a fact). I used Leah because their situations were similar enough that I thought she could offer good advice while providing enough conflict to make it interesting and I liked the parallel to the actual end of Eclipse. The original story ended with Jacob rejoining his friends and Leah remembering how to make boys blush. Healing two wolves with one story. I was so proud of myself.

And then BD came out and I put the story away and forgot about it in a wave of disappointment.

Eventually, I went back, re-edited. Jacob stays, sexual tension disappears, Leah stops believing what she's saying. I think that was my least favourite part of BD. Random pregnancies, random vampires, boring battles...my least favourite part took place between two of my favourite characters (Jasper is my actual favourite, and Rosalie's another-I like characters who fall down further than I can imagine and then crawl up with strength I don't have). Back to Jacob and Leah. The one part of BD that bothered me more than any other:

Do you want to forget the way you feel about Sam?
She deliberated for a moment. I think I do.
I sighed. She was in a healthier place than I was. (319)

WTF? Now, maybe it's just me. Maybe no one else sees anything wrong with this. Weirdly, imprinting as a concept bothered me less than this exchange (and imprinting is not something I'm very cool with, as a whole). This is Jacob approving the very, very sick thing Leah says likes it makes sense. Sure, that's how you would feel but to call it healthy... Really? Really? Maybe I'm over thinking it and it's just poor word choice. It doesn't mean to 'forget' was 'healthier' it just means moving on is good. But that's not what it says. It says having everything forcibly blocked out is better (what everyone should want!) than living with both the good and the bad. And I do not like that. Not at all.

Sidenote: I dislike Breaking Dawn. Immensely. On multiple levels. That said, I was never very invested in the series until the fourth book. Make of that what you will; I know I don't understand it myself. I do understand that other people did like it. I'm happy for you. And jealous; I did want to like the book because I like these characters. All of them. It might not always seem that way, but I do. But if I'm writing about werewolves, I'm going to try and keep a very anti-vampire slant to my work. And vice-versa, if I ever get around to that. Though I don't think the vampires think about the werewolves as much as the werewolves think about them. End sidenote.

But the fact was canon Leah at least sort of approved of imprinting. So in IHAIW Leah no longer believes it herself when she tells Jacob imprinting is bad (though I like to think she accidently managed to convince him anyway).

So I lied before. That exchange wasn't my least favourite part of BD. Least favourite part was page 360 when Jacob gets the "mandatory love-at-first-sight" that he hates. And that page where I watched Jacob happily give up everything he had wanted for his future against his will was the impetus of Singular Solar Eclipse.

Which went through twenty different title changes, and I'm still not happy with the name, but you can't have everything. That story was basically a collection of every pro-anti-imprinting argument that I could think of and poor Jacob and Leah and Nessie stuck in this massive argument. And once I wrote that, I was happy enough with the Twilight series to post IHAIWand go back and make some major edits to SSE. Because it was written about imprinting and not the characters, and that wasn't fair. So major changes.

Example: Part IV originally ended in with them in bed together, but re-writing made it clear that emotionally it didn't work (because he couldn't do that to Nessie, Bella's daughter, no matter how much he wanted to, not yet. The first draft was more forced and looking back I don't know what I was thinking. Oh yeah. Jacob and Leah would be really hot). Anywhoo, that change made me decide to see how far I could take imprinting. Where it controls your life completely, all the way to the physical changes. So I took imprinting to a totalitarian extreme, and then realized I couldn't end where I had, with Leah asking what had happened, but I still wasn't sure how the characters would end it, so I wrote two endings to get the feel of it. One with Jacob and Nessie getting married and the other with Leah and Jacob together at Nessie's wedding. And then I picked both, with one tiny change. (And Embry and Quil and the bridal party got shuffled around)

But while editing that, I started feeling bad. Did I mention I'm a stickler for canon? Absolute nut (Though I tend to root for non-canonical pairings. I'm sort of stupid that way). Interpretation is all well and good, but the further I got into the story, the more time past, the closer Jacob and Leah grew...well, the further I got from canon.

So I started kicking around ideas for I'm Lost and I'm Found.Post-BD, on the beach (a tiny remnant of a Leah centric story I wanted to write before BD, which ended up with a botched suicide-by-Jasper attempt, a fight with Jacob on the beach and a really bizarre drowning/cleansing screaming match-it was so dark I actually scared myself out of writing it but I liked putting Jacob and Leah on a beach) and because I was sticking to canon, I had to make them...allies? Friends? What was their evolving relationship? Well...She's his beta. What does that mean?

Side note: Okay, so this is why all my Twilight stories contain elements of Jacob/Leah. It's not that I'm a total shipper (even though I sort of am, though I hate the term and I swear I tried to stop). Even when they aren't "together" I have them together. And there's a reason for that beyond me thinking these two characters would be compatible (same sense of humour, similar life experiences, similar background, similar goals etc. etc.) though that's also a big part of it.

The idea of a werewolf Alpha is paternalistic. Jacob leads and cares for the wolves under him. He's the chief, the big man, the father figure. And funnily enough, his second in command is the only female of the species. If you put a woman in the second in command position, you effectively make her the mother figure. And mothers and fathers (as most children reluctantly find out) don't just care about you-they care about each other. I play with that a lot in my stories, sometimes explicitly, because it just seems so obvious to me. Leah's personality would make her more of a partner than a second and that just throws them together.

And while I know Jacob loves Bella, Jacob imprints on Nessie, neither one of those girls is on a equal footing with him. Bella was, but she became a vampire and now she's going to be eighteen the rest of her life and Jacob...isn't. And Nessie is on a completely different level. She's more intelligent and yet less developed and I really can't see anything they have in common other than they both like it when he does whatever she asks him for.

So since I like equal relationships, I tend to throw Jacob and Leah together. Not happily, because I won't deny the existence of Nessie (canon nut, remember?) but together because in my head the gender dynamics distance them from the others while pulling them closer and they have this opportunity to have someone who just...gets it. So they're going to be good friends, at the very least.

End side note: I was talking about the idea of being a beta. (Or Beta, as Jacob says, because he would, which Leah just unconsciously adopts)

So that's why ILAIFwas written. To explore Beta's and equality and the old line about guys and girls never really quite being friends, and the fact that Jacob really did just abandon his friends to die for a baby even though it was his idea in the first place. And without me really being conscious of it, it began echoing IHAIW, with Jacob(Leah) trying to help Leah (Jacob), while getting into fights and insulting one another. So I made the echo explicit, but softer because their relationship has grown. So they talk more like friends and they end up figuring out that they sort of do belong together, even if they aren't aware of the full implications of that just yet. And I think (based on the above about Jacob's other unequal relationships) that there are going to be implications.

Implications that are partially explored in Open the Box.This looks completely self-centered to admit, but it was actually inspired by myself. Yes, lame. But as I was almost finished editing SSE a line jumped out at me and did a little ‘pick me! pick me!’ dance:

Leah would be the person to ask if you wanted to figure out if Embry looked more like an Uley or a Black.

And my first thought was...if that’s true, why doesn’t Embry just go and ask her? And it was fun to explore Embry because we only have a glimpse of his character really (the betting and mechanic thing are some of the few quirks I could find; also Jacob quotes Embry quoting Leah to Bella, which is rather interesting). And because I’m obsessed with balance and symmetry I needed him to balance the other members of the pack. Which posed sort of a problem because I see Seth, Quil, Jacob and Leah as all fairly instinctual human beings. Which meant I had to make Embry intellectual and meticulous (and a little pretentious) to the point of neurosis. Which I think I did.

The story does suffer from two problems. The first is that I kept going back and every time I read it Embry kept over-analysing everything and I have a hard time editing. Boy wouldn’t shut up, but I’m a sucker for ramblers (as you may have noticed) so I let him, which means Act III has an extra 2000 words that it wasn’t supposed to have. The second was the format I chose. It’s about three people (and their relationships with three others). It centers on three conversations. Embry/Jacob (mostly about Leah), Embry/Leah (mostly about Jacob), Jacob/Leah...but the story’s from Embry’s point of view! So the last chapter ended up rather disjointed because the focus of it is a conversation that Embry isn’t part of. And then I never could decide if I wanted to put the epilogue in. I did, just because I had written it, but I’m not sure it added much.

But I also wrote OTB to give Embry some love. I tend to write him as part of this weird Jacob/Leah/Embry triangle, but one where it’s clear that Embry’s not the important part, he’s just what the other two need him to be. I felt bad always giving him the short end of the stick (so I went and found him a girlfriend from the books and started writing a story about the two of them only...she wanted to be with Seth. I couldn’t believe it, but that’s the way it turned out. Poor Embry. Fortunately, she came back in the end). And Embry with his backstory seemed an interesting way to talk about the nature of knowledge and of love and high school subjects. OTB was going to originally be written in second person (I want to explore different writing styles), but Embry already sounded like a talking head. I didn’t want him sounding too remote.

I did keep the second person for The Living and the Dead for that very reason. I wanted the remoteness, the isolation. That story had been kicking around in my head for a while. Because Andromeda was the character I always felt most sorry for, because she just lost everything. And I was always a fan of the Black family, interested in the pull between duty and family and tradition and love. What do you owe to people, really? What do you owe to yourself? And how do you get over losing everything you’ve dedicated your life to building?

Harry Potter was my major fandom of interest for a long time, so I have a whole history of the Black family and the purebloods in my head. They are a world of history, after all, of names and dates and family tress. It was hard cutting out references to that inTLATD (references no one but me would have got, because like I said, it’s all in my head) but I tried to make myself. But I could have written pages about Andromeda’s Quidditch team. I should have cut more out, I think.

But I love her almost breakdown. I’m sort of proud of that.

I wrote Old Man one day while trying to work on a Harry Clearwater story that had been kicking around my head for ages (he’s a rambler too and it’s sort of awesome, but he knows too many strange facts for me to write him easily and researching the Quileutes is not an easy task, because I don't want to misreprest anything but there's not a whole lot of detail for me to work with; still, I finished and called it Until the Last). But I was thinking about fathers and children and then Harry and Billy had this conversation and I noticed that Billy’s children sort of...basically rejected everything I think their father stands for. So I made it a story. But a hopeful story, because rejection and hate are two very different things. Though I’m very upset at myself for forgetting Rebecca moved to Hawaii (though I managed to fix it, eventually). An inexcusable mistake, though I don’t think it undercuts my argument about her. She moved halfway across the world just to be with a guy. And the title was because I couldn’t stop singing the Neil Young song of the same name the day I was posting it and since it sort of worked...viola!

The sequel to OTB, For These Ones, was written because...well because I received a very nice review asking me to do so. And I was going to write back and explain that the story ended there, that there wasn’t anything more to say, but...then I started thinking about it. And the story doesn’t end there. The story never ends with people getting together, or not getting together. Which...I left it vague on purpose, but then I remembered how much I hate it when author's do that, so I HAD to keep going. Also, when you confront a problem and three more spring out in its place. If I ever wanted to write a story about the problems that would confront a the relationship between Jacob and Leah (which, seeing as I’m sort of obsessed, I probably would) this was my chance.

I’m not sure why I kept it in Embry’s voice. Partially it was because OTB was written that way and partially because I wasn’t just interested in Jacob/Leah. I was interested in how them wanting to be together would affect everyone, because he’s got a whole lot of responsibilities that he doesn’t always realize. But if I wrote it from one of their POV then it would just be too tempting to always concentrate on their relationship, their interactions. And I didn’t want that, at least not until Embry drove me nuts and gave me writer's block. That's when I introduced the Interludes, which were easy to write because I missed Jacob's/Leah's POV so much. But I planned them so I needed three chapters from Embry between them and so the writer's block came back. It's a shame I kept it from Embry's POV; I didn’t want to try and keep up the humour that writing as either Jacob or Leah requires, but now I miss it even though I’m not that great at it.

It also didn't help that while I was writing FTO,I decided to post a Jacob/Leah story I had written, as told from Nessie's POV. Called She Hates Me, it originally chronicled Nessie's life in fifteen chapters, mostly when she hit puberty and Jacob had her sent to South America where she discovered something much better than werewolves. Though to get the carelessly, casually, cruel rejection of Jacob I needed (to facilitate the 'breaking of the imprint' that I wanted) Nessie had to start off being a little bit...well, spoiled is a good word. She was a complete and utter brat and in the original story she remained that way until she and Leah basically tried to pull the other's hair out it in a wedding dress shop in chapter thirteen and she finally realized how selfish she was being (she was actually getting married to Nahuel and Leah was upset on Jacob's behalf because he was NOT upset; it made more sense in the actual story, promise).

There was only one problem: my bleeding heart. Usually I think of Nessie as this serene, old-soul sort of girl. But the bratty version grew on me too. She may have been treating Jacob horribly, but it wasn't her fault. She didn't realize what she was doing, not until the second last chapter fight with Leah, so I could forgive her. I felt sorry for her. I didn't like her, but I tolerated her.

And then I started getting reviews. People didn't like Nessie (surprise!). Obviously, they didn't like Nessie: as I had written her, she was rather revolting, if amusing to laugh at. Someone reading didn't know about the ending where she became nicer, so why should they like her? That's when it FINALLY occurred to me that there were another ten or so chapters to go and my main character/narrator was utterly repulsive. Not to mention Chapter 1 took place when she was rather young, and the ending took place years later. She stayed annoying for all that time and no one said anything? She's got the most overprotective guardians on the planet and they let her grow up to be a lousy human being? I could justify her younger self by saying the vampires had simply overindulged her, but that no one, not even Jacob or Leah, had bothered to try and help her grow up properly just didn't make sense (yes, I try and make my fanfiction make sense; I don’t know how well I succeed, but I try).

So I decided to rewrite the story. I was going to give Nessie the bringing up process that I thought best (and most fitting with the characters). That she would have been spoiled as a child made sense to me; now I was going to show how it would slowly fade with the passage of time, with interaction, with experience. The first two chapters stayed, but I began playing off Nessie's obsessive jealousy as more of a joke (though I think she would naturally be jealous). I threw out the marriage, the plot, Nahuel...I started writing from scratch.

People started asking where this was going, how long was it and I answered I didn't know. I had no idea how fast I was going to have Nessie develop anymore and that would deeply influence the plot, the plot I didn't have beyond a few rough sketches and a few backgrounds I was going to lift from the original version to save time writing descriptions. The more I wrote from her point of view, the more I liked her, the more I started rooting for her. I actually went back and read the sections with her in Breaking Dawn; by now I've read the scene where Nahuel comes enough to quote it. Sad. There's still very little information on the half-vamps and it annoys me. Anywhoo, eventually enough people asked 'what are you doing?' that I sat down and wrote out a plot. And it was really, really, REALLY long. Insanely long. Even longer than the 56 chapters epilogue I currently have posted.

The sequel would have had a much darker focus. Blame the hybrids. Nessie would have been a grown up and I wouldn't have pulled any punches. I can get really dark when I want to, even if I don't like sharing those stories. This story would would have begun with unfortunate sexual advances and ended with genocide. And that's ignoring the suicide/murder/death in the middle. Be happy I didn't write it. (You are missing Nessie finally earning every last bit of the endless devotion showered on her, but we can't have everything, after all).

The good/bad result of the aborted sequel is that I probably wouldn't have included the epilogue to SHM if I hadn't planned out this sequel. I think the romantic resolution isn't the point of the story, but I had promised people a romantic ending (that's when I thought there was going to be one; by the time I got to the end, it was the wrong choice, but I had promised) and so I wrote one. It set up the sequel nicely, but I don't think it really goes with how the story was ending.

One day I plan to go back and edit the mess that is SHM, and the epilogue probably will disappear, or at least get moved. There's an unfortunate price you pay when you post as you write; you catch fewer mistakes because you're editing less. So, disclaimer: Not all the chapters are as clear as they should be. I want people to work for their understanding, but sometimes I go too far and it just ends up confusing. I'm sorry. I hope to fix that one day. And just generally tighten the story. There's still a lot of foreshadowing and tying up loose ends, considering, but there are a few points I'd fix up if I had the time.

The issue with Leah is a big one. I hope, but I'm not sure, that everyone realized what I was trying to do with her character. She Hates Me IS a story about a love triangle, but not a conventional one. Jacob and Leah are family (which Nessie struggles to define based on her limited experience of people in perpetual coupledom), but she HAS to obey his commands. Jacob and Nessie are soul mates (Nessie spends the story trying to define that as well and I don't think she ever comes up with a completly satisfactory answer), but he HAS to give her what she demands. It should be a straight heirarchy, Nessie on top, Leah at the bottom, but there's the small problem of the Leah/Nessie relationship. The triangle works in the beginning because Nessie insists that they repel.

Someone once asked me why Leah would do Jacob's bidding, why wouldn't Bella just come along? The short answer is that then there would be no story. The medium answer is that there's no point in having a babysitter if you have to go with him. And the long answer, and probably the most important unspoken part of the story, is that Leah isn't doing what Jacob wants, he's doing what she wants. He's giving her this gift, because he doesn't really know how important it is to her, to Rosalie, to Esme, to these women have been told they aren't worthy. He only understands on an instictual level, where most of Jacob's thinking occurs, which is why he knows enough to warn Nessie away from talking to Leah about it. He just knows he needs to pretend being around Nessie is something Leah doesn't want; so Nessie only understands what's been going on at the end. Leah in her gruff, bitter way needs to mother Nessie because it's probably the only chance she's going to get. And so what should be a simple chain of command becomes a triangle as Leah shifts the dynamic between her and Nessie in her favour; it's why the whole story implodes when Nessie actively begins respecting Leah. The tenuous balance in these relationships completely shifts (if Jacob and Leah are equal, but Leah is Mother, what is Jacob? If Jacob is Lover, then Leah needs to shift to his Mother as well...how is that going to work?). But to understand that you have realize what I've been trying to quietly insist on in the story, that Leah's maternal instinct isn't a throw away line in BD, but a part of her character, especially now that she's older.

And I could write more, but I think I've already written enough on this story. She Hates Me is the story that unconsciously took over my life—and I loved every second of it (such is Renesmee’s gift). Thank you all for this.

When I saw Inception I fell in love with the complexity of it all (and the shipper in me loved the brief kiss), though in Awakening I tried to keep the romance as just another part of the relationship between these two people who impress/terrify me in their ruthless determination to get the job done. The last line I loved too much to get rid of even though it seemed a little flippant about the very real danger of their situation. But then I realized that they aren’t Cobb. Ariadne and Arthur can see the difference between reality and dreams and eventually I thought it was a nice way of highlighting that about them. There is the problem that it is a little dense—I knew I was only going to write one Inceptionstory (the canon is too complex for me to write a plotted story, I feel, because plots have never been my strong suit) so I made sure I threw in almost every thought I had about the two characters. It turned out a little description heavy, but I like it anyways. It was very cathartic.

And of course the top stopped spinning ;) Cobb didn’t need to see it—that’s the moment when he’s free, when he knows reality the way the rest of us do. He’s happy there; I’m happy believing he’s home. That’s enough for me. That’s why I just assumed the world of Inceptionkept going, if anyone is wondering.

In order to recover from the really long stories that were SHMand FTO, I started uploading a few of the one-shots that I had written in some spare moments while writing longer stories that I never got around to posting (Mermaids... was written when I felt like getting Seth/Nessie together but I couldn’t in SHM without needing another twenty chapters, The End was written when I started thinking about the reality of a Jacob/Leah relationship, Man to Manwas written when I was going through old e-mails and found one asking me to write a sequel to WtW). I’ve still got some around and I’ll get them all up eventually.

When my wonderful exam schedule left me with two weeks with nothing to do I went back to a 100-page story I had once written. It had started as a find-Embry-a-girl story when I was writing OTB.I hate OCs in fanfiction (I always thought people should just write their own fiction if they were going to focus on their own characters, though I totally cheat on this rule all the time) so I looked through the smaller side characters and decided Angela Webber was a nice girl who could help poor unloved Embry. And then I wrote another story I’m never going to post that had Angela and Seth hanging out. It was such a change for me, writing two characters who are just so nice, that I kind of loved it. So I went back and replaced Seth with Embry and got to the 100-page mark and then my inspiration ran dry and I left it for almost a year (maybe two). When I went back I started planning out an ending...but if I had Angela and Seth together there was absolutely no way they could end up together.

There was the small problem that having the two nicest characters in the Twilight-verse together meant there wasn’t a lot of drama between the two, but I enjoyed having mostly external conflict. Unfortunately, the few conflicts I put between the two made a happy ending impossible. I made their traditions vitally important to each—compromising on them was out of the question. Period. So...no happy ending.

I went back to Embry; the happy ending was possible with him, so Seth was out (though he still liked hanging around—maybe too much). So at least now I could entertain the possibility of my lead characters in my first attempt to write a straight romance would get together at the end. It also allowed me to touch on the characters I normally don’t write (Angela, Jessica, Mike etc.) and explore how the werewolves would look from a human perspective AND maybe even bring in the vampires who I tend not to write about as much as I’d like (oh, Aro, how do I love thee? Helps that you were played by Michael Sheen, but still). I liked the challenge of trying to get everyone in there. So I edited the old pages and then banged out another two hundred...now I’m trying to finish it up while I edit the beginning. It should clock in around 40 chapters or so, which is kind of depressing now that I realize no one is very interested. Oh well. What's written is written. The longest fic I wrote has 20 reviews. Clearly I'm not doing this for the recognition—I just hope I somehow distract someone for an hour or two.

The reason I didn’t finish the story in my two week window is because I started writing Growing Painsat the same time. Since I'm not making any money, anyway, I like trying to make people happy, if I can (especially those who have been so supportive for a long time). When asked for more Blackwater, with children, that's what I did. I pulled Will and the Uley twins from SHM, the then-unnamed Bertrand from FTO, Judith from the Seth/Angela story I’m not going to post, Kara from FG; they all stayed the same ages in these stories, I think, too. I had a blast naming everyone. Levi, Dinah, Jude being the children of Jacob and Leah in the Bible, Benjamin being Rachel’s beloved son (though Rachel’s problems weren’t necessarily inspired by the biblical stories, but from FGwhere I had her pregnant in the first chapter and with no child later on...and I realized, yes, of course, Rachel had lots of problems having children), William for his grandfather and the Uleys from the best children’s program ever ;) The plot...well, at first there wasn’t much plot. There were just a lot of vignettes pieced together. But the more I wrote the more it turned into a story. Eventually it was one. About how it feels to grow up surrounded by parents with secrets you don't understand, and how complicated it is trying to find your own way and most of all about how much it hurts when the relationships that once defined you start to change. Fifteen parts, too many non-canon characters, but as always I can’t help falling in love with any character that I write. So I have my army of OCs (and I know that makes me a hypocrite—I say again, oh well). Below is a link to a family tree (just copy and paste).

http:///?p=JQ6TB&c=siodfuofli&f=513443965717137257

Some notes. Only BIRTH and INTERESTS are filled in. If the DOB is given as JAN, then the day is just how old they are. Example: Dinah’s birthday is NOT 18 JAN 2011, she was born in 2011, which makes her 18 in 2029, when the story is set. However, Levi’s birthday is in September. I hope that makes sense. INTERESTS will give you a bit of a blurb on most of them. I tried to include all the names a character might be called. Jacob is forty, and keeping the pack very young was a very conscious choice—not only does it make it a little more believable that no one’s noticed that they don’t age, it’s part of the reason the younger children are better adjusted.

Nessie is attached to Jacob just because she’s his imprint, not because they’re secretly married in the story or anything like that.

Anything relevant I’ve forgotten, as always, just ask.

Methods of Perception was originally a fairly tame Seth/Nessie fluff story that grew too long since I didn’t post it for so long. And then someone said I wrote them very innocent as a couple. Which, yes. Either because a) the relationship only works, I think, when she's 7/18 if he doesn't push and I write Nessie as uptight and controlling b) I see them both as so open it becomes private again and c) I usually just fade to black because it suits the fluffy nature of the story. But I decided to take that as a challenge it wasn’t. I went on a smut-writing spree. I tried to hide how little actual story there is in the later chapters, but we’ll see how well I succeeded.

If you want a nice long reading spree, you can read Open the Box, For These Ones, Growing Pains and then Chest Pains. I wouldn’t call them a series, just a group of stories that share continuity, but it’s the closest I’ve got.

Most of my stories share a relative continuity. Pre-BD they don’t contradict and are how I imagine the past for all my post-BD stories, and the post-BD stories…well, I tend to keep characterization pretty consistent, even if plot points and style change, so if events don’t contradict, there’s no reason, say, W2W couldn’t be the conclusion to SHM, if you wanted. For example. If you wanted.

And yes I've given this all too much thought (but if you're going to take the time to read it, I sort of owe it to you to think about it). I've got a long walk to and from campus.

Enough rambling.