Welcome to the all-new, all-improved FICTIONALLEY!

Oh, the loveliness that is FictionAlley's brand new, sparkly, shiny, delicious search engine! Ships! Characters! Ratings! Length! House! Genre! Hits! Word count! Spoilers! Upload-date! It's finally all there.

Oh, the cleverness and organization that is the Story Management page, where registered users (you must be logged in to see it properly) can see all their fics on one page, edit the summary, ships, characters, era, spoiler and rating information, upload new chapters, and yes, upload new fics (in other words, we've reopened)!

Oh, the usefulness of an alphabetical listing of authors that shows all of an author's fics in the same summary, and in line with that, oh, the structure and brilliance of an author page that lists all of an author's fics with summary, spoiler, hit, rating, last-update, first-publication date and chapter count information!

SO much love to everyone on Team FictionAlley, from nostrademons, who dreamed it three years ago, to Paul, Jason, alice_and_lain, smilie117, inthesewalls and everyone else who helped with the development of Links, the precursor to this, as well as the building-out of this system, Charles at Dragon.com who makes so much of this possible, and everyone who helped migrate fics, code and process fics, particularly in this last week where we cleared out the in-box, explain the old system (tiresome as that became at times), and especially, every single person who has ever submitted a fic to FictionAlley.

We're moving a little slow tonight as everything gets back in gear, and not all ISPs have resolved to our new urls - if your fic is already up there, we'd appreciate it if you waited a day or so before editing the newly-included information - a lot of it has already been incorporated from things like your Keywords - but I am so damned proud to say that FictionAlley has reopened.

Come on, check it out - and don't forget to submit your essays to the will-be-live-over-the-next-24-hours HPInkPot "house", and have fun editing our Wiki.

We hope you will enjoy it here on FictionAlley.

Spinning canon

In looking around at images from one of the GoF Behind the Scenes shows, I came across the one where Tom Felton was talking about dancing with Emma, so I looked at the stills of people spinning around across the dance floor and realised that what I like about fanfic, or fanvids the HP films, is the little tweaks you can make, or you can see, on the books. I get my canon from JKR, and I don't really read fanfic to get more canon - nobody generates it but JKR herself. What I like are the spins on canon, the bits where some of it gets lifted into the air, or the hands shift from one side to another, and the parts where things move in unison and in quick-step, and Flitwick does some crowd-surfing. So I've decided, per my current default icon, to become a canon spinner. Assuming, that is, I ever write again. But the FA update is so sparkly and shiny that omg I am tempted. Tempted but the truth is discovered, in fact.

Along the lines of icon-pondering, it's probably been a year since I did the "ask me about my icons" meme, so I'm going to do it now, Ask me about my icons, people!

Then go through all the essays you've written over the years and put them into the HPInkPot (and if you think it's pink now, you should've seen it when Sabs started on it). copperbadge came up with the InkPot name, but I couldn't get the domain, so I popped HP in front of it, realised that meant the word PINK was enclosed, and decided that clearly had to be the name. If it's too squicky as a colour, we may magenta-ize it more. Later.

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News of the Day:
ellen_fremedon gave this link to Forbes' list of the 15 richest fictional characters. They included Lucius via a damned clever bio, although I have issues with his inclusiuon in the first place, as I firmly believe that he's a bit of a parvenu who was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to marry the wealthy Narcissa when her cousin Sirius, to whom she was betrothed, walked out on the family and hence the marriage (whether said walking-out was because of his werewolf boyfriend or not is something that I haven't fully decided yet). So I don't think the money is his - I think it's hers. Such a situation would explain his rivalry with Arthur a bit more coherently, IMO, and would also explain why he does bother to become a Death Eater, in a bit of an "I'll Show Them" sort of approach. Wonder what Jason would say.

I was sad to hear that Wendi Jo Sperber died yesterday. I loved her in Bosom Buddies, and the Back to the Future films, among other things. She seems to have been a terrific person. Sad.

But on a happier note to end with, congrats to the new Garner-Affleck baby. Hopefully said child will get a sensible name. Hopefully.