The Sadness of the Moon

I was still quite new to fandom, and therefore very flattered to be asked, when Layna asked me to write a "bonus track" for the 'zine version of her epic Buying Trouble, which had been well in progress when I first arrived. I remember noticing points at which Layna assumed, even almost required, that the reader be paying careful enough attention to the story to remember details from earlier installments -- which, when a thing is posted serially with who-knows-what frequency, is by no means guaranteed. But that kind of faith in one's readership is something I don't see as often as I'd like in fandom, and I've been pleased with Layna ever since for displaying it.

The "assignment" for the "bonus tracks" was to tell some part of the story of Quiaius and Eab from some other character's point of view -- in other words, it was right up my street. My POV character is (listen carefully, because this is the only place I know of where this is explicitly revealed) Diana, goddess of the moon, chastity, and hunting, and I had great fun working in random references to what I remembered of Roman and Greek mythology. The Celts didn't have quite the same pantheon as the Greeks and Romans, of course, but they did have a similar goddess called Abnoba; so my narrator treats the Celts' prayers to Abnoba as prayers to her, just as her sister Minerva accepts the devotions the Greeks made to Athena. A little mono-pantheism to get us totally turned around in circles. Heh.

Although this was written relatively early in my, uh, career, I've always been very pleased with it.