( No, it isn’t posted here. Or anywhere I normally post. Or under any of my normal aliases. Not sure if I ever will put it here. I’m only mentioning it now so people don’t think I disappeared into the wilds of the internet. )

I smell crossover potential!

Okay. I made the above banner. I know it isn’t the best. It just doesn’t say “femslash” does it. There should be at least 1 couple, not 4 separate faces. Image manips? Not really my thing.

And why the above characters from BtVS and Harry Potter? (Using the actresses who portrayed them ) (Narcissa Malfoy (though not how I imagine her in my head so I probably will change that picture of her at some point), Hermione Granger, Buffy Summers, and Tara McKlay)  You’ll see (maybe) in 4 weeks or so. I do try to have at least one fic chapter ready for that day. Might be something old or something new.

And, of course, I don’t own the original photos this is based on.)

So I bought Coda, a tool for old fogies like myself who still edit our website files manually. It doesn’t completely replace TextWrangler from BareBones Software. TextWrangler is a much more powerful editor than the one in Coda. But otherwise, Coda beats it for dealing with an entire website.

And I’ll be using it (even if the money went to the Red Cross, I wouldn’t have paid for it if I didn’t plan to use it.) over the next few months, and etc. to slowly make changes to my fic site. The goal is to change the look of the site. To spiff it up a bit and move it from Web 1.0 to Web.Now.

The same goes for the characters. If I’m going to use a canon character in a story I feel the need to know as much about that character as possible. In the case of characters like Buffy, Willow, Giles, and Xander, in 144 episodes we have over 120 x 44 minutes of story/canon time with them to flesh out their character. To have some idea of whom they are in their world.

But what about the minor characters?

I like to use Vi, a potential slayer in BtVS Season 7, in a lot of stories because she’s mostly a blank slate. I’ll admit to using other roles the actress who played her as a model but that works because she’s yet to be a pivotal character in one of my stories but more like a member of the supporting ensemble cast.

I’m currently tinkering with a story idea that will have Kennedy as a major character. She wasn’t a major character in the series but, due to her connection to Willow in Season 7 (and in the Season 8 comic book) as the Tara replacement we actually know more about her than almost all of the potential slayers who survived Sunnydale. But we don’t really know who she is. Sure, self-professed rich brat and 3rd (?) canon lesbian in the Buffyverse. While we know a little more about her than that it really doesn’t tell us much – only a few details to enhance the “rich brat” description.

But what about her name? Is Kennedy her given name or surname or a nickname? Or an alias given to her by her watcher or the Council to hide who she really is? Is what she tells everyone even true? (I’ve read at least one story where her parents were servants of some rich family…)

A name matters. It tells us history. Ethnicity.

Is Kennedy her surname? Is she a Scottish Kennedy? Or an Irish Kennedy like a certain Massachusetts family? Was her mother a Kennedy or her father?