With a hip, hip and a clippety-clop

Every year in October I say to myself "I am going to finish that update on 'The House on Avian Way' so that I can repost it." And then I don't. Well this year guess what? I did! I also put together a buttload of chapter notes for it, which I will be posting anon! (Probably starting tomorrow.) It is not yet uploaded, either at ff.net (the version there is still the old one) or on my webpage, but it will be soon.

Meanwhile though, I thought that in preparation I would post a sort of history of the fic.

I am, as anyone who knows me personally can attest, a freak about Halloween. I've had to grow out of it in recent years, due to lack of time, but in the past I would decorate not only my house but my webpage and blog, as well. I always wanted to write a ghost fic for the Webfoot Weavings, but for years I had no good ideas. In the late 90s, when I was going to school in Canada, two things converged to make inspiration strike:

First of all, I was reading a Rescue Rangers fic with ghosts in it. I found a lot of it to be genuinely chilling, but was let down by the ending. What I liked about the first part, however, was enough to get me thinking of how *I* would write a ghost story; and secondly, I bought the soundtrack for Beetlejuice, written by Danny Elfman. The music in that movie is very original, at once spooky and cartoony, to fit the tone of the movie. I used to listen to the CD in my car while driving to and from school, and after a while, with this possible ghost story on my mind, the score started to inspire scenes.

To be honest, I don't remember what the initial storyline was, except that in the barest bones kind of way it was what it is now: Beth's house is haunted and the characters have to solve the mystery of just WHO is haunting it. or what, or whatever. :) Over the next couple of years I kept going back to the idea, and in 2000, I started writing it. I then spent the next five years working on it. :D

The title was originally meant to be a place-holder, but after a while I discovered it fit nicely. I think this might have been one of the first fics I worked on where I wrote out of order; I kept finding that I couldn't figure out precisely where to go from one spot, so I'd move on to a later one. Also, this was the first *fic* I wrote out of order; I had previously completed "Something In the Air" but had at least one more to go, possibly two, before this one was to take place. I knew, obviously, what was going to happen in those two (or I thought I did) but had no idea when they would be written.

I think I had about half of it, maybe even more, finished by the time I got married in 2002. I didn't want to release it without having it beta read, so I had to track down some readers - my friends Jess and Amanda were absolutely ESSENTIAL in the completion of this story, and in fact, it's more or less how Amanda and I got to be friends and not just general DWD acquaintances. :D

It still took forever and a day for me to finish this thing off. The ending was impossible to write. I wasn't sure just how I wanted it to go until I got there. And so finally in 2005 it was not just finished but beta'd, corrected, and I finally posted it on FF.net, where it fell a bit flat. Heh. ^_^;; In the next few years I actually finished one of the stories to come before it - "High, Dry, and Flooded" - and despite having had that in my head for *years* already the ending took a direction I hadn't expected and I ended up invalidating a good portion of what I'd written and released in HoAW. Figures. So this is why I had to go back and update it. And I held off because I felt like, why do that before I have the one in between HD&F and HoAW finished? (That one is "All About Elizabeth") I might just invalidate it again!

Well, I have gone long enough without updating it. I hate having it just sit there all defunct and all. So I'm finally posting the durn thing.

Of course, now it has spoilers in it, because it takes place after the story I'm currently working on and it does talk about the end of that story. This time I am pretty certain that story will end the way I think it will, btw. ^_~ But heck, if you've come this far, you probably don't mind. :D

HoAW has influence in a lot of my favourite books and movies, *most* of them about ghosts: The Haunting is a HUGE influence, as is Beetlejuice (of course) and even The Blair Witch Project to an extent. Quite a few others are in there too, as noted in the chapter notes to come. I did not include a soundtrack listing, but I might in the next week if I have the time to go through and match up the tracks.

Not a lot of the story has changed, and the really "important" parts are all the same, but still I hope those who choose to will enjoy rereading "The House On Avian Way" as much as I enjoyed writing it. How corny is that? ^_^