flummery

Martha, over at The Less Than Legendary Journeys, has finally finished her story Dark Hunt, and I thoroughly recommend it to any Hercules fans out there. You may want to start at the beginning of her series, as Dark Hunt relies on your familiarity with the universe she has created around the Hercules characters. You won't regret it if you take the time to do so.

The Less than Legendary Journeys is a gem of a website. Long after I've fallen out of following Hercules fandom, I still watch this site -- a task aided by their helpful mailing list that notifies me when they put new stories up. The site is the home of a small group of authors, and I assume friends, who banded together to build a beautiful archive for their stories, spending as much attention to the graphics and layout of the website as the writing and editing.

The stories are more often than not set in a shared universe that diverged from the canon series after the death of Iolaus. Martha Wilson and Kimberly Rector bring Iolaus back in their story Home is Where the Heart Is and do so far, far better than the show did. Much of the fiction there is gen, or g-rated slash, but it gives me far more emotional satisfaction than most of the slash you'll find out there. Amazing how good writing can do that. With authors like Martha and Artemis Artemis (one of the best, and funniest, authors out there), you don't have to go far to find a wonderful story, and you'd be hard pressed to find a poor story from any of the authors on the site. Instead of spending hours trolling archives searching for something halfway decent, you can take your time wallowing in long, well-plotted, well characterized, caring, and often very funny stories.

I live in fear that these authors will grow bored with the fandom, and move on, but their slow consistent output of high quality works gives me hope that this site will continue to grow for the foreseeable future, and give me truly lovely Hercules fiction to look forward to.