I have been absent from DA for most of this summer because of a series of serious personal & family trials and tribulations, and also because I have been working on a piece of Saiyuki fanfiction that ended up being quite lengthy. It was written for a LiveJournal giftfic exchange, where I happened to draw a prompt that was quite complicated (an AU piece based on "My Fair Lady", I won't even tell you the pairing! LOL)

As I got into it, it became clear to me (I have this compulsion to do things like this things right, even if it means lots of complications) that it couldn't be done in something short and simple, and it ended requiring a heavily-researched, over 120-page, 12 chapter story to really do the thing in what I considered the best possible manner. My best hope is that it was at least worth it - some of my readers have told me that it is one of the best things I have written so far, if not the best. Sometimes it takes a challenge to really show us what we can do - I don't know anymore, you read it and see what you think! ^__~

Because of the shortcomings of DeviantArt's text posting process, it is almost impossible for me to post the whole thing here, so instead I am posting only the first Chapter in a deviation here along with a description and a link to my journal in LiveJournal. It is not friends-locked there, anyone can read it, I only ask that you honor my request that you be over 18, it is rated NC-17, as it is a yaoi story. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them here on DA with the deviation and I will respond.

Normally I wouldn't do this, I would post the full story here, but with over 60,000 words full of HTML codes for italic, underline, footnotes, etc, it would take me weeks to enter those all in here in DA's antiquated system, and frankly I'd rather spend the time working on my next story!

Thanks and peace to you all.

hg