Hi everyone. It's the 21st here now, so I'm posting this while I can, before my brain explodes trying to  work out the time zones ;)

Today we are looking at the epistolic masterpiece of

Adventures  by Quinn222 http://quinn222.livejournal.com

Quinn222’s epistolic fics luckily happened to be some of the early fanfics I found when I first came to the fandom and I’ve been in awe of them ever since. What has always amazed me is that even though on the surface Adventures appears to be a travelogue, the number of different emotions I experience in reading it, the amount of information about their private life that I glean, and the wealth of little details and the angst and humour and teh love included is overwhelming.

It was incredibly difficult to choose which of Quinn222’s stories to feature here today. Nearly all of them are journeys through an incredible post series 4 (mostly) universe that she has created. There are fics that come in sequence before Adventures detailing how Brian and Justin arrived at this point, and fics that continue their life together after Adventures. In the end I chose Adventures because I felt it was the fic you could read without having read the ones before without losing much of the overall story.

The one feeling that I get all through this fic is the total belief that I’m reading a series of excerpts from private diaries, letters and journals. I even find myself occasionally wondering how Quinn has gotten hold of such private documents.

I picked screen 68 (actually it should have been 69) as a good point to stop reading if time was limited so everyone could join in. However I hope you were all as hooked as I am and have read all the way through so we can squee over the rest of the story as well. If you haven’t, please be aware that some comments may spoil you for the rest of the tale.

When I was at uni, we spent a lot of time in literature classes rabbiting on (no offense bunny) about how ‘readerly’ or ‘writerly’ a piece of prose was, whether the author had ‘told’ the story, or the reader had pieced it together. The thing that really annoyed me was how often this delving into the writing focused on ‘what the author meant’ to say, rather than whether the reader actually got a story out of the clues left by the writer.

In Quinn’s works, reading the clues is vital. Although much of the text is actually expositional in format, the characters reactions to events are often told in pictorial clues.

I’ve posted a few discussion points below but my main reason for hosting this was to make sure everyone knew of epistolic fiction so we could squee together over it’s wonderfulness.