I also thought I was doing some drastically different when I wrote my first story, True Love, involving FF. It seemed like back then, 1999ish, there weren’t a lot of FF stories yet…I seem to remember a big surge of them a few years later.

At the time I’d been going through a bad patch in a number of ways, so the idea came into my head to write something uplifting, about two characters who were so in love that pretty much nothing could get in the way of that. I thought I was a genius for making them lesbians. Little did I know that the MC community is a font of actual lesbians. I assumed it was all straight men writing rape fantasies, so I thought I was doing something new.

By the time I wrote Auto a year and a half later, I had seen Buffy, so I can’t say it wasn’t an influence then. But if it was, it wasn’t conscious.

I’ve read it over, and as best I can tell, the resemblance is that they’re a) in love, b) call each other “Sweety”, and c) one of them is a redhead named Allison.

I’ve made a conscious effort not to have characters call each other “Sweety” since then. I’ve even made an effort to reduce the funness of my dialogue. It’s a natural inclination though, so that’s difficult.

Any other resemblance to Willow and Tara is in the mind of the reader.