LINKS: Table of Contents

Thanks everyone for reading, and everybody who's commented so far! You've made me feel really welcome and gotten me excited about continuing this story as a series!

Constructive criticism is welcome. I only ask that you provide an example of ways I can fix what you think is wrong. :3

Note: If you check the Table of Contents, you will find this series now has cover art.

I really like how you're playing this gender switch. In my experience, they're usually really good or awful, kwim? This one is one of the good ones! Can't wait for part 3.

Tara

I like your cover-art from the TOC. I was wondering how Clara (Super Woman) was going to get away with having Cat, Louis, and Lex see her without her soda-bottle glasses.

I love this whole speech! Yea, Cat!

I was a bit disappointed by the switch of Claude to Claudia, as I was hoping the only gender switch would be Lois and Clark. I was thinking you might have Claude buddy up with him and then hire a some woman to seduce Louis and steal his story to give to Claude. It sounds like Claudia did a number on Louis, but I guess we won't be getting any Messenger Hangar confessions of vulnerability from Louis to Clara. So, will Clara become sympathetic to Louis via rumor only? Because so far we haven't seen any direct examples of his dropping the jerk guard with Clara.

Hmmmm. Does this mean no high heal boots for Super Woman?

Ooooh! I'm envious!

Yikes! That is long.

So, did Clara bring the sewing machine back with her from Smallville? No, she didn't, did she, since she landed on Cat's roof. I was going to wonder if Martha helps her out with the costumes or if she made it by herself.

Sounds like a homage to Smallville.

Awwwww. Poor Louis, that he thinks so poorly of himself.

And the sexist pig is back.

Yea, Clara. Atta girl!

Oh, no. Not Clara. I can't look... <<peers through fingers>>

Lex seems even more of a chauvinist than Louis, seeing Clara only as a woman and not as a reporter, especially with that closing line:
Only it's only going to interest Louis, but not Clara? Pig!

This story is still fun. I don't know how you'll wrap up the Pilot in only two more parts. I'm curious to see what other twists on canon you have in store for us.

ROFLOL!!!

Hey, gang member. You wanna try?

I can so see this. And I’m reminded of Brenda Leigh Johnson or “Brenda, just Brenda” from The Closer.

Yep, you’re still being a jerk, Louis.

Ooooh… A man saying that to a woman. Let’s send Louis to the sexual harassment classes. LOL.

Wait a minute. Who said this? The following paragraphs seem to indicate that it was Louis, but this paragraph seems to indicate Clara.

And who said this? Perhaps you could add a little more explanation here.

Awww….

So much waffiness, I’m grinning ear to ear.

Yes, I think you’re right.

This sounds so Cat to have a screen.

I like that you made the dress Clara wore red.

Surely Cat has a needle and thread? Ah, I see. She had to go to Smallville.

Oops.

Love your double entendres.

It could be interesting if she falls for Lex.

This might be a little bold for her to say this to someone who doesn’t know about her super side. I’d scale it back and then have her think about what the truth is.

Great part. I loved it.

But those darn high heels are soooo impractical.

Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying it. :3

Thanks for the thoughtful comments!

Glad you like the cover! I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. I had a lot of fun designing Clara's costume. And yeah, I felt that it was more likely that Clara would have to wear a mask and ditch the glasses, because Clark can get away with always wearing them, but speaking from experience as a woman who prefers glasses to contacts, people will not SHUT UP about how you should wear contacts or just be blind during formal events because your glasses just hide your face/clash with your dress/etc. etc.

Lol yeah, I think Lou is implying he'd sleep with someone for a story. I made that choice, because in canon Louis goes out of her way to emphasize to Clark that she WOULDN'T do that, so I thought it would be an interesting comment to make here, on society's different expectations for men and women. After all, if Lois slept with someone for a story, she's a dirty ho, but if Louis does it, he's not a nice guy, but more people are goig to focus on his dedication to the job than anything else.

But yes, he is totally lying.

Thanks for catching the missing paragraph breaks! I've gone back and fixed them.

Lol yeah, with the 'mommy hand me down' comments, Louis is trying to get out of admitting that he does think Clara is pretty and distance himself from her, but he's also in a bit of a pickle, since he's still in the middle of trying to get her to come to the ball.

Cat - YES. YES GOOD EVERYTHING YOU SAID. I just have a whole lot of Cat Feelings that can't be contained. >_>

Re: Claude to Claudia - I thought about doing what you said, having Claude stay a male reporter with a female accomplice, but in the end I decided it was better to just switch Claude than to make up a female OC who wouldn't have instant name recognition with the readers. Claude/Claudia is the only other genderswitch in the series though, if that makes you feel any better. Everyone else is staying the same - including Linda King, who is now Lou's old college girlfriend.

I think there will be some direct discussion of Claudia in the hangar, but it'll come about differently, since it won't be so much a tearful confession as much as Clara using the opportunity to ask Lou questions, knowing he'll probably answer since they're tied up and, as far as he knows, about to die.

Lou unbends a little soon, too. I'll not spoil it for you, but hopefully it's believable...

And lol, I'm going to get the pilot done in two more parts because I'm skipping every scene that the gender change doesn't affect, and counting on everyone to know what's going on since it's a rewrite of an episode XD But they are -long- parts. I think the story will finish out at close to twenty thousand words.

Thanks again for the thoughtful comments!

Thanks for the lovely feedback!

Yes, I loved the idea of Clara having a hideous purse! XD

Re the quotes: Clara says both of them. No one else has mentioned anything, so I think I'll leave them for now, but if it confuses anyone else I'll go back and make it clearer.

I'm actually not sure yet if Clara is going to fall for Lex or not. Right now she likes him and thinks he's charming. I'm going to see where the story takes me. I do know she's not going to realize he's a crook for quite a while. The A-plot demands that.

Clara's languages: I think as she hasn't invented Superwoman yet in this scene, and given how she's a bit careless when she firsts gets to Metropolis with the bus and the flying around in her own clothes, and the upcoming manhole rescue, that she'd be a bit less than prudent here. Lex is charming and handsome, and maybe she wants to show off a little, and have someone appreciate her after spending a day with Lou acting like she's an idiot.

And yeah, I think Superwoman's boots are going to be pretty much just like Superman's, except they'll come up to just above her knees. I keep imagining her getting heels caught in unfortunate places otherwise, and/or breaking a heel when she's picking up super heavy things.

Thanks again for such thoughtful comments!

Uh-huh, new chapter?

Yay! That might be the start of a wonderful friendship!

Love it, love it, love it! That's the kind of Cat I'd have loved to see in the series!

Probably not. He's not the Editor in Chief of the world's greatest newspaper because he can yodel...

Claudia? Couldn't it have been Claudine or Claudette? Anyway, I like this kind of twist.

Gotta love Cat's pragmatism here.

Wait, no stories about bongo drums and swinging from the chandelier for half the night? Cat must be really warming up to Clara. Nice touch. Very nice touch.

Very interesting. I don't know what's going to happen with her alter ego, but it sure is going to be different.

See something you like?

Do you really want to know?

Took him long enough.

Where, oh where did she pick up that language? At Great-(great-great-)aunt May's?

Another nice little twist. And love the bit about taking turns leading!

Show-off.

Love that little interplay, with Clara once again doing a little more than just raise to the challenge.

Nice move, girl.

Touché. Even if it's highly unlikely anything on Earth can eat her alive without any kryptonite around.

Now don't you get any ideas, missy. Luthor is scary with a capital S. And probably a capital C, too.

I sure hope Clara gets the hint that she's not seen as a professional, but merely as some kind of eye candy and/or trophy to be won.

Great, great, great chapter! I can't wait to see the next part! Do you have a posting schedule?

Loving this story. It would be great to see this follow more of the Season 1 episodes, but I wouldn't want to wait two whole years before they got together ...

Now, I wonder what Louis will think of Superwoman when she turns up, and I wonder whether Clara's smll infatuation with Louis will quickly turn to love, or not.

And I'm really curious to see how Lex will respond to Superwoman. I can't see him thinking of her as an enemy, more as a seduction challenge, so would he put her through those tests?

And Jason Trask, would he be as convinced that there was an alien invasion with it being a super-powered woman. Maybe he'd acuse her of wanting to distract all the men of the world with her skin tight costume making them all think with the brain in their pants!

Anyway, keep posting please.

I like the interaction between Luthor and Clara. I can see him wanting to pursue her, but I hope she doesn't fall for it.

On a totally unrelated note, I've got a question for you, Pris. What does the emoticon you keep using mean? :3 It makes me think of a cat face, but I've never seen anyone use that before, so I'm not sure I'm looking at it right.

no I won't, I will bury the message.

I think that should be "they were".

I hope Clara thinks about this arrogance. Too bad she did not hear the seize the high ground line.

Pris' grammar is quite good. I think this is just a slip. It's far easier to see mistakes in others' writing than it is your own.

Too true, I can vouch for that.

Too true, I can vouch for that. [/b]</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Longer replies to other comments later, as I'm about to dash off to work, but I wanted to say thanks for spotting the typos (and vouching for me !) and I'll be sure to go back and fix them later this evening. :3

Oh, and the ':3' face I'm fond of using is just sort of a cute smiley. In my head I think of it as 'little cute guy'. I use it when I think someone/something else is cute and/or when I am trying to be cute /if that makes sense? The more extreme version of the face is x3 - for when something is SO CUTE OMG.

I should have been more up front that I really, really like this story. I was not trying to be overly critical with my comments. I am sorry if I came across that way.

I neglected to comment enough on my favorite parts earlier.

I like that Louis actually picked Clara up for the ball. I am tempted to say that he comes off as more sympathetic than Lois from this. However, I think he would come up a lot worse off than Lois if he just has Clara show up. Plus, he is trying to use Clara more than Lois ever tied to use Clark.

I really liked the scenes in the taxi cab. I guess they make sense since Louis does have to prep Clara for the cornering of Lex, but they were still very fun.

I am really looking forward to seeing if Clara figures out what is really going on with Lex a lot faster than Lois did.

Hmmm, I really hope she figures out during the test scenes if not before. Well, we shall see.

I have to say to date this is the best geder switch of the main characters in the story I have ever scene, bar none.

Even all my gruming about the amount that Clara is interacting with Lex shows that this is good.

It might help that this is the closest to canon I have ever scene someone do the story. However I think that is what makes it work so well.

I also have to say leaving almost all the other characters unchanged is helpful.

Actually I just realized another reason why "I've Got a Crush on You" is such a fun one to do. You get to give new aliases to Louis and Clara. Hmm, that alone might be a reason to have Clara go to do the undercover work first. Louis using the unemployed sailor outfit just seems to work. It would also lead to a new but still funny dynamic when Clara recognizes Louis in disguise.

Clara:Louis, I can totally tell that is you.

Louis:It's Lenny, Lenny King.

Clara:I can see through any disguise you use Lenny.

Louis:Like you could ever pull off a disguise. By the way, did you hear that Superwoman put out another fire. She is so awesome.

I also have to say I like the cover art. It reinforces my view that Clara will have to get used to slightly immodest clothes. I guess wearing a mask as Superwomen makes sense since Clara has not held as closely to the glasses as Clark.

So you are going to do "The Rival". Interesting. I am wondering if Linda King will go the way of Rachel Harris or Claudia.

One possibility is Linda King being a former associate of Clara's. Considering Linda's getting Clark to take her to the rail station because she was "new in town", it would work better if she was someone Clara had known in the past.

On further reading I see you are keeping Linda having a connectiong to Louis. That will be interesting. It will change the dynamic, but it will if anything make the sense of betrayal even worse. This will be very interesting.

But in canon I am pretty sure that Clark says that line to Lois.

But in MOSB Clark was going around wearing suits when Perry came in in Bermuda shorts. Lois even asked him if he was from a different planet.

Luthor might change his reaction based on having a female superhero. However I do not see Trask changing at all. He hates aliens. At some level he probably does not even see Superwoman as really a woman at all. He no more would react to her based on her gender than he would react to Godzilla based on his gender.

Ok guys: I've gone back and made some changes to one description and one line of dialogue, and properly formatted everything with bold and italics. Thanks for catching typos and helping me improve the story. :3

Now, on to the comment replies!

Lara:

So glad you're enjoying the story, especially the characterization of Cat! I'm trying to do here what I felt like they should have done in the show, if they hadn't been playing her so much for laughs/she'd gotten more screen time. And I think there's an opportunity to show a different side of her here because Clark is Clara. In canon, Clark was always put off by Cat's blatant pursuit of him, and Lois and Cat had something of a rivalry, so Lois wouldn't really have gotten to know Cat that well.

XD Clara tells me that her mother is a member of the Smallville Red Hat Lady Society, and Clara occasionally plays bridge with them.

This cracked me up. </strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Glad you're enjoying it!! And I don't plan on writing past the first season at the moment, so draw what conclusions you will from that...

Louis, I think I can say without really spoiling anything, is going to fall head over heels for Superwoman, and land pretty hard on his face! XD I'm not really sure yet what Lex is going to think. I think I'm just going to have to write the scenes and see what happens. On the one hand, he'll dislike her for the same reasons he disliked Superman - she's as powerful in her own way as Lex is, and she could pose a lot of problems to Lex's criminal empire. But on the other, he might react differently to her being a woman.... Actually, now that I think about it, I think he'll actually hate her more. He's never let gender stop him from crushing other women in his way - Baines, Tony Taylor, etc. - and I think Superwoman being female might actually enrage him more, since he seems to view women mostly as trophies/conquests.

But I think things will go very differently after a while, because in this reality it's Clara he wants, rather than Lois. I'm toying with the idea of having him discover the dual identity in the final episode, because I'm really not sure if his desire for Clara would override his hatred of Superwoman, but I'd like to find out. But again, I think that's probably just going to be something I play by ear.

Trask I don't think will react any differently. He just hates aliens, plain and simple. Though he might think Clara's motivations are different, since she's female. Rather than a conquest by force, he may theorize that she's the advance guard for a race of aliens who want to capture males and breed with them or something, because they ran out of guys on their home world. He'll still want to kill her at any cost, and he'll probably be even nastier to Louis and keep calling him like the Father of Mutants or something, and think that Louis has been chosen to be Superwoman's mate. Which can lead to an interesting conversation, because Louis can bring it up, and Clara will probably just be like >_> because she does want to date Louis.

Thanks for reading New part will be up mid next week.

Thanks! I think I'm going to have fun with Lex and Clara. I think it's going to turn into something like the Lois-Clark-Mason triangle from S2, at least before Clara realizes Lex is up to no good. ^_~

In case you missed it, I answered your question about the :3 emoticon a few comments up. ^_^

John:

Thanks for reading and for all your detailed comments! I'm so glad you enjoy the story so much. Your enthusiasm keeps me just as enthusiastic.

I've actually thought about that too. It would probably have to be something like, she would announce that she was traveling to a different planet and would be back in around a year, and in the mean time some of her friends from the Justice League would be filling in. It's always been my head canon that Clark joined the Justice League some time during S2 of the show, since he mentions Gotham City in early S3. I might even pull a few Justice League mentions into this series... But of course, if anything happened that only Superwoman could possibly handle, then Clara would probably show up, pregnant and all, and eventually have to answer questions. And oh man, probably everyone and their dad would be claiming that they were the father, and the tabloids would be alternating between saying it was Louis Lane, who had clearly cheated on his wife, or like... Batman. Because Batman.

That's exactly what I was thinking!

I actually can't take credit for that. It's pretty common fanon for most Superman fanfiction I've read.

Lol, pretty much! XD

Thanks again so much for all your comments! I'm not going to answer anything else specifically right now, because I don't want to ~give it all away~ ^_~

Oh, my gosh! That would make a great story. (But not this one.) LOL

~~~

As for the glasses, I've seen the explanation about the glass being lead to remind Supes not to use his xray vision many times, but I've never seen the explanation of that being why the glasses were so big and heavy. I think that may have been what John was getting at, but I'm not sure. And as for the idea of Clara not wearing glasses, I think if you have her say she is wearing contacts now that it would work just fine. All you'd need is a very different hairstyle - or even color - and maybe different makeup.

Lol maybe I'll do a story set in the future at some point, where it's Clara's second pregnancy or something, and they're watching the news, and Clara sees that Bats is in danger and she can't NOT go help, and then because she showed up pregnant to help him, everyone assumes that Batman is the father and Louis is like >_< And Batman is like NO BABIES. ONLY JUSTICE.

I think Clara is going to stop wearing her glasses and claim she got contacts by the beginning of 'Strange Visitor' and wear a mask as Superwoman. I've had a few thoughts about the mask I'd like to explore, but I'll not say what yet.

Can't wait for the next part.

Part 2!
I like the cover art. Gives us all a little bit more context

Chocolate. And according to Mouserocks, don’t ask her if she’s got PMS when she accepts them.





Awesome!

Maybe he’s into guys?

Is that Hick for getting her with child?

And he won’t notice the bait and switch?

Oh. To me, it also sounds like a film noir detective. Or it could be short for Filou. Both would fit

Wouldn’t it be fun if she took it all?



No, it would work too, if she were naked and tied to a pole.

Michael