Entries tagged with fanfic

Current Music: Lucky - Radiohead

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I quit, the addendum

This subject is in the air today. It occurred to me in discussions with others (and in the shower) that the one time I had a really long pause in writing, about four or five years, it was because I'd put myself in an all-business footing. I was a Serious Writing Artiste and I needed to think Serious Writing Thoughts and do Serious Work and be Serious About the Business of Writing. I couldn't read a piece of fiction without over-analyzing it, and I stopped reading fiction. I concentrated so hard on my seriousness and what other people expected from me and my writing, that I choked my muse. It got so bad that for the first time in my life since I've had consciousness I stopped telling myself stories as I fell asleep at night.

I felt damned lost, I tell you.

I took up other art forms—sculpture, textile arts, jewelry making, drawing—and although I love all these things, that just didn't fill that cavern inside me. But they did teach me to have fun again. That cold motherf**ker, Seriousness, unwound inside me. I rediscovered my sense of play in the creative process. It took all those four or five years, but I started telling myself stories again as I fell asleep. Then I started reading fiction again. Then I started writing again. Fanfic at first, but very soon after that, I was telling my own stories again.

This should be fun, people. Yes, we need to take the business aspect seriously and be professional, but it needs to be fun, too. Or we really do run the risk of choking that lovely trickster, our muse. And maybe this time, the little s**t won't come back to play again. He's a darling little s**t, but he does run to Temperament.

This is what I keep telling myself, anyway.

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The Monday Poll - Bad Fan Fiction

Inspired by a list of "Worst Fan Fiction" from The Onion.

[Poll #800875]

Which fanfic would you least like to read?

View Answers
Stargate: Disneyworld
0(0.0%)
Buffy and Angel Get Transported To Camelot Where Merlin Cures Angel's Curse and Buffy Stakes Mordred
3(25.0%)
Harry Potter Turns My Teacher, Mrs. Engelblabber, Into A Toad
0(0.0%)
Firefly Kids
0(0.0%)
The Brady Bunch Go Zombie and Eat Alice
1(8.3%)
Indiana Jones and The Ordo Templi Orientis
0(0.0%)
Harry Dresden, Anita Blake, and Rachel Morgan Have A Threesome
0(0.0%)
Battlestar Walker Texas Ranger
0(0.0%)
Dr. Who Meets The Simpsons
1(8.3%)
My Little Pony Transformers
0(0.0%)
CSI: Cucamonga
1(8.3%)
Girls Behaving Badly Vanuatu
1(8.3%)
Iron Chef: Aqua Teen Hunger Force
1(8.3%)
Pride, Prejudice, and Murder She Wrote
0(0.0%)
Snowbound In A Cabin For A Week With Mal Reynolds
0(0.0%)
Ticky Vs. Checkie
0(0.0%)
Which fanfic would you most like to read?

View Answers
Stargate: Disneyworld
0(0.0%)
Buffy and Angel Get Transported To Camelot Where Merlin Cures Angel's Curse and Buffy Stakes Mordred
0(0.0%)
Harry Potter Turns My Teacher, Mrs. Engelblabber, Into A Toad
0(0.0%)
Firefly Kids
2(16.7%)
The Brady Bunch Go Zombie and Eat Alice
1(8.3%)
Indiana Jones and The Ordo Templi Orientis
0(0.0%)
Harry Dresden, Anita Blake, and Rachel Morgan Have A Threesome
0(0.0%)
Battlestar Walker Texas Ranger
1(8.3%)
Dr. Who Meets The Simpsons
1(8.3%)
My Little Pony Transformers
2(16.7%)
CSI: Cucamonga
0(0.0%)
Girls Behaving Badly Vanuatu
1(8.3%)
Iron Chef: Aqua Teen Hunger Force
0(0.0%)
Pride, Prejudice, and Murder She Wrote
1(8.3%)
Snowbound In A Cabin For A Week With Mal Reynolds
2(16.7%)
Ticky Vs. Checkie
1(8.3%)

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The sheltering of the lambs

My sense is that I'm kind of rushing here at the end of Night Warrior, not always giving my characters enough time to have the kind of emotional grounding they need--but I need to move on. Once I've got a complete first draft on the page, I'll concentrate on making "nice-nice" in the rewrites. For now, the drive to the end is all that matters. I'd love to get it done by November 1, which may be doable.

Well, there is that entire household move thing that's happening on November 10. I called the movers yesterday and set that up. That might put a crimp in my writing schedule, but the writing exists, somewhat, outside of the franticness at home. I wrote 1250 words yesterday at lunch to finish off the chapter. I don't expect to get that much done every day, but it would be nice.

I hesitate to say I've hit the end momentum--afraid I'll jinx that--but that would be nice, too...

I rewarded myself for finishing chapter 28 early by allowing myself to work on chapter 2 of Charged With Folly. I did another 1200 words. Back to NW tomorrow, refreshed and perky. Well, maybe that last word's a stretch, but, yanno...

Things I'd like to see: Some Canterbury Tales fanfic. I think the Wife of Bath has a few more tails in her, don't you? And the Miller's Tale calls out for a revenge fantasy sequel, don't you think?

And just so you know... I hate waiting. Anticipation does not make things better for me. It makes me twitch and squirm. So now you know. :-)

Picture of the day:

( Here. )

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Old fanfic never dies

Since it's a three day weekend and I'm tired I decided to take at least one day where I goof off completely—absolutely no productive content whatsoever!—I've been very busy being non-productive. The brain keeps cycling back to thinking about productive things, but I wrench it back to piffle whenever I catch myself thinking about anything that has any meaning.

And every once in a while when I don't feel like doing anything productive, I engage in google searches of my name and the names of others. (I'm really quite an absurd human being sometimes.) A complete time waster, but sometimes quite a strange experience. There's apparently a thoracic surgeon named PJ Thompson and a financial writer. There are too many Pamela Thompsons to bother with. It's most strange when I type in the nom de plumes I used for fanfic. I didn't do a lot: one ST:V novella and a satirical newsletter based around the TV version of La Femme Nikita. (Well, okay, there were a lot of issues of that satire, but whatever. I didn't write and post fanfic for a lot of shows.) The thing that I find odd in my head-in-the-clouds way is that this stuff never seems to go away. It just cycles endlessly. That's okay—I'm happy people are still enjoying it—I just find it kind of odd. I don't know why I should find it odd, but I do. It's ancient history to me. But not to everyone.

The last time I typed in the name I used for my one and only piece of Star Trek porn (posted December 1997), I got one page of entries on google. I was surprised to find even that many, but apparently a number of people had linked to the site where the story was posted. Some had included it in their favorites list (thank you very much!). And of course there was the Golden Orgasm I won for it that year from ASCEM. I even got a vote for Best Hot Sex—well, a split vote between me and someone else. But thanks! I appreciate that very much.

I guess the strangest entry was for an academic article, published in the Journal of American Culture, which discussed fanfic (and Janeway/Chakotay porn in particular). It used my story for its analysis (amongst others). I was dying to read that one. The publisher would sell a pdf for $26.00 but my curiosity wasn't that great. Some of the local libraries had copies of the magazine—at least in their online catalogs. Inevitably, when the actual search for the particular issue was conducted, the issue in question had disappeared from the shelves. One sad archive librarian at the main library in downtown L.A. said that this sort of thing went on all the time anymore. People had no compunction about stealing or destroying magazines and books.

Loyola Marymount said they'd xerox a copy for me, but I had to appear in person to claim it, and because I was non-student, non-faculty I'd have to pay them $10 to copy it plus parking on campus. That was starting to make the $26 look not so bad. But an intrepid research assistant buddy of mine at work thought she could do a better job of finding this thing and within a half hour had found a free pdf on the LA County Library website! Apparently they'd scanned it before somebody stole it.

Reading that article was definitely odd.

So today, non-productive day, trying desperately to keep my mind off The Novel or anything relating to it, I typed in that fanfic name again. There were pages and pages of entries this time! Apparently some guy with the same last name as the novelist I cribbed my last name from wrote an article which mentions the poet I cribbed for my first name, so there were lots of references there. Plus many for the Star Trek porn, including some ones that weren't there before.

Life is funny. Especially when I think I may never get published by the establishment no matter how hard I work or how serious I am, while this stuff that I did for fun way back when cycles and cycles and cycles... Don't get me wrong—I'm happy to have readers. I might still be writing fanfic if I hadn't started longing to tell my own stories with my own characters. Fanfic wasn't doing it for me anymore. So I stopped writing it—but it was a great training ground and I learned many important lessons from the experience of writing it.

Which shows, I suppose, that sometimes even goofing off can have an unanticipated productive side.

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The Locals

Ah, this is serious. I've started serializing my new novel to my local readers. Reactions to chapter one have been very positive. This must mean Night Warrior really is a go.

None of my locals are writers, which is a cool thing. I get straight reader reaction from them. And even if they are my friends, they usually tell me when they think things have gone wrong—quite forcefully at times. They take this beta reading thing seriously, and their help has been invaluable to me. I'm lucky to have three such intelligent and engaged readers to filter my first drafts through. (And none of them read this blog, so that piece of suck up is just because.)

I guess I'll start posting chapters to the 'shop soon. I want to build up a bit more steam first. Also, my historical research is ongoing and I'm always reluctant to put the work seriously out there unless I've got the milieu down. For one thing, all those niggling details are what make a historical setting feel real and I find that if I saturate myself with the details of the past, it's richer, more real to the reader. Still, I feel like the emotional substratum and the plot of this novel are pretty solid and once I've internalized those two things, integrated them into my psyche, it's almost impossible not to start writing. I reach a critical mass inside my brain and it must be written down. Even if the research lags behind.

I also want to get some more crits finished before running this thing through the 'shop. Most of the crits I'm doing these days are offline—that's how far behind I was. But it's been a good opportunity to get a little closer to equity. When I was pumping out a new chapter of Shivery Bones every two weeks, I built up a lot of debt because most of my regulars were not posting as fast as I was. God Bless you everyone, if you're listening. I appreciate all your help.

I find it fascinating how different the reactions can be between my non-writer friends and my writer friends. After the locals have their say, I usually post to my workshop. Sometimes chapters the locals loved get torn to shreds on the 'shop. Sometimes just the opposite. Both sets of input are valuable. One gives me a "non-technical" reaction, the emotional response; the other helps me with the hard work of turning the writing into a serious piece of craft. But it's still fascinating when the two camps disagree.

I'm sure there's a profound lesson there somewhere, but I can't quite see it at the moment. I don't know what it means, if it simply means that different sets of readers have different requirements for fiction. I suppose it could be tangential to the fanfic discussion that's heating up LJ these days: readers have different needs from writers and editors. But I wonder if that's true? All writers and editors start out as readers, after all.

In terms of the fanfic discussion I can't say as I agree that slash is the wave of the future. But I do agree that most literary fiction reads like a plotless ramble, while most genre fiction lacks emotional resonance. Finding books that have both bright, shiny sentences, enthralling plots, and a clear understanding of the way real humans feel things is sometimes tough. The writers who do it for me are Connie Willis, Kage Baker...There are others, but unfortunately my brain is refusing to work at the moment. I'm sure I'm forgetting someone Really Obvious.