The importance of antici--wait for it...

Waiting for Advent in Ordinary Time is a really, really, Catholic thing. (umadoshi provided the link, many thanks, honest!) Or at least, really a thing for any denomination of Christianity that celebrates Advent and has a liturgical year in much the same way that Catholics do. If I wanted to be snarky about it, I could sum up the piece as "the religious reasons why the starting of the Christmas season earlier and earlier every year is a bad idea", but that makes the piece sound more like it cares about the commercialization and the trappings and the way that some people get wound up about a nonexistent War on Wintermas and the increasing proliferation of Vague Early Winter Possibly Religious Festivals. It's not about that. In fact, it makes a very cogent argument that people who are getting obsessed with the trappings and the outward signs and the insistence on correct speech and wanting to start earlier are doing so out of a desire to cover over a very real problem.

First, some background, as the piece itself assumes that you are either of the relevant denomination or have studied it well enough that you don't need someone to explain it all to you. For Catholics (and please add all the relevant others who follow the same pattern, mea culpa that I don't know all of you), the liturgical part of the service usually consists of a first reading from the "Old Testament" (which covers both Tanakh and deuterocanonical books), as it is usually referred to, covering the period from creation and exile from the initial paradise and the covenants made between The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton and his chosen people throughout the recorded history of those people, up to the birth of Jesus.), a second reading from the Christian Foundational Writings (the "New Testament", covering the life of Jesus and his first cohorts of disciples, as well as letters to various communities, either of faith or considering it, usually attributed to or written in the style of Paul of Tarsus, other more generally-addresses letters, and the Apocalypse of John, usually at the end, as a way of covering the eventual end of existence and return of Jesus to begin the new holy age) that is specifically not one of the Gospels (so usually something from Acts or from the Epistles), and then a Gospel reading. Often times, these readings are linked, either thematically, or positioned in such a way that things mentioned in Tanakh as things to come then find their resolution in the later readings.

(Nota bene: what qualifies as part of the canon of Christianity is not universally accepted between denominations, nor sometimes within various groups of nominally the same denomination. A Christian Bible includes and excludes based on translation and the accepted conventions of the denomination or group that is publishing the work. Generally, most Bibles work from one or another of the Protestant canon, and then the good ones tend to have annotation and include works that are apocryphal, pseudepigraphal, or deuterocanonical according to those denominations [or generally accepted scholarly consensus] so that those who aren't Protestants still have the books of their canon if they need to do some scholarly work. Which is to say, when you talk about the Christian Bible, it's complicated. We now return you to your regularly scheduled post.)

The readings themselves are laid out in accordance with the liturgical year, with specific readings and themes highlighted for major events across the calendar year. Advent-Christmas-Epiphany focuses on the birth of Christ and the revelation of his divine nature, Lent-Easter-Pentecost on the death and resurrection of Jesus and the beginnings of the new church, and so forth. Most of the liturgical year, however, is simply "Ordinary Time" - no specific focus on a particular aspect of Jesus and the church, with a rotation among the possible readings such that someone would hear, in pieces, anyway, the entirety of the Catholic Bible on a cycle before beginning again. Much of religious practice is ordinary, both in the sense of not-special, and also in the way of counting time. Catholics and other Christians alike wait and count time before the return of their messianic figure. Waiting for a Messiah is something Christians inherited from Judaism, but Christians say they found theirs and are waiting for his return, rather than still waiting for one to appear.

So, Advent is a specific season within the liturgical year - the four Sundays before Christmas are reserved specifically for messages and themes that are about the time before the birth of Christ. Its major theme is "waiting", more so than in the Ordinary, and it's different than the waiting of Lent. Lent is a season of waiting in fear, because the story of Lent is essentially the part where you know how things are going to end. There will be betrayal, unjust suffering, and eventually, the death of an innocent. And then the miracle of resurrection punctures the darkness for a bit, but there's still more time past that point where everyone is still huddling in fear, because only those few people who were there right at the point of the resurrection have been graced with seeing the resurrected Jesus (until Pentecost, anyway.) Advent, on the other hand, is all about the anticipation of what will be the greatest miracle of all time - the birth of a fully divine, fully human person able to navigate the requirements of the old agreements, fulfill them, and then produce a new, universal, atemporal covenant between The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton and all the people that choose to swear their allegiance to said Being.

But it isn't Christmas yet. There's an enforced period of waiting that has to be gone through first. Waiting is hard. We all know that. And I like the way that the article writer (Laura Jean Truman) acknowledges that humans are terrible at waiting, especially when we have insecurities and low trust that the promised thing in the future will happen. That marshmallow experiment about instant versus delayed gratification you might be thinking of? Turns out it's not about impulse control! The data from the experiment about whether someone takes one marshmallow now or two later has a much better fit if what's being tested is whether or not the child trusts that the adult will come back with two marshmallows if they wait. Now scale that up to a thing that's been promised (eternal life in the kingdom to come) but that you have to trust is going to happen after your physical body dies. (Catholics aren't really all that much about Rapture theology. When you've been around as long as they have, you realize that you're most likely on the slow road to eternity. You still need to be prepared in case you're wrong, but the idea is basically that it's not going to happen in your lifetime.) Given that there's only one account of a person who came back to life after being deliberately killed (and then had his body mutilated further as a proof of death), logic is screaming at you that resurrection is a fool's idea. So you gotta have faith. Faith in the highly improbable, at least from what we can observe. But you don't know, and that means you have to wait to find out. And we're terrible at waiting.

What I like the most about this piece is the encouragement to sit in the waiting, and recognize it, and dig into the reasons why you're antsy about waiting. You can look around and see that the ideal world, the one that's supposed to be the Kingdom promised to you from the beginning of time, it's not here, and it doesn't look like it's going to be any time soon. There are real, structural problems in the world around you. And it's a lot easier to pretend they aren't there, to believe it's all fine, to skip ahead to the announcement of Christmas and insist that the happy times are here and there's no need to dwell on upsetting things. If your faith is strong enough, you'll see it through, right? Except for the part where it's not "sit in your faith until you die and I'll reward you," is it? And there's no part that says "Well, if you give a homeless guy $20 once a year, and you keep your faith until you die, well, that's enough." No, what's there is the kind of stuff you get from the Apocalypse of John, the stuff that says "Every time you did good things to the least of the people around you, you did what I wanted, and I will reward you," and stuff that talks about how the person with nothing that still gives to others is much better than the person who has a lot and just gives from their excesses. Or even the parts about those who acquire material things and treasure on earth have already received their rewards...or that it's much harder for them to get to that eternal reward with the material stuff getting in the way. Throwing out moneychangers. Demanding that every seventh year, fields be left unworked (and the fruits that grow in those years be the exclusive province of the poor), debts forgiven, slaves freed. That sort of stuff that suggests that there's more to your faith than just saying the words and amassing wealth to yourself. If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, does it count? If you miss an opportunity to help someone else, is that complete disqualification? How do you reconcile the fact that your religious history has a significant amount of blood and murder in it? (Although this particular example is from a rabbi contemplating the history of Judaism, it's a shared history of Christianity, and it's not like the Christians somehow avoided their own suite of repeated worldwide warfare.) What is the rubric for grading, anyway? Couldn't we get something more explicit than the works that we have now? Please?

Well, you have to wait. And we're still terrible at waiting. About mundane things, not to mention the Big Things. I got flatly annoyed at a book that The Organization is going to promote as a featured book to read in our service area, because there's a character in there that takes twenty-four chapters to be written out, and the whole time he's there, he sows discord, anger, and domestic violence all throughout the narrative. I know why he's there, I know what he's doing, I can see his relevance to the plot, and yet, I didn't want to wait for the point where he disappeared from the narrative, I wanted him gone a lot earlier than that. Because I didn't particularly want to read the story of how witnessing domestic violence against her mother traumatizes a young girl, how she can't get away from it herself because she wants to bring her mother with her, and how everyone in the community says they're willing to help, but waits until the mother decides that she's had enough before they do anything significant. (Admittedly, the solution that everyone came back to was a lethal one, and that complicated things.) I wanted to get to the post-violent part, but I had to wait. And think. And reflect some on my own experiences, too, that helped me understand why things were happening that way, and to acknowledge that in our reality, they really would happen that way. And do. And that sometimes, the only thing you can do when someone else is doing something that's terrifying to them and uncertain about the outcome is wait.

Because sometimes, if you wait when you have to and you work when you can, you make it past the dark times into the celebratory ones. You anticipate the end result, and you wait, and you work, and then, finally, you get to the promised time. Celebrate. And then, back to the ordinary. Back to the work of the daily, of counting the time, of all the small things in our lives that make the in-between from the big events, but are just as crucial and important in shaping our lives and determining what the judgment on our existence will be.

Back to waiting.

December Days 2018 #7: How Can I Make Structure Work?

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]

Sometimes the way you tell the story is integral to the story itself. Not everything is going to work as a novel-length idea, with multiple chapters of dialogue and exposition and action all neatly arranged. Or disjointed. Or hypertexted, so that you end up with a twisty maze of passages, all alike, such that the way you experience the story has to do with the choices you made on which parts to see first.

Which is to say that structure is an important part of writing. Most of you reading this have probably already been exposed to various writing structures, and maybe you have a few favorites. Structure, as I'm using it here, means both things like limitations on the number and type of words that can be used (sort of like self-imposed challenges) as well as frameworks and templates that a story can be built around that make it recognizably a member of that type of story.

For example, the Choose Your Own Adventure books (now printed from a company called ChooseCo, because we are nothing if on the nose about this) all follow a certain structure that makes them recognizable. CYOA-style books all use second-person narration (because YOU are doing the choosing), a branching plot structure with several different possible endings (only one of which is a complete and good ending in most CYOA-type novels, although there is at least one very famous exception in the canon), and printing the various pieces of the plot on different pages of the book, so that the person reading the book has to go back and forth in the book to get the narrative parts they've chosen (so that someone reading the book isn't spoiled on what they've chosen until they flip to the page and read they've been eaten by a tiger or disintegrated by a laser beam). These books are distinct from other kinds of gamebooks because they usually don't require inventory or statistical management or the use of dice, like, say, the Fighting Fantasy series, which has the same segmented narrative and second-person narration, but also adds various checks that require dice or having obtained various items on the quest to determine the success or the failure of the thing that the reader is trying to do, as well as a combat system where the statistics for the opponents are presented, and the reader is expected to roll combat to see if they are able to defeat the opponent and continue with the adventure. With the advent of digital versions of those gamebooks, the option to press forward in the narrative despite whatever combat the book wants you to complete is sadly taken away, or will be discouraged in some way, shape, or form, which will be frustrating to someone who just wants to get through the narrative without having to stop to roll dice, die, and start over again every time they run into something.

A different example is The Hero's Journey, a specific narrative structure for myths and stories that is widely (mis)applicable to all sorts of works that involve protagonists and antagonists. There are ways to play with the structure, try to skip steps, or omit them entirely, that a book might still be part of the structure even if it doesn't follow all the steps in their exact order. But because there are a lot of stories that follow that structure, there are people who are ready to claim that it's a universal of some sort, and then you get into disagreements.

But structure can also be something as an idea that a work happens in three acts - one to set the stage so everyone is in their place, one to engage the action and reactions, and one to deal with the consequences of what happened. Which might play out over several chapters. Or not.

Fandoms have contributed unique structures to the pool of possibilities, like the Five Times work. A Five Times work can often be boiled down into a sentence: Five Times [CHARACTER(S)] [VERB] [THEME]. "Five Times Darth Vader Almost Renounced The Dark Side." "Five Times Harry Potter Snogged (or Shagged) Draco Malfoy." "Five Dates Cecil used The Weather To Get Out Of". There are endless variations on this idea, and all the structure demands is that you write about five times the character(s) verbed the thematic thing. Long or short, it doesn't matter, so long as there are five of them. Sometimes if you get stuck on an idea, you throw penguins, call it a five times fic, and start the next one of the five.

A common variation of the Five Times fic is a Five Plus One (5+1) fic, where you have Five Times [CHARACTER(S)] [VERB] [THEME], and One Time [they didn't/they did/something completely different that still ties into the theme], which can build some tension into a story just from the structure. "Five Times Batman Almost Caught Catwoman, and One Time He Let Her Go." "Five Times Steven Almost Confessed His Crush On Connie, and The One Time He Actually Managed It." And so on. The possibilities are endless, and this particular structure works well when you have a lot of plots running through your head that all don't want to resolve into full stories on their own, but can be clumped together in their half-finished forms to create a complete work so that they'll just get out of your head for a bit so you can work on the thing you actually are trying to work on. Thematic fragments stitched together with a narrative can create a work.

Structure doesn't have to be big or grandiose, either. Once of the easier-looking but potentially more difficult doing structures is the drabble. 100 words, no more, no less, to create something that will hang on its own. Not quite as restrictive as the six-word story ("For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn." is the usual example) or the methods laid down in how one writes specific verse or polysyllabic poems, but it turns out one hundred words isn't all that much space to write a complete story or scene, if that's what you're looking for. The economy of words needed forces the lens of the story either very close up to something or very far away from it to make it all fit.

That said, a drabble is a great way to dip your toes in and see that you can create something. One hundred words isn't all that much to commit to. Some exchanges are specifically drabble (or double/triple drabble) length, others set their exchange requirements pretty low (300 words) so as to make the bar for creation pretty low and get lots of works popped out regularly. One thousand words seems to have stabilized as a "standard" exchange minimum, which can seem daunting at first, but if you keep turning your dice (a d10 does 1000 words), you'll see the progress as it gets made.

There's also the more daunting challenges - 5k (5000 word minimum) 10k (10,000 words), NaNovel (50,000 words in 30 days), and so forth, which can totally be attempted on a first try if that's what you want to do. Some fic will easily breeze past 100,000 words over the course of its lifetime, and several have made it to the million words department. All from some fairly small beginnings.

As for myself, my works tend to run their course in a pocket of somewhere between 1000 and 7000 words, depending on the idea and the goals of the exchange. I've had some shorter ones that turned out fine, but for the most part, that seems to be about where my brain decides it's had enough and told the story it wanted told. Perhaps for some year, I'll start trying to make something bigger, but right now, I don't feel the great need to write epics. Smaller, more numerous things Seem to be the sorts of things that I'm working on right now. There's always the possibility that something will explode, or an idea will reveal itself to have a lot of depth, but for now, I am where I am. Neither good, nor bad, and the recipients I've had have said they enjoyed the works I've produced. As it turns out, not only are you already good enough, I am, too. And I've been writing a lot of things to keep proving that to myself, in addition to the fun that it is to play in someone else's toybox

Welcome To All The New People!

Welcome to the new people! For those of you who were around when Livejournal was the dominant platform, Dreamwidth is forked from them, so it should seem familiar to you. For those coming from Tumblr, though, there's some adjustment to make. We hope you'll stay and enjoy the place. Also, better heads than I have compiled more than a few introductions and helpful guides to the platform, which, as the magpie I am, I'm grabbing the things I think are most useful and reposting them (It's a little more difficult than just touching a repost button here, which is good and bad.). This is also a fairly convenient excuse for me to show you what many of my posts look like, in case you were wondering about the possible content you'll be subjected to here. (You may have seen a lot of this from elsewhere, mostly umadoshi and conuly if you're subscribed to them.)

If you're looking for the general welcome from the official DW people, here's the official welcome news post. And if you're looking for the philosophical underpinnings of why Dreamwidth is, there's a different news post with a short history of the site, welcoming a different group to the site. ilyena_sylph has put together relevant comment threads from the news post, so if you would like a highlight reel on particular questions, there's a good space for it.

starnise has a great post on getting oriented to Dreamwidth if you're coming from a space not like LiveJournal at all. seperis has a more direct Tumblr-to-Dreamwidth guide.

niqaeli provides a guide on installing and using a script that will capture all of your Tumblr content, including he things that you've given likes to, so that, even if Tumblr completely implodes, you still have the content that you've created. And maybe can upload to somewhere else in a batch, once someone has written a way of parsing it and creating entries for it.

If you're going to be using it mostly on mobile, branchandroot developed a style to be very mobile-responsive. If there are things you'd like from the desktop experience, has some time and some coding that could be put to service in browser tools.

There's also a giant guide to getting started on Dreamwidth, thanks to bisharp, if you really want to dig in deep.

marshv has a guide to using the image uploading and posting, which is still a bit rudimentary (since there hasn't been a giant need for it in a mostly textual thing). If you need more, there's a guide to using Mediafire from mific, which I'm sure could be replicated with other sources. And Instagram can cross-post to DW, with a significant amount of glue and tape holding it together, says niqaeli.

kore offers advice on how to filter out tags so you don't see things you're not interested in, which, regrettably, does require the person in question to use those tags consistently. And the memory function can be used as a way of categorizing and tagging other peoples' entries so they're close-by to hand.

Once that's under your belt, you can take a look at sylvaine's post on some of the more advanced things you can do to your entries and your space, which exposes a lot of the very cool functionality that's baked into the site (or the HTML standard).

ironymaiden has a tag on things you can do to get the best out of Dreamwidth.

Some of the support staff and the very old hands are answering questions without their official hats on if there's something that's sticking on the site or otherwise not going according to plan.

If you're an RPer, there's resources available for you as well, thanks to rpanonos. If video games are your thing, masu_trout offers a community list for popular video games and their fandoms. erinptah has a more general fandom community list. historium is for historical fandoms and Real Person Fiction (RPF). fffriday is a review community for all your F/F needs. And there's more. Waaaaaaay more.

If you're not sure what to do with this seemingly vast and infinite space, melannen offers suggestions on how to build your community of people in your journal space, and siderea offers a recipe for posting, which involves doing a lot of pointing at other people as your primary content.

conuly has a way of adding in Tumblrs as feeds on DW in addition to a large amount of communities and places where you can jump in and start participating immediately. As well as the existence of two currently-running finding friends activities - one for finding not-fannish friends by angelofthenorth and one that's all about fannishness by snickfic

If there are more questions, there's a community called Getting Started. And a community for people coming from Tumblr.

And once you're oriented and ready to go, maybe go see melannen talk about where the next big fannish thing might be, and how sites like DW and AO3 may never end up being the next big fannish space, but they serve their own purposes and help hold the community's history in a way that's more permanent than otherwise might be. trascendenza solicits suggestions on what the mechanical parts of an ideal fannish social site are and greywash offers a lot of cogent thoughts about what a robust fannish site (or network) that can handle images and videos would hae to be able to do. (There's a lot of this going around, so this is a representative sample, rather than an end-all be-all.)

If this is a place that you'd like to throw money at to keep existing, (kore suggests paid accounts here and donations to the Internet Archive) but you can only move money about with PayPal, paidaccountfairy may be a placae to help you convert your PayPal into actual Dreamwidth points (there are Reasons why PayPal doesn't do DW, which are conveniently in the comments of kore's post).

(One last thing, as a thanks for getting through all of this: the creator of Pinboard once asked fandom what they would need from his service to make it work for them. Fandom replied by doing what it does best - creating, organizing, and making sure the tagging was right. Watching the process unfold in front of his eyes changed his opinion completely about what fandom does, doesn't, and is capable of. So thanks for being fans. Also, because everything that's old is new again, there's a second document afoot about what fandom would like to see in their ideal site, and the Pinboard person has actively said he'll see what he can do about bringing it into reality.)