December Days 2018 #26: Yuletide, Part Two

[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 few days left.]

The second Yuletide collection opened up today, so there's some other works that we get to peruse. They're all a lot shorter than the main collection, so they won't take nearly as long to read and enjoy.

Don't Hit It, Rockapella! (113 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Carmen Sandiego, Rockapella
Additional Tags: Crack, Humor, Character Study, Yuletide Treat, Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational, Yuletide Madness
Summary:

Carmen should be used to these goofs showing up at the oddest of times.

While she's trying to lift a vase from the Victoria and Albert Museum is just the least opportune of them all.

Alchemy (100 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Studying Girl (lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to)
Additional Tags: Magical Realism, Drabble, Yuletide Madness Drabble Invitational, Yuletide Madness, Yuletide Treat, Alternate Universe - Magic
Summary:

She is the engine.

The Magical Adventures of Jane Glorious (213 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Calvin & Hobbes
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes), Susie Derkins
Additional Tags: Imagination, Imaginary Friends, Playdates, Humor, Yuletide Madness, Yuletide Treat, Friendship, Double Drabble
Summary:

Calvin reacts predictably to being invited into Susie's room for a playdate.

But Susie is determined to show him she's just as imaginative as he is.

As you can see, all three of these are fabulous works and none of them more than three hundred words. Even if only one of them is a true drabble in the sense of being exactly one hundred words, they're all excellent short-form material.

The first one would be a paragraph or two in a greater work, possibly from Carmen's perspective on how she accomplishes a heist of one sort or another, and it's pretty neat the way that even she is unnerved at the persistent presence of the a capella group that seems to be following her around. And yet, even when faced with that idea, Carmen can still make it work. It's one of the charms of Carmen, that the improbable is never impossible with her.

The second one is all sorts of fun around the wildly popular internet stream that uses as its visual a screenshot of a girl wearing headphones and scratching her pencil on what looks to be homework. Because humans are storytelling creatures, of course, we start to speculate about what the girl is doing, and whether she's aware of the music stream, or whether, as in this case, she can control the music stream herself. Given the shortness of the work, we don't know if it's a conscious control, and if it follows her everywhere, but it's still a great story told in short amounts.

The last work takes the prompt I had in mind with Susie taking control of her own narrative and runs with it for just the beginnings of what could be a much bigger work if it wanted to go delving into Susie's mind in the way that the comic would do so into Calvin's. I would have enjoyed seeing a full amount of that imagination, and eventually, maybe, Calvin stepping in here and there to make the narrative work better and to make the storytelling much more impressive and fun for both of them. It's just enough to get started on something bigger, and the imagination can certainly work from there, which was always the fun of Calvin and Hobbes.

So, those were the three short works that were waiting for me in addition to the long work from yesterday. It's a pretty good set of examples for the idea that length doesn't necessarily matter in the telling of a good story.

And to bring up a topic from earlier again, I didn't have that much of a worry about the extra gifts once I knew that they were short. I could have had a much more terrible time with the actual gift itself, because it was a couple thousand words longer than the one I sent in, but that didn't get in my head, either. I think it was the shortness of the gift that didn't trip anything - a drabble could have been dashed off in only a few minutes or some shorter amount of time, even if the actual amount of time spent on it was more than that. (Significantly more than that, possibly.)

And then you can tuck in to the collection and see what all of the very neat works are in all the different fandoms that are available. Some of us are probably already at work on the next thing, but there's always the possibility of drop, as well. Once everything's been read, if there's nothing new coming forth, then there's a certain amount of unhappiness and malaise that can follow because it was a giant burst of the good stuff that makes fandom awesome, and then....nothing more. It's like coming back from convention and having to go back to the ordinary. If that's you, I understand. I suffer con drop pretty terribly, mostly because these days, I don't have a lot of people who were there that I can say "That thing was awesome!" with. Nice thing about exchange recommendations is that you can do it and it'll still be there for someone else to experience, too. Hooray for that. But even so, take care of yourselves. It'll be okay.

Eventually.

December Days 2018 #27: There's Always Someone Better

[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 few days left.]

One of the things that's nearly constant as you go through archives and find people who you want to follow and bookmark works is that there's a lot of really good stuff out there. And your taste, remember, almost always starts out ahead of your skills, so it's very easy for you to find a lot of the really good stuff that is out there. A steady diet of good material in your favorite fandom and you're going to be confronting some fairly impressive counts on whatever statistical anything your archive of choice decides to track. And, if you're like me, your own counts aren't necessarily ever going to be that high, based on the work that you're doing. It can lead to a period of disappointment, even though, as we already covered, the metrics themselves are always a little sketchy about what they actually do and don't say about everything.

It's one of those things that we have to get used to - there's always someone better. By whatever metric of better that you want to use. Someone who has words just flowing off the page, running in all the right directions to create a moving and compelling story that sweeps you off your feet and brings you along for the ride. All the feels in all the right places. Or who clearly has the attention of the fandom, racking up all the hits, kudos, and comments in their work any time it gets posted. The ones with the dedicated community of followers that are looking forward to their next release and can't get enough of it.

The published, professional authors who get to do this as a career and have made a shirt ton of money to the point where they wouldn't have to create again and they'd still have money left over after it all.

There are also often the people who seem to have made it to the heights of fame and fortune despite not possessing a bone of talent in their bodies, but often times, that's our prejudices about what's good work getting in the way of our ability to see the good stuff that's on the page. I think Ender's Game is a terrible book, but I can also see that it's a very successful power fantasy narrative for young boys steeped in a culture of toxic masculinity. The Chronicles of Narnia are a theological mess, and racist as all get out, but when not trying to make it about Lion Jesus, there's a good story and evocative descriptions of the scenery around the characters. I don't particularly like Twilight, for a lot of reasons related to the way every man in the story treats Bella, but it functions extremely well as a (relatively) sex-positive romance about a depressed young woman who eventually gets everything she wants through her own agency and determination. I might think Fifty Shades of Grey is an utter trash fire of a book, but I can thank it for spawning a lot of good and useful conversations about consent, kink, and what actually goes on in relationships with dynamics. And, even so, it's a book about someone being pampered by a wealthy person and managing to fix his mental health issues - it's a fantasy, and read that way, with full knowledge that what happens in that story has no basis in reality, is probably decent enough material for the imagination for whatever purposes people have fantasies.

Both of these ideas (that there's always someone better and there's always someone that you can't understand why they get all the accolades) can combine to produce the feeling of hopelessness. Why do the writing at all if someone else is going to be better or more statistically important and your own work is going to be not noticed at all? If there's always someone better, why try in the first place?

This is why we stared the series framing it as you already being good enough. It could have been "You are already good," but for a lot of people, even if it's true, it rings hollow, because "good" is almost always "better than me" for a lot of people. And as skill rises and taste appreciates more about the works that exist, the window of what is "good" increases as well, looking always forward about what things aren't yet achievable rather than occasionally looking back and realizing that there's been a lot of ground covered from when you first started. (As we noted then, as well, where people put their start point is usually way too far into the future compared to the actual reality of when they started doing the things that led to the creation of their work.) And sometimes, even as you're looking ahead, you might be slowly building that following and those statistical counts that point out you are quite good at what you are doing.

At a certain point, there's a good chance you'll be someone else's "always someone better." Whether in general, because your work is consumed along with everyone else's to a person that works they're never going to make it, or specifically, because you've become a respected creator in the domain you are currently in and people are in awe of what you create.

Even as I wrote that sentence, my own brain said "There's no way you're one of those people," except, of course, that I don't know that, because I can't reach into the heads of everyone whose read my work and see whether or not it's true. And this is despite the knowledge that earlier in the month, liv, who I respect a great deal as a person and writer explicitly said "Hey, people who read me? silveradept is a person worth reading." Because brains will compartmentalize to make sure their preferred narratives don't get disrupted by such things as evidence to the contrary. Specifically, in this case, "oh, that's very clearly only about my nonfiction writing, and has nothing to do with my fiction writing, so it can't possibly be a comment on my writing skill overall." I know that we're supposed to treat ourselves in the same way that we would treat our friends if they were spouting that sort of things -- and I do treat my friends differently than myself -- but it is sometimes hard to make that leap from treating others compassionately to treating yourself compassionately. And I've been writing for years.

Because it doesn't get said enough, we are all good enough. There will always be someone better, but that doesn't mean we aren't good enough as we are. And to others, there's a good chance we are the someone better. So our work is to be welcoming to those who look up to us, even as we hope those that we look up to will do the same for us. And that way, we all get better.