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In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.
When your creative output (or rather, what you think of as your creative output) is so small, recommending your favorites is easier than it might be if you had a giant amount of possible works to choose from. It doesn't say a lot about the breadth of my fandom, though, unlike those who have a lot to choose from.
When your creative output (or rather, what you think of as your creative output) is so small, recommending your favorites is easier than it might be if you had a giant amount of possible works to choose from. It doesn't say a lot about the breadth of my fandom, though, unlike those who have a lot to choose from.
- As a fantasy reader, primarily, I tend to key into dragons as a large part of my reading choices. Preferably dragons not in the one-dimensional Ultimate Evil forms. So the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Wrede) are great for a young me to see that those stories exist (with bonus active princesses, invisible dusk-blooming chokevines, and wizards being melted with dish soap and water. Argelfaster.) and books like Seraphina and Shadow Scale (Hartman) successfully showing how living as a dragon in the human world is full of the sad experiences of discrimination.
And then there's The Dragonriders of Pern, which at the time of reading it, seemed like a good fit for a dragon-loving child. It was because I liked it a a kid that I decided to go back through it and see how much I was looking at it with rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. As it turns out, a lot. So one of my recommendations is an ongoing giving-of-grief to The Dragonriders of Pern, because I can't change that I liked it as a kid, but I can go back to it and understand what it was I liked. - That is not to say that I think it's wrong to like problematic things. As our social consciousness expands, we look at things from our last and realize how far things have come from days when everyone assumed slaves were an essential part of a functioning society - at least now we try to hide it better. For all their faults, and those faults are legion, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey advance the goal of a literate society by providing them with entertaining works to read.
Being fannish, though, often means noticing details and their execution (or lack thereof). Being able to apply your own expertise to a story to make it better or to fix issues of Did Not Do The Research can help salvage an otherwise excellent fandom. So, number two is An analysis of the baseball scene in Twilight, pointing out as many ways as I could think of that proper baseball fans who are vampires would not be doing what the Cullens do (with extra care for Isabella Swan's life and health than the Cullens show).
Speaking of baseball, the last two years I've been writing various essays about the game, its players, and some of the things that make it compelling and wonderful. The frame that helps give it coherence and scope has been a deck of Tarot cards with a baseball theme. Of the comments received on this series, the people reading certainly seem to enjoy them, which is nice to hear. They are all filed under the December Days: Baseball Tarot tag - please do look and comment. I love comments.
So there's a sampling of the stuff that I do - it may not be your favored flavor, but it seems to be what I'm interested in writing.
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Date: 2016-01-03 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-04 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-04 03:35 am (UTC)...and now I'm hoping you don't somehow discover that I'm a librarian because it becomes far too quickly evident that your reference skills run circles around mine.
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Date: 2016-01-04 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-04 03:49 pm (UTC)My impression of your reference ability came more from your discussion of reference under your day 2 entry.
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Date: 2016-01-04 04:26 pm (UTC)As for reference, it's not really about knowing everything. It's about knowing how and where to find everything. It's more of a combination of equal parts knowledge, experience, social engineering, human-cyborg relations, and pure flim-flam.
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Date: 2016-01-04 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-04 04:46 pm (UTC)I often find that most people coming for reference interactions know what they want, or at least a good inkling of it, and what they need most is someone who can show them how the tools work. And if you have a good group of peers to help you when you're out of your expertise, the whole thing moves smoothly.
You are the Great and Powerful Oz, like all the rest of us.
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Date: 2016-01-04 07:00 pm (UTC)Awesome. And don't get me wrong, I love being the YA librarian. Chalk it up to me succumbing to my excessive underconfidence.
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Date: 2016-01-05 04:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-05 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-06 12:09 am (UTC)As for certainty, I believe that's the exclusive province of those with experience. Everyone else gets to guess.
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Date: 2016-01-06 02:34 am (UTC)Okay. Fundamentalism. I see nothing fundamental about picking out bible verses to support what people believed when one was a kid. It seems to me that religious "Fundamentalism" ought to refer to prioritizing what is most fundamental in religion. For Christianity, you can't get much more fundamental than what Christ explicitly declared the two most important commandments.
And if the faux-pas of getting theological hasn't driven you off I'm fully capable of the faux-pas of getting political.
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Date: 2016-01-06 04:31 am (UTC)Most of those going to the fundament swear by the spoken words of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, even though the Christ-figure is supposed to be a new covenant. One might call them very confused Jews.
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Date: 2016-01-06 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-06 05:58 pm (UTC)Which is one of those running messages through the whole work.
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Date: 2016-01-06 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-04 05:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-04 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-04 07:06 pm (UTC)Also you keep giving me fic ideas.
And you point out the rare places where canon makes more sense than I gave it credit for.
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Date: 2016-01-05 04:26 am (UTC)And if your fiction output is anything like The Lady's Gifts, I foresee much work with Pern in the future.
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Date: 2016-01-05 06:41 am (UTC)(In hindsight, I should've spotted it myself: Lessa learns *all* her teaching ballads from R'gul? Why doesn't she have the equivalent of a sixth-grade education in DF? But I didn't. And you... didn't actually notice it being implied, either, but you sure did call out how it should've been canon!)
So I am incredibly thrilled and honored to know you enjoyed The Lady's Gifts.
(And so excited for the Moreta decon! :D Though I recall that one being one of the two books I call Non-Sucky Pern. Hope it holds up.)
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Date: 2016-01-05 07:03 am (UTC)I still would like to have seen canon Lessa using those skills she had in Dragonflight more - it would make the actions of everyone around her more interesting in trying to figure out whether what they did was them or was her manipulating them.
Ranie, I think, won't have nearly as much difficulty in using her abilities.
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Date: 2016-01-05 07:47 am (UTC)(You can tell it's pre-Dragonquest, can't you?)
But, I mean, F'lar is a conspiracy theorist! He is! He believes in a menace everyone else laughs at, holds to all these outdated traditions because they're totally all part of their ancestors' grand plan to save them from this selfsame ancient menace that no one's seen in centuries, etc. So I'd like information about whether anyone other than F'lar believes in telepathy before I conclude that anyone other than F'lar thinks Lessa can manipulate people that way.
I'm not sure what you mean about Ranie not having as much difficulty. Could you clarify that?
I have just remembered that you don't want spoilers, so no more Moreta discussion for you. (Sorry.) I look forward to reading what you have to say about the book as you get through it, though! :)
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Date: 2016-01-05 02:59 pm (UTC)I wish I knew whether anyone else believed in telepathy after he turned out to be right on Thread, but no such luck in the books. Fic to the rescue.
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Date: 2016-01-05 07:06 pm (UTC)(Someday I will write a fanfic about The Time F'lar Went Haring Off After A Red Herring In The Records And Was Totally The Tinfoil Kind Of Conspiracy Theorist. Because I can believe a conspiracy theorist being right pretty often, if that conspiracy theorist does that much research! But being right all the time? If even the best conspiracy theorists could reliably avoid looking stupid chasing dreams, everyone would be one. Unless literally every possible conspiracy theory on Pern happens to be true. Which canonically they totally are... ugh, canon!Pern, how I love/hate/adore/eyeroll/want to hug you, you big mess of contradictions and awesomeness.)
Though I guess a lot of harpers' tales would suddenly seem more plausible when the Ninth Pass began!
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Date: 2016-01-06 12:11 am (UTC)Fic of the Benden Weyrleader going off on a bender, of sorts, trying to prove a conspiracy would be all sorts of fun to read, I think.
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Date: 2016-01-06 12:39 am (UTC)*sigh* Now I wonder what incorrect idea F'lar could get behind in a fic... I mean, canon really, really does not help here.
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Date: 2016-01-06 04:36 am (UTC)Which could be what the Benden Weyrleader goes after, convinced of its existence, but never actually able to find - someone composing stories that aren't from Harpers.
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Date: 2016-01-06 06:54 am (UTC)(I mean, to be fair, I have that objection to a lot of canon!Pern...)
Can't think why F'lar would care about fiction. It seems beneath him to try to stamp it out, but irrelevant to prove its existence-- he doesn't seem to go around being curious about things that aren't politically or militarily useful...
Wait a minute. Have we ever seen F'lar have any feelings about anything that isn't either Lessa or his job? He used to be a womaniser, but evidently not anymore... he occasionally snarks, e.g. at F'nor about Canth eating a lot... and it's probably a mark of Anne's bad writing that I can't tell whether we're supposed to read him as a real workaholic who doesn't bother to have outside interests, or whether Anne just forgot to give him any. And other than that... he occasionally thinks mean, gossipy things about other people, and that's pretty much it.
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Date: 2016-01-06 02:39 pm (UTC)He might care about fiction for its ability to tell true things in the guise of a good story, and thus be chasing it in case it contained some sort of secret knowledge that isn't part of the Records.
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Date: 2016-01-06 08:28 pm (UTC)That's meta, man!
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Date: 2016-01-06 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-06 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-19 03:02 am (UTC)I just wanted to say that I'd definitely enjoy reading about F'lar's misadventures with hints and portents of things that were totally unlikely to happen!
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Date: 2016-03-19 04:42 am (UTC)Also, hooray for a new commenter!
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Date: 2016-01-04 03:41 pm (UTC)Gotta go read this.
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Date: 2016-01-04 04:09 pm (UTC)