silveradept | Fandom Snowflake 2018 #7: On The Importance Of Feedback

(Nota bene: The duplication is intentional.)

In your own space, create a love meme for yourself. Let people tell you how amazing and awesome and loveable you really are.

One of the more difficult things to do, if you've been socialized that taking credit for yourself will be punished, either because Girls Do Not Brag or because Tall Poppy Syndrome, or for whatever other reason, is to engage in acts of self-love, or to believe someone when they give you an assessment of your skills or your person that says "you are good people." Sometimes you can manage to fend the brainweasels off with sheer volume - if enough people say so, then it has to be at least a little true, right? Other times, if someone of sufficient respect and wisdom in your life says its so, you believe them because they have the experience to be able to tell what's good and what isn't.

Sometimes you have to trick yourself. I think of myself as a middling amateur of no great consequence, but I went back over this year's AO3 output, and even by rough standards counting, I still accumulated over 50,000 words in exchange writing. If I then add on the assumption that each of the weekly Pern chapters at Slacktiverse covered at least a thousand words on average (probably more), than that bumps up the total wordcount to over 102,000 words put out in a year, and that still doesn't count word one of anything I've actually written here on Dreamwidth, so I still have to add in December Days (10k, conservatively?) and all the links and commentary and one off posts on topics, and the Snowflake Challenge from January, and that probably pushes my writing output up towards 125,000 words, conservatively. That's 2.5 NaNoWriMos, if I had actually focused on a single topic and written one big work on it. But it's scattered along small things, and that makes it easy to not realize how much got done at all. That's a forkton of writing, and that still doesn't account for professional presentations, substantive commentary, and all the other word work done that I'm not even aware of.

Yet, it's a lot easier to discount all of that if I'm the only person that's noticing it's getting done. (For a lyrical interpretation of this, I recommend Dream Theater, "About to Crash" and its reprise, both from the album Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence.)

Thus, the love meme. A way of publicly asking people if they would please remind me of the characteristics, actions, and/or works that I have created that they find endearing, inspiring, fun, wonderful, beautiful, or otherwise react positively to. Which can be both terrific (lots of people responded with unique things!) or depressing (not many people responded, and they all said kind of generic things.)

All the same, here it is. Last year was pretty rough for me, so I could use the help remembering.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: Dream Theater - About to Crash

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

azurelunatic

Your creativity. Your enthusiasm. The way you can bring profanity to bear on a situation that deserves it. Your generosity of spirit and wanting to think the best of people. The way you examine your worldview when you get new information. (I am still very something at a person who would have called that a character flaw and lack of consistency.) The way you decided that you would be a person who wrote fanfiction and then threw yourself into doing just that. Your taste in fine links. The way you use your position to help get everyone a seat at the table. Your dedication to letting teenagers be teenagers and express themselves in questionable words and explorative art. The way you do the thing even while you complain about the necessity. Your courage in dealing with all of 2016 and 2017. The way you let others help you when you needed it. Your capacity for silliness. Your devotion and kindness as a mentor. Your love for things that go mew in the night. The glee you take in snow, even though I don't understand it.

The incredible beauty when you light up smiling.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

That is quite a lot of writing. It takes dedication to write that much.

From:

silveradept

Productive use of lunch breaks, mostly. But yeah, that's a lot when you stack it all up in the same place.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

*laugh* Then I also admire your granularity. Suzette Haden Elgin used to drag partial books everywhere she went, and write in 5-minute increments. I cannot do that. Read, yes. Write, no. Too much mass and momentum. I can slingshot around a heavy topic, but not stop on a dime.

From:

silveradept

I can usually make a productive something out of half an hour, even if I would rather write longer. Kind of nice, actually.

From:

alexseanchai

I learned a lot from 2017 December Days.

Libraries need more people willing to encourage the wearing of pajamas at storytime.

*glances tabletward, glances Yulecard-ward, raises eyebrow, grins*

From:

silveradept

*hat-tip*

Thank you for saying how much you enjoyed this year.

From:

chanter1944

I don't know you well at all, but you seem like highly clueful coolness to me! :) I followed your December days series of posts with great interest, as a big city library patron.

From:

silveradept

Oh, thank you for mentioning that. It can be difficult to gauge the reach of your work when all you have are comments to work with. Anything in particular that you liked or thought was weird?

From:

cold_clarity

i don't know you at all, but just the stuff you've said here is really lovely. it's awesome that you did so much this year! i hope, when you're feeling down, you can know that your writing and your presence probably makes a lot of people really happy. <3

From:

silveradept

That's a truth that sometimes gets obscured when having to swing a sword through marauding hordes of brainweasels.

From:

marginaliana

This is such a smart, beautiful post - I really love the way you think about this project. And wow, that is a huge amount of exchange writing. So impressive!

From:

silveradept

Thanks. It's a lot more than I was expecting in terms of wordcount, that's for sure.

From:

mmouse15

It sounds like you are an amazing contributor to fandom, and thoughtful to boot. So, in return, please have some fandom *love*, because creators like yourself should be cherished.

♥

From:

silveradept

Thank you. I've not usually thought of myself as a creator or contributor, so it's nice to hear someone else say it counts.

From:

boxofdelights

I really appreciate reading you talk about your work, especially 2017's December Days. I like your enthusiasm, I like your ideals. I really like your clarity and honesty when you talk about problems in library culture, the ones you've seen, the ones you've suffered from, and the ones you are working to ameliorate.

From:

silveradept

Thank you. As with many things, the ideas themselves aren't new. I'm choosing to add myself to the people who want to talk about them. And if I get the chance, do something about it.

From:

redsnake05

One of the things I chiefly like about you is how informative you are, in the sense that I always learn interesting things from your posts. You have a wide and eclectic range of interests and resources, and a talent for collating and sorting. Some of that, no doubt, is professional necessity, but I like to think you have a particular sort of an eye for patterns. I appreciate that.

From:

silveradept

Some is professional necessity, but I also tend to think in patterns and groupings, which is why the language of TVTropes is so useful to me - it gives names and applications to the patterns I'm already noticing. So I try to arrange things so that the patterns I see stand out a little more to everyone else.

From:

vass

You strike me as consistently kind, thoughtful, and interesting. And the December library post series was really informative.

From:

silveradept

Thank you for that. The library posts are fun, because there's so much that goes on there that just doesn't get shown, even though it's incredibly interesting stuff.