Guardian Profile Challenge: Silver Adept
Mar. 27th, 2019 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptI thought it was a good idea to try and write my own profile that extols my virtues. It takes a while to think about them, and there's always going to be some part of this where it sounds pretentious and insufferable. Based on the things that inspired this challenge, though, pretentious and insufferable might be spot on for what we want.
Silver Adept is not the kind of writer that is going to show up on anyone's rec lists. They don't have a big series with hundreds of thousands of words on the Archive of Our Own (AO3). Going over their collection of finished works, there isn't even a work that crests the moderately low fanfiction bar of 10,000 words. For those who use the site to post transformative works that put familiar characters in novel situations or expound upon the canons started by other authors, pulling, pushing, and often times fixing the errors of representation, characterization, and plot produced by other canon works, Silver Adept is a bit of an odd duck.
If you looked at Silver Adept solely by their Archive of Our Own output, you might be convinced that they're a fannish dilettante, never staying too long in one place, writing small works here and there before zipping off in some other random direction, writing whatever strikes them and posting it. Until you notice how many of those works have a recipient as part of their description, made as gifts for the other members of the community.
"Exchanges," they point out, "are about taking the seed of an idea proposed by someone else and turning it into a work that you can gift back to them. You get at least one thing in return, too, from your own idea pool, and it's really neat to see how others take a small prompt and then make a full work out of it. While there are a lot of creators out there putting together masterpieces of hundreds of thousands of words, I'm more like a short-order cook, taking ideas and turning out tasty creations on a relatively quick deadline."
Diving into the statistics that AO3 provides for each user, the "short-order cook" form still results in a cumulative output of about 50,000 words for each year on the Archive. In 2018, they crested 60,000 words, and celebrated two milestones - one of their older works, The Many Proposals of Nick Burkhardt, reached more than 100 "kudos" (the Archive's version of a "like") and one of their shortest works, Marinette Special, was the fastest to obtain 50 kudos, taking only a few weeks after its posting to reach the half-century mark.
To some, the idea of writing someone else's ideas when there are so many of their own to get down on paper (or the eelctronic equivalent thereof) seems absurd. But there's a thriving community of prompt givers and writers on AO3 and other places, like Dreamwidth, where Silver Adept maintains a journal of "interesting things on the Web, mixed with flat-out rants and the occasional deep dive into a particular topic."
On Dreamwidth, the idea of Silver Adept as a dilettante disappears, as there are posts full of meta (discussions about character motivations, worldbuilding, or other aspects that aren't specifically about narrative stories) about various series, and several instances of the "December Days" and "Fandom Snowflake" sequences. For "December Days", Silver takes a single topic (a baseball-themed Tarot deck or various aspects of the craft of writing, for example) and writes a post a day about that topic for each day in December. "Fandom Snowflake" is a fifteen-day challenge that starts immediately after in the new year, asking questions about a person's fandom history, experiences, hopes, and wishes. "It's a pretty long sequence, but what comes out of it is usually pretty good, and I enjoy doing it," they said. "Plus, it's a way to invite comment and to get to know others in transformative works. It can feel isolating to think you're the only person with your ship, your headcanon, your idea about how everything works."
Putting Dreamwidth and AO3 together significantly raises the number of words that Silver Adept produces each year on fandom-related topics, and it's very difficult to capture how many of those words exist in other Dreamwidth journals and spaces as commentary, but that's still not a complete picture.
"I call it the Giving-of-Grief because there's just a lot to unpack, and I'm probably paying more attention to the things that didn't go well in the worldbuilding and characterization than the things that do," they say about their multi-year commentary series on Anne, Todd, and Gigi McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. Each week, they post about a chunk of narrative in a Pern novel or short story, going in roughly chronological order of publication of each series of Pern. For those looking for a comparison work to go along with Mari Ness's reread of Pern for Tor.com, or those impatient to skip ahead, Silver Adept provides an excellent read-along and commentary for modern audiences.
It is only when you consider all three of these places that you get an idea of the scope of output that Silver Adept quietly produces. The seemingly-diffuse spaces all add up together to a conclusion that Silver Adept is writing a lot more than anyone might guess, but only someone with as wide-ranging of interests as they have might see the complete picture. When asked, they said a "lowball estimate" of what they put out in a single year on fandom topics might be around 150,000 words. That it's not on a single work makes it seem easy to dismiss, but that's three novels' worth of production in what they call "easily counted things."
Silver Adept may never have an epic work to hang their hat on, although they hinted that something significantly more long-form was in the works, based on an "idea that refuses to get shaken off," but providing no further details. Not everyone wants to dine on long-form epics all the time. Sometimes what you want is comfort food. And Silver Adept serves that up in a lot of different fandoms, one exchange prompt at a time.
That sounds about right, if I were trying to write about myself in a way that is otherwise opposite to how I usually feel about my work. (Although I do get nice comments on those works that say that other people enjoy them, so it's not always a pit of nerves and worries about whether any given work resonated or worked well with the audience.)
Silver Adept is not the kind of writer that is going to show up on anyone's rec lists. They don't have a big series with hundreds of thousands of words on the Archive of Our Own (AO3). Going over their collection of finished works, there isn't even a work that crests the moderately low fanfiction bar of 10,000 words. For those who use the site to post transformative works that put familiar characters in novel situations or expound upon the canons started by other authors, pulling, pushing, and often times fixing the errors of representation, characterization, and plot produced by other canon works, Silver Adept is a bit of an odd duck.
If you looked at Silver Adept solely by their Archive of Our Own output, you might be convinced that they're a fannish dilettante, never staying too long in one place, writing small works here and there before zipping off in some other random direction, writing whatever strikes them and posting it. Until you notice how many of those works have a recipient as part of their description, made as gifts for the other members of the community.
"Exchanges," they point out, "are about taking the seed of an idea proposed by someone else and turning it into a work that you can gift back to them. You get at least one thing in return, too, from your own idea pool, and it's really neat to see how others take a small prompt and then make a full work out of it. While there are a lot of creators out there putting together masterpieces of hundreds of thousands of words, I'm more like a short-order cook, taking ideas and turning out tasty creations on a relatively quick deadline."
Diving into the statistics that AO3 provides for each user, the "short-order cook" form still results in a cumulative output of about 50,000 words for each year on the Archive. In 2018, they crested 60,000 words, and celebrated two milestones - one of their older works, The Many Proposals of Nick Burkhardt, reached more than 100 "kudos" (the Archive's version of a "like") and one of their shortest works, Marinette Special, was the fastest to obtain 50 kudos, taking only a few weeks after its posting to reach the half-century mark.
To some, the idea of writing someone else's ideas when there are so many of their own to get down on paper (or the eelctronic equivalent thereof) seems absurd. But there's a thriving community of prompt givers and writers on AO3 and other places, like Dreamwidth, where Silver Adept maintains a journal of "interesting things on the Web, mixed with flat-out rants and the occasional deep dive into a particular topic."
On Dreamwidth, the idea of Silver Adept as a dilettante disappears, as there are posts full of meta (discussions about character motivations, worldbuilding, or other aspects that aren't specifically about narrative stories) about various series, and several instances of the "December Days" and "Fandom Snowflake" sequences. For "December Days", Silver takes a single topic (a baseball-themed Tarot deck or various aspects of the craft of writing, for example) and writes a post a day about that topic for each day in December. "Fandom Snowflake" is a fifteen-day challenge that starts immediately after in the new year, asking questions about a person's fandom history, experiences, hopes, and wishes. "It's a pretty long sequence, but what comes out of it is usually pretty good, and I enjoy doing it," they said. "Plus, it's a way to invite comment and to get to know others in transformative works. It can feel isolating to think you're the only person with your ship, your headcanon, your idea about how everything works."
Putting Dreamwidth and AO3 together significantly raises the number of words that Silver Adept produces each year on fandom-related topics, and it's very difficult to capture how many of those words exist in other Dreamwidth journals and spaces as commentary, but that's still not a complete picture.
"I call it the Giving-of-Grief because there's just a lot to unpack, and I'm probably paying more attention to the things that didn't go well in the worldbuilding and characterization than the things that do," they say about their multi-year commentary series on Anne, Todd, and Gigi McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. Each week, they post about a chunk of narrative in a Pern novel or short story, going in roughly chronological order of publication of each series of Pern. For those looking for a comparison work to go along with Mari Ness's reread of Pern for Tor.com, or those impatient to skip ahead, Silver Adept provides an excellent read-along and commentary for modern audiences.
It is only when you consider all three of these places that you get an idea of the scope of output that Silver Adept quietly produces. The seemingly-diffuse spaces all add up together to a conclusion that Silver Adept is writing a lot more than anyone might guess, but only someone with as wide-ranging of interests as they have might see the complete picture. When asked, they said a "lowball estimate" of what they put out in a single year on fandom topics might be around 150,000 words. That it's not on a single work makes it seem easy to dismiss, but that's three novels' worth of production in what they call "easily counted things."
Silver Adept may never have an epic work to hang their hat on, although they hinted that something significantly more long-form was in the works, based on an "idea that refuses to get shaken off," but providing no further details. Not everyone wants to dine on long-form epics all the time. Sometimes what you want is comfort food. And Silver Adept serves that up in a lot of different fandoms, one exchange prompt at a time.
That sounds about right, if I were trying to write about myself in a way that is otherwise opposite to how I usually feel about my work. (Although I do get nice comments on those works that say that other people enjoy them, so it's not always a pit of nerves and worries about whether any given work resonated or worked well with the audience.)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 04:19 am (UTC)